Category: energy – Page 175
Researchers turn asphaltene into graphene for composites
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.
Recreating photosynthesis for unlimited hydrogen energy
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.
Not only are fossil fuels a limited resource, when burned they also pollute the air with greenhouse gases that warm up our planet. In recent years, we have increased our use of renewable energy – from sunlight, wind and waves, for example – but the machines that generate energy from these sources are made from rare materials that we must dig ever deeper underground to find.
Engineers designed a new nanoscale 3D printing material that can be printed at a speed of 100 mm/s
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.
Phuchit/iStock.
An 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.
World’s first CO2-based energy storage solution will be available in the US soon
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.
Countries around the world are looking to switch to sources of renewable energy in a bid to reduce their carbon emissions. Recently, the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm went online in Norway and will use the harnessed energy to reduce emissions from its oil and gas production facilities.
Cyber vulnerability discovered in networks used by spacecraft, aircraft and energy generation systems
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.
That coexistence has been considered safe for more than a decade, predicated on a design that prevented the two types of network traffic from interfering with one another. The team’s attack, called PCspooF, was the first of its kind to break this isolation.
Evidence found of ions behaving differently than expected in fusion reactions
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.