According to Motherboard (This article and its images were originally posted on Motherboard August 22, 2018 at 10:51AM.)
Illinois’s resident mad scientist and moth-lover, Drake Anthony, is at it again. On his styropyro YouTube channel, Anthony conducts experiments with powerful lasers and chemical reactions. In his latest, he uses a large power supply to run high voltage through ignition coils to create a cool blue arc of high powered electricity.
He doesn’t stop there. The ignition coil arc is pretty but hooking up a blank, perforated circuit board to those ignition coils forces the electric arc down its various paths to create a gorgeous random pattern of dangerous electricity.
Electricity always follows the path of least resistance, so you’d expect it to ignore the copper board. But Anthony explains, using math, that the path of least resistance isn’t always obvious and that traveling the length of the copper board doesn’t add any resistance and, in most cases, is actually easier on the electricity than moving through the air.
Math is cooler when its results are as gorgeous and strange as using ignition coils to run high voltage through a circuit board. “I wish this thing wasn’t so lethal because I’d love one for my room,” Anthony said.
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This article and its images were originally posted on [Motherboard] August 22, 2018 at 10:51AM. All credit to both the author and Motherboard | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day.
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According to ScienceAlert (This article and its images were originally posted on ScienceAlert July 5, 2018 at 11:04AM.)
Sometimes, when it rains or when they feel the urge to migrate, spiders get out their little silk knapsacks, and balloon away.
This ballooning behaviour is well understood by spider scientists, but researchers have recently discovered that electric fields can not only trigger the behaviour, but also provide lift – even without the slightest breeze.
“When one thinks of airborne organisms, spiders do not usually come to mind,” explained researchers Erica Morley and Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol, in their paper.
“However, these wingless arthropods have been found 4 kilometres [2.5 miles] up in the sky, dispersing hundreds of kilometres.”
They travel via the atmospheric potential gradient (APG), an electric circuit between Earth and the ionosphere – the part of Earth’s upper atmosphere that’s ionised by solar radiation.
Thunderstorms act like a giant battery for the APG, charging up and maintaining the electric fields in the atmosphere.
The researchers explain that the idea of ballooning behaviour being caused by this electric circuit was first floated in the 1800’s, but had been dismissed not long after, without being tested.
“Charles Darwin mused over how thermals might provide the forces required for ballooning as he watched hundreds of spiders alight on the Beagle on a calm day out at sea,” explained the researchers in the paper.
“Darwin’s observation, however, did not provide further evidence in support.”
In 2013 a different group of researchers put forward a theory that electric fields might be at least a part of spiders ballooning strategy, and Morley and Roberts were interested to see if the spiders actually responded to the electric fields and their fluctuations.
They caught spiders from the genius Erigone from a balloon trap, and set up an experiment without stimuli such as air movement or atmospheric electricity. Then they turned on an artificial electric field and watched what would happen.
The team did indeed find that the spiders went ballooning when the field was on, and the field’s electrostatic forces alone were enough to power the movement; it’s the same force that lifts up your hair if you rub a balloon on your head.
When the researchers switched off the electric field, the spiders would glide down; turning the field on made them move upwards (those spiders would have been so confused).
“We don’t yet know whether electric fields are required to allow spider ballooning,” says Morley. “We do, however, know that they are sufficient.”
Spiders have sensory hairs called trichobothria that would move in response to the electric field, which the researchers believe is what the spiders use to detect the APG.
Although science has taught us so much, these sorts of studies show just how much there is left to learn about the tricks spiders have up their eight little sleeves.
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This article and its images were originally posted on [ScienceAlert] July 5, 2018 at 11:04AM. All credit to both the author JACINTA BOWLER and ScienceAlert | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day.
The mechanism responsible for the fibre’s generation of electricity is surprisingly simple. A mesh of carbon atoms rolled into tubes 10,000 times thinner than the width of a human hair makes up the fundamental fibres of the complete filament.
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According to ScienceAlert
A twisted fibre made of gel-coated carbon nanotubes could be the very thing we need to steal energy from our surroundings that would otherwise go to waste.
Threads of a material dubbed “twistron” have already shown incredible promise in the laboratory, but could one day be built into power harvesters that collect the energy equivalent of spare change from our bodies, furniture, or wider environment.
