Image copyright Surrey University Image caption Source gated transistors, like these made on glass at Surrey University, could help deliver flexible electronics

A Surrey school student has co-authored a paper investigating components that could be important for the future of flexible electronics.

The 18-year-old studied source gated transistors, an energy-efficient alternative to traditional transistors.

Their usability has been questioned due to some self-heating effects.

The new research, presented at the British Science Festival and published in Scientific Reports, shows that these effects are actually minimal.

Source gated transistors (SGTs) are more energy efficient and more electrically robust than traditional transistors - the fundamental building blocks of electronic devices. They allow the control of colour and brightness in the pixels on a screen, among a raft of other variables.

But it had been thought that SGTs self-heating would lead to device failures.

At the start I didn't think I would be able to do it, but it got easier as I went along Thomas Burridge

Thomas Burridge, a sixth-form student, co-authored the paper during a placement with the University of Surrey last summer, through the educational charity Satro.

He wrote computer code to simulate SGTs self-heating and processed the results, then checked them against data from real experiments.

Simple design changes to the geometry of the SGT, he found, all but eliminated self-heating and its damaging effects.

This year, Mr Burridge is going on to study engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Image copyright Surrey University Image caption These SGTs, made by Philips, are shown next to a memory stick for scale

"When you set the students a task, you never tell them that this is something that no-one has ever tackled before. They're not aware that this is at the edge of our knowledge, yet they deliver great work," said Dr Radu Sporea, Mr Burridge's supervisor and a research fellow at the University of Surrey.

Clothing, sensors and displays could benefit from this development, making wearable technology and flexible screens a reality.

But untapped potential remains, as Dr Sporea explained.

"I don't think we've found the true killer application of this, but the potential is immense because SGTs could be economic, robust, lightweight, and we can manufacture vast amounts of them in a similar way to newspapers being printed in a paper press."

As for Thomas Burridge - he found it all very rewarding: "I wanted to do this because I wanted to experience what it was like to do research. I did all this in four weeks; it's really surprising how much you can learn in a short amount of time. At the start I didn't think I would be able to do it, but it got easier as I went along."