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 […]
Category Archives: Energy
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
E. coli tailored to convert plants into renewable chemicals
Science Daily May 18, 2018 Economically and efficiently converting tough plant matter, called lignin, has long been a stumbling block for wider use of the plant energy source and making it cost competitive. Piecing together mechanisms from other known lignin degraders, a team of researchers in the US (Sandia National Laboratory, Joint BioEnergy Institute, University of Minnesota, UC Berkeley) has engineered E. coli into an efficient and productive bioconversion cell factory… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Nanoporous carbon electrodes harvest blue energy
Nanotechweb May 11, 2018 Capacitive mixing and capacitive deionization are currently developed as alternatives to membrane-based processes to harvest blue energy from salinity gradients between river and sea water and to desalinate water using charge-discharge cycles of capacitors. By simulating realistic capacitors based on aqueous electrolytes and nanoporous carbide-derived carbon electrodes, researchers in France accounted for both their complex structure and their polarization by the electrolyte under applied voltage. They have shown that molecular simulations can realistically predict the capacitance of devices that contain nanoporous carbon materials as the electrodes and salty water as the electrolyte…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL […]
Engineers invent smart microchip that can self-start and operate when battery runs out
Science Daily May 3, 2018 Researchers in Singapore have designed a microchip called BATLESS that switches to the minimum-power mode and operates with a tiny power consumption of about half a nanoWatt when the battery is exhausted. The power management technique enables operations to be self-started, while being powered directly by the tiny on-chip solar cell, with no battery assistance. The chip’s ability to switch between minimum energy and minimum power mode translates into aggressive miniaturisation of batteries from centimetres down to a few millimetres… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Motorizing fibres with geometric zero-energy modes
Phys.org May 4, 2018 An international team of researchers (France, Switzerland, Germany) used responsive materials to generate structures with built-in complex geometries, linear actuators and microswimmers. The results suggest that complex, fully functional machines composed solely from shape-changing materials might be possible. They show that prestrained polymer fibres closed into rings exhibit self-actuation and continuous motion when placed between two heat baths due to elastic deformations that arise from rotational-symmetry breaking around the rod’s axis. Their findings illustrate a simple but robust model to create active motion in mechanically prestrained objects… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Water-based battery stores solar and wind energy
Science Daily April 30, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) has developed a rechargeable manganese–hydrogen battery, where the cathode is cycled between soluble Mn2+ and solid MnO2 with a two-electron reaction, and the anode is cycled between H2 gas and H2O through catalytic reactions of hydrogen evolution and oxidation. They are confident they can take this table-top technology up to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times, creating a grid-scale battery with a useful lifespan well over a decade… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Energy conversion: Optical ‘overtones’ for solar cells
Science Daily April 19, 2018 In solar cells the spectral position of the window of light that can be efficiently converted is strongly related to its band-gap. Researchers in Germany measured the charge carrier density created by the absorption of multiple photons in perovskite nanocrystals. The efficiency of this process becomes drastically enhanced when the frequency of the primary light oscillation and frequency of the exciton at the band-gap become equal. The observation of this novel resonance phenomenon for optical excitations in excitonic semiconductors could pave the way for solar cells to more efficiently convert long-wavelength light into usable electric […]