“The easiest way to think of twistron harvesters is, you have a piece of yarn, you stretch it, and out comes electricity,” says Carter Haines from The University of Texas at Dallas, whose international team of researchers developed the technology.
The concept of salvaging tiny amounts of energy from ambient heat, radio waves, or movement to power our pocket-sized electronic devices is by no means novel.
It’s little wonder why we’re obsessed with the idea – our world buzzes with low level electromagnetic waves, friction, and temperature gradients that can be tapped into and used to shuffle around a few electrons.
But for all of their variety, the hunt is still on to make a material that can harvest that energy, and is as robust, cheap, versatile, and efficient as possible.
So how do solar roofs work? We’ve created this animated guide to show you the process. Learn about more solar energy, solar panels, and how solar roofs work.
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Did you know that solar powers over one million homes in the U.S.?
With the potential to cut your electric bill in half or even eliminate it entirely, solar electricity is a strong alternative to standard electricity. Its efficiency and long-term cost savings, coupled with the fact that solar installation costs have dropped more than 80% since 2008, are just a few of the reasons why homeowners are switching to solar.
If you’re thinking about installing solar roof panels to power your home, you’ve probably wondered, “how do solar roofs work?” That’s why we’ve created this animated guide to show you the process: from a single solar cell to a fully-functional home energy system.
Now that you know the ins and outs of how solar roofs work, it’s time to consider if a solar roof is right for your home. To calculate your potential energy bill savings, plug your address into Project Sunroof’s savings estimator.
In addition to solar roofs, there are plenty of other ways to go green. From installing energy-efficient windows to adding insulating vinyl siding, these home improvement projects can potentially make a big impact not only on your wallet but the environment as well.
Researchers from TU Delft in The Netherlands, in collaboration with a team at the University of Cambridge (U.K.), have found a way to create and clean tiny mechanical sensors in a scalable manner. They created these sensors by suspending a two-dimensional sheet of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), or ‘white graphene’ over small holes in a silicon substrate. This innovation could lead to extremely small gas and pressure sensors for future electronics.
Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is an interesting material with a honeycomb lattice structure similar to that of graphite. But while graphite conducts electricity, while h-BN acts as an insulator. This property makes h-BN popular as a high-end lubricant, especially in industrial applications where electrical conductivity is undesirable. Since h-BN has the added benefit of being chemically and thermally more stable than graphite, it is also used in harsh environments such as space, for example, in deep ultraviolet applications.
Sticky stuff
While layers of the two-dimensional material graphene can be exfoliated from graphite with sticky tape, creating single layers of h-BN is much more difficult. The reason for this is that the layers that make up h-BN ‘stick’ to one another—and other materials—much more strongly than layers of graphene do. Thus, not many researchers have been able to study the properties of h-BN as a 2-D material until now. “There are only two or three institutions in the world that can produce single, two-dimensional layers of white graphite, and the University of Cambridge is one of them,” said lead author Santiago J. Cartamil-Bueno. “This project is a success thanks to our effective collaboration with them.”
Using a technique called chemical vapour deposition, researchers at the University of Cambridge grew a one-atom-thick sheet of h-BN, or ‘white graphene,” onto a piece of iron foil. They then mailed it to TU Delft in The Netherlands. There, through a series of steps, the Delft researchers transferred the sheet of transparent white graphene onto a silicon substrate containing tiny circular cavities. By doing so, they created microscopic ‘drums”. These drums function as mechanical resonators and could be used as infinitesimal gas or pressure sensors, for instance in mobile phones.
Cleaning the drums
While creating the h-BN drums was a significant challenge in itself, this project posed another, even bigger challenge. As a result of the steps needed to transfer the monoatomic sheet onto the silicon substrate, the drums were contaminated with a number of polymers. Common contaminations such as this are undesirable since they change the properties of the sensors. The result is that all of the sensors may behave slightly differently. “In order to outperform the normal sensors in the market, however, it is important that all 2-D sensors behave in exactly the same way,” Cartamil-Bueno explains.
The Delft researchers found a solution: Using ozone gas, they managed to clean the drums. The aggressive gas removed all of the organic polymers. However, traces of PMMA, a polymer with inorganic components, were left behind on the resonators. “Fortunately, this problem can be solved by only using organic substrates while transferring the sheet of white graphite onto the cavities,” says Cartamil-Bueno. Thus, the Delft researchers have provided proof of principle for the fabrication of incredibly small sensors for future electronics.
