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Category: energy

A faster, greener method to recycle lithium-ion batteries can also ease supply chain issues

As global demand for lithium-ion batteries continues to surge, a team of Rice University researchers has developed a faster, more energy-efficient way to recover critical minerals from spent batteries, potentially easing supply chain pressures and reducing environmental harm.

In a new study published in Small, researchers from Rice’s Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering introduce a class of water-based solutions that can extract valuable metals from battery waste in minutes rather than hours. The work centers on aqueous solutions of amino chlorides, which mimic the performance of commonly studied green solvents like deep eutectics, while avoiding their key limitations.

“Traditional recycling methods often rely on harsh acids or slow, energy-intensive processes,” said the study’s first author, Simon M. King, a sophomore studying chemical and biomolecular engineering who completed this work as a summer research fellow at the Rice Advanced Materials Institute. “What we’ve shown is that you can achieve rapid, high-efficiency metal recovery using a much simpler, water-based system.”

Simplifying clean hydrogen production with a new all-in-one photocatalytic cocatalyst

Researchers have demonstrated the first “all-in-one” cocatalyst for photocatalytic overall water splitting, a breakthrough that could simplify the production of clean hydrogen fuel. The discovery marks an important step toward practical technologies that use sunlight and water to generate hydrogen, a key energy carrier expected to play a major role in building a decarbonized and sustainable society.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Hydrogen is widely regarded as a promising clean energy source because it produces only water when used as fuel. Among the various methods for producing hydrogen, photocatalytic overall water splitting —using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen—has attracted increasing attention as an environmentally friendly and sustainable approach.

Protostars ‘sneeze’ and produce rings of gas and magnetic flux as they grow

Researchers have uncovered new insights into the early development of baby stars. As published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team from Kyushu University and Kagawa University reports that during the early growth period of a baby star, the protostellar disk—the dense disk of gas and dust that surrounds the star—expels magnetic flux and forms a giant warm ring of gas about 1,000 au (astronomical units) in size. The research team explains that these “sneezes” of matter and magnetic energy help the baby star release excess energy, leading to proper star formation.

One of the many mysteries that the universe holds is how stars like our sun are born. Stars are born in areas of the cosmos called stellar nurseries, where gas and dust coalesce to form early stars called protostars. The best way to understand star formation is to observe these stellar nurseries. However, this can be difficult due to the aforementioned gas and dust obscuring the baby star.

“Thankfully, one of the most promising ways to get a clear view of protostars is to use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile,” explains Professor Masahiro N. Machida of Kyushu University’s Faculty of Science, who led the study. “This radio telescope lets us see the different materials that make up stellar nurseries.”

Quantum simulations that bypass resolution limits offer insights into high-temperature superconductivity

A new method developed at LMU overcomes fundamental resolution limits and may provide insights into high-temperature superconductivity. Physicist Dr. Sebastian Paeckel has developed a method that can be used to calculate spectral functions of complex quantum systems much more precisely than was possible previously. His approach reconstructs precise energy spectra without requiring lengthy calculations.

This reveals previously hidden details, as Paeckel reports in the journal Physical Review Letters. He conducts research at the Faculty of Physics at LMU and at the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST).

How maze-like magnetic patterns form and evolve in materials

The rapid increase in electric vehicle adoption in recent years has highlighted a crucial issue: the energy conversion efficiency of electric motors. In electric motors, iron loss or magnetic hysteresis loss is a primary source of energy dissipation, arising from the repeated reversal of magnetic fields within the motor core, made of soft magnetic materials. Moreover, electric motors typically operate in high-temperature environments, where thermal effects can lead to partial demagnetization, further complicating energy-loss mechanisms.

The structure of magnetic domains (tiny magnetic regions) of soft magnetic materials strongly influences their magnetic properties, including response to high temperatures and hysteresis loss.

Magnetic domains exhibit a variety of fine structures. In some soft magnetic materials, they form intricate zig-zag patterns known as maze domains. These maze domains show complex and abrupt temperature-dependent behavior that can significantly affect energy loss.

I’ve fired one of America’s most powerful lasers—here’s what a shot day looks like

If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.

I was the lead laser scientist on the Texas Petawatt, or TPW as we called it, from 2020 to 2024. Texas Petawatt, which is currently closed due to funding cuts, was a government-funded research center where scientists from across the country applied for time to use specialized equipment. It was part of LaserNetUS, a Department of Energy network of high-power laser labs.

This type of laser takes a tiny pulse of light, stretches it out so it doesn’t blast optics to pieces, and amplifies it until, for a brief instant, it carries more power than the entire U.S. electrical grid. Then it compresses the pulse back to a trillionth of a second to create a star in a vacuum chamber.

These blazing blue explosions may be born when a compact dead star slams into a Wolf-Rayet star

Luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) are among the universe’s brightest and fastest explosions but their origin is not completely understood. A new study takes a closer look at the galaxies they occur in, offering two important clues about their nature. A paper outlining these results was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on March 24.

LFBOTs are called cow-like events, nicknamed after the first member of this class—AT2018cow—discovered in 2018. They are extremely bright explosions whose brightness peaks within a week and fades to half its peak value in the following week. Their peak brightness is typically greater than 1043 erg per second at optical wavelengths. This is comparable with that of superluminous supernovae, which take a few weeks to months to peak and are generally 10 to 100 times brighter than normal supernovae.

Moreover, LFBOTs’ light curve—a graph that shows changes in their brightness over time—cannot be explained by the decay of nickel-56, which is a common energy source for normal and core-collapse supernovae. There are several theories for their origins; however, there is a lack of consensus.

Transparent cooling film cuts car cabin temperature by 6.1°C without electricity

A transparent radiative cooling film technology that dissipates heat directly to the outside without consuming electricity has been developed to reduce vehicle overheating during summer. The technology was validated through real-vehicle experiments conducted under diverse conditions—including different countries, seasons, and both parking and driving scenarios—and demonstrated the ability to lower cabin temperatures by up to 6.1°C and reduce cooling energy consumption by more than 20%.

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Prof. Seung Hwan Ko (Department of Mechanical Engineering, SNU), in collaboration with Prof. Gang Chen at MIT and research teams from Hyundai Motor Company and Kia (Materials Research & Engineering Center and Thermal Energy Total Development Group), has designed and fabricated a large-area Scalable Transparent Radiative Cooling (STRC) film applicable to vehicle windows. Through real-vehicle evaluations conducted under various climatic and driving conditions, the team demonstrated both energy-saving and carbon reduction effects.

This research was published online on February 4 in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Platinum-free catalyst splits hydrogen from water for energy, running 1,000 hours at industry standards

Using a renewable energy source has multiple benefits, including reducing harmful emissions and dependence on fossil fuels while increasing efficiency. But many renewable energy sources have a higher cost than fossil fuels due to the materials needed to make them usable, such as platinum group metals (PGMs), and the high cost of storage.

A team of researchers led by Gang Wu, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is working to change that. The team is creating a heterostructure catalyst for an anion-exchange membrane water electrolyzer (AEMWE) that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from renewable sources. They created the catalyst with two phosphides that gave them an efficient method to extract hydrogen, a valuable yet low-cost source of zero-emissions fuel. The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Wu’s team has been looking for alternatives to catalysts that use expensive platinum group metals. In this research, their idea began with using sunlight, wind or water to create electricity that they could then use to separate hydrogen from water.

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