Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Nano-Antennas for Military Solar Power and Sensors

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Arnold McKinley is speaking on how nano-scale antennas can be used for collecting solar energy. He started with a reminiscence of communicating with ham radio as a child, using a ring antenna. He has been researching how to use a similar antenna but at nano scale for collecting solar energy. The mathematics of how this works is beyond me, but it has some interesting possible uses beyond solar power.The technique might be used to absorb energy to form a stealth coating for an aircraft, which could also act as a sensor. The result would be that the entire skin of the aircraft could act as an antenna.

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