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Researchers of the FOM Institute DIFFER[ have discovered that the wall material of a fusion reactor can shield itself from high energy plasma bursts. The wall material tungsten seems to expel a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles that serves as a protective layer. The research team publishes their results on 24 March 2014 in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
Currently, an international collaboration building the fusion reactor ITER, designed to be the first in the world to produce net power from fusion. The heart of a fusion reactor like ITER contains an extremely hot plasma, from which short, intense energy bursts rain down on the reactor wall. In ITER, the tungsten wall will face powerful discharges of several gigawatts per square meter, several times per second. However, researchers at FOM Institute DIFFER discovered that under some conditions less than half of that incoming energy actually hits the surface.
Phys.org) —As the world's dependence on fossil fuels causes ever-increasing problems, researchers are investigating solar fuels as an alternative energy source. To make solar fuels, sunlight is converted into hydrogen or another type of chemical energy. Compared to energy produced by solar cells, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, solar fuels such as hydrogen have the advantage of being easier to store for later use.
Because of the enormous amount of sunlight that reaches Earth, solar fuel generation has the potential to serve as a clean, terawatt-scale global energy source. But in order for this to happen, the photocatalysts that enhance light absorption and light trapping must be improved, both in terms of higher performance and lower cost.
In a new study, researchers Soo Jin Kim, et al., at the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials in Stanford, California, have demonstrated that photocatalysts made from iron oxide exhibit substantial performance improvements when they are patterned with nanostructures. Their paper is published in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
Researchers at Rice University have created an ultra-thin, high-performance flexible battery that is lithium-free, only a hundredth of an inch thick, and also doubles as a supercapacitor. The technology could find use in mobile and wearable electronics such as smartphones and fitness bands.
They're too tiny to see, but a new form of light-sensitive nanoparticles could flood the world with solar power.
Colloidal quantum dots sound like something that young Jedi might use for training in a starfighter flight simulator, but they're actually a new form of solid nanoparticles that could lead to the creation of cheaper, lighter, and more flexible solar cells.
The new material could also be used to make better sensors, infrared lasers, remote controls, LEDs -- even satellites.
The dots were developed by a group led by post-doctoral researcher Zhijun Ning and Professor Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto. The team achieved more efficient light absorption in the material by solving a problem in which a type of semiconductor loses its electrons when exposed to the oxygen in the air. The new material can instead remain rich in electrons, even in the open air.
When we think of wind power, we generally think of huge wind turbines sitting high atop towers where they can take advantage of the higher wind speeds. But Maryland-based Solar Wind Energy, Inc. is looking to turn wind power on its head with the Solar Wind Downdraft Tower, which places turbines at the base of a tower and generates its own wind to turn them.
Described by the company as the first hybrid solar-wind renewable energy technology in the renewable energy market, the tower at the center of the system generates a downdraft that drives the wind turbines positioned around its base. This is done by using a series of pumps to carry water to the top of a tower standing up to 2,250 ft (685 m) tall, where it is cast across the opening as a fine mist. The mist then evaporates and is absorbed by hot, dry air, thereby cooling the air and making it denser and heavier than the warmer air outside the tower.
This water-cooled air then falls through the hollow tower at speeds up to and in excess of 50 mph (80 km/h). When it reaches the bottom of the tower, the air is directed into wind tunnels that surround the base, turning wind turbines that are contained within the tunnels. Although the system requires large amounts of water, the bulk of the water emitted at the top of the tower is captured at the bottom and recirculated through the system, being pumped back up to the top with some of the power generated by the wind turbines.
In this way, the company claims the system can generate electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, when located in a hot, dry area – although electricity generation would be reduced in winter. Depending on the tower's geographical location, electricity generation could also be supplemented through the use of vertical "wind vanes" that would capture the prevailing wind and channel it into the tower.
UK researchers today announced what they believe to be a game changer in the use of hydrogen as a "green" fuel.
A new discovery by scientists at the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), offers a viable solution to the challenges of storage and cost by using ammonia as a clean and secure hydrogen-containing energy source to produce hydrogen on-demand in situ.
Hydrogen is considered by many to be the best alternative fuel for automotive purposes but there are complications with its safe and efficient storage and very significant concerns surrounding the costs of a hydrogen infrastructure for transportation. This new discovery may well have found the answers to both these challenges.
It's breath taking how quickly this technology is starting to advance.
Rutgers Univ. researchers have developed a technology that could overcome a major cost barrier to make clean-burning hydrogen fuel—a fuel that could replace expensive and environmentally harmful fossil fuels.
The new technology is a novel catalyst that performs almost as well as cost-prohibitive platinum for so-called electrolysis reactions, which use electric currents to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The Rutgers technology is also far more efficient than less-expensive catalysts investigated to-date.
