Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers at the University of Maryland have created a thin battery, made of a few million carefully constructed “microbatteries” in a square inch. Each microbattery is shaped like a very tall, round room, providing much surface area – like wall space – on which nano-thin battery layers are assembled. The thin layers together with large surface area produces very high power along with high energy. It is dubbed a “3D battery” because each microbattery has a distinctly 3D shape.

These 3D batteries push conventional planar thin-film solid state batteries into a third dimension. Planar batteries are a single stack of flat layers serving the roles of anode, electrolyte, cathode and current collectors.

But to make the 3D batteries, the researchers drilled narrow holes are formed in silicon, no wider than a strand of spider silk but many times deeper. The battery materials were coated on the interior walls of the deep holes. The increased wall surface of the 3D microbatteries provides increased energy, while the thinness of the layers dramatically increases the power that can be delivered. The process is a little more complicated and expensive than its flat counterpart, but leads to more energy and higher power in the same footprint.

Expect hundreds of megabits per second, maybe even a gigabit, even in sparsely populated areas — as long as homes are near power lines.

by

• Stephen Shankland

The world’s largest offshore windfarm has officially opened. The project commanding the Numero Uno status is the Walney Extension. An official inauguration was marked as September 6, and it now means that the Walney Extension overtakes the London Array as the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

How large? Stats say the farm, located in the Irish Sea off the Walney Island coast in Cumbria, covers an area of around 145 sq km (55 square miles). Project watchers are talking electricity for nearly 600,000 UK homes. It’s especially being touted as having been built on time and on budget.

Continue reading “World’s largest offshore wind farm Walney Extension swings into action for energy” »

One day in the not-so-distant future, light sails may hurtle through space at speeds of around 20% of the speed of light (or 60,000 km/sec), propelled not by fuel but rather by the radiation pressure from high-power lasers on Earth. Traveling at these relativistic speeds, laser-powered light sails could reach our nearest neighboring star (other than the Sun), Alpha Centauri, or the nearest known potentially habitable planet, Proxima Centauri b, in about 20 years. Both objects are a little more than four light-years away.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge developed the technique, which involves splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen in plants.

This video is the first in a two-part series discussing 5G. In this video, we’ll be discussing the many many aspects of current generation mobile networks that 5G is set to improve.

As well as the technologies and communication techniques that will be required to enable these upgrades in speed, latency, bandwidth, energy consumption and more!

[0:35–8:15] First we’ll take a look at the core technologies that 5G is composed of, how they work together and the benefits they will each bring.

Continue reading “How Fast Is 5G?” »

We are undeniably using up what little remains of Earth’s petroleum, and because of that, it’s getting expensive. To reduce fuel costs, shipping companies are turning back to sailboats. Yes, seriously. Sailboats. But they don’t look like any sails you’ve seen before.

You know sails – most of the time big rectangle things, sometimes big triangle things, almost always (but not always-always) made out of cloth. But while those things in the top gif don’t look like your normal sails, that’s what they are. They just don’t work like any sail you’ve ever seen before.

Most sails you’ve seen rely on the wind directly acting against them to provide propulsion. But these new types of sails, known as “rotor sails” rely on a physics principle called the Magnus Effect. Here, I’ll let the people with delightfully thick Finnish accents from Norsepower, the company that makes them, explain it:

A sapphire-colored dye called methylene blue is a common ingredient in wastewater from textile mills.

But University at Buffalo scientists think it may be possible to give this industrial pollutant a second life. In a new study, they show that the dye, when dissolved in water, is good at storing and releasing energy on cue.

Continue reading “This bright blue dye is found in fabric. Could it also power batteries?” »

Scotrenewables Tidal Power, a Scottish engineering company, is focused on an energy source they call “tidal energy generation.” A video promoting their solution: They have plenty to show for their efforts, namely, the world’s most powerful operational tidal turbine, the SR2000 2MW.

A reduction in manufacturing and installation costs plus simple, quick and low cost maintenance strategies will be key to success.

Continue reading “Tidal energy turbine company is showing good results” »