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Category: energy – Page 136

Circa 2012 face_with_colon_three

(PhysOrg.com) — Sometimes total electrical isolation is a good thing — and that’s the idea behind a power-over-fiber (PoF) communications cable being developed by engineers at Sandia National Laboratories.

It’s common to isolate communications between systems or devices by using fiber optic cables, said Steve Sanderson of Sandia’s mobility analysis and technical assessment division. But when power also is required, sending it down a copper wire can at times be a safety issue, and substituting it with battery power may not be suitable or practical, he said.

Sanderson, Titus Appel and Walter Wrye, a former Sandia intern, are co-inventors of a hybrid cable design that uses fiber to send and regulate optical power to the communications electronics integral to the cable. A patent is pending on the design.

Continue reading “Developing power-over-fiber communications cable: When total isolation is a good thing” | >

Hydrogen fuel promises to be a clean and abundant source of energy in the future – as long as scientists can figure out ways to produce it practically and cheaply, and without fossil fuels.

A new study provides us with another promising step in that direction.

Scientists have described a relatively simple method involving aluminum nanoparticles that are able to strip the oxygen from water molecules and leave hydrogen gas.

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The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently did some things to advance EV charging tech that are way over my head to make a battery that could theoretically charge an electric car in only one minute.

That might seem silly to people with a decent EV, but I recently found something that could eventually make EV charging so fast that even the owner of a Porsche Taycan might be shocked and amazed— and, as the owner of a Nissan LEAF, I’m lucky to get a 50 kW charge rate, but that’s only on the first charge. If I try to go anywhere on the highway, I quickly find that the second and third charges are a lot slower. If I keep going, I can expect to get charging rates as low as 14 kW on the second or third session, which is more like DC slow charging than DC fast charging. When I get a chance to test and review better EVs, it seems like witchcraft when getting charging over 100 kW, and faster 250 and 350 kW charging sessions look like alien technology.

“The hybrid lithium-ion battery, which has a high energy density (285 Wh/kg) and can be rapidly charged with a high-power density (22,600 W/kg), is overcoming the limitations of the current energy storage system,” Professor Jung-Goo Kang of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering said. “It will be a breakthrough.”

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face_with_colon_three circa 2018.

Gold is amazingly weird. For one thing, it’s now thought that much of it came from aftermaths of the collisions of two super-dense neutron stars. Some of this atomic gold, sprayed across the cosmos, managed to coalesce under gravity, get trapped in a newly-formed Earth, undergo a suite of geological processes, and ultimately pop up at the surface.

Its considerably epic cosmic journey is certainly something to marvel at, as is the fact that it’s useful for so many things besides jewelry. Now, as spotted by New Scientist, we’ve made a new form of gold that’s golder than ever before, and it’s bonkers. Related StoriesCosmic Tug-Of-War Leaves Merging Galaxies Gasping For Fuel “How Do You Handle Menstruation In Space?”: An Astronaut ExplainsEinstein Is Right Again – Gravity Has Not Changed Across The Universe.

Continue reading “New Form Of Lab-Made Gold Is Better And Golder Than Nature’s Pathetic Version” | >

NVIDIA, one of the tech sector’s power players, is pushing the Universal Scene Description protocol as the foundation of interoperable content and experiences in the metaverse. In a recent post the company explains why it believes the protocol, originally invented by Pixar, fits the needs of the coming metaverse.

Though the word metaverse is presently being used as a catchall for pretty much any multi-user application these days, the truth is that the vast majority of such platforms are islands unto themselves that have no connectivity to virtual spaces, people, or objects on other platforms. The ‘real’ metaverse, most seem to agree, must have at least some elements of interoperability, allowing users to seamlessly move from one virtual space to the next, much like we do today on the web.

To that end, Nvidia is pushing Universal Scene Description (USD) as the “HTML of the metaverse,” the company described in a recent post.

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The world needs a bridge to the renewable energy future.

The world needs more oil and gas to deal with the energy shortages it is currently facing, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at an energy conference in Norway on Monday, Bloomberg.

The comment might seem strange coming from a person who sells electric vehicles, battery packs, and solar roofing products. However, this isn’t the first time Elon Musk has made such a comment.

The world needs more oil and gas now to deal with an energy shortage while pushing to transition to renewable supplies, Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Says World Needs More Oil and Gas as Bridge to Renewables” | >

You are looking at a methanol-fed hydrogen fuel cell that may soon be powering marine shipping around the world.

For Maersk, the 12 new ships will help it reduce CO2 emissions by 1.5 million tons annually or 4% of what the company produced in total in 2021. Maersk’s announced commitment is for all future new builds to only burn carbon-neutral fuels. That’s why fuel cells are high on its list of technologies to make that achievement possible.

Methanol Fuel Cells Are a Step Better Than Burning Methanol

A Bill Gates-backed investment group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is bankrolling a new Danish company, Blue World Technologies, with plans to produce methanol and high-temperature fuel cells. It has plans to produce enough of the fuel and the fuel cells to power five container ships this year, and ten times that number by 2024.

Continue reading “Maersk Earmarks .1 Billion for Ships That Will Run on Methanol” | >

A study of Li-metal batteries by the research team led by Dr. Byung Gon Kim at Next-Generation Battery Research Center of Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) was published as a cover paper in the international journal ACS Nano.

While the current Li-ion batteries generate energy by taking Li-ions in and out of the based on the intercalation mechanism, the Li-metal battery does not rely on this bulky and heavy graphite but uses metallic Li itself as the anode. As the Li-metal shows 10 times higher theoretical capacity (3,860 mAh/g) than graphite (372 mAh/g), it has steadily gained much attention from areas that need high-capacity batteries, such as and energy storage systems.

Despite this advantage, Li can grow in the shape of a tree branch, called a Li dendrite, if it is not uniformly and effectively stored when cycling process, leading to large volume expansion of the electrode, which in turn may shorten the battery’s cycle life and cause safety issue such as fire and explosion triggered by internal short-circuits.

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