May
17
Making the Artificial Leaf Into a Forest
May 17, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. The scientists have taken the “artificial leaf” as the popular term for such a system, to success as an “artificial forest.” The DOE is under pressure politically as the climate crowd is [...]
May
15
A Wind Turbine in a Funnel
May 15, 2013 | 5 Comments
One’s first impression is – it won’t work. But some innovative and enterprising folks have driven the wind through a funnel idea to what seems to be a successful field trial. Brian Wang’s NextBigFuture site spotted the small firm’s press release and ran a post. That in itself is an acknowledgment the technology is interesting. [...]
May
14
Closer to a True Paint On Solar Panel
May 14, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering and his team are developing a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what’s available today. Gan is working on the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don’t match traditional solar cells in terms of [...]
May
13
Solar Electricity by Plant Photosynthesis
May 13, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the University of Georgia (UGA) College of Engineering said, “We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make sugars.” Ramasamy is also a member of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. The sun is the largest source [...]
Apr
22
Blowing Beyond the Solar Cell Limit
April 22, 2013 | Leave a Comment
The Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit asserts that the ultimate solar cell conversion efficiency can never exceed 34% for a single optimized semiconductor junction. Researchers at MIT have shown they have a way to blow past that limit. That will raise a cheer to an industry in real need of a major boost. Decades of research on [...]
Apr
12
Raising the Energy Value of Natural Gas by 25%
April 12, 2013 | 2 Comments
The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has announced a system that converts natural gas using sunlight into the more energy-rich fuel called syngas. The new system offers a 25% increase in available energy. Making the syngas uses concentrated solar power. Solar energy comes to a reflecting surface that concentrates the sun’s rays [...]
Mar
28
A New Cooling Panel That Works in the Sun
March 28, 2013 | 1 Comment
A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. The team’s new structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. The paper describing the device was published March 5th [...]
Mar
11
Quantum Dot Photovoltaic Solar Cell Improvement
March 11, 2013 | Leave a Comment
Quantum dot photovoltaics are not market ready just yet, but efficiency and production costs are quite attractive. A new technique developed by University of Toronto Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells. Sargent’s group has devised a new technique to improve efficiency in colloidal quantum dot [...]
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