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Category: sustainability

Nanoreactor Mimics Living Cells To Supercharge Artificial Photosynthesis

A biomimetic nanoreactor combines cellular design principles to produce hydrogen peroxide efficiently under visible light.

Inside a hollow nanoscale structure, researchers have recreated two strategies that living cells use to control chemical reactions. The resulting CdS@polydopamine nanoreactor offers a synthetic way to reproduce some of the organization and efficiency found in biological systems.

The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Can Li of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), led the research with Jian Liu’s group at Inner Mongolia University.

New process turns mixed plastic waste directly into hydrogen fuel without sorting

Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of modern life—in water bottles, shopping bags and car dashboards. But once discarded, it is among the hardest materials on Earth to recycle. Most recycling processes require plastics to be sorted by type first, a step that is both labor-intensive and costly. As a result, only 9% of discarded plastic is actually recycled, while 79% is dumped in landfills and another 12% is incinerated, releasing carbon dioxide in the process.

Now, a team co-led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea has demonstrated a new chemical approach that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics directly into high-purity hydrogen fuel at temperatures far below conventional gasification. The process locks carbon dioxide away as a solid mineral without releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows that alkaline thermal treatment (ATT)—a process in which sodium hydroxide reacts with organic material under heat to drive hydrogen production—can efficiently handle mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) waste in a single reactor, yielding hydrogen gas with purities exceeding 90% without requiring any sorting of plastic types.

Thin films ‘dance’ with substrates that are no longer inert, opening path toward 3D chips

Many of today’s electronic devices—from the semiconductors in your cell phone to the photovoltaic cells in your solar panels—are built on thin-film substrates. The thin film is an electrically conductive material, while the substrate is an inert material. Or is it?

Physicists and materials scientists have long assumed substrates do not react to electrical stimuli, but new research from the University of California San Diego and a team of collaborators has shown that substrates are not inert after all. The discovery has the potential to help engineers build the dense, three-dimensional, brain-inspired computer chips needed for more energy-efficient computing. This work appears in Science.

The research began four years ago in UC San Diego Associate Professor of Physics Alex Frañó’s lab. Frañó is a principal investigator and assistant director at the Quantum Materials for Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing (Q-MEEN-C), one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Centers. One of the goals of Q-MEEN-C is to develop quantum materials that can be used in neuromorphic, or “brain-like,” computing.

Are gas turbines ready for the hydrogen economy?

Can we fuel gas turbines with hydrogen instead of fossil fuels and cut 15% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions? Gas turbines generate around 22% of the world’s electricity. Replacing fossil fuels is a key step toward more sustainable power generation. Hydrogen is widely considered a promising alternative fuel for gas turbines in both power generation and aviation. However, before hydrogen can be used safely on a large scale, researchers need to better understand how it affects the materials exposed to the extreme operating conditions inside turbines.

While the interaction between hydrogen and metallic materials has been extensively studied at ambient temperatures, far less is known about its effects at the elevated temperatures found in gas turbines. An international team of researchers has now investigated how hydrogen affects nickel-based superalloys—the materials of choice for gas turbines—at elevated temperatures.

Their results indicate that hydrogen-induced embrittlement can be at least twice as severe, posing a significant challenge for components that must meet the highest standards of safety and reliability. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (MPI-SusMat) and their collaborators published the new findings in the journal Nature Materials.

AI-powered system offers unprecedented insight into the forces shaping Earth’s climate

The world’s oceans may appear calm from space, but beneath the surface, an intricate web of fast-moving currents drives Earth’s climate. Now, a new study led by Tel Aviv University has unveiled a breakthrough that allows scientists to observe these hidden motions with unprecedented clarity.

The researchers developed GOFLOW, an artificial intelligence-powered system that can reconstruct high-resolution ocean current patterns directly from satellite images. The technology provides scientists with an entirely new way to study the small-scale ocean dynamics that influence weather, climate change and the exchange of heat and gases between the ocean and atmosphere.

The study was led by Roy Barkan, a professor, physical oceanographer and fluid dynamics expert in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Geophysics at the Faculty of Exact Sciences. The research was conducted in collaboration with scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCLA and the University of Rhode Island, and published in Nature Geoscience.

Solar windows could harvest indoor light and sunlight while staying semi-transparent

Semi-transparent solar cells that could be added to windows to efficiently harvest energy from indoor light as well as the sun have been developed by an international team led by UCL researchers.

The technology, described in a paper in Advanced Energy Materials, could help turn buildings into power generators at night and on cloudy days, as well as in sunshine.

The researchers engineered solar windows that let in 30% of sunlight—ordinary glass might let in 80% or 90%—while generating a record amount of energy from indoor light and efficiently harvesting energy from sunshine.

Top environmental fund sees Japan key to AI energy challenge

Asia’s best-performing environmental fund has increased exposure to Japan as it expects the nation’s technology sector to prove increasingly pivotal in solving the artificial intelligence industry’s surging power demands.

The BNP Paribas Green Tigers Fund has returned 34% year-to-date, fueled by bets on Japanese equities that sit at the core of its stock-selection strategy, said Oscar Yang, senior portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management. The $208 million portfolio was the top-performing “dark green” strategy, the EU’s highest sustainability classification, in Asia through June 30, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

“A lot of the Japanese companies are so unique and they’re to some extent almost at a monopoly position,” Yang said. “If you cut Japanese companies’ products out of your supply chain, you just basically can’t operate, especially for leading-edge capacity.”

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