Lifeboat Foundation

Tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon enable significantly higher efficiencies than silicon solar cells alone. Tandem cells from HZB have already achieved several world records. Most recently, in November 2021, HZB research teams achieved a certified efficiency of 29.8% with a tandem cell made of perovskite and silicon. This was an absolute world record that stood unbeaten at the top for eight months. It was not until the summer of 2022 that a Swiss team at EPFL succeeded in surpassing this value.

Three HZB teams worked closely together for the record-breaking tandem cell. Now they present the details in Nature Nanotechnology. The journal also invited them to write a research briefing, in which they summarize their work and give an outlook on future developments.

Most efforts so far have relied on external heating and cooling systems, but these add a lot of bulk and also tend to use up a considerable amount of energy themselves. The researchers’ innovation, outlined in a recent paper in Nature , was to add an extra component to the batteries: a sheet of nickel foil just a few micrometers thick between the stacked electrodes of each cell.

This ultra-thin sheet is used as a heating element, and when a current is passed through it the cell heats up to 149° Fahrenheit in about a minute. This temperature is maintained through charging, but the cell then quickly cools back to room temperature as soon as the current is switched off.

When they tested their approach, the researchers found that they could charge a 265 watt-hour battery to 70 per cent in 11 minutes. They also showed that heating the battery didn’t seriously affect its lifetime, as it survived 2,000 cycles of charging, which would provide enough energy to drive more than 500,000 miles overall.

Continue reading “Adding Heat to Electric Vehicle Batteries Helps Them Charge in Just 10 Minutes” »

The Mississippi River is at record low levels, grounding cargo barges and threatening some towns’ drinking water. USACE is doing damage control.

A collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington State University opens the door to sustainable jet fuel.

An underused natural resource might be just what the airline industry needs to reduce carbon emissions.

U.S. researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.

Warrior Moms, a national citizen action group, is battling for their children’s right to breathe clean air in polluted cities like Delhi, by engaging in urban mobility, waste management, biomass burning, and biodiversity protection.

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T he Indian Electric Vehicle market is set to reach a sales volume of 10.8 lakh units by 2025. However, these vehicles are currently at a high price and are not affordable to consumers in low-income categories.

To bridge this gap, a team of seven students at the KL University, Hyderabad have retrofitted an old and discarded bike into an EV.

“We also added futuristic features including wireless charging and cell balancing, which ensures equalised charging,” says Charan Sai (21), a fourth-year student of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, and the lead of the project.

Continue reading “Hyderabad Students Convert Discarded Bike Into Low-Cost EV With Wireless Charging” »

Wind and solar power are intermittent, generating power when it’s available rather than when it’s needed, so the green energy transition will require huge amounts of energy storage. This could end up taking many forms, from conventional lithium-based “big battery” installations, to flow batteries, silicon phase-change batteries, molten salt batteries, iron-air batteries, gravity batteries, carbon dioxide expansion batteries, and other more unusual ideas like buoyancy batteries.

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of efficiency, size, location, installation costs, operating costs, input and output power ratings, longevity and how long it can store the energy for. That’s good, since different solutions will fill different needs – some backing up the power grid during instantaneous demand spikes, others smoothing out the mismatched daily curves between demand and renewable supply, and others still helping to address seasonal supply drops, like when solar drops off through the winter.

Continue reading “World’s first commercial sand battery begins energy storage in Finland” »

Sound-diffracting walls and rubberised asphalt ingredients tackle the major environmental concern of noise pollution from traffic.

In cities across the European Union, noise is a significant health hazard along with air pollution. Efforts are under way to reduce a major source of both: traffic.

Noise is the number-two environmental source of health troubles, after air pollution, according to the United Nations World Health Organization.

That’s what Musk announced during Tesla’s Q3 2022 earnings call.

The third vehicle platform for Tesla, following the big one supporting the Model S and X and the small one supporting the Model 3 and Y, has received new information from company CEO Elon Musk.

Continue reading “Tesla’s new vehicle platform will be cheaper and less labor intensive, says Musk” »