Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2010

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are used in many applications to gather intelligence without risking human lives. These aircraft, however, have limited flight time because of their reconnaissance payload requirements coupled with their limited scale. A microwave-powered flight vehicle would be able to perform a reconnaissance mission continuously.

Using beamed microwave energy from a remote source on the ground, the airplane gathers energy using onboard antennas. A rectifying antenna, or rectenna, harvests power and rectifies it into a form usable by an onboard electric motor that drives the propeller, providing thrust. Using a rectenna array affixed to the underside of the aircraft, the power needed to maintain flight can be remotely transmitted.

Continue reading “Microwave Energy Transmission for Aircraft” »

Reactive molecules, such as free radicals, can be produced in the body after exposure to certain environments or substances and go on to cause cell damage. Antioxidants can minimize this damage by interacting with the radicals before they affect cells.

Led by Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering, Penn State researchers have applied this concept to prevent imaging damage to conducting polymers that comprise soft electronic devices, such as organic solar cells, organic transistors, bioelectronic devices and flexible electronics. The researchers published their findings in Nature Communications today (Jan. 8).

According to Gomez, visualizing the structures of conducting polymers is crucial to further develop these materials and enable commercialization of soft electronic devices—but the actual imaging can cause damage that limits what researchers can see and understand.

Polaron formation in perovskite solar cells has been indicated in scientific research as a possible factor for making this kind of cell particularly efficient, although the mechanism behind polarons’ action is completely unknown. A U.S. research group has now observed how polaron distortions form and grow.

Polarons are fleeting distortions in a material’s atomic lattice that form around a moving electron in a few trillionths of a second, then quickly disappear. As ephemeral as they are, they affect a material’s behavior, and may even be the reason that solar cells made with lead hybrid perovskites achieve extraordinarily high efficiencies in the lab.

Now scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have used the lab’s X-ray laser to watch and directly measure the formation of polarons for the first time. They reported their findings in Nature Materials today.

“These materials have taken the field of solar energy research by storm because of their high efficiencies and low cost, but people still argue about why they work,” said Aaron Lindenberg, an investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC and associate professor at Stanford who led the research.

Circa 2016

Completing the first trip around the world exclusively on solar power, the experimental craft shows what’s possible in energy and flight.

This is some real sci-fi stuff.

Beaming solar power from outer space sounds like a Marvel movie plot, but space could remove barriers to solar acceptance that dominate the Earthbound discourse.

German scientists are researching a method to produce hydrogen using light and photoactive compounds on an organic chemical basis.

Hydrogen is considered to be one of the alternative energy sources of the future. So far, however, the costly and energy-intensive production process has been a major problem with regard to the environmental friendliness of this substance, which is in itself CO₂ neutral. For this reason, increasing numbers of scientists around the world are researching other methods of producing hydrogen: from algae, for example. (IO reported). Scientists in Germany at the Friedrich Schiller University, the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technologies (Leibniz IPHT) and the University of Ulm have taken inspiration from nature for their method of producing hydrogen.

To do so, the team from the “CataLight” Collaborative Research Center at the Universities of Jena and Ulm has combined new organic dyes with non-precious metal catalyst molecules that release gaseous hydrogen in water when irradiated with light. This substitute has shown a remarkable impact in terms of longevity and effect after excitation by visible light, they write in their study, published in Chemistry – A European Journal.

Continue reading “Hydrogen production with artificial photosynthesis and polymers” »

Engineering student Carvey Ehren Maigue has been named the James Dyson Awards first-ever global sustainability winner for his AuReus system, in which waste crops are turned into cladding that can generate clean energy from ultraviolet light.

Unlike traditional solar panels, which only work in clear conditions and must face the sun directly because they rely on visible light, the translucent AuReus material is able to harvest power from invisible UV rays that pass through clouds.

As a result, it is able to produce energy close to 50 per cent of the time according to preliminary testing, compared to 15 to 22 per cent in standard solar panels.

Scientists in Australia have developed a process for calculating the perfect size and density of quantum dots needed to achieve record efficiency in solar panels.

Quantum dots, man-made nanocrystals 100, 000 times thinner than a sheet of paper, can be used as light sensitisers, absorbing infrared and visible light and transferring it to other molecules.

This could enable new types of solar panels to capture more of the light spectrum and generate more electrical current, through a process of ‘light fusion’ known as photochemical upconversion.