The large Barren Ridge solar panel array near Mojave, California. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)
According to the Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly, a bit more than 10 percent of all electricity generated in the US in March came from wind and solar power (including both distributed residential solar panels and utility-scale solar installations). That’s a record number for the country, and it reflects continuing effort to install more renewable capacity across the nation.
The EIA shows that eight percent of total electricity generation that month came from wind, and the other two percent came from solar. The administration also predicts that wind and solar will contribute more than 10 percent of the total electricity produced in April, although numbers for that month aren’t out yet.
Renewables have tended to hit records in spring and fall—often called shoulder seasons—because wind is plentiful and the northern hemisphere receives a more even amount of sunlight during those seasons than it does during winter. In addition, electricity consumers tend to use less during the shoulder seasons (mild weather means they’re usually not running air conditioners or space heaters, for example). That means overall energy use is low and peak-demand fossil fuel-burning plants don’t need to come online. All these factors together make it easy for renewable energy to shoulder a larger and larger share of the work.
Although solar electricity generation usually increases considerably in the summer, the EIA doesn’t expect that increase to compensate for the reductions in spring and fall wind power this year.
In a separate study, GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association also found that stationary energy batteries have had a booming first quarter of 2017 as well. Batteries go hand in hand with intermittent resources like wind and solar because they can smooth out some of the times when those renewable sources can’t provide electricity.
In the first quarter of 2017, a record 234 MWh of storage appear to have been installed around the US. The surge was partially caused by a mandate from California regulators that utilities in that state install batteries after a massive methane leak prompted the shutdown of the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility. Tesla, AES Energy Storage, and Ice Energy all completed contracts in the first quarter of 2017 pursuant to California’s mandate.
However, the study suggested that this first quarter may be the largest for energy storage in 2017 because few additional storage projects are currently planned for later in the year.
For now, the EIA says the renewable energy number to beat is seven percent, which is the percentage of electricity that was renewably generated in the US throughout 2016. Last year, Texas accounted for the most wind on the US grid, with California trailing Texas in wind and almost making up the difference in solar.
“As a share of the state’s total electricity generation, wind and solar output was highest in Iowa, where wind and solar made up 37 percent of electricity generation in 2016,” the EIA wrote. Part of Iowa’s high percentage of renewable energy has to do with the state’s electricity needs being comparatively low. California and Hawaii are two states that have aggressive renewable goals, too. If we include geothermal, biomass, and small-scale hydroelectric power in addition to wind and solar, California sourced 27 percent of its energy from renewable sources last year, and Hawaii hit 26 percent.
Stanford scientists have created a device that wirelessly transmits electricity to a movable disc. The technology could some day be used to charge moving electric vehicles and personal devices. Credit: Sid Assawaworrarit/Stanford University
If electric cars could recharge while driving down a highway, it would virtually eliminate concerns about their range and lower their cost, perhaps making electricity the standard fuel for vehicles.
Now Stanford University scientists have overcome a major hurdle to such a future by wirelessly transmitting electricity to a nearby moving object. Their results are published in the June 15 edition of Nature.
“In addition to advancing the wireless charging of vehicles and personal devices like cellphones, our new technology may untether robotics in manufacturing, which also are on the move,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the study. “We still need to significantly increase the amount of electricity being transferred to charge electric cars, but we may not need to push the distance too much more.”
The group built on existing technology developed in 2007 at MIT for transmitting electricity wirelessly over a distance of a few feet to a stationary object. In the new work, the team transmitted electricity wirelessly to a moving LED lightbulb. That demonstration only involved a 1-milliwatt charge, whereas electric cars often require tens of kilowatts to operate. The team is now working on greatly increasing the amount of electricity that can be transferred, and tweaking the system to extend the transfer distance and improve efficiency.
Driving range
Wireless charging would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. Tesla Motors expects its upcoming Model 3 to go more than 200 miles on a single charge and the Chevy Bolt, which is already on the market, has an advertised range of 238 miles. But electric vehicle batteries generally take several hours to fully recharge. A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations.
“In theory, one could drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to stop to recharge,” Fan explained. “The hope is that you’ll be able to charge your electric car while you’re driving down the highway. A coil in the bottom of the vehicle could receive electricity from a series of coils connected to an electric current embedded in the road.”
