#Water-splitter could make hydrogen fuel on Mars Making fuel on site for a return trip to Mars may be a step closer.
and future Earthlings enabling them to use renewable energy sources for making hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen fuel cells can power vehicles ranging from cars to submarines and rockets.
They can also heat buildings and double as portable power-packs for computers or other kit used in the field.
But existing methods for creating usable hydrogen gas from water require a lot of electricity. That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
Cronin and his colleagues see this as a major obstacle to a future in which hydrogen fuel replaces oil.
and protons to recombine to make hydrogen gas. The whole process uses a single whack of power and patchy renewable energy will suffice for this says Cronin.
or for making fuel on Mars to power a rocket back to Earth. It is unclear
In a single degenerate system the shock wave from the white dwarf explosion should smash into the surrounding gas from the companion star generating radio waves.
While it is true that there is no sign of the gas that might be there in a single degenerate perhaps that gas is more distant
which NIF engineers originally designed to implode fuel capsules for research into nuclear fusion power. The team fixed a diamond inside a hole cut in a small gold cylinder
For instance commodity traders might pay top dollar for detailed information on the level of oil in Saudi arabia's storage facilities.
We could also use other sensors to assess methane outgassing levels and explosion risk. Initially the firm plans to use information collected by European space agency satellites
It also accounts for complex phenomena such as cooling gas star formation supernova explosions and supermassive black holes pulling in material that gets too Close to run the simulation the team used several supercomputers in Europe and the US each
Canada has imposed other restrictions on Russia as a result of the Ukraine crisis such as economic sanctions against a Crimean oil and gas company and the expulsion of a Russian diplomat from an embassy in Ottawa.
But Mertsch says the models they used didn't account for dust shells produced as the expanding remnants of supernovae slam into surrounding gas and dust.
Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Much of the weight of today's rockets comes from their own propellant so having a source of fuel already in space would pave the way for much more ambitious human missions.
and beyond we don't want to have to bring fuel with us says Anthony Colaprete of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field California.
and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
It will carry five scientific instruments including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's atmosphere.
On earth methane is produced mainly by life so there was a stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago.
Some are sceptical of those results believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
The sun is currently zipping through one of the Milky way's spiral arms at a relative speed of about 23 kilometres per second ploughing through thin clouds of interstellar dust and gas.
The laser pulse ionises inert helium gas generating a stream of high-speed electrons. This electron beam is directed at a thin metallic foil
Some of these clumps begin gathering gas from the disc and become the cores of gas giants like Jupiter.
According to models of this process as the clumps get larger they feel more drag as they move through the gas and dust.
or larger one that sees smaller dust grains only about 50 micrometres wide and one that sees cold gas.
The team found that the gas and the small dust grains form rings of evenly distributed material all the way around Oph IRS 48.
If the idea is sound there must be a way to make vortices without first making giant planets perhaps involving the star heating the gas until it creates a region of instability.
When this article was published first on 6 june 2013 it mistook the temperature of the gas that Nienke van der Marel
The next drill scoop will have to wait until the planet comes back into Range in the meantime the science team has plenty of data to fuel new discoveries and daydreams.
These studies include technology policy reports focused on nuclear power coal natural gas and the smart electric grid.
undercutting even today low-cost natural gas but in areas like New england and the Southeast, taller towers are needed to reach the strong winds that make wind energy economically feasible. nce youe at the heights wee looking at,
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
#New approach to boosting biofuel production Yeast are used commonly to transform corn and other plant materials into biofuels such as ethanol.
However large concentrations of ethanol can be toxic to yeast which has limited the production capacity of many yeast strains used in industry.
Now Stephanopoulos and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified a new way to boost yeast tolerance to ethanol by simply altering the composition of the medium in
Ethanol and other alcohols can disrupt yeast cell membranes eventually killing the cells. The MIT team found that adding potassium and hydroxide ions to the medium in
By making these changes the researchers were able to boost yeast s ethanol production by about 80 percent.
