The material shows promise to replace more costly and energy-intensive processes. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel.
All of this works in ambient temperatures unlike current high-temperature capture technologies that use up a significant portion of the energy being produced.
and this week set new rules to cut carbon pollution from the nation s power plants. ur technique allows one to specifically remove carbon dioxide at the source.
and produces energy as a byproductnd couples that with an ultrafiltration, air stripping, and a reverse osmosis system. f you have 1, 000 cows on your operation,
#New battery turns wasted heat into energy Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Dan Stober-Stanford on May 22 2014researchers have developed a new battery technology that captures low-temperature waste heat
and converts it into electricity. Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants.
Researchers have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy. Most such efforts have focused on thermoelectric devicesâ##solid-state materials that can produce electricity from a temperature gradientâ
##but the efficiency of such devices is limited by the availability of materials. Now researchers have found a new alternative for low-temperature waste-heat conversion into electricityâ##that is in cases where temperature differences are less than 100 degrees Celsius.
The researchers describe the approach inâ Nature Communications. irtually all power plants and manufacturing processes like steelmaking
and refining release tremendous amounts of low-grade heat to ambient temperaturessays Yi Cui an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford university. ur new battery technology is designed to take advantage of this temperature gradient at the industrial scale. he new system
is based on the principle known as the thermogalvanic effect which states that the voltage of a rechargeable battery is dependent on temperature. o harvest thermal energy we subject a battery to a four-step process:
heating up charging cooling down and dischargingsays Seok Woo Lee a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford
First an uncharged battery is heated by waste heat. Then while the battery is still warm a voltage is applied.
Once fully charged the battery is allowed to cool. Because of the thermogalvanic effect the voltage increases as the temperature decreases.
When the battery has cooled it actually delivers more electricity than was used to charge it. That extra energy doesn t appear from nowhere explains Cui.
It comes from the heat that was added to the system. The system aims at harvesting heat at temperatures below 100 C which accounts for a major part of potentially harvestable waste heat. ne-third of all energy consumption in the United states ends up as low-grade heatsays co-lead author Yuan
Yang a postdoc at the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT. In the experiment a battery was heated to 60 C charged and cooled.
The process resulted in an electricity-conversion efficiency of 5. 7 percent almost double the efficiency of conventional thermoelectric devices.
This heating-charging-cooling approach was proposed first in the 1950s at temperatures of 500 C
or more says Yang who notesâ that most heat recovery systems work best with higher temperature differences. key advance is using material that was not around at that timefor the battery electrodes as well as advances in engineering the system says co-author Gang Chen a professor
of mechanical engineering at MIT. his technology has the additional advantage of using low-cost abundant materials
and manufacturing processes that are used already widely in the battery industryadds Lee. While the new system has a significant advantage in energy conversion efficiency over conventional thermoelectric devices it has a much lower power densityâ##that is the amount of power that can be delivered for a given weight.
The new technology also will require further research to assure long-term reliability and improve the speed of battery charging
and discharging Chen adds. t will require a lot of work to take the next step. here is currently no good technology that can make effective use of the relatively low-temperature differences this system can harness Chen says. his has an efficiency we think is quite attractive.
and deployed to use it. he results are very promising says Peidong Yang a professor of chemistry at the University of California Berkeley who was involved not in the study. y exploring the thermogalvanic effect the researchers were able to convert low-grade heat to electricity with decent efficiencyhe says. his is a clever idea
The DOE in part through the Solid-state Solar-Thermal energy Conversion Center helped support the MIT research.
As it moves along a carbon-nanotube track it continuously harvests energy from strands of RNA molecules vital to a variety of roles in living cells
and viruses. ur motors extract chemical energy from RNA molecules decorated on the nanotubes and use that energy to fuel autonomous walking along the carbon nanotube trackchoi says.
The core is made of an enzyme that cleaves off part of a strand of RNA. After cleavage the upper DNA arm moves forward binding with the next strand of RNA
CNTS are long chains of carbon atoms that are extremely efficient at conducting and controlling electricity.
