Posted by jumperhead on May 9th, 2008
Getting the so-called layman interested in science can be a bit of a thankless task. So hats off to the University of Manchester, who’ve had a brave stab at describing their latest hydrogen fuel breakthrough in terms Joe Public can grasp: it’s a bit like crispy noodles.
Yep, you heard Greenbang, a bit like crispy noodles.
Greenbang will let the university of Manchester explain:
A new material developed in Manchester, which has a structure that resembles crispy noodles, could help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped out and drive the next generation of high-performance hydrogen cars.
After a nice bit of funding - to the tune of £150,000 - dished out to Dr Peter Budd, a materials chemist working in the Organic Materials Innovation Centre at the University, researchers are looking at a new polymer which looks like it can whip carbon out of emissions from the likes of power stations.
The polymers of intrinsic microporosity (let’s call them PIMs for short) will be used in special membranes for carbon removal and recovery and could even make storing hydrogen for cars a bit more safer and energy efficient.
Greenbang will hand over once again to the science people at Manchester:
Dr Budd said: “The PIMs act a bit like a sponge when hydrogen is around. It’s made up of long molecules that can trap hydrogen between them, providing a way of supplying hydrogen on demand.
“Imagine a plate of spaghetti - when it’s all coiled together there’s not much space between the strands. Now imagine a plate of crispy noodles - their rigid twisted shape means there are lots of holes.
“The polymer is designed to have a rigid backbone, and it has twists and bends built into it. Because of this, lots of gaps and holes are created between molecules - perfect for tucking the hydrogen into.
“The holes between the molecules give the polymer a very high surface area - each gram has a surface area equivalent to around three tennis courts. The molecules in the polymer act like sieves, catching smaller molecules like hydrogen in the gaps between them.
“The holes created in the polymer between molecules are a good fit for hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules stick in these holes and are kept there by weak forces - this means they can be released when they are needed.
“Hydrogen is most sticky when it is cooled down to low temperatures. When the hydrogen is needed to power the car, the system would just raise the temperature to free up the hydrogen molecules.”
PIMs were created at The University of Manchester several years ago by Dr Budd and colleagues.
Dr Budd says he is encouraged by the progress being made, but warns that a lot of work still needs to be done.
“In the context of climate change and dwindling oil reserves, hydrogen could be the perfect zero-carbon fuel for a car as it only gives water as a by-product,” he adds.
Posted by jumperhead on May 7th, 2008
Mushrooms are fast becoming Greenbang’s environmental superhero. Move over, Al Gore, you’re no match for the humble fungus, despite its lack of documentary making prowess.
Last week, Greenbang learnt the little blighters could be used to sop up pollution. Now she learns that they are also set to be the new superstars of the biofuel world.
Researchers led by the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have discovered a fungus, best known for chewing its way through military uniforms circa World War II, ” has revealed a surprisingly minimal repertoire of genes that it employs to break down plant cell walls, highlighting opportunities for further improvements in enzymes customised for biofuels production”.
The fungus bears the delightful title of Trichoderma reesei, and here’s why it’s so goshdarn exciting:
“The information generated from the genome of T. reesei provides us with a roadmap for accelerating research to optimize fungal strains for reducing the current prohibitively high cost of converting lignocellulose to fermentable sugars,” said Eddy Rubin, DOE JGI Director and one of the paper’s senior authors. “Improved industrial enzyme ‘cocktails’ from T. reseei and other fungi will enable more economical conversion of biomass from such feedstocks as the perennial grasses Miscanthus and switchgrass, wood from fast-growing trees like poplar, agricultural crop residues, and municipal waste, into next-generation biofuels. Through these incremental advances, we hope to eventually supplant the gasoline-dependent transportation sector of our economy with a more carbon-neutral strategy.”
You might point out, rightly, that biofuels are about as popular at the moment as a loud fart in a stuck lift, but that’s not to say this sort of stuff mightn’t come in handy when the biofuels problems have been fixed up.