This work goes a long way to squeezing the last drop of ethanol from sugar adds Gerald Fink an MIT professor of biology member of the Whitehead Institute and the paper s other senior author.
or group of genes that could be manipulated to make yeast more tolerant to ethanol but this approach did not yield much success
and increasing the ph with potassium hydroxide the researchers were able to dramatically boost ethanol production.
They also found that these changes did not affect the biochemical pathway used by the yeast to produce ethanol:
Yeast continued to produce ethanol at the same per-cell rate as long as they remained viable. Instead the changes influenced their electrochemical membrane gradients differences in ion concentrations inside and outside the membrane
Ethanol increases the porosity of the cell membrane making it very difficult for cells to maintain their electrochemical gradients.
the longer they survive the more ethanol they make. By reinforcing these gradients we re energizing yeast to allow them to withstand harsher conditions
What s also exciting to us is that this could apply beyond ethanol to more advanced biofuel alcohols that upset cell membranes in the same way Lam says.
Industrial relevancebefore yeast begin their work producing ethanol the starting material usually corn must be broken down into glucose.
While many studies have examined ways to boost ethanol tolerance at low glucose levels the MIT team used concentrations of about 300 grams per liter similar to
Otherwise what you learn at low ethanol levels is not likely to translate to industrial production Stephanopoulos says.
Lonnie Ingram director of the Florida Center for Renewable Chemicals and Fuels at the University of Florida describes the MIT team s discovery as remarkable and unexpected.
In more recent experiments the MIT researchers have used this method to bump ethanol productivity even higher than reported in the Science paper.
They are also working on using this approach to boost the ethanol yield from various industrial feedstocks that because of starting compounds inherently toxic to yeast now have low yields.
Instead of climbing into a conventional bulky gas-pressurized suit an astronaut may don a lightweight stretchy garment lined with tiny musclelike coils.
thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials. Ultimately the big advantage is mobility and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration.
What s more such robots run on gasoline and are powered by a gasoline engine in order to generate high forces.
and oil rigs these simulations require intensive computation done by powerful computers over many hours, costing engineering firms much time and money.
and oil and gas industries are now using the Akselos software. The startup is also providing software for an MITX course on structural engineering.
which also included research scientist Jifa Qi, graduate student Matthew Klug and postdoc Xiangnan Dang, was supported by Italian energy company Eni through the MIT Energy Initiative y
or ridges just a few micrometers across that is then impregnated with a fluid that can be manipulated for example an oil infused with tiny magnetic particles or ferrofluid
In the desert environment dust is present on a daily basis says co-author Numan Abu-Dheir of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi arabia.
which electricity runs through a gas to produce light. These are very bright but can be as large as trucks
#Separating finely mixed oil and water Whenever there is a major spill of oil into water the two tend to mix into a suspension of tiny droplets called an emulsion that is extremely hard to separate and that can cause severe damage to ecosystems.
But MIT researchers have discovered a new inexpensive way of getting the two fluids apart again.
and could process large quantities of the finely mixed materials back into pure oil and water.
In addition to its possible role in cleaning up spills the new method could also be used for routine drilling such as in the deep ocean as well as on land where water is injected into wells to help force oil out of deep rock formations.
Typically Varanasi explains the mixed oil and water that s extracted is put in large tanks to allow separation by gravity;
the oil gradually floats to the top where it can be skimmed off. That works well when the oil and water are already large globs of stuff already partly separated Varanasi says.
The difficulty comes when you have what is called an emulsion with very tiny droplets of oil stabilized in a water background or water in an oil background.
The difficulty significantly increases for nanoemulsions where the drop sizes are below a micron. To break down those emulsions crews use de-emulsifiers
In the 2010 Deepwater horizon oil spill in the Gulf of mexico for example large amounts of dispersants and de-emulsifiers were dumped into the sea.
