Lifeboat Foundation

When most people think of crystals, they picture suncatchers that act as rainbow prisms or the semi-transparent stones that some believe hold healing powers. However, to scientists and engineers, crystals are a form of materials in which their constituents—atoms, molecules, or nanoparticles—are arranged regularly in space. In other words, crystals are defined by the regular arrangement of their constituents. Common examples are diamonds, table salt, or sugar cubes.

However, in research just published in Soft Matter, a team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Sangwoo Lee, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, discovered that crystal structures are not necessarily always regularly arranged. The discovery advances the field of materials science and has unrealized implications for the materials used for semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicle technologies.

One of the most common and important classes of crystal structures is the close-packed structures of regular spheres constructed by stacking layers of spheres in a honeycomb arrangement. There are many ways to stack the layers to construct close-packed structures, and how nature selects specific stacking is an important question in materials and physics research. In the close-packing construction, there is a very unusual structure with irregularly spaced constituents known as the random stacking of two-dimensional hexagonal layers (RHCP). This structure was first observed from cobalt metal in 1942, but it has been regarded as a transitional and energetically unpreferred state.

Discover how car parks are evolving into solar powerhouses, generating clean energy, reducing costs, and shaping a sustainable future.

Imagine this: a car park with sleek solar panels mounted on jet-black steel supports, harnessing the sun’s energy while providing shade for parked vehicles.

This groundbreaking concept is becoming a reality in car parks across the UK, offering much more than just parking spaces.

The country’s government recently announced a €2 billion fund aimed at tackling its severe drought problem.

Spain hit an impressive renewable energy milestone last week when it was powered solely by renewables for nine hours straight.

Energy generated by solar panels, wind turbines, and hydro energy was able to power mainland Spain from 10 am to 7 pm local time (CEST) on Tuesday, May 16, a report from Spanish newspaper El País reveals.

Solar panels have long been criticized for their appearance, with some people arguing that the large, opaque panels spoil the look of homes.

The Solar powered Aptera can replenish up to 40 miles a day with built in solar panels all over the exterior. Get $30 dollars off your Aptera pre-order with this link: https://lz953.isrefer.com/go/preorder/a107820 The Aptera has a top speed of 110mph and a 0–60 of 4 seconds — the future is going to be fun.

A research group led by Professor Minoru Osada (he, him) and postdoctoral researcher Yue Shi (she, her) at the Institute for Future Materials and Systems (IMaSS), Nagoya University in Japan, has developed a new technology to fabricate nanosheets, thin films of two-dimensional materials a couple of nanometers thick, in about one minute.

This technology enables the formation of high-quality, large nanosheet films with a single click without the need for specialized knowledge or technology. Their findings are expected to contribute to developing the industrial manufacturing process for various types of nanosheet devices. The study was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Nanosheets have a thickness that is measured in nanometers. Nanometers are so thin that the sheets cannot be seen from the side with the naked eye. They have potential uses in several different fields, including electronics, catalysis, energy storage, and biomedicine. Those made from graphene and inorganic nanosheets are being tested for use in a range of devices, from solar cells to sensors and batteries, because they have electrical, transparency, and heat-resistance functions different from those of conventional bulk materials.

Waste heat produced by solar cells undermines their performance, but the race is on to harness it for useful purposes. Researchers have found a way to tap into that heat to collect water out of the air, and have demonstrated the effectiveness of the idea by growing spinach in the Arabian desert, one of the driest places on Earth.

Stephen has a science degree with a major in physics, an arts degree with majors in English Literature and History and Philosophy of Science and a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication.

The robot can drive heavy steal beams into the ground at a rate of 1 per 73 seconds, which will help expedite solar farm construction.

A transition to a carbon-free economy is the reality of the modern energy industry. Reduction in CO₂ emission is one of the main challenge in energy engineering in the last decades. Renewable energy sources are playing an important role on the way to a zero-carbon economy [1,2]. Solar energy is one of the main and almost unlimited energy sources in the World. The different technologies of solar energy use have been developed in the last years [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]]. However, even though the progress in the development of solar energy technologies is notable, there are a lot of challenges for energy science. One of them is the fact that more than 60% of electricity is produced by conventional technologies via hydrocarbon fuel combustion: steam turbines, gas turbines, etc. While the share of electricity produced by using solar energy is no more than a few percent [9].

Among various ways of utilization of solar energy for electricity generation, a combination of solar energy with the traditional steam and gas turbine cycles can be highlighted. The power plants where solar energy is combined with conventional power cycles are named integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS). In these systems, solar energy is used to produce heat and after that heat is used to generate mechanical work or electricity.

Combined cycle power plants (CCPP) show one of the highest energy efficiency among conventional power plants [10]. The modern cycles with high-temperature gas turbines have an efficiency up to 70% and even higher. In such cycles, the high-temperature gas turbines with the turbine inlet temperature (TIT) up to 1,600 °C are applied [11,12]. In the last years, a lot of various integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS) were developed by various scientists and engineers. The main way to use solar energy in such cycles is a steam generation in CCPP [[13], [14], [15], [16]]. In other words, solar energy in such ISCCS is utilized as an energy source in a steam turbine cycle.