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Engineers at MIT have developed a new battery design using common materials – aluminum, sulfur and salt. Not only is the battery low-cost, but it’s resistant to fire and failures, and can be charged very fast, which could make it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries have dominated the field for the last few decades, thanks to their reliability and high energy density. However, lithium is becoming scarcer and more expensive, and the cells can be hazardous, exploding or bursting into flames if damaged or improperly used. Cheaper, safer alternatives are needed, especially as the world transitions towards renewable energy and electric vehicles.

So the MIT team set out to design a new type of battery out of readily available, inexpensive materials. After a search and some trial and error, they settled on aluminum for one electrode and sulfur for the other, topped off with an electrolyte of molten chloro-aluminate salt. Not only are all of these ingredients cheap and common, but they’re not flammable, so there’s no risk of fire or explosion.

99 percent of the panels were made of PET.

Do you remember the solar panels that Prof. Paul Dastoor from the University of New Castle and his team produced with a 3D printer? If you don’t, it’s an evergreen story worth remembering. Let’s dive in…

Continue reading “3D-printed solar cells are cheaper, easier to produce, and deployable at speed” »

Luxury electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors unveiled the new Lucid Air Sapphire Edition, a top-of-the-line sedan, which the company says will do zero to 60mph in under two seconds, zero to 100mph in under four seconds, and the quarter-mile in under nine seconds.

That’s tremendously impressive in a full-size, fully-electric luxury sedan and potentially makes the new sapphire blue car the most powerful production sedan on the market, beating out the previous record holder, the Tesla Model S Plaid.

The new Sapphire Edition, which was revealed Friday during Monterey Car Week, pairs a number of the features from Lucid’s lower trim models like the Dream Edition and the Grand Touring Performance Edition. First, the new version of the Air gets three motors, two at the rear and one at the front, that Lucid says brings the estimated horsepower up to 1,200.

Researchers say Indigenous “silvopasture” practices of raising livestock in naturally forested areas could be a critical tool to protect cows from climate change.

Clean water is essential for human survival. However, less than 3% of fresh water can be used as drinking water. According to a report published by the World Meteorological Organization, there is scarcity of drinking water for approximately 1 billion people worldwide, which is expected to rise to 1.4 billion by 2050.

Seawater desalination technology, which produces fresh water from seawater, could solve the problem of water scarcity. At the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), a research team led by Dr. Kyung Guen Song from the Center for Water Cycle Research, have developed a hybrid membrane distillation module that combines solar energy with hydrothermal heat pumps to reduce thermal energy consumption during the desalination process. Their results are published in Energy Conversion and Management.

Reverse osmosis and evaporation methods are relatively common seawater desalination processes; however, these methods can operate only at high pressures and temperatures. In comparison, the membrane distillation method produces fresh water by utilizing the vapor pressure generated by the temperature difference between the flowing raw water and treated water separated by a membrane. This approach has the advantage of low energy consumption, as fresh water can be generated at pressures of 0.2–0.8 bar, which is lower than atmospheric pressure, and temperatures of 50–60℃. However, large scale operation requires more thermal energy. Thus, research studies are required to reduce the use of thermal energy for commercial operation.

As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available.

Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap.

The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Engineers at RMIT University have developed a method to use disposable personal protective equipment (PPE) to make concrete stronger, providing an innovative way to significantly reduce pandemic-generated waste.

The RMIT team is the first to investigate the feasibility of recycling three key types of PPE—isolation gowns, face masks and rubber gloves—into concrete.

Published in the journals Case Studies in Construction Materials, Science of the Total Environment and Journal of Cleaner Production, the studies by RMIT School of Engineering researchers demonstrate the potential for PPE to be used as reinforcement materials in structural concrete.

A radical new idea for offshore wind turbines would replace tall unwieldy towers that had blades on top with lightweight, towerless machines whose blades resemble the loops of a whisk. Now new software can help optimize these unusual designs to help make them a reality, researchers say.

This new work comes as the U.S. government plans to boost offshore wind energy. In March, the White House announced a national goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of new offshore wind power by 2030. The federal government suggested this initiative could help power more than 10 million homes, support roughly 77,000 jobs, cut 78 million tonnes in carbon emissions, and spur US $12 billion in private investment per year. As part of this new plan, in June, the White House and eleven governors from along the East Coast launched a Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership to further develop the offshore wind supply chain, including manufacturing facilities and port capabilities.

One reason offshore wind is attractive is the high demand for electricity on the coasts. People often live far away from where onshore wind is the strongest, and there is not enough space in cities for enough solar panels to power them, says Ryan Coe, a mechanical engineer in Sandia National Laboratories’ water-power group in Albuquerque.

New technology could divert problem plastics from landfills and convert them into fuel sources.

A plastics recycling innovation that does more with less simultaneously increases conversion to useful products while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. It will be presented today (August 22, 2022) at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago.

“The key discovery we report is the very low metal load,” said Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) chemist Janos Szanyi, who led the research team. “This makes the catalyst much cheaper.”