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Category: energy – Page 155

A scientific article just published by four Brazilian and two American scientists reports gains in electric and thermal energy obtained when brewer’s spent grain (barley bagasse), an abundant waste produced by the beer industry, is treated with ultrasound before undergoing anaerobic digestion, a microbiological process involving consumption of organic matter and production of methane.

Pre-treatment generated biogas with 56% methane, 27% more than the proportion obtained without use of ultrasound. After purification in methane, the biogas can be used as vehicle fuel with a very low carbon footprint compared to conventional fossil fuels. Moreover, in cogenerators, the methane can be burned off by the brewery to produce electricity and heat. The final waste can be used as biofertilizer instead of mineral fertilizer. The methodology is described in detail in the article, which is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

The innovative process was developed at the Laboratory of Bioengineering and Treatment of Water and Waste (Biotar) in the State University of Campinas’s School of Food Engineering (FEA-UNICAMP). The research group lead, T nia Forster-Carneiro, is principal investigator for a project supported by FAPESP.

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A study led by UCLA researchers could help accelerate the use of hydrogen as an environmentally friendly source of energy in transportation and other applications.

The team developed a method for predicting platinum alloys’ potency and stability—two key indicators of how they will perform as catalysts in . Then, using that technique, they designed and produced an alloy that yielded excellent results under conditions approximating real-world use. The findings are published in the journal Nature Catalysis.

“For the sustainability of our planet, we can’t keep living the way we do, and reinventing energy is one major way to change our path,” said corresponding author Yu Huang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “We have fuel cell cars, but we need to make them cheaper. In this study, we came up with an approach to allow researchers to identify the right catalysts much faster.”

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Circa 2018 unlimited energy using graphene.

University of Arkansas researchers have shown that the motion of graphene could supply an unlimited amount of clean energy. (Image credit: Pixabay)Graphene advancements are rolling out on a regular basis, with new developments in production 0, strength 0, and have even used it to create 3D printed objects. Researchers from the University of Arkansas have also utilized the material to create a source of potential unlimited clean energy, thanks to its flexibility.

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— Energy Info

Media Contact: Jennifer Kalez

SALEM – A public partnership with the Oregon Department of Energy, Oregon Department of Land Conservation & Development, Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, and the U.S. Department of Defense has published new educational materials that will help local governments, Tribes, communities, policymakers, agencies, energy developers, and other stakeholders access important information and considerations for potential renewable energy in Oregon.

The Oregon Renewable Energy Siting Assessment (ORESA) project was funded through a $1.1 million U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) grant, with the goal of providing baseline data to support important conversations around potential energy and transmission development in the state.

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Stir this silicon-based powder into water, and hydrogen will bubble out, ready for immediate use. Hong Kong company EPRO Advance Technology (EAT) says its Si+ powder offers an instant end to the difficulties of shipping and storing green energy.

This is the second powdered hydrogen advance we’ve learned about this week, designed to solve the same problems: transporting hydrogen is difficult, dangerous and expensive, whether the costs are for cryogenic cooling in a liquid hydrogen system, or for compression to around 700 times the normal sea-level air pressure.

But where Deakin University’s mechanochemical storage process takes hydrogen gas and traps it in a powder for easy, stable transport, releasing it only once the recyclable powder is heated, EAT’s silicon-based powder doesn’t require you to start off with any hydrogen at all – and getting the hydrogen back out is even easier.

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New electrocatalysis electrodes have been created that are simpler and cheaper than conventional ones, and can substantially increase the efficiency of water splitting. Decorated with chiral molecules like helicenes, these devices double the activity of the oxygen evolution reaction, the bottleneck of the process, and improve its selectivity.

‘With electrocatalysis, we [can] use electrons from renewable sources [like solar and wind] to produce clean chemicals and fuels,’ explains Magalí Lingenfelder from the Max Planck–EPFL laboratory for molecular nanoscience and technology, in Switzerland, who led the study. In this work, her team focused on the oxygen evolution reaction. ‘It’s the bottleneck of water splitting,’ she says. ‘We wanted to increase its performance with cheap, simple solutions.’

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Physics World

To get around this problem, Kanté and colleagues utilized photonic crystals. These are periodic structures, which, like electronic semiconductors, have “band gaps” – frequencies at which they are opaque. Like graphene in electronics, photonic crystals generally contain Dirac cones in their band structures. At the vertex of such a cone is the Dirac point, where the band gap closes.

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