Some transportation experts envision an automated highway system where driverless electric vehicles are wirelessly charged by solar power or other renewable energy sources. The goal would be to reduce accidents and dramatically improve the flow of traffic while lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
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Wireless technology could also assist GPS navigation of driverless cars. GPS is accurate up to about 35 feet. For safety, autonomous cars need to be in the center of the lane where the transmitter coils would be embedded, providing very precise positioning for GPS satellites.
Magnetic resonance
Mid-range wireless power transfer, as developed at Stanford and other research universities, is based on magnetic resonance coupling. Just as major power plants generate alternating currents by rotating coils of wire between magnets, electricity moving through wires creates an oscillating magnetic field. This field also causes electrons in a nearby coil of wires to oscillate, thereby transferring power wirelessly. The transfer efficiency is further enhanced if both coils are tuned to the same magnetic resonance frequency and are positioned at the correct angle.
However, the continuous flow of electricity can only be maintained if some aspects of the circuits, such as the frequency, are manually tuned as the object moves. So, either the energy transmitting coil and receiver coil must remain nearly stationary, or the device must be tuned automatically and continuously – a significantly complex process.
To address the challenge, the Stanford team eliminated the radio-frequency source in the transmitter and replaced it with a commercially available voltage amplifier and feedback resistor. This system automatically figures out the right frequency for different distances without the need for human interference.
“Adding the amplifier allows power to be very efficiently transferred across most of the three-foot range and despite the changing orientation of the receiving coil,” said graduate student Sid Assawaworrarit, the study’s lead author. “This eliminates the need for automatic and continuous tuning of any aspect of the circuits.”
Assawaworrarit tested the approach by placing an LED bulb on the receiving coil. In a conventional setup without active tuning, LED brightness would diminish with distance. In the new setup, the brightness remained constant as the receiver moved away from the source by a distance of about three feet. Fan’s team recently filed a patent application for the latest advance.
The group used an off-the-shelf, general-purpose amplifier with a relatively low efficiency of about 10 percent. They say custom-made amplifiers can improve that efficiency to more than 90 percent.
“We can rethink how to deliver electricity not only to our cars, but to smaller devices on or in our bodies,” Fan said. “For anything that could benefit from dynamic, wireless charging, this is potentially very important.”
More information:
Sid Assawaworrarit et al. Robust wireless power transfer using a nonlinear parity?time-symmetric circuit, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22404
The scans show that stimulation ‘in beat’ increases brain activity in the regions involved in task performance. On the other hand, stimulation ‘out of beat’showed activity in regions usually associated with resting. Credit: Ines Violante
Scientists have uncovered a method for improving short-term working memory, by stimulating the brain with electricity to synchronise brain waves.
Researchers at Imperial College London found that applying a low voltage current can bring different areas of the brain in sync with one another, enabling people to perform better on tasks involving working memory.
The hope is that the approach could one day be used to bypass damaged areas of the brain and relay signals in people with traumatic brain injury, stroke or epilepsy.
The brain is in constant state of chatter, with this activity seen as brainwaves oscillating at different frequencies and different regions keeping a steady ‘beat’.
In a small study, published today in the journal eLife, the Imperial team found that applying a weak electrical current through the scalp helped to align different parts of the brain, synchronising their brain waves and enabling them to keep the same beat.
“What we observed is that people performed better when the two waves had the same rhythm and at the same time,” said Dr Ines Ribeiro Violante, a neuroscientist in the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who led the research.
In the trial, carried out in collaboration with University College London, the team used a technique called transcranial alternating current stimulation (TACS) to manipulate the brain’s regular rhythm.
They found that buzzing the brain with electricity could give a performance boost to the same memory processes used when people try to remember names at a party, telephone numbers, or even a short grocery list.
Dr Violante and team used TCAS to target two brain regions – the middle frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule – which are known to be involved in working memory.
Ten volunteers were asked to carry out a set of memory tasks of increasing difficulty while receiving theta frequency stimulation to the two brain regions at slightly different times (unsynchronised), at the same time (synchronous), or only a quick burst (sham) to give the impression of receiving full treatment.
In the working memory experiments, participants looked at a screen on which numbers flashed up and had to remember if a number was the same as the previous, or in the case of the harder trial, if it the current number matched that of two-numbers previous.
Results showed that when the brain regions were stimulated in sync, reaction times on the memory tasks improved, especially on the harder of the tasks requiring volunteers to hold two strings of numbers in their minds.
