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Archive for the ‘energy’ category: Page 253

Aug 26, 2019

Forget the F-35: The Tempest Could Be the Future (Armed with Lasers, Hypersonic Missiles and Swarms)

Posted by in categories: drones, energy, military

With a flourish of a silk curtain at the Farnborough Air Show on July 16, British defense secretary Gavin Williamson unveiled a full-scale model of the Tempest, the UK’s concept for a domestically built twin-engine stealth fighter to enter service in the 2030s. The Tempest will supposedly boast a laundry list of sixth-generation technologies such as being optionally-manned, mounting hypersonic or directed energy weapons, and capability to deploy and control drone swarms. However, it may also represent a Brexit-era gambit to revive defense cooperation with Germany and France.

London has seeded “Team Tempest” with £2 billion ($2.6 billion) for initial development through 2020. Major defense contractor BAE System is leading development with the Royal Air Force, with Rolls Royce contributing engines, European firm MBDA integrating weapons, and Italian company Leonardo developing sensors and avionics.

Design will supposedly be finalized in the early 2020s, with a flyable prototype planned in 2025 and production aircraft entering service in 2035, gradually replacing the RAF’s fourth-generation Typhoon fighters and complementing F-35 stealth jets. This seventeen-year development cycle is considered ambitious for something as complicated and expensive as a stealth fighter.

Aug 26, 2019

Physicists’ study demonstrates silicon’s energy-harvesting power

Posted by in categories: energy, internet, physics

A University of Texas at Dallas physicist has teamed with Texas Instruments Inc. to design a better way for electronics to convert waste heat into reusable energy.

The collaborative project demonstrated that silicon’s ability to harvest energy from heat can be greatly increased while remaining mass-producible.

Dr. Mark Lee, professor and head of the Department of Physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, is the corresponding author of a study published July 15 in Nature Electronics that describes the results. The findings could greatly influence how circuits are cooled in electronics, as well as provide a method of powering the sensors used in the growing “internet of things.”

Aug 23, 2019

Dark-energy mapper will reconstruct 11 billion years of cosmic history

Posted by in categories: energy, space

A telescope in Arizona will conduct the largest spectroscopic survey of galaxies.

Aug 22, 2019

TeraWatt Technology solid-state battery prototype tests showing 432 kWh/kg

Posted by in category: energy

TeraWatt Technology announced that its 4.5Ah prototype solid-state battery design achieved a record-breaking energy density of 432Wh/kg (1122Wh/L) in validation tests conducted by third parties, including TOYO System based in Japan.

Branded as TERA3.0, this 4.5Ah next-generation design will be available for select early adopters in 2021 and full release in 2022. TeraWatt Technology continues to further iterate the TERA3.0 line of design, as well as further develop additional designs including different cell formats, sizes and energy capacities.

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Aug 22, 2019

Does our energy future hold electrification, biomass and hydrogen?

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

Physics World represents a key part of IOP Publishing’s mission to communicate world-class research and innovation to the widest possible audience. The website forms part of the Physics World portfolio, a collection of online, digital and print information services for the global scientific community.

Aug 21, 2019

Physicists create world’s smallest engine

Posted by in categories: energy, physics, transportation

Theoretical physicists at Trinity College Dublin are among an international collaboration that has built the world’s smallest engine—which, as a single calcium ion, is approximately ten billion times smaller than a car engine.

Work performed by Professor John Goold’s QuSys group in Trinity’s School of Physics describes the science behind this tiny motor. The research, published today in international journal Physical Review Letters, explains how random fluctuations affect the operation of microscopic machines. In the future, such devices could be incorporated into other technologies in order to recycle and thus improve .

The engine itself—a single calcium ion—is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The working substance of the engine is the ion’s “intrinsic spin” (its angular momentum). This spin is used to convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion.

Aug 21, 2019

Scientists find a way to create long-life, fast-charging batteries

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

A group of researchers led by Skoltech Professor Pavel Troshin studied coordination polymers, a class of compounds with scarcely explored applications in metal-ion batteries, and demonstrated their possible future use in energy storage devices with a high charging/discharging rate and stability. The results of their study were published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

The charging/discharging rate is one of the key characteristics of lithium-ion batteries. Most modern commercial batteries need at least an hour to get fully charged, which certainly limits the scope of their application, in particular, for electric vehicles. The trouble with active materials, such as the most popular anode material, graphite, is that their capacity decays significantly, as their charging rate increases. To retain the battery capacity at high charging rates, the active electrode materials must have high electronic and ionic conductivity, which is the case with the newly-discovered coordination polymers that are derived from and salts of , such as nickel or copper. Although these compounds hold a great promise, their application in lithium-ion batteries remains virtually unexplored.

A recent study undertaken by a group of scientists from Skoltech and the Institute for Problems of Chemical Physics of RAS led by Professor P. Troshin in collaboration with the University of Cologne (Germany) and the Ural Federal University, focused on tetraaminobenzene-based linear polymers of nickel and copper. Although the linear polymers exhibited much lower initial electronic conductivity as compared to their two-dimensional counterparts, it transpired that they can be used as anode materials that get charged/discharged in less than a minute, because their conductivity increases dramatically after the first discharge due to lithium doping.

Aug 19, 2019

Three New US Patents for Solidia Technologies’ CO2-cured Concrete Advances the Performance and Sustainability of Building Materials

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Solidia’s systems offer superior products that address the cement industry’s goal of reducing its carbon emissions, which contribute 3 to 5% of global CO2 pollution. Solidia’s patented processes start with an energy-saving, sustainable cement. Concrete made with this cement is then cured with CO2 instead of water. Together, the sustainable cement and CO2-cured concrete reduce the carbon footprint of cement and concrete by up to 70%. Additionally, up to 100% of the water used in concrete production can be recovered and recycled.


The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued three patents covering processes and products manufactured using Solidia Technologies‘cement and carbon-curing technology. The patents extend the range of applications for Solidia’s processes to include hollow core, pervious and aerated concrete.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190516006022/en/

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Aug 18, 2019

Terraforming Mars in 50 Years with Large Orbital Mirrors, Bacteria and Factories

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, energy, engineering, environmental, space

The McKay-Zubrin plan for terraforming Mars in 50 years was cited by Elon Musk.

Orbital mirrors with 100 km radius are required to vaporize the CO2 in the south polar cap. If manufactured of solar sail-like material, such mirrors would have a mass on the order of 200,000 tonnes. If manufactured in space out of asteroidal or Martian moon material, about 120 MWe-years of energy would be needed to produce the required aluminum.

The use of orbiting mirrors is another way for hydrosphere activation. For example, if the 125 km radius reflector discussed earlier for use in vaporizing the pole were to concentrate its power on a smaller region, 27 TW would be available to melt lakes or volatilize nitrate beds. This is triple the power available from the impact of a 10 billion tonne asteroid per year, and in all probability would be far more controllable. A single such mirror could drive vast amounts of water out of the permafrost and into the nascent Martian ecosystem very quickly. Thus while the engineering of such mirrors may be somewhat grandiose, the benefits to terraforming of being able to wield tens of TW of power in a controllable way would be huge.

Aug 17, 2019

The Rasa: A Hydrogen Powered Car That Emits Water Instead Of Carbon Dioxide

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

A small company in Wales is reinventing clean motoring with a handmade ecological car, the Rasa, powered by fuel cells and emits water rather than CO2.