They are so thinâ##thousands of CNTS could fit side by side in a human hairâ##that it takes very little energy to switch them off according to Wong a co-author of the paper. hink of it as stepping on a garden hosewong explains. he thinner the hose the easier it is to shut off the flow. n theory this combination
Depending on how the CNTS grow a fraction of these carbon nanotubes can end up behaving like metallic wires that always conduct electricity instead of acting like semiconductors that can be switched off.
Then they pumped the semiconductor circuit full of electricity. All of that electricity concentrated in the metallic nanotubes
which grew so hot that they burned up and literally vaporized into tiny puffs of carbon dioxide.
#Colonies of wired microbes turn sewage into electricity Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Tom Abate-Stanford on September 19 2013a new way to generate electricity from sewage uses naturally occurring ired microbesas mini power plants
to produce electricity as they digest plant and animal waste. Scientists hope the icrobial batterycan be used in places such as sewage treatment plants
At the moment however the laboratory prototype is about the size of A d-cell battery and looks like a chemistry experiment with two electrodes one positive the other negative plunged into a bottle of wastewater.
and produce electricity that is captured by the battery s positive electrode. e call it fishing for electronssays Craig Criddle a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford university.
but tapping this energy efficiently has proven challenging. What is new about the microbial battery is a simple yet efficient design that puts these exoelectrogenic bacteria to work.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the battery s negative electrode colonies of wired microbes cling to carbon filaments that serve as efficient electrical conductors.
Using a scanning electron microscope the Stanford team captured images of these microbes attaching milky tendrils to the carbon filaments. ou can see that the microbes make nanowires to dump off their excess electronscriddle says.
At that point it is removed from the battery and re-oxidized back to silver oxide releasing the stored electrons.
Engineers estimate that the microbial battery can extract about 30 percent of the potential energy locked up in wastewater.
That is roughly the same efficiency at which the best commercially available solar cells convert sunlight into electricity.
Of course there is far less energy potential in wastewater. Even so the microbial battery is worth pursuing because it could offset some of the electricity now used to treat wastewater.
That use currently accounts for about 3 percent of the total electrical load in developed nations.
Most of this electricity goes toward pumping air into wastewater at conventional treatment plants where ordinary bacteria use oxygen in the course of digestion just like humans and other animals.
Looking ahead the engineers say their biggest challenge will be finding a cheap but efficient material for the positive node. e demonstrated the principle using silver oxide
#Will 3d printing bring space-based solar power to reality? Spiderfab 3-D robotic printer Since the 1970##s, space-based solar power has been a futuristic fantasy
but the advent of 21st#century 3-D printing may bring it a step closer to reality.
It would##enable construction of large support structures for systems such as multi-hundred-kilowatt solar arrays, large solar sails,
##For#space-based solar power (SBSP), there would be two basic steps, Hoyt explained. First, the 3-D printer would build a carbon fiber truss structure that would act as a frame for the system.
if concentrating solar power was being deployed.####We haven t yet looked in detail at space-based solar,
But a just-completed design analysis for a 300-kilowatt orbital solar array verified that Spiderfab can provide the projected tenfold decrease in stowed volume
TUI also developed a lab version of the device that would fabricate the truss structure in that analysis.##Geostationary solar could produce baseload electricity for 99 percent of the hours of the year,
Terrestrial solar arrays have achieved grid parity Davis said, but without storage they cannot provide the baseload power utilities need.
And#the cost of storage#to provide that service will##double or triple our electricity rates.##
##The Solar High Group is working##to put together a consortium of government and industry, ##Davis said.
They looked at technology feasibility, environmental impact, land use, manpower needs, energy payback, and estimated costs and confirmed the concept was##technically feasible with no new science
The microwave transmission that would deliver SBSP s electricity from an orbiting antenna to terrestrial rectennas would be##2 million times the power of that produced by the microwave oven.##
##and Lobbyists who protect#other energy sources subsidies#who would be##out of their jobs###The term 3-D printing has become a catch-all for a number of purposes
and other forms of passive energy, our future water networks will be operate with far more efficiency and convenience than anything imaginable today.
