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Category: energy

A collaborative team of researchers from Imperial College London and Queen Mary University of London has achieved a significant milestone in sustainable energy technology, as detailed in their latest publication in Nature Energy.

The study unveils a pioneering approach to harnessing sunlight for efficient and stable hydrogen production using cost-effective organic materials, potentially transforming the way we generate and store clean energy.

The research tackles a longstanding challenge in the development of solar-to-hydrogen systems: the instability of organic materials such as polymers and small molecules in water and the inefficiencies caused by energy losses at critical interfaces. To address this, the research team introduced a multi-layer device architecture that integrates an organic photoactive layer with a protective graphite sheet functionalized with a nickel-iron catalyst.

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As the global demand for sustainable energy solutions continues to grow, Lithuanian researchers have taken a step forward by developing a technology that not only transforms waste into valuable hydrogen but also eliminates a long-standing issue in gasification—the presence of tar. This new method offers an efficient and eco-friendly way to produce high-purity hydrogen from various waste materials, representing a significant advancement in clean energy production.

Hydrogen is a key element in the transition to cleaner energy. However, conventional gasification methods are often unable to ensure its high purity—synthesis gases contain very low concentrations of hydrogen.

This inefficiency limits the industrial application of hydrogen as a clean gas fuel, highlighting the need for more advanced production methods.

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Hydrogen is often seen as the fuel of the future on account of its zero-emission and high gravimetric energy density, meaning it stores more energy per unit of mass compared to gasoline. Its low volumetric density, however, means it takes up a large amount of space, posing challenges for efficient storage and transport.

In order to address these deficiencies, hydrogen must be compressed in tanks to 700-bar pressure, which is extremely high. This situation not only incurs but also raises safety concerns.

For hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) to become widespread, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has set specific targets for : 6.5% of the storage material’s weight should be hydrogen (gravimetric storage capacity of 6.5 wt%), and one liter of storage material should hold 50 grams of hydrogen (a volumetric storage capacity of 50 g L‒1). These targets ensure that vehicles can travel reasonable distances without excessive fuel.

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Li and colleagues used a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which, while new to the world of seismology, is already used to monitor pipelines and power cables for defects. The method involves sending laser light pulses over optical fibers and measuring the intensity of the signals reflected back from imperfections in the fiber. Slight stretching or contracting of the fiber (say, from an) can change the reflected signals.

Based on the pulse’s time of return, you can pinpoint when and where along the cable the disturbance occurred. Because light gets reflected from thousands of imperfection points along fibers, a kilometers-long stretch of cable can act as thousands of seismometers. This means significantly more seismic data, leading to higher resolution, which allows pinpointing the location of smaller seismic activity.

The Caltech researchers have converted preexisting optical cables into a DAS array. Telecom companies usually lay down more fiber than they need, and the research team taps into some of this “dark” unused fiber. With permission from the California Broadband Cooperative, the team set up a DAS transceiver at one end of a length of fiber-optic cable along the border between California and Nevada.

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BANGKOK (AP) — China’s energy and auto giant BYD has announced an ultra fast EV charging system that it says is nearly as quick as a fill up at the pumps.

BYD, China’s largest EV maker, said Monday that its flash-chargers can provide a full charge for its latest EVs within five to eight minutes, similar to the amount of time needed to fill a fuel tank. It plans to build more than 4,000 of the new charging stations across China.

Charging times and limited ranges have been a major factor constraining the switch from gas and diesel vehicles to EVs, though Chinese drivers have embraced that change, with sales of battery powered and hybrid vehicles jumping 40% last year.

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Korean researchers have succeeded in developing a key technology for all-solid-state secondary batteries, known as next-generation lithium-ion batteries due to their high safety. The work was published online as a cover study in Small at the end of last year.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) developed a separation membrane based on a material that easily becomes fibrillized when subjected to mechanical shearing (force applied) through a mixing process with solid electrolyte powder without using a solvent. This solid electrolyte membrane is simple and fast to manufacture and is extremely thin and robust.

In general, in research on all-solid-state secondary batteries, the thickness is set to several hundred micrometers (µm) to 1 millimeter (mm) to increase the durability of the membrane when using a hard solid electrolyte in the manufacturing process. However, this has the disadvantage of being too thick compared to conventional polymer separation membranes, resulting in a very large loss of energy density.

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Interconnected materials containing networks are ubiquitous in the world around us— rubber, car tires, human and engineered tissues, woven sheets and chain mail armor. Engineers often want these networks to be as strong as possible and to resist mechanical fracture and failure.

The key property that determines the strength of a network is its intrinsic fracture energy, the lowest energy required to propagate a crack through a unit area of the surface, with the bulk of the network falling apart. As examples, the intrinsic fracture energy of polymer networks is about 10 to 100 joules per square meter, 50–500 J/m2 for elastomers used in car tires, while spider silk has an intrinsic fracture energy of 150–200 J/m2.

Until now, there has been no way to calculate the intrinsic fracture energy (IFE) for a networked material, given the mechanical behavior and connectivity of its constituents.

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