Lifeboat Foundation

A telescope in Arizona will conduct the largest spectroscopic survey of galaxies.

TeraWatt Technology announced that its 4.5Ah prototype solid-state battery design achieved a record-breaking energy density of 432Wh/kg (1122Wh/L) in validation tests conducted by third parties, including TOYO System based in Japan.

Branded as TERA3.0, this 4.5Ah next-generation design will be available for select early adopters in 2021 and full release in 2022. TeraWatt Technology continues to further iterate the TERA3.0 line of design, as well as further develop additional designs including different cell formats, sizes and energy capacities.

Physics World represents a key part of IOP Publishing’s mission to communicate world-class research and innovation to the widest possible audience. The website forms part of the Physics World portfolio, a collection of online, digital and print information services for the global scientific community.

Theoretical physicists at Trinity College Dublin are among an international collaboration that has built the world’s smallest engine—which, as a single calcium ion, is approximately ten billion times smaller than a car engine.

Work performed by Professor John Goold’s QuSys group in Trinity’s School of Physics describes the science behind this tiny motor. The research, published today in international journal Physical Review Letters, explains how random fluctuations affect the operation of microscopic machines. In the future, such devices could be incorporated into other technologies in order to recycle waste heat and thus improve energy efficiency.

The engine itself—a single calcium ion—is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The working substance of the engine is the ion’s “intrinsic spin” (its angular momentum). This spin is used to convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion.

A group of researchers led by Skoltech Professor Pavel Troshin studied coordination polymers, a class of compounds with scarcely explored applications in metal-ion batteries, and demonstrated their possible future use in energy storage devices with a high charging/discharging rate and stability. The results of their study were published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

The charging/discharging rate is one of the key characteristics of lithium-ion batteries. Most modern commercial batteries need at least an hour to get fully charged, which certainly limits the scope of their application, in particular, for electric vehicles. The trouble with active materials, such as the most popular anode material, graphite, is that their capacity decays significantly, as their charging rate increases. To retain the battery capacity at high charging rates, the active electrode materials must have high electronic and ionic conductivity, which is the case with the newly-discovered coordination polymers that are derived from aromatic amines and salts of transition metals, such as nickel or copper. Although these compounds hold a great promise, their application in lithium-ion batteries remains virtually unexplored.

A recent study undertaken by a group of scientists from Skoltech and the Institute for Problems of Chemical Physics of RAS led by Professor P. Troshin in collaboration with the University of Cologne (Germany) and the Ural Federal University, focused on tetraaminobenzene-based linear polymers of nickel and copper. Although the linear polymers exhibited much lower initial electronic conductivity as compared to their two-dimensional counterparts, it transpired that they can be used as anode materials that get charged/discharged in less than a minute, because their conductivity increases dramatically after the first discharge due to lithium doping.

Solidia’s systems offer superior products that address the cement industry’s goal of reducing its carbon emissions, which contribute 3 to 5% of global CO₂ pollution. Solidia’s patented processes start with an energy-saving, sustainable cement. Concrete made with this cement is then cured with CO₂ instead of water. Together, the sustainable cement and CO2-cured concrete reduce the carbon footprint of cement and concrete by up to 70%. Additionally, up to 100% of the water used in concrete production can be recovered and recycled.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued three patents covering processes and products manufactured using Solidia Technologies‘cement and carbon-curing technology. The patents extend the range of applications for Solidia’s processes to include hollow core, pervious and aerated concrete.

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Continue reading “Three New US Patents for Solidia Technologies’ CO2-cured Concrete Advances the Performance and Sustainability of Building Materials” »

The McKay-Zubrin plan for terraforming Mars in 50 years was cited by Elon Musk.

Orbital mirrors with 100 km radius are required to vaporize the CO₂ in the south polar cap. If manufactured of solar sail-like material, such mirrors would have a mass on the order of 200,000 tonnes. If manufactured in space out of asteroidal or Martian moon material, about 120 MWe-years of energy would be needed to produce the required aluminum.

The use of orbiting mirrors is another way for hydrosphere activation. For example, if the 125 km radius reflector discussed earlier for use in vaporizing the pole were to concentrate its power on a smaller region, 27 TW would be available to melt lakes or volatilize nitrate beds. This is triple the power available from the impact of a 10 billion tonne asteroid per year, and in all probability would be far more controllable. A single such mirror could drive vast amounts of water out of the permafrost and into the nascent Martian ecosystem very quickly. Thus while the engineering of such mirrors may be somewhat grandiose, the benefits to terraforming of being able to wield tens of TW of power in a controllable way would be huge.

A small company in Wales is reinventing clean motoring with a handmade ecological car, the Rasa, powered by fuel cells and emits water rather than CO₂.

In the U.S., air travel accounts for about a third of all CO₂ emissions. A startup called ZeroAvia wants to clean things up in a big way.

ZeroAvia recently emerged from stealth with a zero-emission powertrain for small aircraft. It’s electric, but there are no big, bulky batteries involved. ZeroAvia opted for compressed hydrogen instead.

Continue reading “This Hydrogen-Powered Plane Can Fly 20 Passengers Up to 500 Miles” »