Posted by jumperhead on May 2nd, 2008
Truly, the US Department of Energy must have captured a dirty great Leprechaun farm and then successfully managed to GPS its way to the end of the rainbow. How else can you explain the never-ending cash it pulls out of its back pocket to fund whatever renewable energy trend happens to flit through its collective mind at the time? Smart meters? Have $50 million. Biomass? $7 million for you! (Greenbang would like to point out to the DoE she has a perpetual motion machine that needs a bit of investment if the DoE has got any pocket change they don’t want).
But back to real life: today’s funding-magnets are concentrating solar power technologies, with up to $60 million at stake over five years.
The department reckons it will distribute the lucre to between 10 and 25 projects, all aimed at “develop advanced thermal storage concepts and heat transfer fluids to further increase the efficiency of concentrating solar power plants”.
The DoE also wants the private sector to rattle its piggyback and fund the lucky projects to the tune of 20 percent.
Here’s a little more for you:
With a minimum 20 percent cost share by the private sector for research and development phases and a minimum 50 percent private cost share for final demonstration phases, the total research investment in advanced solar technologies under this solicitation is expected to exceed $75 million.
CSP systems use heat generated by concentrating and absorbing solar energy to produce thermal energy. This type of solar energy can be used immediately for generating power through a steam turbine or heat engine, or may be saved as thermal energy for later use. Storage of solar energy in this manner removes the intermittency of sunlight, making it “dispatchable” and thus enabling CSP systems to provide electricity day or night.
If you want to apply, there’s info here.
Posted by jumperhead on April 28th, 2008
Ah, the English winter - all the charm of an STD. It’s got icy pavements, frozen fingers and a working day that precludes seeing any of the fleeting British daylight - once you add in a snowballs with stones in the centre (Greenbang salutes the innovative kids she went to school with for that one) and road gritters, and there’s not much to put a smile on your face for a few months.
But the Highways Agency is working on scheme to store a little bit of the summer for reuse in the colder months. Unfortunately, it won’t mean beaming 25 degree days and mojitos into your living room - it’s rather more practical than that.
According to <a href=”http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/25/solarpower.energy”>The Guardian</a>, the Highways Agency is planning to test a scheme where roads have water filled pipes put in underneath that can gather solar energy in the summer and then pump it back out in the winter to melt icy roads.
The Guardian says it’s already been tested in Toddington, where the trapped summer heat was enough to keep the road ice-free for nearly all of the following winter.
It’s not a short payback project: the paper quotes a Transport Research Laboratory report which reckons the system would pay back the outlay within some 30 years.
Posted by jumperhead on April 18th, 2008
Greenbang would like to say: electric solar wind sail. Nope, she’s not trapped in a youthful hell playing Mallett’s Mallet, being smacked over the head with a rubber hammer, she’s just describing an incredible invention out of Finland: an electric solar wind sail.
Not only a great collection of words, the electric solar wind sail is also set to help humankind explore and research space - all without fuel. Greenbang doesn’t think things can get much cooler.
The electric solar wind sail was invented a couple of years ago by the Finnish Meteorological Institute and could soon be used on a test mission
So how does it work?
The electric sail uses solar winds as its propulsion, and so doesn’t need any fuel and the device uses “long metallic tethers and a solar-powered electron gun which keeps the tethers positively charged. The solar wind exerts a small but continuous thrust on the tethers and the spacecraft”, according to the Institute.
Greenbang was actually wrong, it can actually get cooler. Much cooler. Here’s how, courtesy of the Institute:
if and when realised, the electric sail could enable faster and cheaper Solar System science and exploration. It might also enable an economic utilisation of asteroid resources for, e.g. producing rocket fuel in orbit.
“The electric sail might cheapen all space activities and thereby for example help making large solar power satellites a viable option for clean electricity production. Solar power satellites orbiting in the permanent sunshine of space could transmit electric power to Earth by microwaves without interruptions. Continuous power would be a major benefit compared to e.g. ground-based solar power where storing the energy over night, cloudy weather and winter are tricky issues especially here in the far North”, says Dr. Pekka Janhunen.
