Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/505968
62 SMT Magazine • May 2015 realtimewith.com CliCk To View video interview Mycronic's nico coenen and Mattias Jonsson sit down with i-connect007 guest Editor Steve Williams to take an in-depth look at the value of solder paste print on de- mand. one of the benefits is that the technology allows the option of optimizing the paste volume on each and every component, for each pad. The Value of Solder Paste Print On-Demand by Real Time with... IPC APEX EXPO 2015 Engineers at the university of California, San Diego have discovered a method to increase the amount of electric charge that can be stored in graphene, a two-dimensional form of car- bon. The research, published recently online in the journal nano letters, may provide a better understanding of how to improve the energy storage ability of capacitors for potential appli- cations in cars, wind turbines, and solar power. capacitors charge and dis- charge very fast, and are more useful for quick large bursts of energy, such as in cam- era flashes and power plants. Their ability to rapidly charge and discharge is an advantage over the long charge time of batteries. However, the prob- lem with capacitors is that they store less en- ergy than batteries. How can the energy storage of a capacitor be improved? one approach by researchers in the lab of Mechanical engineering professor prabha- kar Bandaru, at the Jacobs School of Engineering at uCSD, was to introduce more charge into a capacitor electrode using graphene as a model material for their tests. The principle is that in- creased charge leads to increased capacitance, which translates to increased energy storage. The team used a method called argon-ion based plasma processing, in which graphene samples are bombarded with positively-charged argon ions. During this process, carbon atoms are knocked out of the graphene layers and leave be- hind holes containing positive charges—these are the charged defects. exposing the graphene samples to argon plasma in- creased the capacitance of the materials three-fold. 'Holey' Graphene for Energy Storage