After a while the oil just disappeared Varanasi says but people know it s hidden in the water in these fine emulsions.
In the case of land-based drilling where so-called produced water from wells contains fine emulsions of oil companies sometimes simply dilute the water until it meets regulatory standards for being discharged into waterways.
It s a problem that s very challenging to the industry Varanasi says both in terms of recovering the oil
Tiny droplets of water colored blue are suspended in oil on top of a membrane developed by the MIT team.
and repels oil the droplets shrink as they pass through the membrane ultimately leaving just pure oil behind.
A similar membrane with a different coating can do the reverse allowing oil droplets to pass
either attract oil and repel water or vice versa. This allows one material to pass while blocking the other with little flow resistance Varanasi says.
or repel oil and water. The skin layer thickness can be optimized further using polymeric pore formers to enhance throughput.
Within seconds an oil-water mixture that is heavily clouded becomes perfectly clear as the water passes through the membrane leaving pure oil behind.
Oil-water nanoemulsions are ubiquitous in a number of industries and these membranes could enable rapid separation of those emulsions with high purity and efficiency.
where the ability to adjust the texture of panels to minimize drag at different speeds could increase fuel efficiency,
#A new way to detect leaks in pipes Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have made frequently headlines in recent years,
Now researchers at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi arabia have devised a robotic system that can detect leaks at a rapid pace and with high accuracy by sensing a large pressure
The researchers have begun discussions with gas companies and water companies the system can also detect leaks in water pipes,
or in petroleum pipelines about setting up field tests under real-world conditions. Chatzigeorgiou presented the concept this month at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong kong,
In addition to their potential for dangerous explosions, leaking gas pipes can be a significant contributor to global warming:
Methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
and should be effective in gas, water, and oil pipes. MIT mechanical engineering professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi, a co-author of the research papers,
adds, his technology allows for an unambiguous and reliable sensing of very small leaks that often go undetected for long periods of time.
People in rural Alaska rely on gas and diesel generators for power paying upward of $1 per kilowatt-hour for electricity.
and to convert carbon dioxide to fuels for applications On earth and in space. Today industrial infrastructure manages basic resources linearly
while producing small amounts of burnable methane, have gained popularity in the last few decades but such systems only function under specific circumstances,
In 2012, NASA began funding a Cambrian project, called Exogen, that uses electromethanogenesis to more efficiently extract oxygen or fuel from CO2 for long-duration space flights.
and the introduction of alkyl groups caused by pollutants such as fuel exhaust and tobacco smoke. To achieve this, the researchers created five different circular pieces of DNA, four
The sensors detected changes in oxygen pressure as small as 15 millimeters of mercury and it took less than 10 minutes to see the effects of a change in inhaled gas.
The knee now used by thousands of patients worldwide utilizes iron particles suspended in oil between steel plates
Inventors just care a lot about their inventions and that passion and commitment fuels commercial progress.
The work was supported by the U s. Department of energy and by the National Science Foundation and used facilities of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center r
Unlike fuels that are burned this system uses material that can be reused continually. It produces no emissions
The work was supported by BP though the MIT Energy Initiative and the U s. Department of energy Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy n
They shopped their phages to bacteria-plagued industries such as oil and water treatment, where biofilms build up in pipelines before seeing firsthand that the food industry as in desperate need of new detection technologies.
and corrode oil pipelines, or to detect the pathogenic bacteria that sometimes cause oil to sour by changing its composition.
The next practical application however, is most likely in health care, with the potential for clinical diagnostics or rapid detection of contamination in hospital rooms with the aim of decreasing the 1. 7 million cases of hospital-associated infections recorded in the United states each year.
and fuel, release the oxygen that we breathe, and add beauty to our surroundings. Now, a team of MIT researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production
they also modified plants to detect the gas nitric oxide. Together these represent the first steps in launching a scientific field the researchers have dubbed lant nanobionics. lants are very attractive as a technology platform,
What is the impact of nanoparticles on the production of chemical fuels like glucose? Giraldo says.
