Researchers in the U.S. have discovered a self-sustaining material that uses capillary condensation to harvest water from the air.
Category: sustainability
A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy.
The research, published in Science Advances, describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.
The interdisciplinary team includes Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE); Amish Patel, Professor in CBE; Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author; and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich.
When we think about renewable energy, images of sprawling solar farms or towering coastal wind turbines usually come to mind. Yet, there is a quieter, more compact option: a slender strip of material fluttering in the breeze, capable of converting ambient airflow into usable electrical energy.
In our research group, we have been exploring how flexible structures—thin polymer sheets—can convert the energy of ambient flow into electricity using piezoelectric materials. These materials generate an electrical signal when mechanically deformed. Think of them as energy translators—converting flutter and vibration into voltage.
Our work focuses on a simple idea: attach a flexible plate with a piezoelectric sheet to the downstream side of a cylinder and expose it to wind. As wind flows past the cylinder, it causes the attached plate to flutter—much like a flag.
Engineers have developed a water-based battery that could help Australian households store rooftop solar energy more safely, cheaply and efficiently than ever before.
Their next-generation “flow battery” opens the door to compact, high-performance battery systems for homes and is expected to be much cheaper than current $10,000 lithium-ion systems.
Flow batteries have been around for decades but have traditionally been used in large-scale energy storage due to their large size and slow charge speeds.
A novel thin-film material capable of simultaneously enhancing the efficiency and durability of tandem solar cells has been developed.
Led by Professor BongSoo Kim from the Department of Chemistry at UNIST, in collaboration with Professors Jin Young Kim and Dong Suk Kim from the Graduate School of Carbon Neutrality at UNIST, the team developed a multi-functional hole-selective layer (mHSL) designed to significantly improve the performance of perovskite/organic tandem solar cells (POTSCs). Their study is published in Advanced Energy Materials.
Tandem solar cells are advanced photovoltaic devices that stack two different types of cells to absorb a broader spectrum of sunlight, thereby increasing overall energy conversion efficiency. Among these, combinations of perovskite and organic materials are particularly promising for producing thin, flexible solar panels suitable for wearable devices and building-integrated photovoltaics, positioning them as next-generation energy sources.
A study carried out at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, presents a new way to mitigate the rapid degradation of perovskite solar cells. The problem, which limits the use of these devices in everyday life, has challenged researchers in the field to find viable solutions.
Perovskite solar cells are a very promising photovoltaic technology. They are as efficient as silicon cells and have lower production costs. In addition, they are light, flexible and semi-transparent, which opens up numerous possibilities for applications such as windows, clothing or tents that can generate electricity from sunlight.
However, the commercialization of these cells is hampered by their low durability due to the degradation that perovskite materials undergo when exposed to humidity and ambient temperature conditions during both manufacturing and use. This degradation affects the performance of the devices over time and therefore their durability.
Almost half of the scientists who responded to a survey have experienced territorial and undermining behaviours from other scientists — most commonly during their PhD studies1. Of those affected, nearly half said that the perpetrator was a high-profile researcher, and one-third said it was their own supervisor.
Most of the survey respondents were ecologists, but the study’s organizers suspect that surveys focusing on other disciplines would yield similar results.
The gatekeeping behaviours that the study documents “damage careers, particularly of early-career and marginalized researchers”, says lead author Jose Valdez, an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig. “Most alarming was that nearly one in five of those affected left academia or science entirely.”
Musk said a Tesla robotaxi service will start with about 10 vehicles in Austin and rapidly expand to thousands of vehicles should the launch go well with no incidents.
Researchers in Australia are working on a way to lower the cost of producing solar thermal energy by as much as 40% with the help of shatterproof rear-view mirrors originally designed for cars.
That could be huge for agriculture and industrial facilities which need large amounts of heat for large-scale processes at temperatures between 212 — 754 °F (100 — 400 °C). That addresses food production, drying crops, grain and pulse drying, sterilizing soil and treating wastewater on farms; industrial applications include producing chemicals, making paper, desalinating water, and dyeing textiles.
A quick refresher in case you’re out of the loop: solar thermal energy and conventional solar energy (photovoltaic) systems both harvest sunlight, but they work in fundamentally different ways. Solar thermal setups capture the Sun’s heat rather than its light, use reflectors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, and convert solar radiation directly into heat energy. This heat can be used directly for heating buildings, water, or the aforementioned industrial processes.
Using global land use and carbon storage data from the past 175 years, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Cognizant AI Labs have trained an artificial intelligence system to develop optimal environmental policy solutions that can advance global sustainability initiatives of the United Nations.
The AI tool effectively balances various complex trade-offs to recommend ways of maximizing carbon storage, minimizing economic disruptions and helping improve the environment and people’s everyday lives, according to a paper published today in the journal Environmental Data Science.
The project is among the first applications of the UN-backed Project Resilience, a team of scientists and experts working to tackle global decision-augmentation problems—including ambitious sustainable development goals this decade—through part of a broader effort called AI for Good.