Energy

The race is on to replace lithium-ion batteries and Rice University research may put nickel-tin nanowires in the hunt. The vertical arrays of nickel-tin nanowires are encased in PMMA, the polymer best known as Plexiglas.  The Rice laboratory of Pulickel Ajayan found a way to reliably coat single nanowires with a smooth layer of a PMMA-based gel electrolyte that insulates the wires from the counter electrode while allowing ions to pass through.  "In a battery, you have two electrodes separated by a thick barrier," said Ajayan, professor in mechanical engineering and materials…

Lactococcus lactis, the workhorse bacterium that helps turn milk into cheese, may also lead to understanding of how microbes turn the organic compound cellulose into biofuels, according to new research from Concordia University published in Microbial Cell Factories.  Concordia biology professor Vincent Martin and PhD student Andrew Wieczorek demonstrated how structural or scaffolding proteins on the surface of the bacteria can be engineered in Lactococcus lactis towards the breakdown of plant material.   They showed how these scaffold proteins were successful in providing a stable…

Beginning in 1988, and until a Republican Congress approved mandates and subsidies for biofuels in 2005 (at which point every Democrat and environmental activist irrationality extolling ethanol must have realized there was something wrong), Al Gore insisted despite a lack of evidence that it was a viable solution to the fossil fuel issue.   He saw 'renewable' and didn't look any farther but he is older and wiser now. What the non-agenda-based section of science (people in the actual energy industry that is, science bloggers fawned over the stuff) knew all along was this would be an…

New X-ray imaging capability at Sandia's Z accelerator may help remove an obstacle in efforts to harness nuclear fusion to generate electrical power from sea water.  More accurate simulations could lead to 'break-even' fusion in the future. Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instabilities are spoilers that arise wherever electromagnetic forces are used to contract - 'pinch' - a plasma, which is essentially a cloud of ions. The pinch method is the basis of the operation of Z, a dark-horse contender in the fusion race.   A pinch contracts plasma so suddenly and tightly that hydrogen…

The big knock on huge wind or solar farms in developed countries is whose back yard the new power lines will run through.   Off-shore wind farms or solar farms in remote deserts may be a solution to that but current methods of transmission are unsuitable - at long distances, alternating current will have as much as 40% loss and while direct current will only lose about 7%, it means huge converter stations are essential before the power can reach homes. High-voltage direct-current transmission (HVDCT) could be made more achievable using low-cost semiconductor cells, the focus of research…

Continuing my series on the history of batteries, we now more on to batteries with nickel-based electrodes. 1899 saw the development of the nickel-cadmium battery by Waldemar Jungner. He also experimented with a nickel-iron chemistry that he never commercialized himself, but was used extensively in the early electric car industry after its commercialization by Thomas Alva Edison in 1901.  When electric cars fell out of favor, the more expensive nickel-iron battery was replaced by the cheaper lead-acid for automotive applications. It would be some time before the nickel-cadmium battery…

The debate on biofuel vs. food is more of less like the suggestion of a person when we were taking plantion in a park area near our home some 25 years ago. We planted 400 trees almost at the distance of 2x2 meter in a small patch. Someone pointed out that its too close for tree plantation . Plant trees at minimum distance of 3 to 10 m apart as they need space to grow. Now when I pass that park area each day there is only one surviving tree which is of mammoth size. Only one tree survived out of 400 trees in a span of 25 years and all others died. During plantation season which is also…

Spanning the Kill Van Kull tidal strait and first opened in 1931, the Bayonne Bridge was the longest in the world until 1978 and is currently the fourth longest steel arch bridge in the world.  Today it carries about 20,000 vehicles per day over its four lanes and it was dramatically blown up in the Steven Spielberg-directed 2005 movie "War of the Worlds", starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning.In 2002, inspired by the events of the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, eight-year-old Veronica Granite from New Jersey began a petition drive to illuminate her hometown…

Many alternative Bio Diesel fuels have been shown to have better exhaust emissions than traditional Diesel fuel. Jatropha Bio diesel holds promise as fuel alternatives for diesel engine because :- Bio Diesel are renewable fuelDepletion of the Primary FuelsBio Diesel are agriculture orientedA number of researches have shown that jatropha bio diesel has fuel properties and provides engine performance that is very similar to diesel fuel The severe emission regulations in the world have placed design limitations on heavy duty diesel engines. The trend towards cleaner burning fuel is growing…

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly regarded as promising for the cars of the future (at least until hydrogen fuel cells are ready for prime time) but environmentalists interested in electric or hybrid vehicles are concerned about the acid rain caused by battery manufacturing and high replacement cost for the batteries, which will last about the same as a standard car battery but are a terrific expense. If batteries didn't need to be replaced, they would be a lot more attractive and in a laboratory at Ohio State University, an ongoing experiment is studying why lithium-ion batteries lose their…