New Developments May 2017

Discovery of a facile process for hydrogen production using ammonia as a carrier However, low volumetric energy density and the dangers of transporting and handling H2 are drawbacks for commercial applications. These problems could be eliminated by using ammonia as a H2 storage medium (H2 carrier). They found that H2 can be produced by supplying ammonia and oxygen at room temperature to a pre-treated RuO2/?-Al2O3 catalyst without external heating. The heat evolves by ammonia adsorption onto this catalyst, increasing it to the catalytic auto-ignition temperature of ammonia. Subsequently, production of H2 by oxidative decomposition of ammonia begins. In this process, once the reaction is initiated, it can start again repeatedly even if there is no external heat supply because adsorbed ammonia is desorbed during the reaction.

Japan’s Largest Solar Power Plant Breaks Ground Tokyo-based solar project developer, Pacifico Energy has announced the construction plan for Japan’s largest solar power plant with a capacity of up to 257.7MW in Mimasaka-Shi City, Okayama Prefecture. The solar power plant is scheduled to become operational in September 2019. Covering a land of approximately 400 hectares, the solar power plant is planned to be completed within 30 months. 150MWdc from the whole 257.7MWac solar panels will be connected to the grid and all electricity generated will be sold to Chugoku electric Power Company. Pacifico Energy expected that Sakuto Mega Solar Power Station will generate approximately 290,000,000kWh of solar electricity per year, offsetting around 200 thousand tons of GHG emissions.

X-ray imaging and computer modeling help map electric properties of nanomaterials

Using experimental data, we make informed models which in turn make predictions at space and time scales that experiments cannot reach. The researchers applied their new approach to the study of zinc oxide, a material that can generate electricity when twisted, bent or deformed in other ways. With its desirable piezoelectric and semiconducting properties, zinc oxide has emerged as a promising material for generating electricity in small-scale devices. In their experimental approach, known as ultrafast X-ray coherent imaging, researchers took a nanocrystal of zinc oxide and exposed it to intense, short X-ray and optical laser pulses at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. The ultrafast laser pulses excited the crystal, and the X-ray pulses imaged the crystal structure as it changed over time. This enabled researchers to capture very small changes in the material at a high resolution in both time and space. Researchers identified the deformation modes -- meaning new ways in which the material could bend, twist, rotate, etc. -- from this experimental approach, and used this insight to build a model that would describe the behavior of the nanocrystal. With this model, researchers discovered additional twisting modes that can generate 50 percent more electricity than the bending modes of the crystal.

Air Pollution Can Cut Solar Panel Efficiency By Up To 25% Dust and particulate matter (often a by-product of diesel engines) can reduce solar panel efficiency by 17% to 25%. Half this reduction comes from dust and particles deposited on the surface of solar panels which form a physical barrier to the passage of sunlight. The rest of the reduction comes from ambient haze from atmospheric pollution, a condition known as solar dimming. A 2016 study in Baghdad, for example, found an 18.74% decline in efficiency for solar modules left uncleaned for a month. The Bergin study is the first to quantify the combined impact of ambient particles and deposited matter. He and his colleagues analyzed deposits on solar panels at the IIT campus in Gandhinagar and tracked energy yield before and after cleaning. Power generation increased 50% after each cleaning, the study found. Developers like ourselves will be extra cautious when signing power purchase agreements with clients with facilities located in highly polluted zones,” Nobre said. “Our returns are impacted by air pollution, which in turn end up increasing electricity tariffs we are able to offer.”

Totally biodegradable electronics could help solve e-waste problem A new kind of electronic device completely disintegrates within a month when exposed to a mild acid like watered-down vinegar. Almost 50 million tons of electronics will be discarded this year alone, the United Nations Environment Programme has projected—and most of this material will be non-decomposable and contain toxic materials. Essentially, the material is a type of flexible plastic that can conduct electricity. Polymer-based electronics, also known as organic electronics, have attracted lots of research interest in recent years because they are made of commonly available raw materials and their manufacturing process is more environmentally friendly than that of silicon-based electronics. The subunits of the new polymer that Bao’s team created are connected with imine bonds, which link atoms of carbon and nitrogen. Imine bonds can withstand high temperatures and immersion in water, but break apart when exposed to weak acid. The team built circuits on the polymer out of iron, which is environmentally friendly and nontoxic to humans. And it fully disintegrates—unlike gold, which has previously been used in circuits for transient electronics. The resulting device has a lot of advantages: it’s less than a micrometer thick, very lightweight (one-fortieth the weight of a sheet of office paper of similar size), flexible, and able to conform to irregular surfaces. And it requires little power to operate.

