May
19
A New Way to Get Hydrogen From Water
May 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
Monash University of Australia in the lead role with researchers at UC Davis in the USA and using the facilities at the Australian Synchrotron has published a paper the journal Nature Chemistry Sunday May 15, 2011 describing very simple mineral, commonly seen as a black stain on rocks that oxidizes the oxygen out of water. [...]
May
18
A New Way To Catch A Photon
May 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jun Xu a member of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division has boosted the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaic solar cells by nearly 80 percent with a new method to build photovoltaic solar cell. Xu said he and his team, “designed the three-dimensional structure to provide an intrinsic electric field distribution that promotes [...]
May
17
Getting the Heat to Pay and Payback
May 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Enormous amounts of thermal energy arrive each day in solar energy and a huge share of the thermal or heat energy we consume is simply lost to the air to radiate away into space. With only a little engineering know how, realization of the losses are appalling. Steve Novack at the Idaho National Laboratory whose [...]
May
16
Designing Better Plants for Food and Fuels
May 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
Michigan State University researcher David Kramer a Hannah Distinguished Professor of Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics leads an effort to improve fuel and food producing plants saying, “This is critical since it’s the process that powers all of life in our ecosystem. The efficiency of photosynthesis, and our ability to improve it, is critical to whether the [...]
May
13
Competition for EEStor With Activated Graphene
May 13, 2011 | 3 Comments
U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists Dong Su and Eric Stach have helped to uncover the nanoscale structure of a novel form of carbon, contributing to an explanation of why this new material acts like a super-absorbent sponge when it comes to soaking up electric charge. The excitement is about a new material [...]
May
12
Bussard’s IEC Fusion On Track
May 12, 2011 | 2 Comments
The very lucky Alan Boyle who writes the CosmicLog on the MSNBC site interviewed the new leader at Dr. Robert Bussard’s EMC2 Inertial Electrostatic Containment fusion project. The leading comment for news comes from new CEO Jaeyoung Park who has assumed the position since Rick Nebel retired back in November. The key quote is Park [...]
May
11
Solar Energy Directly to Hydrogen Production
May 11, 2011 | 1 Comment
Getting solar energy into a stored form is a major and elusive goal. One idea that has intrigued for decades is using solar energy to split water for the hydrogen product. Some wee progress has been made. May 10, 2011 saw a Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) team discovering that it is possible [...]
May
10
Collecting Solar Heat to Make Electricity
May 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
Rice University researchers are describing a new way to harvest solar energy with a new paper this week in the journal Science. Naomi Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the paper’s lead researcher explains, “We’re merging the optics of nanoscale antennas with the electronics of semiconductors. There’s no practical way [...]
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