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Sep 1, 2024

Scientists Extract Energy from “Nothing” Using Quantum Mechanics

Posted by in categories: energy, quantum physics

Physicists Successfully Demonstrate Quantum Energy Teleportation in Lab Experiments

TL;DR

Bob finds himself in need of energy — he wants to charge that fanciful quantum battery — but all he has access to is empty space. Fortunately, his friend Alice has a fully equipped physics lab in a far-off location. Alice measures the field in her lab, injecting energy into it there and learning about its fluctuations. This experiment bumps the overall field out of the ground state, but as far as Bob can tell, his vacuum remains in the minimum-energy state, randomly fluctuating. But then Alice texts Bob her findings about the vacuum around her location, essentially telling Bob when to plug in his battery. After Bob reads her message, he can use the newfound knowledge to prepare an experiment that extracts energy from the vacuum — up to the amount injected by Alice.

Aug 31, 2024

Scalable graphene technology could significantly enhance battery safety and performance

Posted by in categories: energy, materials

Researchers at Swansea University, in collaboration with Wuhan University of Technology, Shenzhen University, have developed a pioneering technique for producing large-scale graphene current collectors.

This breakthrough promises to significantly enhance the safety and performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), addressing a critical challenge in energy storage technology.

Published in Nature Chemical Engineering, the study details the first successful protocol for fabricating defect-free foils on a commercial scale. These foils offer extraordinary thermal conductivity—up to 1,400.8 W m–1 K–1 —nearly ten times higher than traditional copper and aluminum current collectors used in LIBs.

Aug 31, 2024

Scientists Detect Invisible Electric Field Around Earth For First Time

Posted by in category: energy

An invisible, weak energy field wrapped around our planet Earth has finally been detected and measured.

It’s called the ambipolar field, an electric field first hypothesized more than 60 years ago, and its discovery will change the way we study and understand the behavior and evolution of our beautiful, ever-changing world.

Continue reading “Scientists Detect Invisible Electric Field Around Earth For First Time” »

Aug 28, 2024

Solid-state electrolyte advance could double energy storage for next-gen vehicles

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, sustainability, transportation

Using a polymer to make a strong yet springy thin film, scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are speeding the arrival of next-generation solid-state batteries. This effort advances the development of electric vehicle power enabled by flexible, durable sheets of solid-state electrolytes.

The sheets may allow scalable production of future solid-state batteries with higher energy density electrodes. By separating negative and positive electrodes, they would prevent dangerous electrical shorts while providing high-conduction paths for ion movement.

These achievements foreshadow greater safety, performance and compared to current batteries that use liquid electrolytes, which are flammable, chemically reactive, thermally unstable and prone to leakage.

Aug 28, 2024

Rare Milky Way star cluster is packed with red supergiants 1 million times brighter than the sun

Posted by in categories: energy, space

“There are many open clusters in the galaxy. However, not all open clusters have the same level of interest to astronomers,” Ignacio Negueruela, a researcher at the Universidad de Alicante who was part of the team behind the discovery of supergiants in Barbá 2, told Space.com. “Clusters rich in red supergiants are very rare and tend to be very far away, but they play a crucial role in understanding key aspects in the evolution of massive stars.”

The intimidating size and power of supergiants means these monster stars burn through their nuclear fuel much faster than stars like the sun. Whereas our star will exist in its main sequence lifetime for around 10 billion years, supergiants are estimated to last just a few million years.

The short lifetime of supergiants means that while open clusters like Barbá 2 are common, with over 1,100 already discovered in the Milky Way alone, finding one packed with red supergiants is extremely rare.

Aug 28, 2024

Observation of a magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor instability in magnetically collimated plasma jets

Posted by in category: energy

We present the direct experimental observation of the formation of a diamagnetic cavity and magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability in a betaapprox1 high energy density plasma. Proton radiography is used to measure the two dimensional path-integrated magnetic field in a laser-produced plasma propagating parallel to a preimposed magnetic field. Flutelike structures, associated with the MRT instability, are observed to grow at the surface of the cavity, with a measured wavelength of 1.2 mm and growth time of 4 ns. These measurements are in good agreement with predictions of three dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations using the GORGON code.

Aug 25, 2024

Space missions are getting more complex − lessons from Amazon and FedEx can inform satellite and spacecraft management in orbit

Posted by in categories: energy, space

Logistics companies on the ground solve similar problems every day and transport goods and commodities across the globe. So, researchers can study how these companies manage their logistics to help space companies and agencies figure out how to successfully plan their mission operations.

One NASA-funded study in the early 2000s had an idea for simulating space logistics operations. These researchers viewed orbits or planets as cities and the trajectories connecting them as routes. They also viewed the payload, consumables, fuel and other items to transport as commodities.

This approach helped them reframe the space mission problem as a commodity flow problem – a type of question that ground logistics companies work on all the time.

Aug 24, 2024

Could we ever harness quantum vacuum energy?

Posted by in categories: energy, quantum physics

The fabric of spacetime is roiling with vibrating quantum fields, known as vacuum energy. It’s right there, everywhere we look. But could we ever get anything out of it?

Aug 24, 2024

NZ to trial world-first commercial long-range, wireless power transmission

Posted by in categories: business, energy

A New Zealand-based startup has developed a method of safely and wirelessly transmitting electric power across long distances without the use of copper wire, and is working on implementing it with the country’s second-largest power distributor.

The dream of wireless power transmission is far from new; everyone’s favorite electrical genius Nikola Tesla once proved he could power light bulbs from more than two miles away with a 140-foot Tesla coil in the 1890s – never mind that in doing so he burned out the dynamo at the local powerplant and plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into blackout.

Tesla’s dream was to place enormous towers all over the world that could transmit power wirelessly to any point on the globe, powering homes, businesses, industries and even giant electric ships on the ocean. Investor J.P. Morgan famously killed the idea with a single question: “where can I put the meter?”

Aug 23, 2024

A mechanism that transfers energy from nitrogen to argon enables bidirectional cascaded lasing in atmospheric air

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

To produce light, lasers typically rely on optical cavities, pairs of mirrors facing each other that amplify light by bouncing it back and forth. Recently, some physicists have been investigating the generation of “laser light” in open air without the use of optical cavities, a phenomenon known as cavity-free lasing in atmospheric air.

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