Power plants could cut a third of their emissions by using solar energy The concept is based on the combination of concentrated solar power (CSP) technology and a traditional power plant process into a hybrid plant which produces electricity on the basis of consumption. various types of hybrid plant solutions can produce power flexibly according to demand, without the need for energy storage. the plant's net efficiency improved by 0.8 per cent. In addition to positive climate effects, good hybrid plant planning can also bring financial benefits since part of the power plant components are shared by two power production methods.

Electroplating delivers high-energy, high-power batteries The process that makes gold-plated jewelry or chrome car accents is now making powerful lithium-ion batteries. Traditional lithium-ion battery cathodes use lithium-containing powders formed at high temperatures. The powder is mixed with gluelike binders and other additives into a slurry, which is spread on a thin sheet of aluminum foil and dried. The slurry layer needs to be thin, so the batteries are limited in how much energy they can store. The glue also limits performance. "The glue is not active. It doesn't contribute anything to the battery, and it gets in the way of electricity flowing in the battery." The researchers bypassed the powder and glue process altogether by directly electroplating the lithium materials onto the aluminum foil. Since the electroplated cathode doesn't have any glue taking up space, it packs in 30 percent more energy than a conventional cathode. manufacturers can use materials lower in cost and quality and the end product will still be high in performance, eliminating the need to start with expensive materials already brought up to battery grade.  By using a solid electrode rather than a porous one, you can store more energy in a given volume.

Data science used to better predict effect of weather and other conditions Data science has been used by researchers to determine and predict the effects of exposure to weather and other conditions on materials in solar panels. Using data science to predict the deterioration of such materials could lead to finding new ways to extend their lifetime. "If solar modules last 50 years, and science can back that up," she said, "it will make solar energy more affordable by decreasing the dollar-per-watt of electricity generation." The research explains the degradation of PET, which is necessary for lifetime prediction of solar panels.

New, more efficient catalyst for water splitting University of Houston physicists have discovered a catalyst that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, composed of easily available, low-cost materials and operating far more efficiently than previous catalysts. The catalyst, composed of ferrous metaphosphate grown on a conductive nickel foam platform, is far more efficient than previous catalysts, as well as less expensive to produce. The catalyst also is durable, operating more than 20 hours and 10,000 cycles in testing. the lack of an inexpensive and efficient oxygen catalyst has created a bottleneck in the field.

Moon as unprospected eighth continent that will produce trillionaires Moon Express is one of only two teams in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition with a verified launch contract for its 2017 lunar mission. Deep Space Industries and the University of Tennessee were awarded NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program funding for developing technology to slow spacecraft carrying asteroid resources as they return to Earth’s orbit. “Using aerobrakes instead of propellant will expand by 30 to 100 times the number of asteroids where water and other supplies can be affordably delivered to markets in Earth orbit,” said Dr. John S. Lewis, chief scientist at DSI. “In the near future,” explains Lewis, “asteroid resources will support space stations, expeditions to the Moon and Mars, and the transfer of payloads from low orbit to geosynchronous orbit by space-based tugs refueled with asteroid propellant.” National Space Society has updated analysis of the enormous growth potential of orbital space colonization and near earth settlement. If the single largest asteroid (Ceres) were to be used to build orbital space settlements, the total living area created would be well over a hundred times the land area of the Earth. This is because Ceres is a solid, three dimensional object but orbital space settlements are basically hollow with only air on the inside. Thus, Ceres alone can provide the building materials for uncrowded homes for hundreds of billions of people, at least.

Sorry, Tesla owners, but your electric car isn’t as green as you think it is some hybrid vehicles can be greener options than fully electric cars, according to people who study the sources of carbon emissions that cause global warming. it can be a much greener choice to keep the perfectly functional car you have, rather than go out and buy a new one. One of the reasons why buying a new car is a problem is the vehicle’s so-called embodied carbon, meaning all of the energy that was used to build the car from scratch — including the extraction and processing of raw materials, and shipping parts and vehicles across oceans in filthy bunker-fuel burning cargo ships.  the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that it takes about 15 percent more embodied carbon to produce an electric vehicle (EV) than it does to manufacture a gasoline-powered car, largely because of the materials and fabrication processes used to make the battery packs. However, Reichmuth is quick to point out that while an electric car is modestly more polluting to manufacture, it more than makes up for the difference over the life of the vehicle. A study Reichmuth co-authored and released in 2015 shows that by the time a mid-size electric car hits 135,000 miles, it will have produced half of the emissions of a comparable gasoline-powered sedan. Electric car emissions are measured using the carbon output of electrical power plants. Since most electric power is generated from fossil fuels, electric cars contribute to greenhouse gas emissions unless all of the electricity they consume comes from renewable sources like wind and solar.