Lean green machines The researchers also showed that they could turn Arabidopsis thaliana plants into chemical sensors by delivering carbon nanotubes that detect the gas nitric oxide,
and fuel consumption electric and hybrid cars and trucks struggled for years to find a solid customer base.
and charging them requires plug-in infrastructure that s still sparse in the United states. Now MIT spinout XL Hybrids is upfitting (and retrofitting) gas and diesel commercial vans and trucks with fuel-saving add-on electric powertrains
and Fedex among others can provide a 20 percent reduction in fuel consumption and CO2 EMISSIONS. The goal is to reduce oil consumption with cost-effective electric drive technology where fleets don t need additional infrastructure
and don t need a large battery says Tod Hynes 02 co-founding president of XL Hybrids and a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of management.
But XL Hybrids innovation comes from targeting commercial fleet vehicles with a good value proposition all around Hynes says offering low-cost equipment quick installation savings on gas and oil and easy integration.
At the end of the day it s about making the economics work to compete against the price of fuel Hynes says adding We re able to do a lot with a little.
XL Hybrids installs small 1. 8-kwh lithium-ion batteries that provide a 20 percent fuel savings Hynes says.
which involves running a vehicle on treadmill-like rollers to estimate fuel mileage in urban driving.
With this savings companies can expect to save 4000 gallons of fuel over the life of an XL Hybrids system Hynes says.
When a fleet customer looks at the numbers they want to see benefits based on fuel savings
It has an oil problem he says. We re very dependent on oil: We rely on imports
and more than 95 percent of transportation fuel is oil. So he quit his job in 2008 with the aim of starting a company to cut oil consumption.
With rising innovations in batteries and advanced power inverters and motors Hynes backed into a technological solution with retrofitted electric powertrains.
Reconnecting with former mentor Bill Aulet now managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Hynes put the final pieces into place.
The MIT team found that they could create novel sensors by coating the nanotubes with specifically designed amphiphilic polymers polymers that are drawn to both oil and water, like soap.
and fuel-injected engines, as well as for processes such as spray cooling of hot metal. One application now being considered by Varanasi
such as in deep-sea oil wells. By creating a computer model of that microstructure and studying its response to various conditions,
including materials used in aircraft, oil wells, and other critical industrial applications. Metal fatigue, for example which can result from an accumulation of nanoscale cracks over time s probably the most common failure modefor structural metals in general
The work was funded by the BP-MIT Materials and Corrosion Center l
#Better robot vision Object recognition is one of the most widely studied problems in computer vision.
supplying them with the essential gas. This blood deoxygenation causes the hemoglobin in sickle cells to form long fibrous chains,
Oxygen diffuses from the gas compartment to the microfluidic channel, allowing researchers to control how much oxygen cells are exposed to.
have helped replace thousands of kerosene lanterns usually burned in homes for lighting; such lanterns spew out black carbon that contributes to global warming and indoor air pollution.
These stoves, Wu says, cook twice as fast, with half the charcoal. Moreover, Wu says,
And schools, municipalities, oil refineries, and other organizations have hired Essess to scan their facilities and find, for instance, fixes that might affect their heating bills in the winter,
including an oil company in Thailand and Japanese heavy-equipment manufacturer IHI Corp. The process has received eight patents
high-quality fuels from low-quality oil New findings released by MIT researchers could help energy companies implement a long-recognized process for converting heavy, high-sulfur crude oil into high-value,
cleaner fuels such as gasoline without using hydrogen a change that would reduce costs, energy use, and carbon dioxide emissions.
The process involves combining oil with water under such high pressures and temperatures that they mix together, molecule by molecule,
and the role played by the water in breaking apart the heavy oil compounds and shifting the sulfur into easily removable gases.