After many years of development and testing, the WMS1000 (shown above) became the world first wind turbine able to produce 1, 000 liters of water a day from air condensation.
Moisture is harvested out of the air to irrigate crops through an efficient system that produces large amounts of condensation A turbine intake drives air underground through a network of piping that rapidly cools the air to the temperature of the soil where it reaches 100%humidity
Ecoloblue has created an off-grid water harvester/dispenser specifically for the home or office. The unit shown above, the Ecoloblue 30,
and is designed to work with PV solar panels and batteries, to continually generate water even in emergency situations.
so that it can can carry the battery, electronic centers, and all the other things necessary for autonomous flight.
In theory, they would just have to come back to something to recharge their batteries. But we re very early on in working this out.
That s important for the battery and other electronics and sensors. Once the robot can stay aloft on its own,
increasing its battery life, and making it fly faster. Then there are a whole host of issues to work out dealing with wireless communications s
in order to take advantage of the sun s energy, or grow indoors with the help of artificial lights. Vertical farming is promising
and energy and improve crop yield. It takes advantage of the vertical space of city buildings rather than turning over wide expanses of land to agriculture and uses advanced greenhouse technology:
The cost of growing Vertical farming s biggest limitation is energy consumption. Considerable energy is required to power a closed, indoor greenhouse facility s artificial lighting, heating and cooling
and hydroponic or aeroponic growing systems. The amount of energy required per unit of product is an important factor for ensuring
not only that the farm is sustainable, but that it is economically viable. Recently, more and more studies have focused on pairing solar panels
and wind turbines with greenhouses to provide self-generated renewable electricity on-site. But the single technology that will be key to making vertical farms possible is lighting.
New LED light technology is the key that makes it possible to build vertically integrated farms.
and reduces transmission losses. They re also physically small, have a long service life, lower power consumption, generate less heat,
and can produce light of varying intensity. Because it produces less heat, the light can be moved closer to the plants.
This increases efficiency, not just in terms of energy use but by allowing layers of growing plants to be packed more densely, making more efficient use of space.
produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health and our environment. Scientifically viable in 2013;
If you wanted to look up the calorie content of a specific food you are eating you could take it to a lab and run it through a spectrometer.
from the filament in a light bulb to the silicon in a computer chip. Whether we 3d print them
#Honda Smart home produces more energy than it uses Wouldn it be great if your house produced more energy than it consumed?
Does that mean negative utility bills? Indeed it does, because solar panels can return power to the grid
and make your meter spin backwards. Japanese companies are fascinated with net-zero energy buildings, usually incorporating transportation as part of the mix.
Panasonic Eco Ideas House, with solar, a fuel cell, battery backup and a plug-in Toyota prius, has stood long next to a company headquarters in Tokyo,
and the company is also developing a green-themed housing development. In Japan, Toyota is invested also heavily in green communities.
The automaker has made a splash with its vehicle-to-grid technology but now it getting more serious with the Honda Smart home on the campus of the University of California at Davis
A 9. 5-kilowatt solar array, backed up by a 10-kilowatt-hour lithium battery and a 10-kilowatt DC car charger.
The solar will generate more than enough energy to heat the house, supply the appliances, and power a Honda Fit electric car.
Michael Koenig, Honda Smart home project leader, said that converting DC to AC wastes energy, so this is a DC-based project.
The Home energy management System (HEMS) optimizes the house microgrid, so that the Fit can charge during the low-demand nighttime,
and run on stored solar power. A geothermal system with eight, 20-foot deep boreholes uses a heat pump to heat
and cool the home floors and ceiling all year. LED lighting, with five times the efficiency of conventional illumination, is used throughout.
a large machine/small waste treatment plant developed by Janicki Bioenergy (an offshoot of Sedro-Woolley-based Janicki Industries)
but electricity used to power the machine itself. Any leftover electricity generated through the process is fed back into the power grid.
