In case you missed it, the geniuses at Stanford have created super batteries using carbon nanotube ink and silver nanowires. They basically spread the carbon nanotube/silver goop on paper and it’s ready to store energy. The paper batteries are capable of storing 10 times as much energy by weight as lithium-ion batteries and are conceivably good for 40,000 charge-discharge cycles. From the Stanford article:
“These nanomaterials are special,” [assistant professor Yi] Cui said. “They’re a one-dimensional structure with very small diameters.” The small diameter helps the nanomaterial ink stick strongly to the fibrous paper, making the battery and supercapacitor very durable. The paper supercapacitor may last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles – at least an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries. The nanomaterials also make ideal conductors because they move electricity along much more efficiently than ordinary conductors, Cui said.
Cui says that the thin, lightweight, flexible batteries could be used in everything from consumer electronics to cars. He also says the technology is basically ready for action. Just a few refinements and the batteries could go into production.
The desert planet of Arrakis, Dune, is a ball of desiccated sand, a place where water is more precious than gold. Wait, no, we’re talking about Australia. Or Dubai. The EVOLUTE toilet concept is designed for parched climates and uses 90 percent less water than conventional toilets.
The toilet ditches the conventional water tank and instead uses a rotating sphere and miserly jets of water. The sphere sits at the base of the bowl. It has a small cup to catch your stuff. Hit the flush and the sphere rotates and dumps the waste down the sewer drain. A small jet of water rinses out the cup and washes down the walls of the bowl. The whole thing is mechanical–no electricity required. It uses less than one liter of water per flush and takes up 30 percent less floor space than a conventional toilet.
It’s a clever design and should be on the market sometime in 2012. But really, I just wanted to mention Arrakis.
Compared to this, even you look like a gas guzzler. Students at Cal Poly have built a super-streamlined ride that clocks a record 2,752.3 miles per gallon. They call it the Black Widow. The all-carbon-fiber three wheeler weighs a scant 95 pounds and is powered by a seriously tweaked 3-horsepower, four-stroke Honda 50cc single. Its coefficient of drag is an astounding .12. It uses 20-inch bicycle wheels, two in the front and one in the rear. Yeah, it tops out at just 30 miles per hour, but still, it’s an incredible feat.
The bicycle is nearly perfect—an an efficient and beautiful expression of man and machine. Still, the geniuses at MIT have found a way to improve it. Meet the Copenhagen Wheel, a super-snazzy wheel with a kinetic-energy capture system and built-in electronics to monitor everything from distance to pedaling effort.
The heart of the Copenhagen wheel is a KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). The system captures energy when you slow down, which can then be delivered on demand for a boost of speed. It uses an electric motor and batteries contained within the hub.
The Copenhagen wheel also beams information to the iPhone via Bluetooth, including speed, distance traveled, direction, and even air pollution.
The wheel will be on sale sometime in 2010. From MIT:
The initial prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel were developed along with company Ducati Energia and the Italian Ministry of the Environment. It is expected that the wheel will go into production next year, with a tag price competitive with that of a standard electric bike. According to Claus Juhl, CEO of Copenhagen, the city might place the first order and use bicycles retrofitted with the Copenhagen Wheel as a substitution for city employee cars as part of the city’s goal to become the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025.
It’s pretty slick. I’d definitely add one to my around-town cruiser, budget permitting.
Batteries are heavy and weight makes cars crappy. That’s why Volvo engineers are developing a special carbon fiber body panel that can hold a charge, saving weight and space at the same time. The panels could be used to replace some of the batteries in electric cars.
The material could be used in the fenders, hoods, trunk lids, and roofs of electric cars to reduce overall weight by about 15 percent. Eventually, says Volvo, the material could hold all the electricity an electric car could need.
Volvo engineers also say the material could be used in mobile electronics to extend run time or save weight.
Wood is ancient history. The building material of the future is fungus. Artist and hardcore amateur mycologist Philip Ross is growing super-durable bricks of mycelium that could be used for everything from structural support to insulation.
Ross grows bricks of mycelium—wispy, spongy fungal root systems—in rusty shipping containers on his farm Far West Fungi in the California Bay Area. When dried, the bricks are stronger pound-for-pound than concrete and insulate better than fiberglass insulation.
So far Ross has constructed a single six-foot archway out of the stuff. According to the artist, he ruined several saw blades and metal files shaping the bricks—they’re that tough. He called the structure Mycotectural Alpha and it’s on display in a gallery in Germany.
