Greener electronics gets a good reception

Electronic devices made from metallic nanoparticles could lead to flexible technologies that are more environmentally friendly to manufacture.

Components made from films of metal nanoparticles surrounded by organic material could lead to flexible electronics that are greener to manufacture than silicon-based devices.

Modern electronic circuits predominantly use components made from silicon-based semiconducting materials. However, devices made from metallic nanoparticles combined with charged organic materials could provide a greener alternative. But such devices have proved challenging to fabricate.

Now, an international team of scientists, including researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, has made a diode by sandwiching ultrathin layers of gold nanoparticles covered by a shell of positively charged trimethylamine ions between a gold electrode and a porous carbon nanotube–graphene electrode.

The team used the diode in a circuit to convert radio signals into sound waves and demonstrated that a porous electrode gave a ten-fold increase in rectification efficiency — the ability to convert an alternating current into a direct current.

This article was first published by Springer Nature. Read the original article at https://www.natureindex.com/article/10.1126/sciadv.aau3546.

To read more of my writings check out my website at https://gluons2galaxies.com.