“The classic behaviour is to do slower on the harder cognitive task, but people performed faster with synchronised stimulation and as fast as on the simpler task,” said Dr Violante.
Previous studies have shown that brain stimulation with electromagnetic waves or electrical current can have an effect on brain activity, the field has remained controversial due to a lack of reproducibility.
But using functional MRI to image the brain enabled the team to show changes in activity occurring during stimulation, with the electrical current potentially modulating the flow of information.
“We can use TACS to manipulate the activity of key brain networks and we can see what’s happening with fMRI,” explained Dr Violante.
“The results show that when the stimulation was in sync, there was an increase in activity in those regions involved in the task. When it was out of sync the opposite effect was seen.”
However, one of the major hurdles for making such a treatment widely available is the individual nature of people’s brains. Not only do the electrodes have to get the right frequency, but target it to the right part of the brain and get the beat in time.
Dr Violante added: “We use a very cheap technique, and that’s one of the advantages we hope it will bring if it’s translatable to the clinic.
“The next step is to see if the brain stimulation works in patients with brain injury, in combination with brain imaging, where patients have lesions which impair long range communication in their brains.
“The hope is that it could eventually be used for these patients, or even those who have suffered a stroke or who have epilepsy.”
Professor David Sharp, a neurologist in Imperial’s Department of Medicine and senior author on the paper, added: “We are very excited about the potential of brain stimulation to treat patients. I work with patients who often have major problems with working memory after their head injuries, so it would be great to have a way to enhance our current treatments, which may not always work for them.
“Our next step is to try the approach out in our patients and we will see whether combining it with cognitive training can restore lost skills.”
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In a light harvesting quantum photocell, particles of light (photons) can efficiently generate electrons. When two absorbing channels are used, solar power entering the system through the two absorbers (a and b) efficiently generates power in the machine (M). Credit: Nathaniel Gabor and Tamar Melen
A University of California, Riverside assistant professor has combined photosynthesis and physics to make a key discovery that could help make solar cells more efficient. The findings were recently published in the journal Nano Letters.
Nathan Gabor is focused on experimental condensed matter physics, and uses light to probe the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. But, he got interested in photosynthesis when a question popped into his head in 2010: Why are plants green? He soon discovered that no one really knows.
During the past six years, he sought to help change that by combining his background in physics with a deep dive into biology.
He set out to re-think solar energy conversion by asking the question: can we make materials for solar cells that more efficiently absorb the fluctuating amount of energy from the sun. Plants have evolved to do this, but current affordable solar cells – which are at best 20 percent efficient – do not control these sudden changes in solar power, Gabor said. That results in a lot of wasted energy and helps prevent wide-scale adoption of solar cells as an energy source.
Gabor, and several other UC Riverside physicists, addressed the problem by designing a new type of quantum heat engine photocell, which helps manipulate the flow of energy in solar cells. The design incorporates a heat engine photocell that absorbs photons from the sun and converts the photon energy into electricity.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that the quantum heat engine photocell could regulate solar power conversion without requiring active feedback or adaptive control mechanisms. In conventional photovoltaic technology, which is used on rooftops and solar farms today, fluctuations in solar power must be suppressed by voltage converters and feedback controllers, which dramatically reduce the overall efficiency.
Nathan Gabor’s Laboratory of Quantum Materials Optoelectronics utilizes infrared laser spectroscopy techniques to explore natural regulation in quantum photocells composed of two-dimensional semiconductors. Credit: Max Grossnickle and QMO Lab
The goal of the UC Riverside teams was to design the simplest photocell that matches the amount of solar power from the sun as close as possible to the average power demand and to suppress energy fluctuations to avoid the accumulation of excess energy.
The researchers compared the two simplest quantum mechanical photocell systems: one in which the photocell absorbed only a single color of light, and the other in which the photocell absorbed two colors. They found that by simply incorporating two photon-absorbing channels, rather than only one, the regulation of energy flow emerges naturally within the photocell.
The basic operating principle is that one channel absorbs at a wavelength for which the average input power is high, while the other absorbs at low power. The photocell switches between high and low power to convert varying levels of solar power into a steady-state output.