Finland, Greenbang salutes you!
Posted by jumperhead on April 16th, 2008
For years, popcorn has remained quiet, biding its time. Once an underachiever, now it’s ready to burst out from the shadows, able to finally give to humanity, prove its worth and save the world. And you thought it was just there to make you feel vaguely queasy after a movie marathon. How wrong you were.
Popcorn is the inspiration for a new technology that looks like it could help make solar cells more efficient, courtesy of the University of Washington.
“By using a popcorn-ball design — tiny kernels clumped into much larger porous spheres — researchers at the University of Washington are able to manipulate light and more than double the efficiency of converting solar energy to electricity,” says the University.
Go popcorn, you buttery charmer!
The popcorn design will let dye-sensitised solar cells get better conversion rates - able to bring them more in line with their silicon counterparts.
Here’s more from Washington:
Dye-sensitized solar cells, first popularized in a scientific article in 1991, are more flexible, easier to manufacture and cheaper than existing solar technologies. Researchers have tried various rough surfaces and achieved higher and higher efficiencies. Current lab prototypes can convert just over one tenth of the incoming sun’s energy into electricity. This is about half as efficient as the commercial, silicon-based cells used in rooftop panels and calculators.
The UW researchers did not attempt to maximize the overall efficiency of a dye-sensitized solar cell to match or beat these previous records. Instead, they focused on developing new approaches and compared the performance of a homogeneous rough surface with a clumping design. One of the main quandaries in making an efficient solar cell is the size of the grains. Smaller grains have bigger surface area per volume, and thus absorb more rays. But bigger clumps, closer to the wavelength of visible light, cause light to ricochet within the thin light-absorbing surface so it has a higher chance of being absorbed.
“You want to have a larger surface area by making the grains smaller,” Cao said. “But if you let the light bounce back and forth several times, then you have more chances of capturing the energy.”
Other researchers have tried mixing larger grains in with the small particles to scatter the light, but have little success in boosting efficiency. The UW group instead made only very tiny grains, about 15 nanometers across. (Lining up 3,500 grains end to end would equal the width of a human hair.) Then they clumped these into larger agglomerations, about 300 nanometers across. The larger balls scatter incoming rays and force light to travel a longer distance within the solar cell. The balls’ complex internal structure, meanwhile, creates a surface area of about 1,000 square feet for each gram of material. This internal surface is coated with a dye that captures the light.
The researchers expected some improvement in the performance but what they saw exceeded their hopes.
“We did not expect the doubling,” Cao said. “It was a happy surprise.”
Greenbang loves a happy ending.
Posted by jumperhead on April 14th, 2008
Greenbang has always held MIT in some respect. They walk in shadow, move in silence, guard against extraterrestrial violence. They’re the first, last and only line of defence against the worst scum of the universe, and to give them their due, they keep Will Smith in gainful employment. All that fighting off space monsters and nary a dent in the Ray Bans. Props to them.
Aside from all that, MIT (oh alright, that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presumably not affiliated with the MIB) has also manage to strike a deal with the Fraunhofer Institute, the largest solar lab in Europe, to set up a sustainable energy systems centre.
The centre has landed $5 million from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to help with start up costs and $1 million over five years from utility National Grid.
The centre will be based in.. guess! Yes, Massachusetts, and will work on solar, green buildings and energy device prototyping projects and other tasty fields of sustainable energy.
Here’s more on their cunning plans, from Dr. William Hartman, Vice President of Fraunhofer USA:
“We look forward to working with MIT to establish a close relationship with the New England Energy Cluster; thereby facilitating the quick transfer of the results of the Center’s applied research to the commercial sector.” The center’s goal in solar is to significantly reduce the cost of solar over the next five years by employing advanced materials and “smart” electronics to research, design and build better “plug-and-play” solar modules. The MIT-Fraunhofer center’s mission in green buildings is to substantially reduce the energy consumption of new and retrofitted structures by adapting state-of-the-art building technology on both sides of the Atlantic to local needs, while further developing the technology in conjunction with MIT’s excellence in advanced materials R&D and computer simulation capabilities.”
