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Category: sustainability – Page 21

Envision a settlement where the sunlight that beams across Australia buoy on its vast outback powers millions of homes and industries across Southeast Asia. This is how the Australia-Asia PowerLink (AAPowerLink) is being realized: the longest sub-sea cable in the world, linking northern Australia to Singapore, presently is one of the all-time break-through renewable energy developments. By virtue of this mammoth solar farm with its advanced energy transmission technology, this ambitious vision will shape the future energy systems around the world while addressing some critical climate issues.

Taking enormous advantage from its plentiful sunlight, northern Australia houses the world’s biggest Solar Precinct in its Northern Territory gathering between 17–20 GW peak electricity, a size surpassing that of Australia’s largest coal-fired power station.

The project incorporates advanced storage of 36–42 GWh, supplying 800 MW to Darwin and 1.75 GW to Singapore. In addition to reducing emissions and electricity prices for the Darwin region, it creates a renewable energy export marketplace for the region and demonstrates the use of the solar-rich area to meet 15 percent of Singapore’s electricity demand.

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Batteries made from waste and methane offer lower CO2 emissions than current technologies.

It’s also being claimed that the technology has the potential to improve fast-charging speed by up to 50%, making EV ownership even more convenient. Lithium-sulfur batteries are expected to cost less than half the price per kWh of current lithium-ion batteries, according to Stellantis.

The batteries will be produced using waste materials and methane, with significantly lower CO2 emissions than any existing battery technology. Zeta Energy battery technology is intended to be manufacturable within existing gigafactory technology and would leverage a short, entirely domestic supply chain in Europe or North America, according to a press release.

Ned Curic, Stellantis’s Chief Engineering and Technology Officer, stated that the collaboration with Zeta Energy is another step in helping advance the company’s electrification strategy as they work to deliver clean, safe, and affordable vehicles.

Continue reading “Dodge maker developing lithium-sulfur EV batteries to boost range” | >

How much does sulfur emitted by marine life cool the atmosphere and help mitigate the effects of climate change? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as an international team of researchers conducted a first-time numerical analysis regarding the amount of sulfur is emitted by marine life and how much it cools the climate, with an emphasis on the Southern Ocean. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand how the planet cools itself, thus enabling us to work together to protect it.

“This is the climatic element with the greatest cooling capacity, but also the least understood,” said Dr. Charel Wohl, who is a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study. “We knew methanethiol was coming out of the ocean, but we had no idea about how much and where. We also did not know it had such an impact on climate. Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds. The work done here partially closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations.”

For the study, the researchers produced a database of ocean methanethiol concentrations with the goal of estimating their produced emissions and how this contributes to ocean-derived aerosols that are responsible for cooling the planet. In the end, the researchers discovered that methanethiol emissions increase the aerosol amount between 30 to 70 percent over the Southern Ocean while simultaneously decreasing atmospheric oxidants and increasing planetary cooling. The Southern Ocean is located around Antarctica and serves as a staging ground for the world’s oceans, influencing their circulation.

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Professor Carlos Duarte, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor, Marine Science, and Executive Director, Coral Research \& Development Accelerator Platform (CORDAP — https://cordap.org/), Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST — https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en/study/fac…), in Saudi Arabia, as well as Chief Scientist of Oceans2050, OceanUS, and E1Series.

Prior to these roles Professor Duarte was Research Professor with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Director of the Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia. He also holds honorary positions at the Arctic Research Center in Aarhus University, Denmark and the Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia.

Professor Duarte’s research focuses on understanding the effects of global change in marine ecosystems and developing nature-based solutions to global challenges, including climate change, and developing evidence-based strategies to rebuild the abundance of marine life by 2050.

Building on his research showing mangroves, seagrasses and salt-marshes to be globally-relevant carbon sinks, Professor Duarte developed, working with different UN agencies, the concept of Blue Carbon, as a nature-based solution to climate change, which has catalyzed their global conservation and restoration.

Continue reading “Prof. Carlos Duarte, Ph.D. — Executive Director, Coral Research & Development Accelerator Platform” | >

When molecules interact with ultraviolet (UV) light, they can change shape quickly, producing strain—stress in a molecule’s chemical structure due to an increase in the molecule’s internal energy. These processes typically take just tens of picoseconds (one millionth of a millionth of a second). Advanced capabilities at X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) facilities now enable scientists to create images of these ultrafast structural changes.