Development of ultra-high capacity lithium-air batteries using CNT sheet air electrodes NIMS Kubo-san

A NIMS research team led by Yoshimi Kubo and Akihiro Nomura, team leader and researcher, respectively, Lithium Air Battery Specially Promoted Research Team, C4GR-GREEN, developed lithium-air batteries with very high electric storage capacity15 times greater than the capacity of conventional lithium-ion batteries using carbon nanotubes (CNT) as an air electrode material. The battery may have drastically large capacity and reduce production cost. However, conventional battery research usually focuses on basic studies of battery reactions using small amounts of materials, and therefore is not designed to demonstrate large battery capacities using cells of actual size and shape. The research team recently achieved very high electric storage capacity of 30 mAh/cm² using realistic cell forms. This value represents about 15 times greater capacity compared to the capacity of conventional lithium-ion batteries (about 2 mAh/cm²). This achievement was made by using CNTs as an air electrode material and thereby optimizing the electrode's microstructure.

Researchers find first compelling evidence of new property known as 'ferroelasticity' in perovskites Crystalline materials known as perovskites could become the next superstars of solar cells. Over the past few years, researchers have demonstrated that a special class of perovskites—those consisting of a hybrid of organic and inorganic components—convert sunlight into electricity with an efficiency above 20 percent and are easier to fabricate and more impervious to defects than the standard solar cell made of crystalline silicon. As fabricated today, however, these organic/inorganic perovskites (OIPs) deteriorate well before the typical 30-year lifetime for silicon cells, which prevents their widespread use in harnessing solar power. At high temperatures, OIP crystals do not subdivide and have the same cubic arrangement of atoms throughout. At room temperature, however, the OIP crystal structure changes from cubic to tetragonal, in which one axis of the cube elongates. That's where the ferroelastic property of the material comes into play. The boundaries between the newly discovered ferroelastic domains inside a single crystal—intra-grain boundaries—might also affect the stability of OIPs and their performance as solar cells.

Harnessing energy from glass walls Scientists are exploring ways to develop transparent or semi-transparent solar cells as a substitute for glass walls in modern buildings with the aim of harnessing solar energy. But this has proven challenging, because transparency in solar cells reduces their efficiency in absorbing the sunlight they need to generate electricity. The Korean team developed a 'top transparent electrode' (TTE) that works well with perovskite solar cells. The TTE is based on a multilayer stack consisting of a metal film sandwiched between a high refractive index layer and an interfacial buffer layer. This TTE, placed as a solar cell's top-most layer, can be prepared without damaging ingredients used in the development f perovskite solar cells. Unlike conventional transparent electrodes that only transmit visible light, the team's TTE plays the dual role of allowing visible light to pass through while at the same time reflecting infrared rays. The semi-transparent solar cells made with the TTEs exhibited an average power conversion efficiency as high as 13.3%, reflecting 85.5% of incoming infrared light. Currently available crystalline silicon solar cells have up to 25% efficiency but are opaque.

Where rivers meet the sea: Harnessing energy generated when freshwater meets saltwater Penn State researchers have created a new hybrid technology that produces unprecedented amounts of electrical power where seawater and freshwater combine at the coast. That difference in salt concentration has the potential to generate enough energy to meet up to 40 percent of global electricity demands. Though methods currently exist to capture this energy, the two most successful methods, pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) and reverse electrodialysis (RED), have thus far fallen short. The main problem with PRO is that the membranes that transport the water through foul, meaning that bacteria grows on them or particles get stuck on their surfaces, and they no longer transport water through them. The second technology, RED, uses an electrochemical gradient to develop voltages across ion-exchange membranes.
"Ion-exchange membranes only allow either positively charged ions to move through them or negatively charged ions," Gorski explained. "So only the dissolved salt is going through, and not the water itself."
A third technology, capacitive mixing (CapMix), is an electrode-based technology that captures energy from the voltage that develops when two identical electrodes are sequentially exposed to two different kinds of water with varying salt concentrations, such as freshwater and seawater. The researchers have combined both the RED and CapMix technologies in an electrochemical flow cell. At 12.6 watts per square meter, this technology leads to peak power densities that are unprecedentedly high compared to previously reported RED (2.9 watts per square meter), and on par with the maximum calculated values for PRO (9.2 watts per square meter), but without the fouling problems.