“Hydrogen has long been expected to play a vital role in our future energy landscapes by mitigating, if not completely eliminating, our reliance on fossil fuels,” said Tewodros (Teddy) Asefa, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the School of Arts and Sciences. “We have developed a sustainable chemical catalyst that, we hope with the right industry partner, can bring this vision to life.”
Asefa is also an associate professor of chemical and biochemical engineering in the School of Engineering.
“This is the holy grail — a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally friendly way to produce high performance lithium ion battery anodes,” states Zachary Favors, a graduate student working with Cengiz and Mihri Ozkan, both engineering professors at UC Riverside.
The idea came to Favors, very unsurprisingly, while he was hanging out at the beach. The exact moment was when “he picked up some sand, took a close look at it and saw it was made up primarily of quartz, or silicon dioxide. ” That’s certainly a Eureka moment right there isn’t it?
Most commercial battery anodes currently in use (the industry standard) are composed of graphite. The material certainly works well but its limits have more or less been hit. As a result, researchers are currently exploring substitutes, of which silicon at the nanoscale is one.
There’s an issue with it, though: it degrades relatively quickly and it’s hard to produce cheaply in large amounts. That’s where the new work comes in.
The press release from UC Riverside provides more:
Favors set out to solve both these problems. He researched sand to find a spot in the United States where it is found with a high percentage of quartz. That took him to the Cedar Creek Reservoir, east of Dallas, where he grew up. Sand in hand, he came back to the lab at UC Riverside and milled it down to the nanometer scale, followed by a series of purification steps changing its color from brown to bright white, similar in color and texture to powdered sugar.
After that, he ground salt and magnesium, both very common elements found dissolved in sea water into the purified quartz. The resulting powder was then heated. With the salt acting as a heat absorber, the magnesium worked to remove the oxygen from the quartz, resulting in pure silicon.
The Ozkan team was pleased with how the process went. And they also encountered an added positive surprise. The pure nano-silicon formed in a very porous 3-D silicon sponge like consistency. That porosity has proved to be the key to improving the performance of the batteries built with the nano-silicon.
Via the improved performance, the researchers think that the lifespan of silicon-based electric vehicle batteries could be increased by as much as 300% or more.
A new conversion efficiency world record for concentrator photovoltaic modules (CPV), of 36.7%, was recently set thanks to a research collaboration between the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and the French CPV developer Soitec (along with the French research center CEA-Leti, and the Helmholtz Center in Berlin).
The researchers from Fraunhofer ISE — based in Freiburg, Germany — have spent the last few years working on the CPV module technology known as FLATCON, utilizing fresnel lenses to bundle and focus sunlight onto miniature, super efficient solar cells. The new record was achieved by combining this work with the adaption of a new wafer bonding solar cell structure developed together with Soitec
By incorporating the said four-junction (GaInP, GaAs, GaInAs and InP) solar cell structure into the Fraunhofer ISE module concept, sunlight can be concentrated “by a factor of 230 suns onto fifty-two 7 mm2 miniature solar cells, with the help of fifty-two 16 cm2 Fresnel lenses.”
“Naturally we are incredibly excited about this high module efficiency,” stated Dr Andreas Bett, who leads the CPV research at Fraunhofer ISE.
The new work, according to Dr Bett, proves that the high efficiencies of Soitec’s novel four-junction solar cells can be carried over to the module level..
Researchers working at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering claim to have produced a sponge-like substance that helps convert water to steam using sunlight one-hundredth as bright as that required by conventional steam-producing solar generators. A composite of graphite flakes layered on a bed of carbon foam, the new material is reported to convert as much as 85 percent of received solar energy into steam.
In practice, the scientists say that the graphite flakes and carbon foam composite that they've created forms a porous insulating material structure that floats on water. After a number of experiments, the scientists found that the best method to maximize heat retention properties in the top layer was to exfoliate (expand a material by heating so that it increases in volume and lowers in density) graphite by cooking it in a microwave, causing it to bubble and swell. The outcome is an exceedingly permeable top layer able to maximize absorption and retention of solar energy.
The bottom layer is fashioned from carbon foam containing hundreds of tiny pockets of air that keeps the material floating on the surface of the water, while also providing insulation that prevents heat escaping to the water underneath it. Most importantly for the generation of steam, the foam is also riddled with tiny pores that allow water – through capillary action from applied heat – to make its way up through the material.
Photovoltaic cells are one of the more promising alternative energy sources. Mechanically they are very simple, with no moving parts, and are clean and emission-free. Unfortunately they are also inefficient. One of the reasons for this is that they overheat, a problem that a Stanford University team under electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan is addressing with the development of a thin glass layer that makes solar cells self-cooling.
Despite many advances in recent decades, solar cells suffer from efficiency problems. Only a small amount of the energy from sunlight that falls on solar cells is converted to electricity, peaking at below 20 percent for most cells on the market today. Overheating is a constant problem because the sunlight used to generate electricity routinely heats up the panels to 130⁰ F (55⁰ C) or higher.