In work appearing in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, researchers found structural evidence of a strained bicyclic molecule (a molecule consisting of two joined rings) that emerges from the chemical reaction that occurs when a cyclopentadiene molecule absorbs UV light. Cyclopentadiene is a good sample chemical for studying a range of reactions, and these findings have broad implications for chemistry.

Highly strained molecules have a variety of interesting applications in solar energy and pharmaceuticals. However, strain doesn’t typically occur naturally—energy must be added to a molecular system to create the strain. Identifying processes that produce molecules with strained rings is a challenge of broad interest in physical chemistry.

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MIT engineers have released DrivAerNet++, an open-source dataset of over 8,000 car designs, to accelerate automotive innovation using AI. This dataset, featuring detailed aerodynamic data, aims to enhance fuel efficiency and electric vehicle range, promoting sustainable car design advancements.

Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. Significant advances in performance, such as in fuel efficiency or electric vehicle range, can therefore be slow and siloed from company to company.

MIT engineers say that the search for better car designs can speed up exponentially with the use of generative artificial intelligence tools that can plow through huge amounts of data in seconds and find connections to generate a . While such AI tools exist, the data they would need to learn from have not been available, at least in any sort of accessible, centralized form.

Continue reading “Want to design the car of the future? Here are 8,000 designs to get you started” | >

These scenarios pose several new challenges, since the environmental and operational conditions of the mission will strongly differ than those on the International Space Station (ISS). One critical parameter will be the increased mission duration and further distance from Earth, requiring a Life Support System (LSS) as independent as possible from Earth’s resources. Current LSS physico-chemical technologies at the ISS can recycle 90% of water and regain 42% of O2 from the astronaut’s exhaled CO2, but they are not able to produce food, which can currently only be achieved using biology. A future LSS will most likely include some of these technologies currently in use, but will also need to include biological components. A potential biological candidate are microalgae, which compared to higher plants, offer a higher harvest index, higher biomass productivity and require less water. Several algal species have already been investigated for space applications in the last decades, being Chlorella vulgaris a promising and widely researched species. C. vulgaris is a spherical single cell organism, with a mean diameter of 6 µm. It can grow in a wide range of pH and temperature levels and CO2 concentrations and it shows a high resistance to cross contamination and to mechanical shear stress, making it an ideal organism for long-term LSS. In order to continuously and efficiently produce the oxygen and food required for the LSS, the microalgae need to grow in a well-controlled and stable environment. Therefore, besides the biological aspects, the design of the cultivation system, the Photobioreactor (PBR), is also crucial. Even if research both on C. vulgaris and in general about PBRs has been carried out for decades, several challenges both in the biological and technological aspects need to be solved, before a PBR can be used as part of the LSS in a Moon base. Those include: radiation effects on algae, operation under partial gravity, selection of the required hardware for cultivation and food processing, system automation and long-term performance and stability.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been continuously inhabited for over twenty years. The Life Support System (LSS) on board the station is in charge of providing the astronauts with oxygen, water and food. For that, Physico-Chemical (PC) technologies are used, recycling 90% of the water and recovering 42% of the oxygen (O2) from the carbon dioxide (CO2) that astronauts produce (Crusan and Gatens, 2017), while food is supplied from Earth.

Space agencies currently plan missions beyond Low Earth Orbit, with a Moon base or a mission to Mars as potential future scenarios (ESA Blog 2016; ISEGC 2018; NASA 2020). The higher distance from Earth of a lunar base, compared to the ISS, might require the production of food in-situ, to reduce the amount of resources required from Earth. PC technologies are not able to produce food, which can only be achieved using biological organisms. Several candidates are currently being investigated, with a main focus on higher plants (Kittang et al., 2014; Hamilton et al., 2020) and microalgae (Detrell et al., 2020b; Poughon et al., 2020).

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Scientists in China have claimed a breakthrough that might completely change how we store energy by turning waste oil into a formidable substance for energy storage.

As the world grapples with increasing power demand, supercapacitors are becoming more popular because of their quick charging and discharging times, which makes them perfect for high-performance applications.

The researcher’s novel method provides a sustainable way to make these supercapacitors while addressing waste management and energy storage challenges, according to a press release by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

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A new design principle has been identified that could eliminate the use of toxic chemicals in solar cell manufacturing.

The standard manufacturing process of organic cells involves toxic solvents. This environmental concern has hindered the widespread adoption of organic solar cells.

Researchers at Linköping University (LiU) have revealed a new design principle for eco-friendly, high-efficiency organic solar cells.

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