Energy

With this first post, I will make an attempt to give a quick outline of the battery's invention and how a battery is structured. Hopefully, it will be accessible to those not from the electrochemical field and not too sacrilegious to those who are. Please let me know whether it is too technical, not enough or just right in the comments. Enjoy! Any history of the battery would be incomplete without mention of Alessandro Volta. In 1800, Volta built the first battery which was called the voltaic pile due to its stacked arrangement. The battery was a stack of alternating zinc and copper plates…

Energizing the Future is designed to cover recent breakthroughs and my own personal thoughts on energy storage and generation. As my primary focus in research is batteries, I will start the blog off with an overview of battery technologies, starting with the Volta cell and progressing through to the present day, and some of the more recent and exciting advances in battery chemistry. I look forward to contributing to this community and hope to have my first content blog up by the end of the week.

A chronic issue with fuel cells is that, in order to deliver a high enough power output, a lot of them have to be connected in series. Traditionally that has meant stacking the fuel cells – creating a structure consisting of several metal plates, each containing one channel for air and one for hydrogen - but this makes the fuel cell stack quite heavy. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM, together with colleagues at the Technical University of Berlin, have developed a fuel cell that weighs only 30 grams yet has an output of 12 watts. The high…

Saving energy is big business these days and automobiles are a prime target for savings because two-thirds of the energy from fuel is wasted in the form of heat - about 30 percent through the engine block and a further 30 to 35 percent as exhaust fumes. Researchers are working on a thermoelectric generator that converts the heat from car exhaust fumes into electricity. The module feeds the energy into the car’s electronic systems. This cuts fuel consumption and helps reduce the CO2 emissions from motor vehicles. There is clearly a great need for thermoelectric generators (TEGs). These…

GOTHENBURG, Sweden, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Swedish SEKAB today announced that it is the first company in the world to supply verified sustainable ethanol. This ethanol from Brazilian sugarcane is quality assured from environmental, climate and social perspectives. "Consumers and other stakeholders need guarantees that the ethanol is verified sustainable," says Anders Fredriksson, EVP of SEKAB BioFuels & Chemicals. SEKAB has together with progressive Brazilian producers developed criteria that cover the entire lifecycle of ethanol from the sugarcane fields to its use in flexi-fuel (FFV)…

Solar cells provide great opportunities for future large-scale electricity generation. However, there are currently significant limitations, such as the relatively low output of most solar cells (typically fifteen percent) and high manufacturing costs. One possible improvement could derive from a new type of solar cell made of semiconducting nanocrystals (crystals with dimensions in the nanometre size range). In conventional solar cells, one photon (light particle) can release precisely one electron. The creation of these free electrons ensures that the solar cell works and can provide power…

The University of Rochester will mark another important step in the effort toward attaining sustainable fusion, the ultimate source of clean energy, Friday, May 16. University President Joel Seligman, along with special guests, will dedicate the new Omega EP (Extended Performance) laser facility at the Robert L. Sproull Center for Ultra High Intensity Laser Research at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The Omega EP comprises a new set of four ultra-high-intensity laser beams that will unleash more than a petawatt—a million billion watts—of power onto a target just a millimeter across…

Hydrogen is touted as replacing carbon-based fuels for transportation in the future, but researchers first must develop a method to store and release large amounts of the highly flammable, odorless invisible gas economically and safely. There are materials that are known to trap relatively large quantities of hydrogen, at normal pressures, but to date they all require heating to fairly high temperatures to release the hydrogen. A materials scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has deciphered the structure of a new class of materials that can store relatively…

One consistent feature of human progress throughout history has been that science will come up with creative answers to current problems. When ancient people living in small tribes were running out of game to hunt, some leaders thought rationing and mitigation were the answers. They would have created a culture of despair. Domesticated livestock was the answer instead and then efficient agriculture and even terraforming. Based on that confidence, a lot of people, me included, assume that global warming can be solved by some 'future technology' as yet undeveloped. Killing our economy by…

The genome analysis of a champion biomass-degrading fungus has revealed a surprisingly minimal repertoire of genes that it employs to break down plant cell walls, highlighting opportunities for further improvements in enzymes customized for biofuels production. The discovery of Trichoderma reesei, the target of the published analysis, dates back to World War II, when it was identified as the culprit responsible for the deterioration of fatigues and tents in the South Pacific. This progenitor strain has since yielded variants for broad industrial applications and is known today as an abundant…