Ross isn’t alone. A company called Ecovative is building at 10,000-square-foot fungi farm on Green Island, N.Y. They plan to grow a ton of fungi-based building material. Their first commercial product will be a biodegradable alternative to Styrofoam called Ecocradle.
The best thing about mushroom-based building material? Mushrooms munch waste—stuff that’s left over from food crops, like seed husks.
So don’t be surprised if you find fungus-based building material at your local Home Depot in a few years.
What if you could turn your lawn clippings and potato peels into fuel? It sounds like alchemy, but a research team with the U.S. Department of Energy, of all places, have managed to do it—using bacteria. The Joint BioEnergy Institute (with the D.O.E.) and South San Francisco-based biotech company LS9 have engineered a strain of E. coli that can digest plant waste and turn it directly into biodiesel.
The joint research team added some genes that let the E. coli strain produce enzymes that can break down cellulose, the tough fibrous bits of plants that we usually throw out. The enzymes break cellulose down into sugars, which the bacteria use to make biodiesel.
The bioengineers also tweaked the E. coli to make it put on weight. Normally, the bacteria doesn’t hold on to excess oil, but the new strain packs on the pounds, which increases biodiesel yield considerably.
The team envisions the bacteria being used to turn corn husks, grass clippings, saw dust, wheat stalks, and virtually any plant waste into biodiesel. It’s currently perfecting the strain and hopes to make it commercially available in the near future.
Electric cars don’t spew C02, but they’re not exactly environmentally friendly. Their batteries wear out and could be dumped, leaking all kinds of nasty into the soil. So when Japanese company Eamex says they’ve developed a lithium-ion battery for cars that lasts 20 years, it’s a big deal.
Eamex say they’ve stabilized the electrodes that normally wear out in batteries. That makes their batteries good for 10,000 charge cycles. If true, it’s a huge breakthrough that will make electric cars even more environmentally friendly and cheaper to own for the long term.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could suck all the extra C02 out of the atmosphere and turn it back into fuel? Climate change would subside, gas prices would fall, and we’d have a surplus of fuel. Sounds like a dream, but researchers at UCLA might have figured out how to make it a reality.
Bioengineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have created a cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, that can turn C02 into a fuel called isobutanol. Like plants, cyanobacteria use sunlight and C02 as an energy source to grow and prosper. The reachers tweaked a few genes in a strain of cyanobacteria to make it absorb more C02, then added some genes from other organisms to make it produce isobutyraldehyde gas. Smush the bacteria and stir the resulting sludge with an inexpensive catalyst and you get isobutanol, a liquid fuel that can be used like gasoline. Plus, the bacteria could be further modified to produce isobutanol directly without a catalyst.
The new strain of cyanobacteria uses energy from sunlight and C02 in the atmosphere to make the fuel. Researchers say they could grow the bacteria in ponds next to fossil fuel power plants to reclaim some of the emitted C02. Of course, there’s nothing stopping them from growing the cyanobacteria all over the place to help reduce greenhouse gas and provide us with ample fuel for our 1967 Camaros.
Lotus is known for light, simple, and fast cars. But the company’s engineering division has created some of the most innovative automotive technology of the last century. Recently, it helped develop GM’s current superstar economy/performance Ecotec engine, and now it’s building a hyper-efficient, ultra-low-emissions engine codenamed “Omnivore.”
The Omnivore is a direct injection, variable compression, two-stroke engine designed to run on virtually any liquid fuel—gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, alcohol, you name it. It uses a “puck” at the top of the combustion chamber to vary compression ratios all the way up to 40:1, or about four times the compression of a standard four-stroke engine. Those super-high compression ratios mean that the Omnivore can achieve combustion without a spark plug in a similar manner to diesel engines. In Omnivore, the air-fuel mixture is squeezed until it explodes. Combustion takes place throughout the mixture simultaneously, which makes for super-clean and efficient combustion. How much more efficient? So far Lotus has managed a 10 percent gain in efficiency (measured in fuel consumption) over current direct-injection four-stroke engines. That may not sound like a lot, but in the engineering world it’s huge. Plus, Lotus hopes to gain even more efficiency as time goes on.
The Omnivore is still in development stages, but Lotus hopes the technology can be refined and put into production in the next decade. Two-stroke engines have long since been banned from automotive duty due to heavy emissions, but with the Omnivore they might see a resurgence.
