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Archive for the ‘energy’ category: Page 241

May 26, 2020

Novel Device Harnesses Shadows to Generate Electricity

Posted by in categories: electronics, energy

Researchers have created a device called a ‘shadow-effect energy generator’ that makes use of the contrast in illumination between lit and shadowed areas to generate electricity. This novel concept opens up new approaches in harnessing indoor lighting conditions to power electronics.

Shadows are often associated with darkness and uncertainty. Now, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) are giving shadows a positive spin by demonstrating a way to harness this common but often overlooked optical effect to generate electricity.

“Shadows are omnipresent, and we often take them for granted. In conventional photovoltaic or optoelectronic applications where a steady source of light is used to power devices, the presence of shadows is undesirable, since it degrades the performance of devices. In this work, we capitalised on the illumination contrast caused by shadows as an indirect source of power. The contrast in illumination induces a voltage difference between the shadowed and illuminated sections, resulting in an electric current. This novel concept of harvesting energy in the presence of shadows is unprecedented,” explained research team leader Assistant Professor Tan Swee Ching, who is from the NUS Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

May 26, 2020

Investors bet $27.5 million that Nanotech Energy’s graphene battery breakthrough is the real thing

Posted by in categories: energy, nanotechnology

The startup claims to be “the world’s top supplier of graphene” and plans to release a non-flammable, environmentally friendly lithium battery that can charge “18 times faster than anything that is currently available on the market” — within the next year.

May 26, 2020

The Future Of Fusion? Meet The Stellarator

Posted by in categories: energy, futurism

Can be used for a force field: 3.


Power and energy are essential parts of our everyday life. Every time you turn on a light, you’re using power. If you’re reading this online, you’re using energy. If you’re watching a video — you guessed it — you need energy. So that means that with so many people needing power and energy, we’re brought into a world that’s demanding more and more power. What’s more, getting this power is the hard part.

May 25, 2020

Global leader in harvesting energy and data from footfall

Posted by in categories: energy, innovation

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PkEGoBe-EdA

“Pavegen creates high engagement with citizens by converting their footsteps into energy, data and rewards.

As pedestrians walk across the Pavegen system, the weight from their footsteps compresses electromagnetic generators below, producing 2 to 4 watt seconds of off-grid electrical energy per step.”

Continue reading “Global leader in harvesting energy and data from footfall” »

May 24, 2020

First Floating Ocean Hybrid Platform Can Generate Power From Waves, Wind And Solar

Posted by in category: energy

A German startup has developed a modular marine platform able to simultaneously generate energy from three different renewable sources.

May 23, 2020

Laser cooling a nanomechanical oscillator close to its ground state

Posted by in categories: energy, quantum physics

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM Research Europe recently demonstrated the laser cooling of a nanomechanical oscillator down to its zero-point energy (i.e., the point at which it contains a minimum amount of energy). Their successful demonstration, featured in Physical Review Letters, could have important implications for the development quantum technologies.

May 22, 2020

The Amphibious Warship USS Portland Has Shot Down A Drone With Its New High-Power Laser

Posted by in categories: drones, energy, military

Pew pew :3.


The successful test of the powerful laser is a major step forward for the Navy’s directed energy weapons ambitions.

Continue reading “The Amphibious Warship USS Portland Has Shot Down A Drone With Its New High-Power Laser” »

May 21, 2020

Emp High Power Electromagnetic Weapons Railguns Microwaves

Posted by in categories: drones, energy

EMP weapons, streams of microwaves, electromagnetic railguns, and high-power lasers offer new ways to bring down swarming drones, sink ships without explosives, and disperse formations of soldiers.

J.R. Wilson

May 19, 2020

Flodesign’s Jet Engine-Inspired Wind Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power Technology

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability, transportation

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WB5CawKfE2M

We read about different innovations in clean technology almost on a daily basis. A small Massachusetts-based start-up, FloDesign Wind Turbine, has created a wind turbine design based on jet engine technology. This revolutionary wind turbine can generate much more electricity at half the cost than today’s traditional wind turbines. It has also won two clean-energy competitions for its amazing innovation.

A traditional wind turbine can extract just 50% of the available wind energy in the given area it occupies. However, the Wind Jet by FloDesign uses blades covered in shrouds to direct the air through the turbine blades. This results in increased flow of air. As the airflow through the blades increases, the higher the speed of the turbines and ultimately the more power that is generated. The energy generated by this new wind turbine matches that of a traditional turbine with blades that are half the size.

Continue reading “Flodesign’s Jet Engine-Inspired Wind Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power Technology” »

May 18, 2020

A system for robust and efficient wireless power transfer

Posted by in categories: electronics, energy

Current methods for charging electronic devices via wireless technology only work if the overall system parameters are set up to match a specific transfer distance. As a result, these methods are limited to stationary power transfer applications, which means that a device that is receiving power needs to maintain a specific distance from the source supplying it in order for the power transfer to be successful.

Researchers at Stanford University have recently developed a new technique that could enable more efficient wireless transfer regardless of the distance between a device and its power source. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could help to overcome some of the current limitations of existing tools for the wireless charging of elecronic devices.

“The main purpose of our study was to overcome the barrier to dynamic wireless charging,” Sid Assawaworrarit, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “Our idea is based on parity-time symmetry (PT symmetry), which concerns systems with balanced gain and loss.”