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Category: energy – Page 227

“What our technology does is it improves range and lowers vehicle cost,” Campbell said. “It’s as simple as that.”

As the name of his company suggests, Campbell thinks the key is a more-solid electric car battery. The lithium-ion batteries powering almost all of today’s electric vehicles rely on a liquid electrolyte, which ferries charged ions from a cathode to an anode. While the technology makes it practical to charge and recharge, the liquid can catch fire if overloaded.

For decades, scientists have seen a potential answer in solid electrolytes, which could allow a battery to soak up more energy without overheating.

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If we’re going to get better at powering the planet with renewable energy, we need to get better at finding ways of efficiently storing that energy until it’s needed – and scientists have identified a particular material that could give us exactly that.

The material is known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), in which carbon-based molecules form structures by linking metal ions. Crucially, MOFs are porous, so they can form composite materials with other small molecules.

That’s what the team did here, adding molecules of the light-absorbing compound azobenzene. The finished composite material was able to store energy from ultraviolet light for at least four months at room temperature before releasing it again – a big improvement over the days or weeks that most light-responsive materials can manage.

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Almost 200 years after French physicist Jean Peltier discovered that electric current flowing through the junction of two different metals could be used to produce a heating or cooling effect, scientists continue to search for new thermoelectric materials that can be used for power generation.

Researchers writing in Nature Materials, however, say it is time to step up efforts to find for thermoelectric cooling.

Bismuth tellurium compounds have been used for thermoelectric cooling for more than 60 years, and the researchers say the fact that there is already a commercial demand for the technology suggests better materials can expand the market.

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O,.0 based on my sources could bring minor earthquakes perhaps also satellite outages.

The sun unleashed its most powerful solar eruption in more than three years on Sunday (Nov. 29).

The solar flare, which is a sudden, bright explosion of electromagnetic energy, measured as an M4.4 on the scale astronomers use for sun storms. M-class flares are medium-sized eruptions (compared to small C-class flares and large X-class flares) and rank on a scale from 1 to 9, with larger numbers representing stronger flares.

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