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Category: energy – Page 261

World first: Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel

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.

If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free cycle. The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat.

Recently, Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands has become the first business in the world to put this process to work at an industrial scale. The company has been working with the Metal Power Consortium and researchers at TU Eindhoven to install a cyclical iron fuel system at its Brewery Bavaria that’s capable of providing all the heat necessary for some 15 million glasses of beer a year.

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Scientists produce rare diamonds in minutes at room temperature

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.

Artificial versions of this famously tough material could find use as new cutting tools to slice through ultra-hard materials, new kinds of protective coatings or other industrial devices where toughness is a desirable attribute. And recently we’ve seen some promising techniques developed that can turn fossil fuel molecules into pure diamonds, or make them from carbon nanofibers with the help of superfast lasers.

First fast radio burst discovered in the Milky Way is now repeating

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.

Quantum tunneling pushes the limits of self-powered sensors

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.

Scientists find more bright blasts of energy coming from space

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.

No losses: Scientists stuff graphene with light

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.

Hy-Generation Unveils a Self-Adjusting Electric Boat Propeller Without an Axis

french start-up hy-generation has unveiled a new type of electric thruster, equipped with patented self-adjusting blades that improve the performance (thrust and speed) and autonomy of ships. dubbed the electro propulsion PM5kW, this top class electric thruster has been designed essentially for OEM and electric project conversion, suitable for licenseless navigation.

developed to meet the need for expertise and engineering on technologies that profoundly change the energy landscape: fuel cells and hydrogen, hy-generation integrates the latest practices in permanent magnet electric motors with the patented self-adjustable blade system to set a new standard in terms of performance and efficiency. after two years of development, the technology has been refined to be adapted to slow, high displacement boats.

Does all the gold in the universe come from stars?

In a remote galaxy, two neutron stars circled one another in a ballet of ultimate destruction and inevitable creation. Both objects were the remnants of massive stars, probably from a binary system, that had become supernovae long before. Each was incredibly massive, with neutrons so closely packed that their cores became diamond. The dance, alas, could not go on forever and the stars collided, releasing unimaginable energy and sending gravitational waves speeding through the fabric of space-time.

In 2017, 1.3 billion years later, astronomers detected those waves with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. Albert Einstein’s prediction that the universe should be filled with such faint ripples caused by gravity from massive objects included sources such as neutron star mergers. Yet finding a disturbance in the fabric of space-time from this kind of event had proven elusive until then. When news of the detection of gravitational waves broke, the media wanted to know what else happens when neutron stars collide. Astronomers explained that, beyond the destruction of the stars and the ripples in space, such events also create all the heavy elements we know in the blink of an eye. But what did the media key into? That gold comes from outer space.