Aug
31
Use Sunlight to Smelt Iron Ore
August 31, 2010 | 3 Comments
George Washington University Professor Stuart Licht has developed a revolutionary carbon dioxide-free method of producing iron that could provide a breakthrough for an industry that has been using the same polluting process of iron smelting for more than three thousand years. Using renewable solar energy and a process of solar conversion the now patented process [...]
Aug
2
A New Source Of Magnetism Discovered By Accident
August 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
A new magnetic effect was discovered by accident when a UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher and several students grew graphene on the surface of a platinum crystal. Graphene is a one atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern, that looks like chicken wire. Examination showed when grown on platinum, the carbon atoms do [...]
Jul
6
Catalysts Built With The Smallest Life Form
July 6, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Siluria Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup is reporting progress with a New York Times story in commercializing a nanoscience-based approach to ethylene production using a virus for the catalyst construction scaffold. The technique is focused on the ability of a genetically engineered virus to coat itself with a metal that serves as a catalyst for [...]
Jul
2
Saving Platinum
July 2, 2010 | 3 Comments
Catalysts – substances that enable or speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed – are used to initiate virtually every industrial manufacturing process that involves chemistry. Metallic catalysts are the workhorses with platinum being one of the best. In industry catalysts typically operate under pressures ranging from millitorr to atmospheres, [...]
Jun
15
Wind to Fertilizer Construction Begins
June 15, 2010 | 3 Comments
The Associated Press must be the only press release recipient for some major news. The University of Minnesota Renewable Energy Center at Morris Minnesota has designed a $3.75 million carbon-free system that uses wind power from a towering turbine to produce anhydrous ammonia, NH3, a the most common and widely used nitrogen fertilizer and a [...]
Jun
14
A New Way to Make Carbon Fiber
June 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
Carbon fiber – it’s the current holy grail of structural material for transportation vehicles like airplanes, cars, trucks, busses and rail. Moving the person or the freight is one thing; the thing that moves them is the other. The less the moving thing weighs the more efficient and less energy required. But carbon fiber is [...]
Nov
9
The Strongest Magnet Attempt
November 9, 2009 | 4 Comments
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee Florida has been awarded nearly $3 million to build a novel kind of superconducting magnet that’s expected to break records for magnetic field strength, make possible new types of science and save vast amounts of energy and money. Of interest is the technologies that could benefit from [...]
Sep
4
Seeing Superconductivity
September 4, 2009 | 3 Comments
Researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Cornell University and the Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan, in a paper published in Science August 28th, 2009 show for the first time that the spectroscopic “fingerprint” of high-temperature superconductivity remains intact well above the super cold temperatures at which these materials carry current with [...]