When Gabor’s team applied these simple models to the measured solar spectrum on Earth’s surface, they discovered that the absorption of green light, the most radiant portion of the solar power spectrum per unit wavelength, provides no regulatory benefit and should therefore be avoided. They systematically optimized the photocell parameters to reduce solar energy fluctuations, and found that the absorption spectrum looks nearly identical to the absorption spectrum observed in photosynthetic green plants.
The findings led the researchers to propose that natural regulation of energy they found in the quantum heat engine photocell may play a critical role in the photosynthesis in plants, perhaps explaining the predominance of green plants on Earth.
Other researchers have recently found that several molecular structures in plants, including chlorophyll a and b molecules, could be critical in preventing the accumulation of excess energy in plants, which could kill them. The UC Riverside researchers found that the molecular structure of the quantum heat engine photocell they studied is very similar to the structure of photosynthetic molecules that incorporate pairs of chlorophyll.
The hypothesis set out by Gabor and his team is the first to connect quantum mechanical structure to the greenness of plants, and provides a clear set of tests for researchers aiming to verify natural regulation. Equally important, their design allows regulation without active input, a process made possible by the photocell’s quantum mechanical structure.
The paper is called “Natural Regulation of Energy Flow in a Green Quantum Photocell.”
More information: Trevor B. Arp et al. Natural Regulation of Energy Flow in a Green Quantum Photocell, Nano Letters (2016). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03136
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This graphic explains novel method for capturing the greenhouse gas and converting it to a useful product — while producing electrical energy.
Credit: Cornell University
While the human race will always leave its carbon footprint on the Earth, it must continue to find ways to lessen the impact of its fossil fuel consumption.
“Carbon capture” technologies — chemically trapping carbon dioxide before it is released into the atmosphere — is one approach. In a recent study, Cornell University researchers disclose a novel method for capturing the greenhouse gas and converting it to a useful product — while producing electrical energy.
Lynden Archer, the James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering, and doctoral student Wajdi Al Sadat have developed an oxygen-assisted aluminum/carbon dioxide power cell that uses electrochemical reactions to both sequester the carbon dioxide and produce electricity.
Their paper, “The O2-assisted Al/CO2 electrochemical cell: A system for CO2capture/conversion and electric power generation,” was published July 20 inScience Advances.
The group’s proposed cell would use aluminum as the anode and mixed streams of carbon dioxide and oxygen as the active ingredients of the cathode. The electrochemical reactions between the anode and the cathode would sequester the carbon dioxide into carbon-rich compounds while also producing electricity and a valuable oxalate as a byproduct.
In most current carbon-capture models, the carbon is captured in fluids or solids, which are then heated or depressurized to release the carbon dioxide. The concentrated gas must then be compressed and transported to industries able to reuse it, or sequestered underground. The findings in the study represent a possible paradigm shift, Archer said.
“The fact that we’ve designed a carbon capture technology that also generates electricity is, in and of itself, important,” he said. “One of the roadblocks to adopting current carbon dioxide capture technology in electric power plants is that the regeneration of the fluids used for capturing carbon dioxide utilize as much as 25 percent of the energy output of the plant. This seriously limits commercial viability of such technology. Additionally, the captured carbon dioxide must be transported to sites where it can be sequestered or reused, which requires new infrastructure.”
The group reported that their electrochemical cell generated 13 ampere hours per gram of porous carbon (as the cathode) at a discharge potential of around 1.4 volts. The energy produced by the cell is comparable to that produced by the highest energy-density battery systems.
Another key aspect of their findings, Archer says, is in the generation of superoxide intermediates, which are formed when the dioxide is reduced at the cathode. The superoxide reacts with the normally inert carbon dioxide, forming a carbon-carbon oxalate that is widely used in many industries, including pharmaceutical, fiber and metal smelting.
Google just paid for part of its acquisition of DeepMind in a surprising way.
The internet giant is using technology from the DeepMind artificial intelligence subsidiary for big savings on the power consumed by its data centers, according to DeepMind Co-Founder Demis Hassabis.
In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York.
The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, “which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment,” he said.
The savings translate into a 15 percent improvement in power usage efficiency, or PUE, Google said in a statement. PUE measures how much electricity Google uses for its computers, versus the supporting infrastructure like cooling systems.
Google said it used 4,402,836 MWh of electricity in 2014, equivalent to the average yearly consumption of about 366,903 U.S. family homes. A significant proportion of Google’s spending on electricity comes from its data centers, which support its globe-spanning web services and mobile apps.
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