Eurekalert September 19, 2019 Researchers at Rice University made an incandescent light source by breaking down a one-element system into two or more subunits. They put sub-elements together in such a fashion that they interact with each other. The idea is to rely upon collective behavior, not just a single element. Breaking the filament into many pieces provides more degrees of freedom to design the functionality. The resonator’s output can be controlled by damping the lossy resonator or by controlling the level of coupling through a third element between the resonators. The ability to tune the oscillator phase provides new […]
Category Archives: Energy
Liquid Air Could Store Renewable Energy and Reduce Emissions
IEEE Spectrum September 18, 2019 Refrigerated food warehouses and factories consume immense amounts of energy. A team of researchers and companies in Europe working under the CryoHub project sponsored by EU are now developing a cryogenic energy storage system that could reduce carbon emissions from the food sector while providing a convenient way to store wind and solar power. The system will use extra wind and solar electricity to freeze air to cryogenic temperatures, where it becomes liquid, and in the process shrinks by 700 times in volume. The liquid air is stored in insulated low-pressure tanks similar to the […]
Device generates light from the cold night sky
EurekAlert September 12, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, Stanford University) built a thermoelectric generator that sidesteps the limitations of solar power by taking advantage of radiative cooling, in which a sky-facing surface passes its heat to the atmosphere as thermal radiation, losing some heat to space and reaching a cooler temperature than the surrounding air harnessing temperature differences to generate electricity. The device consists of a polystyrene enclosure covered in aluminized mylar to minimize thermal radiation and protected by an infrared-transparent wind cover. In tests the device generated 25 milliwatts of energy per square meter in […]
Chip converts waste heat into electricity
Nanowerk July 10, 2019 It is estimated that as much as two-thirds of energy consumed in the U.S. each year is wasted as heat. Researchers at the University of Utah have demonstrated that they can go well beyond the theoretical “blackbody limit”. They produced a 5mm-by-5mm chip of two silicon wafers with a nanoscopic gap between them. While the chip was in a vacuum, they heated one surface and cooled another surface, which created a heat flux that can generate electricity. The technology could be used to not only cool down portable devices like laptops and smartphones but also to […]
Assessing battery performance: Compared to what?
Eurekalert May 9, 2019 Industrial engineers and researchers from governmental and academic labs often devise their own procedures for characterizing lithium-ion batteries based on the battery technology’s intended application. According to an international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of Hawaii, Argonne National Laboratory) the appropriateness of a test depends on what the investigator is studying. Their comprehensive review analyses and discusses the various international standards and regulations characterisation and electrical testing of lithium-ion cells, specifically for high-power automotive and grid applications. They produced an easy-to-use table comparing eight test methods, including the main equipment needed, the information generated, and […]
Flexible, transparent monolayer graphene device for power generation and storage
Nanowerk May 8, 2019 Researchers in North Korea adapted a single-layer graphene (SLG) as an electrode for the supercapacitor, touch sensor, and a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), thus making an electronic system that is ultrathin, lightweight, transparent, and flexible. Capacitive-type transparent and flexible electronic devices can be simultaneously used as an electrochemical double-layer capacitance-based supercapacitor and as a sensitive, fast-responding touch sensor in a single-device architecture by inserting a separator of polyvinyl alcohol–lithium chloride-soaked polyacrylonitrile electrospun mat on polyethylene naphthalate between two symmetric SLG film electrodes. They successfully demonstrated the device…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Wave device could deliver clean energy to thousands of homes
Science Daily February 12, 2019 An international team of researchers (Italy, UK) developed a device, known as a Dielectric Elastomer Generator (DEG), using flexible rubber membranes. It is designed to fit on top of a vertical tube which, when placed in the sea, partially fills with water that rises and falls with wave motion. As waves pass the tube, the water inside pushes trapped air above to inflate and deflate the generator on top of the device. As the membrane inflates, a voltage is generated. This increases as the membrane deflates, and electricity is produced. In a commercial device, this […]
To conserve energy, AI clears up cloudy forecasts
Eurekalert February 6, 2019 To manage energy systems in buildings researchers at Cornell University have developed a new approach which predicts the accuracy of the weather forecast using a machine learning model trained with years’ worth of data on forecasts and actual weather conditions. They combined that predictor with a mathematical model that considers building characteristics including the size and shape of rooms, the construction materials, the location of sensors and the position of windows. They applied the smart control system to an old building on campus to demonstrate that it could reduce energy usage by up to 10 percent…read […]
Giant lasers pass new milestone towards fusion energy
Physics World June 18, 2018 An international team of researchers (USA – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, industry, University of Rochester, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Germany) has shown that the fusion energy generated by the laser implosion of a deuterium-tritium fuel capsule is twice that of the kinetic energy of the implosion. They changed the shape of the laser pulses to create much more stable implosions. In 2014, these “high-foot” pulses each yielded up to 17 kJ of fusion energy (and later 26 kJ) – exceeding the roughly 10 kJ created in earlier experiments. They say they will be close […]
Self-assembling 3D battery would charge in seconds
Science Daily May 17, 2018 Researchers at Cornell University propose a three-dimensional architecture for batteries, where instead of having the batteries’ anode and cathode on either side of a nonconducting separator, intertwine the components. For their proof of concept architecture, they used gyroidal thin films of carbon as anode featuring thousands of periodic pores coated with electronically insulating but ion-conducting separator. They used sulfur as anode backfilling it with an electronically conducting polymer poly[3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene] (PEDOT). According to the researchers, due to the nanoscale dimensions of the battery’s elements it has the potential for very fast charging… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE