Sep

30

Magnetic Energy Recovery

September 30, 2010 | 11 Comments

In an interesting collaboration the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global (ONR), and MERSTech brings a design of a system that controls electrical flow for lighting, a highly efficient platform that may spark a new era of power savings. The design comes form the Tokyo Institute and was [...]

Sep

29

Make Hydrogen While You Drive

September 29, 2010 | 6 Comments

Some press releases go pretty far. One hopes the scientists proofread the text before it gets out.  The University of Wisconsin says in its release about a low cost, low temperature hydrogen catalyst for purification, “Engineering researchers from Tufts University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University have demonstrated the low-temperature efficacy of an atomically [...]

Sep

28

A New Orbital Solar Collector

September 28, 2010 | 7 Comments

The quick refresher – a Dyson Sphere is an idea to encase the sun in a ball to collect the whole solar energy output.  There are problems – one is if all the matter in the solar systems was used and made into a material at about steel’s density it would be about 8cm or [...]

Sep

27

A New Way to Harvest Heat

September 27, 2010 | 5 Comments

Catching the energy lost from waste heat has been on the wish list of engineers for as long energy has been understood.  Yet the functioning concept for replacing existing techniques that is both more efficient and economically competitive hasn’t arrived. Now University of Arizona physicists are announcing they have discovered a new way of harvesting [...]

Sep

24

An Antenna Breakthrough

September 24, 2010 | 5 Comments

Indefatigable persistence has its rewards.  Do you remember those TV antenna devices that plugged into the home wiring and to the TV claiming they would be a great TV antenna?  This writer had one that worked great – on one UHF channel. University of Washington and the Georgia Institute of Technology use residential wiring to [...]

Sep

23

Organizing Traffic Signals With New Ideas

September 23, 2010 | 4 Comments

Without doubt the single most aggravating system in metropolitan areas is the roadway control by traffic signals.  Traffic jams and road congestion do a lot more than disrupt the lives of millions of people every day – in the United States alone, delays linked to backed-up traffic cost nearly $100 billion each year, and waste [...]

Sep

22

Silicon Nanowires In Lithium Batteries Gets Closer

September 22, 2010 | 9 Comments

Back in January of 2008 we had a look at silicon nanowires with suspicions of the then 10-fold increase in capacity claims.  Today Amprius is looking to get into the market with a doubling – still a huge improvement. Amprius says it has developed batteries capable of storing twice as much energy as anything on [...]

Sep

21

Understanding the How in Gasification

September 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Purdue University, funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, has developed a facility aimed at learning precisely how coal and biomass are broken down in reactors called gasifiers. Gasifiers are reactors in which biomass, coal or other carbon rich substances are heated and flooded with steam, oxygen or both.  Simply put, the [...]

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