Renewables

What if industrial waste water could become fuel? With affordable, long-lasting catalysts, water could be split to produce hydrogen that could be used to power fuel cells or combustion engines. By conducting complex simulations, scientists showed that adding lithium to aluminum nanoparticles results in orders-of-magnitude faster water-splitting reactions and higher hydrogen production rates compared to pure aluminum nanoparticles. The lithium all...

University of Oregon chemists have synthesised a stable and long-lasting carbon-based molecule that, they say, potentially could be applicable in solar cells and electronic devices. The molecule changes its bonding patterns to a magnetic biradical state when heated; it then returns to a fully bonded non-magnetic closed state at room temperature. That transition, they report, can be done repeatedly without decomposition. It remains stable in the p...

Masdar Institute faculty are part of a collaborative team of researchers that has discovered a novel way to significantly increase the amount of sunlight that a solar absorber can convert into heat. By converting more of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface into heat in a low-cost way, the solar absorber can help make sustainable technologies that rely on solar heat, like solar thermal technologies, more efficient and affordable.

EPFL researchers are pushing the limits of perovskite solar cell performance by exploring the best way to grow these crystals. Michael Graetzel and his team found that, by briefly reducing the pressure while fabricating perovskite crystals, they were able to achieve the highest performance ever measured for larger-size perovskite solar cells, reaching over 20% efficiency and matching the performance of conventional thin-film solar cells of s...

Scientists at UC San Diego, MIT and Harvard University have engineered "topological plexcitons," energy-carrying particles that could help make possible the design of new kinds of solar cells and miniaturised optical circuitry. The researchers report their advance in an article published in the current issue of Nature Communications. Within the Lilliputian world of solid state physics, light and matter interact in strange ways, exc...

The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch foundation developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, announces that it has successfully secured the funding required for its North Sea prototype test, which will start early summer 2016.

The large amount of waste heat produced by power plants and automobile engines can be converted into electricity due to the thermoelectric effect, a physics effect that converts temperature differences into electrical energy. Now in a new study, researchers have confirmed theoretical predictions that 2D materials—those that are as thin as a single nanometer—exhibit a significantly higher thermoelectric effect than 3D materials, which ...

By 2050, the world will need to produce 70% more food than we did in 2007 to feed a global population expected to reach 9.6 billion, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Increased food production means a greater demand for energy. But many farmers in developing countries do not have access to clean and affordable modern energy. Moreover, they are often unaware of what technology might enable them to farm more ef...

A project called LightChEC, running at the University of Zurich since the beginning of 2013, focuses on "turning solar energy into chemical energy". The researchers involved are aiming to refine artificial photosynthesis to make it suitable as a means for supplying energy to industry and society. Three Empa scientists, Andreas Borgschulte, Karl-Heinz Ernst and Andreas Züttel, are carrying out research as part of LightChEC. Ern...

A University of Queensland researcher has turned waste into power, partnering with Queensland Urban Utilities to convert biogas into electricity. The UQ Advanced Water Management Centre's Dr Shihu Hu has been researching at Queensland's largest wastewater treatment facility, at Brisbane's Luggage Point. "The site gives me unlimited access to free samples, with about 60 Olympic swimming pools of waste arriving every day," he said.