This paper focuses on the study of DC-to-DC converters, which are suitable for low-voltage high-power applications. The output voltages generated by renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic arrays and fuel cell stacks are generally low and required to be increased to high voltage levels. Development of DC-to-DC converters, which provide high step-up voltage conversion ratios with high effi...

This research investigated the ability of on-farm pretreatments with acid, alkali, ozone or novel enzymes to improve enzymatic degradability of cellulose and hemicelluloses in biomass at the biorefinery. Two perennial grasses, switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) and reed canarygrass (Phalaris arundinacea L.), were direct-cut harvested, pretreated, and stored anaerobically for 30 d. Pretreated and un...

The poor response of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) to red and infrared light is a significant impediment to the realization of higher photocurrents and hence higher efficiencies. Photon up-conversion by way of triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA-UC) is an attractive technique for using these otherwise wasted low energy photons to produce photocurrent, while not interfering with the photoanodi...

We experimentally investigate the limits of 800-nm-to-terahertz (THz) energy conversion in lithium niobate at room temperature driven by amplified Ti:sapphire laser pulses with tilted pulse front. The influence of the pump central wavelength, pulse duration, and fluence on THz generation is studied. We achieved a high peak efficiency of 0.12% using transform limited 150 fs pulses and observed s...

We propose wavelength converters based on modulated coupled resonators that achieve conversion by matching the modulation frequency to the frequency splitting of the supermodes of the unmodulated system. Using temporal coupled-mode theory, we show that these time-variant systems have an equivalent linear, time-invariant filter representation that simplifies the optimal engineering of design par...

Thermophotovoltaics convert heat into electricity via thermal radiation. The efficiency of this process depends critically on the selective emitter, which can be controlled by both the choice of the material and the emitter design. We find that surveying the set of refractory and near-refractory metals yields four primary candidates: tungsten, chromium, tantalum, and molybdenum. We developed a ...

Yeast prions are protein-based genetic elements that produce phenotypes through self-perpetuating changes in protein conformation. For the prion [PSI(+)] this protein is Sup35, which is comprised of a prion-determining region (NM) fused to a translational termination region. [PSI(+)] strains (variants) with different heritable translational termination defects (weak or strong) can exist in the ...

Electrocatalytic hydrogenation (ECH) is a sustainable pathway for the synthesis of value-added organic compounds, provided affordable catalysts with high activity, selectivity and durability are developed. Here, we synthesize Cu/C, Ni/C, and CuNi/C nanoparticles and compare their performance to Pt/C, Ru/C, PtRu/C for the ECH of hydroxyacetone, a bio-derived feedstock surrogate containing a carb...

In this proceeding, we use optical modeling and detailed balance analysis to predict the limiting efficiency of nanostructured silicon solar cells based on vertically-aligned nanowire and nanohole arrays. We first use the scattering matrix method to study broadband optical absorption. By incorporating the calculated optical absorption into a detailed balance analysis, we obtain the limiting sho...