Burning plants for fuel is greener than you think. The logic is this: Burning plants releases CO2, but growing plants locks it back up again. In essence, it’s carbon neutral. But you can’t run a car on firewood. That’s why a group of chemists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed a new catalyst that can turn cellulose—the stuff plants are made of—into the key component of biofuel.
The new catalyst, an ionic liquid called chromium chloride, can break cellulose down into simple sugars and then hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a big component of fuel and plastic.
The process is ten times faster than the standard acid-based method, and can be performed at much lower temperatures (about 120 degrees C).
It’s possible the catalyst can be used to convert the waste from food crops, like corn husks and wheat chaff and stocks, into carbon neutral fuel for transport or power. That means less fossil fuel burned and less net CO2 in the atmosphere.
Breathing battery boosts buzz
23 Jun2009
A new battery tech named STAIR (St Andrew’s Air) could store 10 times the power of a typical lithium-ion battery, yet weigh considerably less.
During discharge, the battery breathes in atmospheric oxygen, which reacts with carbon to crank out more power.
The new battery tech is being developed at the University of St Andrews Chemistry Department and is, of course, “at least five years away.”
- In: Engineering| Environment| Gadgets| Green Tech
Sexy new electric BRUSA roadster
17 Jun2009
Porsche 550 styling cues. Lightweight composite materials. Two electric motors with a combined 270 horsepower and 324 foot-pounds of torque. 2,000-pound curb weight. Zero to 60 in less than four seconds. Wicked green paint. It’s the BRUSA roadster, a Swiss fun-mobile that could compete with the paragon of electric performance, the Tesla Roadster. And it’s hot.
The car was built by BRUSA Elektronik in Switzerland. It features a lithium-polymer batter good for more than 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) and can be recharged in four hours via a 220-volt power outlet.
No word on whether the BRUSA roadster will actually be produced or sold, but one can hope.
- In: Engineering| Green Tech| Peak Oil| Renewable Energy| Transportation
- Tags: BRUSA, Electric Car, Lithium-polymer, Roadster
Self-healing concrete
17 Jun2009
Concrete cracks, then crumbles. It’s why we spend billions repairing buildings and walkways across the world. The newest concrete, however, can bend and heal itself.
Victor Li at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has spent more than a decade developing the new super concrete. His latest composite material can bend like rubber and suffer only hairline cracks that repair themselves when exposed to water and air. The material uses water and air to form calcium carbonate—the same stuff seashells are made of—that seals the cracks almost instantaneously.
It costs nearly three times as much as traditional concrete, but should save builders and owners countless cash in the long run by nearly eliminating maintenance costs. The composite also eliminates the need for expensive and complex anti-earthquake equipment. Li estimates that, all things considered, the new material will make buildings and structures cheaper and more durable than ever before.
A similar material has already been used in a 60-story skyscraper in Osaka, Japan, and a bridge in Michigan.
Link to National Geographic article
- In: Engineering
- Tags: Flexible Concrete
Virus builds eco-friendly battery
17 Jun2009
Want a non-toxic battery? Ask a virus to build it. A group of scientists at MIT have genetically engineered a virus to construct the components of lithium-ion batteries without toxic solvents or chemicals. The virus, which normally infects bacteria, can build the positive and negative terminals of a battery on the molecular level.
The batteries have a the same output and capacity of current lithium-ion batteries found in everything from laptops to electric cars like the Tesla Roadster. The current prototype is a typical disc battery that can light a single LED, but the team plans to create more powerful batteries based on manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate.
The team, led by MIT materials and biological engineer Angela Belcher, tweaked the genes of the virus to coat itself with iron phosphate, then nab carbon nanotubes to create a conducting network. The resulting goop crammed into a traditional battery case and voila, vat-grown batteries.
MIT President Susan Hockfield met with President Obama to show the new technology off, and encourage federal funding for clean-energy technologies.
Carbon nanotube super muscles
30 Apr2009
At long last my boyhood dreams of ripping a lamp post from the pavement and using it to play stickball with parked cars may come true. Ray Baughman, director of the Nano Tech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas has created carbon nanotube muscles that are 30 times stronger than human muscle.
They’re also fast. Natural muscles can contract a maximum 10 percent per second. The nanotube muscles can contract 40,000 percent per second. Oh, and they can withstand the -320 degree Fahrenheit temperatures of liquid nitrogen and the 2,800 degree Fahrenheit melting point of iron.
The muscles work on a simple function of physics that causes carbon nanotubes to repel each other when electrically charged. They’re as strong and stiff as diamond in one direction and as pliable as rubber in the other.
Of course, I would need a carbon nanotube skeleton to withstand the forces these muscles generate, as well as carbon nanotube-based power cells to give me enough juice to use them.
Electrifying new battery tech
30 Apr2009
The automotive future is electric. But if we want to chuck fossil-fuel-chugging cars into the recycling bin, we’ll need better batteries. Two new developments in battery tech could make electric transportation feasible.