The small amount of solid waste that comes out on the other end is no longer poop
000 people and, from that, produce 86,000 liters of clean water on a daily basis while also generating a net 250 kilowatts of electricity.
The resulting films conduct electricity better than any other sample of graphene produced in the past. Until recently
His team is also looking at using the graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells. Easing the pain
but is used in everything from stainless steel to rechargeable batteries. Rare-earth elements are concentrated much less at around 0. 1,
#Beating battery drain Stream video on your smartphone or use its GPS for an hour or two and you ll probably see the battery drain significantly.
As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features battery life has become a concern.
Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone s battery last perhaps twice as long
and help to conserve energy in cell towers. The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones antennas.
Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power.
Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage eating away power more than any other smartphone component and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations#and wasting
This means smartphone batteries lose longevity and base stations waste energy and lose money. But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones)
and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) based on nearly a decade of MIT research to essentially switch gears to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed cutting the waste.
You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that every few nanoseconds modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery explains Joel Dawson Eta Devices chief technology officer
The savings could be substantial Dawson says noting that a large carrier could save $100 million in annual electricity costs.
Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life. Besides battery life Dawson adds there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency.
Eta Devices approach could lead to smaller handset batteries for example and even smaller handsets since there would be less dissipating heat.
The technology could also drive down operating costs for base stations in the developing world where these stations rely on expensive diesel fuel for power
At the time I was suffering as everyone else was from my iphone running out of battery at lunchtime Astrom says.
The research was supported by KFUPM through the Center for Clean water and Energy at MIT f
But a more cyclical approach where waste is used as an energy source could provide higher profit yields
for example, consumes over 3 percent of the electricity in the United states, yet organics in the wastewater have energy that can be extracted
and used locally, Silver says. nd that the case for a lot of waste products in general. Cambrian automated and modular Ecovolt system delivered on a flatbed
in the process, generate electricity. This electricity travels through a circuit and onto cathodes coated with separate microbes that consume that electricity
along with carbon dioxide to produce biogas at a rate of up to 100 cubic feet per minute.
The biogas enters a connected cogeneration system for power conversion. Depending on several site factors, this produces anywhere from 30 to 400 kilowatts of electricity.
Treated wastewater exits the reactor with 80 to 90 percent of pollutants removed, so it can be used for irrigation, equipment washing,
and other things. The system can treat 10,000 to 1 million gallons of wastewater daily.
through carbon-free energy generation and avoiding municipal wastewater treatment ffectively planting over 4, 400 acres of trees in a year,
At current usage rates, Cambrian estimates the system will generate enough electricity to meet 25 to 50 percent of these breweriesneeds
where aerobic microorganisms degrade pollutants consume a lot of energy and generate biosolids (organic materials) that are managed at cost.
and provides real-time data thanks to using exoelectrogens as sensors. hese bugs are generating electricity,
to see how well the reactor is doing, explains Buck, who invented Cambrian sensor technologies.
and generates electricity to power itself. Another project, funded by the National Science Foundation, uses exoelectrogens to sense nitrate in wastewater, cheaply and with very high specificity,
and generate electricity for astronauts. Soon, they came across exoelectrogens; a 1999 study had revealed that exoelectrogens could,
where the waste of industry is recycled to create energy and value much like in natural ecosystems. n a natural ecosystem,
Now, a team of MIT researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production
In a new Nature Materials paper, the researchers report boosting plantsability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast,
Supercharged photosynthesis The idea for nanobionic plants grew out of a project in Strano lab to build self-repairing solar cells modeled on plant cells.
As a next step, the researchers wanted to try enhancing the photosynthetic function of chloroplasts isolated from plants, for possible use in solar cells.