Off-the-shelf, power-generating clothes are almost here A lightweight, comfortable jacket that can generate the power to light up a jogger at night may sound futuristic, but a materials scientist could make one today. Powering advanced fabrics that can monitor health data remotely are important to the military and increasingly valued by the health care industry. "We show them to be stable to washing, rubbing, human sweat and a lot of wear and tear." PEDOT coating (a conducting polymer, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxytiophene)) did not change the feel of any fabric as determined by touch with bare hands before and after coating. Coating did not increase fabric weight by more than 2 percent. 

We can’t possibly plant enough trees to stop climate change In a study published in May in the journal Earth’s Future, a group of European researchers made those calculations. They used a computer model of global vegetation to determine how extensive biomass plantations would have to be in order to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2° C under different emissions scenarios. Converting large areas of natural landscape to biomass plantations threatens these already stressed ecosystems. Converting agricultural land makes it harder to feed the world’s population. Fertilizing tree plantations requires huge inputs of nitrogen fertilizer—which also results in the release of greenhouse gases—and watering them taxes an already water-scarce world. Biomass plantations can contribute to climate change mitigation, the researchers say—albeit as a supporting actor rather than in a lead role. And we shouldn’t miss the chance to reforest degraded land, or protect forests so that they can increase and regain their capacity to store carbon. But their calculations lead to an unmistakable conclusion. We can’t plant our way out of climate change. The only way to avoid disaster is to cut our carbon dioxide emissions—much faster and much more deeply than we’ve managed to wrap our heads around to date.

Bacteria that turn methane to electricity could help fight gas emissions and leaks We waste around 3.5 trillion cubic feet of gas every year globally via leaks or emissions at wells, storage tanks, and pipelines. That’s as much natural gas as Norway produces each year, and enough to power millions of homes. Wasted natural gas also has an immense climate impact since its main component, methane, is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Penn State University chemical engineer Thomas K. Wood and his colleagues have created a microbial fuel cell that could harness some of this waste gas. Microbial fuel cells are battery-like devices in which bacteria at the anode consume some kind of organic fuel and produce electrons that travel to the cathode, creating electric current. The new lab-synthesized bug consumes methane and produces acetate and electrons. To improve the efficiency of the microbial fuel cell, the research team mixed the engineered bacteria with two other microbes: one that produces electrons from acetate, and another found in waste-treatment sludge that can shuttle the electrons to the electrode. In a microbial fuel cell, the bacterial trio converted methane directly into a significant amount of electrical current. The best devices had a power density of around 170 mW/m² and a current density over 270 mA/m². Those numbers are pretty high for a microbial fuel cell, Wood said, but still 1,000 times less than conventional methanol fuel cells that are used in vehicles.

Energy transition: Smart, interconnected, sustainable Home storage systems on the market differ considerably. For better comparability, we have set up a checklist with the most important criteria and the results measured by KIT as benchmarks. This checklist is to enable customers and craftspeople to ask the right questions to storage system manufacturers and suppliers. The "SafetyFirst" project does not only cover the quality of storage systems, but also transport and functional safety as well as their contribution to grid stability. Based on the results, development recommendations can be made for the benefit of all grid and storage system operators as well as for the consumer. 

Fueling the future New research investigated the full life cycle impact of one promising 'second-generation biofuel' produced from short-rotation oak. The study found that second-generation biofuels made from managed trees and perennial grasses may provide a sustainable fuel resource. Numerous studies have raised critical concerns about the promise of corn ethanol's ability to mitigate climate change and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Some of the studies have suggested that after a full life cycle assessment -- meaning an analysis of environmental impact throughout all stages of a product's life -- biofuels like corn ethanol may not offer any greenhouse gas emissions reductions relative to petroleum fuels. This study found that second-generation biofuels made from managed trees and perennial grasses may provide a sustainable fuel resource. A significant metric for determining the efficacy of fuel is the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) ratio. The EROI of petroleum crude production remains high at about 11:1, meaning an investment of one unit of energy will yield 11 units of energy. When researchers study potentially promising energy sources, they look for a ratio greater than 1:1. Corn derived ethanol, for example, has a EROI of 1.3:1. The study found the median EROI for multistage second-generation biofuel systems ranges from 1.32:1 to 3.76:1. The study surpassed minimum requirements and showed an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to baseline petroleum diesel. Additionally, there was a 40 percent reduction in hydrogen consumption relative to a single-stage pyrolysis system. Our research showed that a multistage, lower temperature system of pyrolysis can increase the carbon chain length, create more liquid fuel and improve the energy output of the entire process.