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Category: energy – Page 229

If there’s one major thing that’s holding back an electric revolution in the aviation world, it’s energy storage. But there are a ton of very clever people banging away at the problem of how to increase the energy density of batteries, and another growing faction working to make long-range, fast-fueling hydrogen-fuel-cell powertrains the standard for future flight.

Either way, it’s going to happen in the coming decades, and one new company out of Minneapolis is turning its attention to the other critical element of the propulsion system. H3X Technologies is bursting out of the gate with an integrated electric motor design it says can deliver the same sustained power as some of the best motors on the market at a third or less of the total weight.

Weight, of course, is a big deal in aviation – and that goes double for electric aircraft. Every pound carried skyward represents a pound less payload you can carry, a reduction in the range you’ll get from your battery or hydrogen tank, and ultimately a loss of money for the owner.

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“California curtailed between 150,000–300,000 MWh of excess renewable energy per month through the spring of 2020, yet saw its first rolling blackouts in August because the grid was short on energy,” says Paul Browning, CEO of Mitsubishi Power Americas (formerly known as MHPS). “Long-duration energy storage projects like ours that are designed to shift excess energy from periods of oversupply, like California in the spring, to periods of undersupply, like California in late summer, are critical to ensure similar events are avoided as we continue to make significant strides towards deep decarbonization.”

Storing fuel in salt caverns isn’t new, but hydrogen’s growing role in decarbonization has revitalized interest in the concept. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has long stored emergency crude oil in underground salt caverns on the Gulf Coast, and notes they cost 10 times less than aboveground tanks and 20 times less than hard rock mines. The Reserve has 60 enormous caverns, typically 200 feet in diameter and 2,500 feet tall, and one “large enough for Chicago’s Willis Tower to fit inside with room to spare.”

Caverns can be created in salt domes by drilling into the salt dome and injecting the rock with water, which dissolves the salt. The resulting brine is extracted, leaving a large cavity. The next step is storing hydrogen in the cavern. Hydrogen electrolyzers can convert water into hydrogen by using renewable energy from solar and other sources. The hydrogen can then be stored, and reconverted to electricity when needed.

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Burning iron as clean fuel.

Very interesting. I wonder if this method can become mainstream. 😃

Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission.

Continue reading “World first: Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel” | >

I guess they can now make the diamond sword from minecraft! 😃

While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they not only form quickly, but do so at room temperature.

Although the idea of creating diamonds in a laboratory in just a few minutes would be an appealing one for jewelers, rappers or those looking to pop a certain question, that’s not quite the aim of this type of research.

Continue reading “Scientists produce rare diamonds in minutes at room temperature” | >

The first radio burst discovered in the Milky Way is now repeating as it travels from a magnetar – a neutron star with a strong magnetic field – 32,616 light-years away.

The initial flash of energy was first detected in April and scientist have identified two more, confirming fast radio bursts ‘are emitted by magnetars at cosmological distances.’

A team working with the Westerbrok Telescope in the Netherlands captured the signal, which came as two short bursts, each one millisecond long and 1.4 seconds apart.

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Shantanu Chakrabartty’s laboratory has been working to create sensors that can run on the least amount of energy. His lab has been so successful at building smaller and more efficient sensors, that they’ve run into a roadblock in the form of a fundamental law of physics.

Sometimes, however, when you hit what appears to be an impenetrable roadblock, you just have to turn to and tunnel through it. That’s what Chakrabartty and other researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis did.

The development of these self-powered quantum sensors from the lab of Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Systems & Electrical Engineering, was published online Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Communications.

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Scientists have detected two bright radio bursts from a magnetar in our galaxy, as they get closer to discovering the source of the blasts.

Earlier this month, scientists discovered that fast radio bursts were coming from the object, in a major breakthrough in the search for the source of those mysterious blasts of energy. It was the first time an FRB had been detected coming from inside our Milky Way, and also the first time such a blast had been traced back to a particular source.

Now scientists say they have found new bursts coming from that same magnetar. That should help further indicate whether it is really a source of FRBs – and whether the same process could be powering those bursts we have discovered coming from elsewhere in the universe.

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O,.o.

Physicists from MIPT and Vladimir State University, Russia, have converted light energy into surface waves on graphene with nearly 90% efficiency. They relied on a laser-like energy conversion scheme and collective resonances. The paper was published in Laser & Photonics Reviews.

Manipulating light at the nanoscale is a task crucial for being able to create ultracompact devices for optical conversion and storage. To localize light on such a small scale, researchers convert optical radiation into so-called plasmon-polaritons. These SPPs are oscillations propagating along the interface between two materials with drastically different refractive indices—specifically, a metal and a dielectric or air. Depending on the materials chosen, the degree of surface wave localization varies. It is the strongest for light localized on a material only one atomic layer thick, because such 2-D materials have high refractive indices.

The existing schemes for converting light to SPPs on 2-D surfaces have an efficiency of no more than 10%. It is possible to improve that figure by using intermediary signal converters—nano-objects of various chemical compositions and geometries.

Continue reading “No losses: Scientists stuff graphene with light” | >