Lifeboat Foundation

Asphaltenes, a byproduct of crude oil production, are a waste material with potential. Rice University scientists are determined to find it by converting the carbon-rich resource into useful graphene.

Muhammad Rahman, an assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering, is employing Rice’s unique flash Joule heating process to convert asphaltenes instantly into turbostratic (loosely aligned) graphene and mix it into composites for thermal, anti-corrosion and 3D-printing applications.

The process makes good use of material otherwise burned for reuse as fuel or discarded into tailing ponds and landfills. Using at least some of the world’s reserve of more than 1 trillion barrels of asphaltene as a feedstock for graphene would be good for the environment as well.

face_with_colon_three circa 2020.

“I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.” – Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (1874).

We have come a long way since science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote this visionary sentence, but hydrogen has still not emerged as a major source of energy. ESA is setting out to change this through the latest Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) call for ideas.

Continue reading “Recreating photosynthesis for unlimited hydrogen energy” »

It’s all thanks to nanoclusters.

A new nanoscale 3D printing material developed by Stanford University engineers may provide superior structural protection for satellites, drones, and microelectronicsAn improved lightweight, a protective lattice that can absorb twice as much energy as previous materials of a similar density has been developed by engineers for nanoscale 3D printing.

According to the study led by Stanford University, a nanoscale 3D printing material, which creates structures that are a fraction of the width of a human hair, will enable to print of materials that are available for use, especially when printing at very small scales.

Continue reading “Engineers designed a new nanoscale 3D printing material that can be printed at a speed of 100 mm/s” »

Four numbers that were in the news this week that should be a wakeup call for humanity.

8 billion is Earth’s human population. 419 PPM is atmospheric CO₂ levels. 636 are COP27 fossil fuel lobbyists. 100 are the countries at COP.

KNP Arises, a Delhi-based startup run by Kirti and Sushil Vaishnav, collects used cooking oils from restaurants and converts it into biodiesel, which generates 80% lower carbon emissions as compared to fossil fuels.

Sounds Interesting? Share it now!

Commercial deployment could be achieved as early as 2024.

Energy Dome, the Italian company that uses carbon dioxide for long-duration energy storage, has now entered the U.S. energy market, Electrek.

Continue reading “World’s first CO2-based energy storage solution will be available in the US soon” »

A major vulnerability in a networking technology widely used in critical infrastructures such as spacecraft, aircraft, energy generation systems and industrial control systems was exposed by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA.

It goes after a network protocol and hardware system called time-triggered ethernet, or TTE, which greatly reduces costs in high-risk settings by allowing mission-critical devices (like flight controls and life support systems) and less important devices (like passenger WiFi or data collection) to coexist on the same network hardware. This blend of devices on a single network arose as part of a push by many industries to reduce network costs and boost efficiency.

Continue reading “Cyber vulnerability discovered in networks used by spacecraft, aircraft and energy generation systems” »

It would usually be cheaper to use e-fuels derived from hydrogen — rather than H2 directly — due to system costs, academic paper explains.

A team of researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, has found evidence of ions behaving differently than expected in their fusion reactions.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the group describes their study of ions in the plasma generated in their reactor. Stefano Atzeni, with Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue giving an overview of the work being done at the NIF and the effort now being conducted by the team to better understand the unexpected ion behavior.

Scientists around the world have been trying for many years to replicate the fusion reactions that occur in the sun—this could provide humanity a nearly limitless source of energy. Such work has been step-by-step, with researchers tweaking reactors in search of the right combination of factors to produce more energy than is used to run the reactor.