The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Sorted by date Results 26 - 45 of 45
Out of West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University has earned a Guinness World Record for an unintended side effect to reducing global warming – creating the whitest paint ever. "When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. It was Ruan and a team of graduate students who invented the paint; the idea was to create a paint that would reflect s...
Seeing a win-win-win situation that revitalizes an old Superfund site, creates jobs for New Yorkers, and supercharges a cutting-edge renewable energy storage technology, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, picked up the phone and called Zinc8 Energy Solutions CEO Ron MacDonald to urge the energy-storage technology company to manufacture zinc-air batteries in his home state. During this pivotal call to MacDonald, Sen. Schumer touted the cleaned up and refurbished...
While thermoelectric generators are proving useful in a growing number of modern applications, ranging from electric vehicles to spacecraft, a new potential use for the technology has emerged that could give a whole new meaning to the phrase, "personal electronic device." Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new, low-cost wearable device that uses tiny thermoelectric generators with liquid metal wiring to transform the human body into a...
Launches $20M consortium to boost American-made CdTe cells Increasing federal backing of American-made thin-film solar technologies is likely to increase the demand for tellurium, a key ingredient of cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cells. Tellurium is a metalloid, one of seven elements with properties that fall between metals like aluminum and tin and non-metals like carbon and phosphorus. These semimetals, which also include silicon and germanium, have natural semiconductive...
Hydrogen, boron and lasers could be the secret ingredients to the Holy Grail of energy – fusion. A team of scientists in Australia have developed a method of creating fusion energy like that of the sun that utilizes a unique process first pioneered by Professor Heinrich Hora in the 1970s. The company, aptly named HB11, uses an approach to fusion that does away with rare, radioactive and difficult fuels-as well as the incredibly high temperatures necessary for conventional f...
Researchers from Northeastern University in Boston have identified a novel class of catalysts that, because of their particular non-noble-metal nature, could offer a lower-cost alternative to the platinum-based standard that has prevented hydrogen from advancing in the fuel sector. In the most basic terms, a fuel cell transforms hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen into electricity, water vapor, and a little heat. Using platinum as a catalyst, hydrogen is split and fed into one...
Researchers at the University of Cambridge, with academics at Imperial College London, have developed a bismuth leaf that may one day be able to produce clean hydrogen from water and sunlight, overcoming some of the basic challenges of producing this emerging green energy fuel. Hydrogen fuel is expected to play a critical role in the transition to decarbonization and in reaching many countries' goals of net-zero emissions. With most hydrogen currently supplied from fossil...
The International Energy Agency warns that traffic jams threaten the clean energy future. Not on global highways congested with electric vehicles, nor in lines of these EVs waiting to top off their batteries with low-carbon electricity at charging stations. Instead, this gridlock is more likely to happen in automotive and battery factories that cannot find plentiful and affordable supplies of the minerals and metals needed. "Prices of many minerals and metals that are essentia...
As part of a wider initiative to recover critical minerals as byproducts at its current mining operations, Rio Tinto is now producing the tellurium used in thin-film photovoltaic solar panels at its Kennecott copper operation in Utah. "We are proud to deliver a new domestic supply of tellurium to support the manufacturing of solar panels and other critical equipment here in the United States," said Rio Tinto Copper Chief Operating Officer Clayton Walker. This key ingredient...
The quest to generate clean energy like that produced inside our Sun and other stars moved a step closer to reality recently when scientists in the United Kingdom broke the record for power released in a sustained fusion reaction. In early February, scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility reported producing 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power) in a fusion reaction, more than doubling the previous record of 21.7 megajoules set in 1997...
With the recent completion of a $2 million expansion, US Vanadium Holding Company LLC is now able to produce up to 4 million liters of ultra-high-purity electrolyte for vanadium redox flow batteries per year at its facility in Hot Springs, Arkansas. "We are very pleased to announce the completion of this major expansion of our ability to produce ultra-high-purity electrolyte for vanadium redox flow batteries," said US Vanadium CEO Mark Smith. "This milestone establishes...
Announced just before the end of 2021, a team led by the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron or DESY research center, laid the foundation for an alternative method of storing hydrogen gas using palladium nanoparticles wrapped around a core of iridium, which can attract and accumulate hydrogen like a kind of chocolate glaze. Considered a promising energy carrier of the future, hydrogen as fuel presents its own set of problems and challenges. Although a suitable and potentially...
As the world aspires to move away from fossil fuels and minimize carbon emissions, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new method to generate clean hydrogen fuel using scrap aluminum and water. Hydrogen fuel cells function by combining hydrogen and oxygen in an electrochemical process to produce electrical energy and water. While an incredible source of energy, with the only byproduct being water vapor, the extraction of hydrogen is not...
Mankind's use of minerals has evolved over the eons hand-in-hand with innovation. From the first crude fire starters and simple machines to the evolving wonders of the Information Age, human beings have looked to rocks and the minerals within them for the building blocks of technological advancement. Now comes an innovation that could change everything, especially for electronics that require their own power sources. University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a...
As the cultural and economic shift towards renewable energy continues to develop, the pursuit for new renewable technologies is emerging as well. Some believe these pursuits should include revisiting a bygone, yet controversial, energy source to combat the encroaching climate issue. Nuclear energy, a hot button issue due to our sordid history with the technology, but a discussion regarding the viability of nuclear energy may soon be approaching. For almost a hundred years the...
"I care deeply about the environment, which is why I work in the mining industry," is how Lucy Crane, opened a TEDx talk on mining's role in battling climate change. A geologist who completed her undergraduate in earth sciences at Oxford and earned her Master's in Mining Geology at the Camborne School of Mines, Crane is all too familiar with the stigma mining has and the disconnect between clean energy and the mined materials that make that energy possible. And she is tired of...
Since its invention nearly 140 years ago, the modern steam turbine has represented the apex of efficiency when it comes to converting thermal energy into electricity. Now, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National Renewable Energy Laboratory have created a heat engine with no moving parts that exceeds the efficiency of the turbines used in today's coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Reminiscent of the photovoltaic solar cells that convert...
It is an inconvenient truth that the low-carbon future envisioned by world leaders that gathered for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, cannot be built without massive new supplies of minerals and metals. While battery metals, rare earths, and other critical minerals have garnered the spotlight for their role in building this future of traveling and transporting goods with electric vehicles charged with renewable energy – and rightfully so – the inc...
Continuing its transformation from a British company supplying much of the world's petroleum needs for the past 120 years to an integrated energy company embracing a spectrum of energy sources for a low-carbon future, bp has put in orders for advanced cadmium-telluride (CdTe), thin-film photovoltaic solar modules produced by First Solar. Lightsource bp, the largest solar provider in Europe, and bp have placed multi-year orders for up to 5.4 gigawatts of First Solar PV modules...
Solar accounted for nearly 40% of the new electricity generating capacity added in the United States during 2019. With sun-fueled electricity expected to continue growing with more residents installing panels on their roofs and utilities commissioning large solar electricity generating facilities, a group of metals that typically lurk in the shadows are now seeing the light of day. Many of the metals needed to build out America's solar generating capacity are fairly common...
