Lifeboat Foundation

Careful sample preparation, electron tomography and quantitative analysis of 3D models provides unique insights into the inner structure of reverse osmosis membranes widely used for salt water desalination wastewater recycling and home use, according to a team of chemical engineers.

These reverse osmosis membranes are layers of material with an active aromatic polyamide layer that allows water molecules through, but screens out 99 to 99.9 percent of the salt.

“As water stresses continue to grow, better membrane filtration materials are needed to enhance water recovery, prevent fouling, and extend filtration module lifetimes while maintaining reasonable costs to ensure accessibility throughout the world,” said Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering, Penn State. “Knowing what the material looks like on the inside, and understanding how this microstructure affects water transport properties, is crucial to designing next-generation membranes with longer operational lifetimes that can function under a diverse set of conditions.”

Continue reading “3D electron microscopy uncovers the complex guts of desalination membranes” »

Lucid Motors, the electric car startup that aims to compete with Tesla, will receive an eye-popping $1 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the kingdom announced on Monday. The investment will finance Lucid Motor’s 2020 commercial launch of its first electric vehicle, the Lucid Air. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock dipped by as much as 2 percent in early trading on news of the investment.

The deal is a major win for Lucid, which has languished over the last year as it failed to secure the funding necessary to start making its luxury electric cars. News of the talks comes weeks after Saudi Arabia purchased 5 percent of Tesla and emerged as a central player in Elon Musk’s failed effort to take the company private again. Musk cited conversations with the director of the Saudi fund as the impetus for his push to take Tesla private.

I am all for recycling of plastics but I would prefer we stop using petroleum based plastics and instead use hemp based plastics that are biodegradable. I have better materials for roads and paths that could last for hundreds of years. If you want to know more get in touch with me.

Officials with the Dutch city of Zwolle have announced the opening of a new bike path made using recycled plastic. The bike path is part of a nationwide effort to recycle more user end products. The bike path was made using a modular design called PlasticRoad by a pipe-making company called Wavin.

Continue reading “Bike-path made from recycled plastic opens in the Netherlands” »

WASHINGTON (AP) — A warmer world makes for nastier hurricanes. Scientists say they are wetter, possess more energy and intensify faster.

Their storm surges are more destructive because climate change has already made the seas rise. And lately, the storms seem to be stalling more often and thus dumping more rain.

Study after study shows that climate change in general makes hurricanes worse. But determining the role of global warming in a specific storm such as Hurricane Florence or Typhoon Mangkhut is not so simple — at least not without detailed statistical and computer analyses.

(AP) — California Gov. Jerry Brown said Friday that the state plans to launch its “own damn satellite” into orbit to battle climate change.

The man the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko famously dubbed “Gov. Moonbeam” made the announcement at the conclusion of a two-day climate summit he organized in San Francisco.

Continue reading “‘Moonbeam’ at Last? Gov. Brown Says State Will Launch Satellite” »

WASP, the Italian manufacturer behind DeltaWASP 3D printers, has unveiled a new construction system which will be used to print sustainable houses in a village.

The Crane WASP, also referred to as the “the infinity 3D printer” is designed to accelerate the development of the technological village of Shamballa, a WASP project to develop 3D printed eco-friendly houses. The company states.

Continue reading “WASP releases ‘infinity 3D printer’ for construction” »

Ready-made snap-together solar panels that turn waste heat into hot water are being developed at Brunel University London in a £10 million sustainable energy scheme starting next month.

With energy use in buildings predicted to double or even triple by 2050, and most home energy used to heat water, project PVadapt promises to crack several sustainable energy problems at once.

Funded by Horizon 2020, the three and a half-year multi-disciplinary project aims to perfect a flexible solar powered renewable energy system that generates both heat from hot water and electricity.

Continue reading “Lego-style solar panels to smash energy bills” »

Researchers are paving the way to total reliance on renewable energy as they study both large- and small-scale ways to replace fossil fuels. One promising avenue is converting simple chemicals into valuable ones using renewable electricity, including processes such as carbon dioxide reduction or water splitting. But to scale these processes up for widespread use, we need to discover new electrocatalysts—substances that increase the rate of an electrochemical reaction that occurs on an electrode surface. To do so, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are looking to new methods to accelerate the discovery process: machine learning.

Zack Ulissi, an assistant professor of chemical engineering (ChemE), and his group are using machine learning to guide electrocatalyst discovery. By hand, researchers spend hours doing routine calculations on materials that may not end up working. Ulissi’s team has created a system that automates these routine calculations, explores a large search space, and suggests new alloys that have promising properties for electrocatalysis.

Continue reading “Accelerating electrocatalyst discovery with machine learning” »

University of Birmingham scientists are paving the way to swap the lithium in lithium-ion batteries with sodium, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) are rechargeable and are widely used in laptops, mobile phones and in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. The electric vehicle is a crucial technology for fighting pollution in cities and realising an era of clean sustainable transport.

However lithium is expensive and resources are unevenly distributed across the planet. Large amounts of drinking water are used in lithium extraction and extraction techniques are becoming more energy intensive as lithium demand rises – an ‘own goal’ in terms of sustainability.

Continue reading “New high-capacity sodium-ion could replace lithium in rechargeable batteries” »