This heating causes all sorts of problems – not the least of which is a dramatic drop in efficiency. According to the Stanford team, each degree Celsius (1.8⁰ F) heating results in an efficiency drop of 0.5 percent. Equally unpleasant, with each increase in temperature of 10⁰ C (18⁰ F) the deterioration rate of the cells doubles.
They’ve done it again: The battery barons of Stanford, led by Yi Cui, have created what those in the industry call the “Holy Grail” of lithium-ion battery design. In specific, they’ve finally worked out how to create a rugged lithium electrode that can increase the capacity of a lithium-ion battery by three to four times — as in, this lithium electrode, on its own, could increase the battery life of your smartphone by three times, or significantly reduce the size and cost of an electric car’s battery pack.
A lithium-ion battery’s capacity (i.e. the amount of work it can do before it runs out of juice) is mostly dictated by how many lithium ions can be sucked up into the anode during charging. (For a more details on lithium-ion battery chemistry, read our featured story about how they work.) In almost all modern LIBs, the anode is made of graphite. Graphite is cheap and long-lasting (it keeps its capacity over hundreds of charge/discharge cycles), but its useful capacity is actually quite low (about 350 mAh/g). Lithium is by far the best anode material with a specific capacity that’s more than ten times that of graphite (3,860 mAh/g), but it degrades very quickly — and, perhaps more importantly, it has a tendency to violently explode when brought into contact with the electrolyte. If these niggling issues could be rectified, a LIB with much higher capacity could be built (not quite 10 times higher though; there are lots of other factors at play that prevent theoretical limits from being hit).
New Solar CPV Module Efficiency World Record Set 36.7% Efficiency Achieved Thanks To Fraunhofer ISE And Soitec Collaboration
New Solar CPV Module Efficiency World Record Set -- 36.7% Efficiency Achieved Thanks To Fraunhofer ISE And Soitec Collaboration | CleanTechnica
A new conversion efficiency world record for concentrator photovoltaic modules (CPV), of 36.7%, was recently set thanks to a research collaboration between the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and the French CPV developer Soitec (along with the French research center CEA-Leti, and the Helmholtz Center in Berlin).
The researchers from Fraunhofer ISE based in Freiburg, Germany have spent the last few years working on the CPV module technology known as FLATCON, utilizing fresnel lenses to bundle and focus sunlight onto miniature, super efficient solar cells. The new record was achieved by combining this work with the adaption of a new wafer bonding solar cell structure developed together with Soitec
By incorporating the said four-junction (GaInP, GaAs, GaInAs and InP) solar cell structure into the Fraunhofer ISE module concept, sunlight can be concentrated by a factor of 230 suns onto fifty-two 7 mm2 miniature solar cells, with the help of fifty-two 16 cm2 Fresnel lenses.
Naturally we are incredibly excited about this high module efficiency, stated Dr Andreas Bett, who leads the CPV research at Fraunhofer ISE.
The new work, according to Dr Bett, proves that the high efficiencies of Soitecs novel four-junction solar cells can be carried over to the module level..
New Solar CPV Module Efficiency World Record Set 36.7% Efficiency Achieved Thanks To Fraunhofer ISE And Soitec Collaboration
New Solar CPV Module Efficiency World Record Set -- 36.7% Efficiency Achieved Thanks To Fraunhofer ISE And Soitec Collaboration | CleanTechnica
A new conversion efficiency world record for concentrator photovoltaic modules (CPV), of 36.7%, was recently set thanks to a research collaboration between the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and the French CPV developer Soitec (along with the French research center CEA-Leti, and the Helmholtz Center in Berlin).
The researchers from Fraunhofer ISE based in Freiburg, Germany have spent the last few years working on the CPV module technology known as FLATCON, utilizing fresnel lenses to bundle and focus sunlight onto miniature, super efficient solar cells. The new record was achieved by combining this work with the adaption of a new wafer bonding solar cell structure developed together with Soitec
By incorporating the said four-junction (GaInP, GaAs, GaInAs and InP) solar cell structure into the Fraunhofer ISE module concept, sunlight can be concentrated by a factor of 230 suns onto fifty-two 7 mm2 miniature solar cells, with the help of fifty-two 16 cm2 Fresnel lenses.
Naturally we are incredibly excited about this high module efficiency, stated Dr Andreas Bett, who leads the CPV research at Fraunhofer ISE.
The new work, according to Dr Bett, proves that the high efficiencies of Soitecs novel four-junction solar cells can be carried over to the module level..
Oh Boy !!!! Solyndra 2.0.. Can't wait for Obama to bless this and invest my money.. Lots of optics, less VERY EXPENSIVE multi-junction silicon.,.. Nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Anyone developed a quick-charging battery so we can start harnessing lightning? All that electricity over our heads not being utilized.