The plant captures this electrical energy and uses it to power the second stage of photosynthesis building sugars.
however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes or, even better,
that can extract energy from the environment to recharge. Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology And circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it
even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous ultralow-power converters that used the same approach had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.
Moreover, the researcherschip achieves those efficiency improvements while assuming additional responsibilities. Where most of its ultralow-power predecessors could use a solar cell to either charge a battery
or directly power a device, this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.
All of those operations also share a single inductor the chip main electrical component which saves on circuit board space
the chip power consumption remains low. e still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,
Ups and downs The circuit chief function is to regulate the voltages between the solar cell, the battery,
If the battery operates for too long at a voltage that either too high or too low, for instance, its chemical reactants break down,
since the rate at which it dissipates energy as heat is proportional to the square of the current.
and falls depends on the voltage generated by the solar cell, which is highly variable. So the timing of the switch throws has to vary, too.
whose selection is determined by the solar cell voltage. Once again, when the capacitor fills, the switches in the inductor path are flipped. n this technology space,
because there a fixed amount of energy that consumed by doing the work, says Brett Miwa,
#Nanoparticle network could bring fast-charging batteries (Phys. org) A new electrode design for lithium-ion batteries has been shown to potentially reduce the charging time from hours to minutes by replacing the conventional graphite electrode with a network of tin-oxide nanoparticles.
Batteries have called two electrodes an anode and a cathode. The anodes in most of today's lithium-ion batteries are made of graphite.
The theoretical maximum storage capacity of graphite is limited very at 372 milliamp hours per gram hindering significant advances in battery technology said Vilas Pol an associate professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University.
The researchers have performed experiments with a porous interconnected tin-oxide based anode which has nearly twice the theoretical charging capacity of graphite.
Findings are detailed in a paper published in November in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
and contract or breathe during the charge-discharge battery cycle. These spaces are very important for this architecture said Purdue postdoctoral research associate Vinodkumar Etacheri.
Without the proper pore size and interconnection between individual tin oxide nanoparticles the battery fails. The research paper was authored by Etacheri;
#Toward a low-cost'artificial leaf'that produces clean hydrogen fuel For years scientists have been pursuing artificial leaf technology a green approach to making hydrogen fuel that copies plants'ability to convert sunlight into a form of energy they can use.
and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy. Automakers have started introducing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles
But making hydrogen which mostly comes from natural gas requires electricity from conventional carbon dioxide-emitting power plants.
Producing hydrogen at low cost from water using the clean energy from the sun would make this form of energy
#Streamlining thin film processing saves time energy Energy storage devices and computer screens may seem worlds apart but they're not.
When associate professor Qi Hua Fan of the electrical engineering and computer science department set out to make a less expensive supercapacitor for storing renewable energy he developed a new plasma technology that will streamline the production of display screens.
and plasma technologies Fan was named researcher of the year for the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering.
His research focuses on nanostructured materials used for photovoltaics energy storage and displays. Last spring Fan received a proof-of-concept grant from the Department of energy through the North Central Regional Sun Grant Center to determine
and commercialize renewable bio-based energy technologies. The proof-of-concept grants allow researchers to advance promising research to the next level of toward product development and commercialization.
Through this project Fan developed a faster way of treating the biochar particles using a new technology called plasma activation.
Treating means you use plasma to change the material surface such as creating pores Fan said.
The plasma treatment activates the biochar in five minutes and at room temperature Fan explained. Conventional chemical activation takes several hours to complete
This saves energy and is much more efficient Fan said. In this project he has been collaborating with assistant professor Zhengrong Gu in the agricultural
whose research focuses on energy storage materials and devices. They plan to use these promising results to apply for federal funding.
Plasma processing is a very critical technology in modern optoelectronic materials and devices Fan explained.
The high-energy plasma can deposit highly transparent and conductive thin films create high quality semiconductors and pattern micro-or nanoscale devices thus making the display images brighter and clearer.
Fan will work with Wintek to develop a prototype plasma system. The activation method has the potential to improve production efficiency saving time and energy he noted d
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