A team at the University of Maryland has developed a new breed of supercapacitor that could replace conventional batteries in electric cars. The new supercapacitors can store as much juice as the best batteries, but deliver that juice as quickly as a capacitor.
It’s a big deal, especially for electric cars. To get an electric car to burn rubber (accelerate briskly), you need a lot of current, quickly. Batteries can’t do it without the help of capacitors—the superchargers of the electrical world. Capacitors store energy on the surface of two plates separated by an insulator. They store and release electricity much faster than batteries.
The team at the University of Maryland joined forces with engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology to create a grid of nano capacitors. Their prototype contains more than 10 billion nano capacitors linked together with electrodes. And they did it on aluminum foil.
Gary Rubloff, a physicist at the University of Maryland, anodized (added a layer of oxide) a sheet of foil to create a uniform grid of nanopores. Using atomic layer deposition, the team filled the pores with three layers of material that mimic the conductor-insulator-conductor layout of a normal capacitor.
A kilogram of the new supercapacitor could deliver a megawatt of power—enough to power 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.
Whiz kids at MIT have also found a way to make lithium batteries speedier. Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has drastically improved the charge and discharge rate of lithium batteries by redesigning their structure.
Everyday lithium batteries store tons of energy, but they can’t absorb or discharge it very quickly. Turns out that the slow charge/discharge rate is due to a kind of atomic traffic jam. Charged ions get gummed up traveling in and out of the battery.
Ceder and grad student Byoungwoo Kang found that they could fee up the traffic jam by engineering a beltway of material around the battery. The result is a small battery that can be charged and discharged between 10 and 20 seconds. The discovery should lead to faster-charging gadgets and quick recharges for electric vehicles.
A team of international scientists, without the help of a time-traveling Scott and a 512k Mac, have discovered a transparent metal. Unfortunately, we’re talking sodium, and not aluminum. And it’s at a pressure of about 2 million atmospheres.
The team, led by Artem Oganov, Professor of Theoretical Crystallography at Stony Brook University, and Yanming Ma, the lead author and professor of physics at Jilin University in China, was able to demonstrate that sodium turns transparent under pressure.
Typically, elements turn metallic at high pressure—forming a lattice of positive ions surrounded by electrons. Metallic elements are magnetic and conductive. It even happens to hydrogen, in the highly pressurized center of gas giants like Saturn and Pluto. Sodium does just the opposite, first becoming an insulator, then transparent like glass.
Ma and Oganav used mathematical models to predict sodium’s surprising response under pressure, but hadn’t tested them. Mikhail Eremets, the leader of an experimental group at Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, engineered several experiments to test the theories.
The discovery will help scientists study the chemistry found at the center of gas giants and stars.
- In: Astronomy| Physics
- Tags: Chemsitry, Gas Giants, Physics, Stars, Transparent Metal
Ads everywhere: ViVid screens window displays
12 Mar2009
The lonely dark windows of shuttered shops could soon glow with the frenetic energy of advertising, thanks to new ViVid projection screens. LinkEarth Corp has developed a flexible, cuttable window film full of LCD crystals that turns opaque when a current is applied. Project some video on the film and voila, your dormant storefront comes alive to advertise the latest neuro-implant upgrade or holographic porn.
To achieve this miraculous feat, LinkEarth Corp houses the LCD layer in a spongy polymer acrylic. The acrylic-laced layer can be bent, folded, punctured, or chopped into odd shapes without losing its ability to go opaque. The film is going on sale soon: Expect a 40-inch “screen” to cost about $1500. Projector sold separately, of course.
- In: Engineering
- Tags: Advertising, LCD, Projection Screen, Technology
Artificial life, thy name is AEGIS
2 Mar2009
“It’s evolving. It’s doing what we designed it to do.” That sentence isn’t from the chilling trailer for the next Michael Chrichton adaptation. It’s the words of an honest-to-goodness biochemist describing his creation, a synthetic self-replicating jumble of chemicals called AEGIS—Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System.
AEGIS is an experiment devised by biochemist Steve Benner at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution that aims to get at the roots of life itself by creating artificial self-replicating chemicals that are capable of evolution. And it works. Benner has AEGIS happily replicating and evolving in a beaker in his Florida lab. What makes AEGIS different than everyday life? For starters, it has 12 base pairs instead of four. Beyond that, information is sketchy, but Benner assured Discover News that AEGIS is thriving. In fact, it’s the first synthetic genetic system capable of Darwinian evolution.
Now all we have to do is wait for it to escape and consume us all.
I plan to contact Benner in the coming weeks to get more info about AGIS—how it was created, what he’s learned. Look for an update.
And thanks to Matt Chisholm for the tip!
- In: Biology| Genetics
- Tags: Artificial Life, Biology, FFAME, Genetics, Steve Benner, University of Florida