Israel is experimenting with desalinating sea water to replenish a freshwater lake. If it works, it could offer a solution to many other countries where lakes are drying up.
Plants use light waves from only a portion of the spectrum for photosynthesis—the remainder can be recovered and used to generate solar power. That’s the idea behind the solar modules developed by EPFL startup Voltiris. Following encouraging preliminary results, a new pilot installation was recently installed in Graubünden.
In Switzerland, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other light-and heat-intensive vegetables requires building a greenhouse—but operating one consumes a huge amount of power. Farmers have to carefully balance crop yields and economics with environmental concerns. “It costs more than CHF 1.5 million a year to heat a 5-hectare greenhouse,” says Nicolas Weber, the CEO of Voltiris. “And a greenhouse of that size emits roughly the same amount of CO2 per year as 2,000 people.”
The Swiss federation of fruit & vegetable growers, which cultivate several thousand hectares across the country, has set a target of eliminating all fossil-fuel-based energy from its farming processes by 2040. The system developed by Voltiris can go a long way towards reaching that goal. Its technology is based on the fact that plants don’t use all of the waves contained in sunlight; the remaining ones can be concentrated onto photovoltaic (PV) cells to generate solar power. Voltiris’ system is lightweight and designed to track the sun’s movement across the sky, and boasts daily yields on par with conventional solar panels. The first vegetables grown under Voltiris’ system were harvested this summer through pilot tests carried out at two greenhouses, in the cantons of Valais and Graubünden.
The planet is 1.27 times the diameter of Jupiter but has only 28% of its mass. It orbits just 0.0486 AU (7.3 million km) from its star, taking only 4.1 days to complete one “year” and resulting in a temperature of 900°C (1,600°F).
The parent star WASP-39 is of spectral class G – the same type as our own Sun – and just slightly smaller than the Sun. The system is 698 light years from Earth in the Virgo constellation.
Previous observations from telescopes including Hubble and Spitzer revealed the presence of water vapour, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere. Last month, it became the first exoplanet to be studied by the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and this week NASA released the data from those observations. Webb’s unmatched infrared sensitivity has now confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on this planet as well.
Engineers at MIT have developed a new battery design using common materials – aluminum, sulfur and salt. Not only is the battery low-cost, but it’s resistant to fire and failures, and can be charged very fast, which could make it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.
Lithium-ion batteries have dominated the field for the last few decades, thanks to their reliability and high energy density. However, lithium is becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the cells can be hazardous, exploding or bursting into flames if damaged or improperly used. Cheaper, safer alternatives are needed, especially as the world transitions towards renewable energy and electric vehicles.
So the MIT team set out to design a new type of battery out of readily available, inexpensive materials. After a search and some trial and error, they settled on aluminum for one electrode and sulfur for the other, topped off with an electrolyte of molten chloro-aluminate salt. Not only are all of these ingredients cheap and common, but they’re not flammable, so there’s no risk of fire or explosion.
99 percent of the panels were made of PET.
Do you remember the solar panels that Prof. Paul Dastoor from the University of New Castle and his team produced with a 3D printer? If you don’t, it’s an evergreen story worth remembering. Let’s dive in…
Continue reading “3D-printed solar cells are cheaper, easier to produce, and deployable at speed” »
Luxury electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors unveiled the new Lucid Air Sapphire Edition, a top-of-the-line sedan, which the company says will do zero to 60mph in under two seconds, zero to 100mph in under four seconds, and the quarter-mile in under nine seconds.
That’s tremendously impressive in a full-size, fully-electric luxury sedan and potentially makes the new sapphire blue car the most powerful production sedan on the market, beating out the previous record holder, the Tesla Model S Plaid.
The new Sapphire Edition, which was revealed Friday during Monterey Car Week, pairs a number of the features from Lucid’s lower trim models like the Dream Edition and the Grand Touring Performance Edition. First, the new version of the Air gets three motors, two at the rear and one at the front, that Lucid says brings the estimated horsepower up to 1,200.
Researchers say Indigenous “silvopasture” practices of raising livestock in naturally forested areas could be a critical tool to protect cows from climate change.
Clean water is essential for human survival. However, less than 3% of fresh water can be used as drinking water. According to a report published by the World Meteorological Organization, there is scarcity of drinking water for approximately 1 billion people worldwide, which is expected to rise to 1.4 billion by 2050.
Seawater desalination technology, which produces fresh water from seawater, could solve the problem of water scarcity. At the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), a research team led by Dr. Kyung Guen Song from the Center for Water Cycle Research, have developed a hybrid membrane distillation module that combines solar energy with hydrothermal heat pumps to reduce thermal energy consumption during the desalination process. Their results are published in Energy Conversion and Management.
Reverse osmosis and evaporation methods are relatively common seawater desalination processes; however, these methods can operate only at high pressures and temperatures. In comparison, the membrane distillation method produces fresh water by utilizing the vapor pressure generated by the temperature difference between the flowing raw water and treated water separated by a membrane. This approach has the advantage of low energy consumption, as fresh water can be generated at pressures of 0.2–0.8 bar, which is lower than atmospheric pressure, and temperatures of 50–60℃. However, large scale operation requires more thermal energy. Thus, research studies are required to reduce the use of thermal energy for commercial operation.
As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available.
Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap.
The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