They have formulated also models that show how best to mix the oil and water to promote the desired reactions critical guidance for the design of commercial-scale reactors.
More than a third of the world energy needs are met using oil, and our reliance on that convenient, high-energy density resource will likely continue for decades to come, especially in the transportation sector.
But converting crude oil into lightweight, clean-burning, high-quality fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel is getting harder.
In the past, oil found in the ground tended to be lightweight, clean, and easily made into high-value fuels.
Now, more and more of it is heavy thick, tarry material that, when refined, yields a higher fraction of lower-value products such as asphalt along with solid chunks of waste called coke.
Moreover, newly discovered oil contains ever-higher concentrations of sulfur, a contaminant that, when burned, produces gases that are regulated now strictly
because they interfere with pollution control systems in vehicles and contribute to acid rain and smog. Processes now used to upgrade
and desulfurize heavy crude oil are expensive and energy-intensive, and they require hydrogen, which companies typically produce from natural gas a high-cost process that consumes valuable gas resources
and releases high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). o there a lot of interest in finding alternative processes for converting low-quality crude oil into valuable fuels with less residual coke and for removing the sulfur efficiently
and economically without using hydrogen, says Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane('72) Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT.
One approach calls for using water rather than natural gas as the source of the hydrogen molecules needed for key chemical reactions in the refining process.
Ordinarily, oil and water won mix, so the molecules can eeone another and chemically react.
but spreads out to fill a confined space as a gas does. Add oil to supercritical water (SCW) and stir,
and the two will mix together perfectly, setting the stage for the desired chemical reactions without any added hydrogen from natural gas.
Industrial and academic researchers have demonstrated that mixing heavy oils with SCW produces lighter hydrocarbons (compounds of hydrogen
and carbon atoms) containing less sulfur and forming less waste coke. But no one has understood exactly how it happens
and oil molecules react and about the flows and mixing behaviors that will produce the desired reactions and reaction products.
When crude oil is mixed with SCW, the hundreds of chemical compounds present can react together in different combinations and at different rates,
in some cases producing intermediate compounds that are involved then in further reactions. he challenge with SCW processing is that you have to let the oil
and the products ultimately include lighter hydrocarbons that are converted readily into valuable light fuels. The sulfur combines with hydrogen atoms to form hydrogen sulfide, a gas that can easily be removed
and dealt with using existing technology. Green notes that some of those reactions came as a surprise. eople didn expect them
Those results define for the first time the key roles played by water in the SCW system. e confirmed that the hydrogen atoms needed to convert the sulfur to hydrogen sulfide can be provided by water rather than by hydrogen gas,
When oil is injected into flowing SCW, interactions between the two flows determine how mixing and heating proceed, first at the macroscale and then down to the microscale at
and oil near a eejunction consisting of a horizontal pipe with a smaller pipe coming into it from the top.
and cold oil here a sample hydrocarbon is injected into it through a vertical pipe. Figure 2 in the slideshow above shows how the SCW
and oil mix as they flow down the pipe from left to right. The walls of the circular pipe are shown not.
mixing the oil and SCW together. Moving along the pipe, the vortices break down, and mixing rates decay.
Blue regions are rich in cold oil; red regions are rich in hot SCW; and regions shown in intermediate colors have varying concentrations of the two fluids.
The oil enters the cross section at the top and water at the bottom. As the spinning vortices form, the oil is driven downward near the center of the pipe,
and the water is driven upward along the walls. In the first cross section, the interface layer between the oil
and SWC is thin and sharp. In subsequent cross sections, that layer expands and diffuses, showing the extent of the mixing.
Given design and operating details the kind of oil; pressures, speeds, and temperatures of the incoming flows;
which various oils will diffuse and mix in SCW an effect first discovered in their modeling analyses.
and upgrading technologies to create a combined system that will make it practical to continue producing high-value fuels from all kinds of oil for decades to come.
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