Posted by jumperhead on April 7th, 2008
Here’s an interesting one: make of this what you will. If you were the world’s banker, - not in the Deal or No Deal sense, alas - and you had the choice of whether to splash the cash on medical breakthroughs or fuel efficiency and alternative fuels breakthroughs, where would you place your bets? All depends on whether you’re a Brit or an American, apparently.
The Fairfax County Economic Development Authority (FCEDA) carried out two surveys, one in the UK, one in the US, asking folk; “If you had to choose from the following categories, what do you believe should be the highest priority, in terms of investing money and resources, in order to achieve a meaningful technological advancement in the next 10 years?”
In the UK, medical breakthroughs came top with 38 percent, followed by fuel efficiency and alternative fuels with 33 percent.
In the US, fuel efficiency and alternative fuels came top with 37 percent, followed by medical breakthroughs 30 percent. in both the US and UK surveys, the environment came third.
Why the difference? Let us know by leaving some feedback below.
Posted by jumperhead on March 25th, 2008
Greenbang has written several times before of being a great fan of scientists. If you leave them alone long enough, they work out how to do things quicker, better, cheaper or sooner. Which is why, in an ideal world, they would be Greenbang’s butler - they’d be great at making exquisitely engineered sandwiches and get the ironing done in half the time. But luckily the focus of their energy is a bit more useful to humanity than that.
A team of white-coated folks University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Maryland (UM) have come up with a new nanotechnology-driven chemical catalyst that could make fuel cell vehicles even better.
The University of Wisconsin explains the breakthrough like this:
UW-Madison chemical and biological engineering Professor Manos Mavrikakis and UM chemistry and biochemistry Professor Bryan Eichhorn describe a new type of catalyst created by surrounding a nanoparticle of ruthenium (Ru) with one to two layers of platinum (Pt) atoms. The result is a robust room-temperature catalyst that dramatically improves a key hydrogen purification reaction and leaves more hydrogen available to make energy in the fuel cell.
One day, it could be common for fuel cells to create electricity by consuming hydrogen generated from renewable resources. For now, most of the world’s hydrogen supply is derived from fossil fuels in a process called reforming.
An important step in this multistage process, called preferential oxidation of CO in the presence of hydrogen (PROX), uses a catalyst to purge hydrogen of carbon monoxide (CO) before it enters the fuel cell. CO presents a major obstacle to the practical application of fuel cells because it poisons the expensive platinum catalyst that runs the fuel cell reaction.
Attractive for transportation applications and as a battery replacement, proton exchange membrane fuel cells generate electricity using porous carbon electrodes containing a platinum catalyst separated by a solid polymer. Hydrogen fuel enters one side of the cell and oxygen enters on the opposite side. Platinum facilitates the production of protons from molecular hydrogen, and these protons cross the membrane to react with oxygen on the other side. The result is electricity with water and heat as byproducts.
Normally the catalyst using ruthenium and platinum would need to be heated to 70 degrees but the universities’ new little beauty needs just room temperature. Voila - energy saving.
Posted by jumperhead on March 24th, 2008
As Roy Castle sang, “If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest, ooo-ooo, dedication’s what you need - if you want to be a record breaker”. If Castle’s comments are right, then in seems Mitsubishi Electrics has got dedication (ooo-ooo) in abundance.
The company has just revealed its got a world record breaking solar cell which promises a conversion efficiency rate of 18.6 percent - up 0.6 percent on its last bite of the cherry. The efficiency rate came from a 150mm multi-crystalline silicon solar cell, which broke the record thanks to a low reflectivity surface texture, a bit like a honeycomb, which helped increase electric current generation.
The company wants to be able to get the new cell into production by fiscal 2011. And if all that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, the company is investing around 7 billion yen to expand annual production capability of its photovoltaic cells.
If all goes well, by October this year, production capacity will have grown from 150 MW to 220 MW and by fiscal 2013, that figure will be up to 500 MW.
