The more things change, the more they stay the same... Just as readers of science magazines in the 40s and 50s liked to read about how jetpacks and passenger-carrying deep space rockets were right around the corner, so do today’s readers like to believe that car/boat/plane/helicopter hybrids and extensive underwater resorts are something they’ll soon be seeing. Those last two are examples of the “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas put forth by British conceptual designer Phil Pauley. While such fantastic visions might or might not ever see the light of day, they’re definitely inspiring to consider, and as the saying goes – more or less – “shoot for the moon and land in the stars.” With that in mind, here’s his latest idea: a family of boats that can fly, submerge, or sprout an extra deck.

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The proposed watercraft would constitute the Cruiser series, and would include four boats: the Yacht Cruiser, Sub Cruiser, Fly Cruiser and Power Cruiser.

The biggest of the bunch, the Yacht Cruiser would not surprisingly offer “7 Star luxury from top to bottom,” which would include floor to ceiling one-way glazing. Its Wonders of the Future feature, however, would be the ability to raise its upper deck on pistons, to create a whole other usable deck space underneath it. Called the Party Deck, this area would be intended for sports and social activities – although if one wanted to use it for tax preparation or ironing laundry, presumably they could do so.

The Fly Cruiser, on the other hand, would give users the option of taking to the air and cruising at a speed of over 100 knots. With the touch of a button, engine-equipped wings would fold out from the sides, allowing it to lift off from the surface of the water once it had achieved take-off velocity. A dagger board on the underside would help stabilize it while taking off, and would retract once the boat became airborne. Without any sort of rudder at the rear, however, it's questionable how well the vehicle would handle in the air.

The Sub Cruiser would, of course, have the ability to submerge and travel underwater.

The Power Cruiser, from the sounds of things, would simply be a luxury, high-performance powerboat. As with its three siblings, however, its hull would be designed to “irradiate vibration, bang and slap to literally smooth through the water no matter what the weather or sea condition.”

Any of these watercraft would only be made to order, so if you’re interested, Pauley would no doubt like to hear from you.

All images courtesy Phil Pauley

(Gizmag)

Given that no one semiconductor alloy can respond to all wavelengths, the approach used in the past has been to stack layers of different semiconductors – each one with a different band gap – and wire them in series. Nine years ago, by adjusting the amounts of indium and gallium in the alloy indium gallium nitride, Berkeley’s Wladek Walukiewicz and Kin Man Yu were able to tweak its band gap to respond to different wavelengths. Using this technology, they were able to create a full-spectrum solar cell by stacking different versions of the same alloy, but the production process was quite complex.

In 2004 they took a different approach, creating a single alloy of highly mismatched semiconductors based on a common alloy, zinc (plus manganese) and tellurium. They were able to add a third band gap, between those of the zinc and tellurium, by doping the alloy with oxygen. This once again resulted in a full-spectrum solar cell, but the method of creating it was once again too complicated and expensive.

Their latest creation is another multiband semiconductor alloy, gallium arsenide nitride, which has a composition similar to that of the commonly-used gallium arsenide. In this case, the third band is created by replacing some of the arsenic atoms with nitrogen. Unlike their previous efforts, this solar cell material can be produced via one of the most common methods of fabricating compound semiconductors – metalorganic chemical vapor deposition.

When exposed to sunlight, a test cell made with the new semiconductor was shown to respond strongly to all parts of the spectrum, making this a significant step in towards more efficient solar cells that can be mass produced by conventional methods.

The research was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Via Berkeley Lab.

(gizmag)