.

Solar energy is a renewable energy whose harvesting depends on the incidence of solar rays on solar panels. Solar trackers are basically made of mechanically or pneumatic actuating systems enable to adapt the solar panel inclination with solar daily course. Although this action may lead to more effective solar panel, it costs actuating energy and requires maintenance which is detrimental in extreme environment like space.

Key challenges for solar fuel technologies to become viable and widely deployed are their durability and cost. These challenges directly relate to the semiconductor-electrolyte (SE) interface inherent to traditional photoelectrochemical (PEC) approaches and to the low energy density of solar radiation (~1000 W/m2) and its stochastic and cyclic nature, requiring large processing areas with idle waiting time (i.e. low capacity factors).

Advanced III-V technologies, especially wide-bandgap GaN, are the engines powering the rapid deployment of various SATCOM multi-beam active antenna arrays in space today. Although power levels per element in the recent Direct Radiating Arrays (DRAs) are typically in the order of few watts (e.g. for GEO with HPA MMICs 2-15W), already now it is apparent that larger deployable active antennas with hundred or even thousand elements will yield much lower power per radiating element with DRA.

The aim of the work has been to develop an efficient and robust turbine demonstrator that can efficiently operate under Mars environmental conditions. A combination of low friction and high inherent triboelectric charge density materials have been integrated into the Triboelectric Generator (TEG) architecture operating under a freestanding mode and including 4 generators. Each generator is compounded by Al+PTFE stator and H-DLC+Al rotor and the complete efficient design has 2 rotors and 4 stators.

The Doherty concept has proven to be a very effective technique for designing amplifiers, which maintain a high efficiency over a wide range of operating conditions. This technique is extensively used in terrestrial applications like base stations where power efficiency is getting more and more attention. Power efficiency is also of concern for space and the Doherty concept could certainly help in designing more efficient PAs. Ka-band is now being considered for mobile services that could offer very high capacity as compared to the existing ones at L-band.

The modulation of cold atom experiments currently uses bulky laser sources, wavelength converters and electro- or acousto-optic modulators to achieve high power and large extinction ratio at wavelengths close to the visible range. Here, we propose to exploit the lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform to integrate an electro-optic modulator (EOM) with a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) building block on the same photonic chip to maximize the available power and modulation depth.

n/a

n/a