Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: energy – Page 113

Tungsten oxide hydrate: the future of smart windows

Researchers unveil a revolutionary material, tungsten oxide hydrate, enabling dynamic windows that adapt to light and temperature, boosting energy efficiency.

Dynamic windows have long been the dream of architects and engineers, promising buildings that adapt to varying light and temperature conditions.

Now, researchers from NC State University have taken a giant leap forward in this field by unveiling a revolutionary material known as tungsten oxide hydrate. This innovation could pave the way for the next generation of dynamic windows, offering building occupants the ability to switch their windows between three distinct modes: transparency, infrared light blocking, and glare control, according to a university release.

Nanofluidic device generates power with saltwater

There is a largely untapped energy source along the world’s coastlines: the difference in salinity between seawater and freshwater. A new nanodevice can harness this difference to generate power.

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has reported a design for a nanofluidic device capable of converting ionic flow into usable electric power in the journal Nano Energy. The team believes that their device could be used to extract power from the natural ionic flows at seawater-freshwater boundaries.

“While our design is still a concept at this stage, it is quite versatile and already shows strong potential for energy applications,” said Jean-Pierre Leburton, a U. of I. professor of electrical & computer engineering and the project lead. “It began with an academic question—’Can a nanoscale solid-state device extract energy from ionic flow?’—but our design exceeded our expectations and surprised us in many ways.”

New Consortium to Make Batteries for Electric Vehicles More Sustainable

Lithium-ion batteries could get a significant boost in energy density from disordered rock salt (DRX), a versatile battery material that can be made with almost any transition metal instead of nickel and cobalt.

DRX cathodes could provide batteries with higher energy density than conventional lithium-ion battery cathodes made of nickel and cobalt, two metals that are in critically short supply.

Formed last fall, the DRX Consortium – which includes a team of approximately 50 scientists from Berkeley Lab, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of California at Santa Barbara – was awarded $20 million from the Vehicle Technologies Office in DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The funding – allocated in $5 million yearly increments through 2025 – will allow the consortium to develop DRX battery cathodes that could perform just as well if not better than the NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) cathodes used in today’s lithium-ion batteries.

Motorcycle Goes 300 Miles on 1 Liter of Water

Here is another story from web bike world: “Is water the future of motorbikes”

https://www.webbikeworld.com/water-power-future-motorbikes/

Circa: 2016.

With all this attention to electric, people are making the same mistake as putting all attention to petrol (fossil fuels). Since 2016 Sao Paulo inventor Ricardo Azevedo has said his T Power H20 bike can even run on polluted water.

A motorcycle that runs on water! It will go about 300 miles on just one liter of water. A Brazilian man has modified a small motorcycle to run on hydrogen. We all know that an ICE (internal combustion engine) will run on hydrogen, so there’s nothing new there.

Continue reading “Motorcycle Goes 300 Miles on 1 Liter of Water” | >

Inside One of Europe’s Largest Urban Development Projects—aspern Seestadt

The result: aspern Seestadt, reclaims a brownfield area to create a development that embraces new urban ideals while retaining the classical urban structure of old Vienna.

As aspern Seestadt has evolved, it has emerged as one of Europe’s most dynamic planned communities and an incubator for smart city initiatives. Geographic information system (GIS) technology helps planners implement clean energy and low-emission strategies and aids the long-range planning and implementation to ensure that aspern Seestadt achieves a unique balance of sustainability and livability.

-Vienna’s sustainable city within a city can be a model used by developing and developed countries dealing with housing crisis.

Mapping tools help the City of Vienna and its partners test and apply smart city concepts to the Aspern Seestadt planned development.

New method to recycle materials inside lithium-ion batteries

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), which store energy leveraging the reversible reduction of lithium ions, power most devices and electronics on the market today. Due to their wide range of operating temperatures, long lifespan, small size, fast charging times and compatibility with existing manufacturing processes, these rechargeable batteries can greatly contribute to the electronics industry, while also supporting ongoing efforts towards carbon neutrality.

The affordable and eco-friendly recycling of used LIBs is a long sought-after goal in the energy sector, as it would improve the sustainability of these batteries. Existing methods, however, are often ineffective, expensive or harmful to the environment.

Moreover, LIBs heavily rely on materials that are becoming less abundant on Earth, such as cobalt and . Approaches that enable the reliable and cost-effective extraction of these materials from spent batteries would drastically reduce the need to source these materials elsewhere, thus helping to meet the growing LIB demand.

Violating the Universal Kasha’s Rule — Scientists Uncover Secrets of a Mysterious Blue Molecule

Scientists from IOCB Prague are the first to describe the causes of the behavior of one of the fundamental aromatic molecules, azulene. This molecule has captivated the scientific community not just with its distinct blue hue, but also with its unique properties.

Their current undertaking will influence the foundations of organic chemistry in the years to come and in practice will help harness the maximum potential of captured light energy. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

Azulene has piqued the curiosity of chemists for many years. The question of why it is blue, despite there being no obvious reason for this, was answered almost fifty years ago by a scientist of global importance, who, coincidentally, had close ties with IOCB Prague, Prof. Josef Michl.

Engineers develop enhanced GaN-based LED array visible light communication system

Under the limitation of current density, micro-LED is difficult to achieve watts level optical power, which is not suitable for long-distance and underwater optical communication that requires high-power optical transmitter devices. Therefore, how to improve the communication performance of conventional-size LED is also a key issue at present.

The authors of an article published in Opto-Electronic Science studied a wavelength division multiplexing visible light communication system based on multi-color LED. The system uses a Si substrate GaN-based LED with a 3D structured quantum well. In the active layer of this LED, there is a three-dimensional structure (“V” shaped pit, or V-pit) with a hexagonal profile, opening towards the P-type GaN layer.

With the large-scale commercial use of 5G, global academia and industry have started research on the next-generation mobile communication technology (6G).

However, the existing RF spectrum resources are seriously depleted to meet the spectrum demand of 6G for ultra-high speed and ultra-large capacity. This severe challenge stimulates researchers to focus on higher frequency bands such as terahertz, infrared and . Among them, visible light communication utilizes the ultra-wide spectrum from 400THz to 800THz, which has the merits of no licensing, high secrecy, environmental-friendly, and no electromagnetic radiation.

At the same time, with the help of commercially available LED technology, visible light communication systems can be integrated with . However, limited by the electro-optic response performance of LED devices, the actual available bandwidth of the system is very small compared with the frequency band of visible light.