Electrochemistry News Items & Facts - September 2024

Every day, we all use battery powered devices at home, drive vehicles, eat packaged foods, and drink clean water. These are a few examples of the countless aspects of our modern lifestyles which are reliant on electrochemistry - broadly defined as the study of how electricity interacts with materials.

As an electrochemistry instrumentation company, Admiral Instruments proudly serves our customers who are among the millions of scientists, engineers, & technicians around the world using potentiostats and battery cyclers to uncover new ways electrochemistry may benefit us all.

To celebrate how electrochemistry has shaped the past, touches our present-day lives, and influences the future, every month Admiral Instruments posts five notable news articles, publications, & trivia somehow related to electrochemistry. Click on each entry to read more from the source article!

Electrochemistry News Items & Facts for September 2024:

1. The chemical compounds used in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are gallium arsenide to make yellow, gallium phosphide to make green, and gallium nitride to make blue. But the ability to use gallium nitride to make blue was not developed until the 1990s to complete the color pallet for producing full-color LED displays.
   

2. Instead of a separate backlight like in liquid crystal displays (LCD), organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays are self-illuminating and this is why OLED screens are significantly thinner than LCD because no backlight is required.
   

3. Mixing polyurethane with certain light-emitting polymers created a soft and pliable all-polymer LED that could be stretched 2x and still maintain high brightness, paving the way for digital displays which can be worn on the body.
   

4. The most often used color of soldermask on printed circuit boards (PCBs) is green, and it is theorized that this happened because the US Army commissioned the production of massive amounts of electronics after World War II and specified for them to all be green which incentivized manufacturers to invest all their processes to be most efficient making green PCBs.
   

5. The current generated from photosynthesis in synechocystis, a species of blue-green algae, was able to be collected and used to continuously operate an ARM Cortex M0+ microprocessor for an entire year.