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At the 2008 Julius Springer Forum on Applied Physics, Sheng Shen took home the Best Poster award for his poster titled "Breakdown of the Planck's blackbody radiation law at nanoscale gaps." The poster was coauthored by MIT NanoEngineering group members/alumni Lu Hu, Xiaoyuan Chen, Arvind Narayanaswamy, and Professor Gang Chen.

The NanoEngineering Group at MIT, in collaboration with Professor Zhifeng Ren at Boston College and GMZ Energy, Inc. received an R&D 100 award for their development of High Performance Thermoelectric Materials.

[The team] found that a low concentration of the CTAB in the surrounding solution accelerates heat dissipation after the nanorod is hit with infrared light. When the concentration of CTAB is high, heat is dissipated more slowly. That information could help scientists design nanorods that fight cancer agents by burning away tumor cells when activated with infrared light.

Andy Muto and Daniel Kraemer, graduate students in mechanical engineering, and Bryan Ho, a graduate student in materials science and engineering, have been working together on a thermoelectric system that could be installed in a hot-water pipe, or in exhaust flues at the plant, to get some extra electric power from heat currently going to waste.

Professor Gang Chen was awarded the 2008 Heat Transfer Memorial Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in March 2008. The award recognizes Professor Chen's "outstanding contributions to the field of heat transfer through teaching, research, practice and design, or a combination of such activities." The award specifically recognizes Professor Chen in the category of the science of heat transfer.

Here we show that a peak ZT of 1.4 at 100°C can be achieved in p-type nanocrystalline bismuth antimony telluride bulk alloy. These nanocrystalline bulk materials were made by hot-pressing nanopowders ball-milled from crystalline ingots under inert conditions. More importantly, ZT is about 1.2 at room temperature and 0.8 at 250C, which makes these materials useful for cooling and power generation. This discovery sets the stage for use of a new nanocomposite approach in developing high performance low-cost bulk thermoelectric materials. Full article

Click here to download slides from the ENIC tutorial sessions and see photos from the conference.

The Energy Nanotechnology International Conference was hosted at MIT on June 26-28, 2006. The conference featured invited and contributed presentations, poster sessions, academic, industrial and government panels, and investment opportunities.

Conditions have been discovered that allow extensive deformation of rigid single-walled nanotubes.

J. Y. Huang, S. Chen, Z. Q. Wang, K. Kempa, Y. M. Wang, S. H. Jo, G. Chen, M. S. Dresselhaus, Z. F. Ren, "Superplastic carbon nanotubes," Nature 439, 281-281 (19 Jan 2006). Full article

Ming-Shan Jeng, Ronggui Yang, David Song, and Gang Chen, "Monte Carlo Simulation of Thermal Conductivity and Phonon Transport in Nanocomposites," Proceedings of InterPACK2005, ASME InterPACK05, July 17-22, 2005, San Francisco, CA, HT2005-72780.

From the International Thermoelectric Society:
"Ronggui Yang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology met demanding standards to win the 2005 Goldsmid Award for Excellence in Research in Thermoelectrics by a Graduate Student. The Goldsmid Award, presented to Mr. Yang at the ICT2005 banquet, seeks to identify exceptional Ph.D. candidate graduate students who have made unusually notable contributions to thermoelectrics. Mr. Yang's publication record is impressive for anyone, much less for a student." Read more