Lifeboat Foundation

Say hello to ionocaloric cooling. It’s a new way to lower temperatures with the potential to replace existing methods of chilling things with a process that is safer and better for the planet.

Typical refrigeration systems transport heat away from a space via a gas that cools as it expands some distance away. As effective as this process is, some of the choice gases we use are particularly unfriendly to the environment.

There is, however, more than one way a substance can be forced to absorb and shed heat energy.

A Google-backed startup has successfully tested an enhanced geothermal system that could harness Earth’s inner heat to generate clean electricity anywhere, anytime — and they built it, ironically, with technology perfected by the oil industry.

The challenge: Geothermal power plants take advantage of the heat radiating from deep inside the Earth to create electricity. Usually, this is done by drilling wells down to natural underground reservoirs of hot water and using that steam to spin electric turbines.

This is a clean, reliable source of energy, but it is hard to scale. The need to build geothermal plants near existing hydrothermal reservoirs, which are relatively rare, limits its use to a handful of places — today, geothermal supplies just 0.4% of the US’s utility-scale electricity.

WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) — The Department of Energy said on Thursday it is accepting applications from states and territories for $8.5 billion in rebate programs for upgrades in U.S. homes that aim to lower energy bills and increase energy efficiency.

The rebates for items including insulation, heat pumps, and efficient appliances will be available to consumers after states and territories apply for and get funds from the department. The two rebate programs were funded by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that fellow Democrats in Congress passed last year without a single Republican vote.

The rebate programs will save up to $1 billion a year in energy costs and support about 50,000 jobs in construction, manufacturing and other businesses, the department said.

RMIT University’s new proton battery could revolutionize energy storage, offering a safe, affordable, eco-friendly alternative to lithium-ion batteries.

The latest ‘proton battery’ developed by RMIT University holds the potential to revolutionize power supply for homes, vehicles, and devices without the disposal-related environmental challenges posed by lithium-ion batteries.

The battery works by using a carbon electrode to store hydrogen that has been separated from water, functioning like a hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricity.

Giant waves have been found swirling in the plasma at the boundary of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, scientists have found.

Data from Juno suggests the Jupiter probe regularly dips through these waves, invisible to the naked eye, as it orbits the giant planet. The discovery helps astronomers understand how mass and energy is transferred from the solar wind to the Jovian planetary environment.

Continue reading “Giant Swirling Plasma Waves Detected at The Edge of Jupiter’s Magnetosphere” »

The two-dimensional layered crystal structure of niobium oxide polymorph T-Nb2O5 exhibits fast Li-ion diffusion that is promising for energy storage applications. Epitaxial growth of single-crystalline T-Nb2O5 thin films with ionic transport channels oriented perpendicular to the surface are now demonstrated.

A better way to wirelessly charge over long distances has been developed at Aalto University. Engineers have optimized the way antennas transmitting and receiving power interact with each other, making use of the phenomenon of “radiation suppression”. The result is a better theoretical understanding of wireless power transfer compared to the conventional inductive approach, a significant advancement in the field.

Charging over short distances, such as through induction pads, uses magnetic near fields to transfer power with high efficiency, but at longer distances the efficiency dramatically drops. New research shows that this high efficiency can be sustained over long distances by suppressing the radiation resistance of the loop antennas that are sending and receiving power. Previously, the same lab created an omnidirectional wireless charging system that allowed devices to be charged at any orientation. Now, they have extended that work with a new dynamic theory of wireless charging that looks more closely at both near (non-radiative) and far (radiative) distances and conditions. In particular, they show that high transfer efficiency, over 80 percent, can be achieved at distances approximately five times the size of the antenna, utilizing the optimal frequency within the hundred-megahertz range.

‘We wanted to balance effectively transferring power with the radiation loss that always happens over longer distances,’ says lead author Nam Ha-Van, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University. ‘It turns out that when the currents in the loop antennas have equal amplitudes and opposite phases, we can cancel the radiation loss, thus boosting efficiency.’

Measurements conducted over an unprecedented span of conditions uncover universal behavior, but not the kind that theorists expected.

Turbulence is a mesmerizing, chaotic state of fluid motion. It occurs in natural and artificial settings whenever the Reynolds number (quantifying the relative size of inertial to viscous forces in the flow) is large. Through nonlinear coupling, kinetic energy cascades from large scales to ever smaller scales (Fig. 1) until it is dissipated by viscous effects. The fluctuations excited during this process play a crucial role in a diverse range of problems, including planetesimal formation [1], rain initiation in clouds [2], and heat transport within oceans [3]. Remarkably, a new experimental study by Christian Küchler of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany and co-workers provides compelling evidence that current theoretical models for how the fluctuations are distributed across the scales are missing some important ingredients [4].

Turbulent flows are complex. Quantitative predictions of their properties that are derived directly from the Navier-Stokes equation, without ad hoc assumptions, are accordingly scarce. Most theoretical approaches have perforce been phenomenological, the most famous being Andrey Kolmogorov’s groundbreaking 1941 theory, nicknamed K41 [5]. This mean-field theory assumes that the multiscale properties of the turbulent fluctuations are governed by the average cascade of kinetic energy passing through the scales and by the fluid viscosity. In K41 Kolmogorov went on to propose the existence of an inertial range, which corresponds to an intermediate range of scales over which viscous forces could be ignored relative to inertial forces and where the details of the large-scale forcing are unimportant.

Researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) have created a supercapacitor with a record level of energy storage, marking a significant advancement in the field.