A doctoral student at the University of Delaware has developed a prototype for a self-sustaining, emissions-free solar reactor that produces hydrogen fuel.
"The reactor is capable of using sunlight to increase the heat inside its cylindrical structure above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Zinc oxide powder is then gravity fed through 15 hoppers into the ceramic interior where it converts to a zinc vapor. At that point the vapor is reacted with water separately, which in turn produces hydrogen."
"If the reactor proves to be a success it can apparently be scaled up relatively easily to produce hydrogen at an industrial level."
This is about a great project to make an open source, universal sensing instrument. The name was popularized in a science fiction series - Star Trek I believe it was - where they were never without one when visiting a new planet or some unfamiliar environment.
While this one starts out very modestly, it has the potential to become a real powerhouse of personal sensor, better than anything we have today.
"The Tricorder X-Prize aims to bring a diverse array of inexpensive sensors together in an accessible, easy to use, handheld design. On Jan 12, 2012, the contest was officially opened at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas."
"Dr. Jansen’s Mark 2 runs on Linux. The hardware includes an ARM Atmel microcontroller squeezed into a clam-shell with two OLED touchscreens. Schematics, board layouts, and the firmware is all available free and includes the initial proof-of-concept device."
There is also a blog about how it's made, by the guy behind the project...
It looks like we have Cold Fusion emerging into the mainstream.
Sidney Kimmel, a philanthropist who founded The Jones Group—which encompasses fashion industry pillars such as Jones New York, Anne Klein, Nine West and Gloria Vanderbilt—made the largest donation ever given by a non-alumnus to the University of Missouri (MU).
The $5.5 million is to be used to create the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance (SKINR), which will study effects related to low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).
MIT physicists have managed to build a light-emitting diode that has an electrical efficiency of more than 100 percent. You may ask, "Wouldn't that mean it breaks the first law of thermodynamics?
"The answer, happily, is no.
The LED produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent. That means it operates above "unity efficiency" -- putting it into a category normally occupied by perpetual motion machines.
However, while MIT's diode puts out more than twice as much energy in photons as it's fed in electrons, it doesn't violate the conservation of energy because it appears to draw in heat energy from its surroundings instead. When it gets more than 100 percent electrically-efficient, it begins to cool down, stealing energy from its environment to convert into more photons."
(My comment:) There is really nothing like a perpetuum mobile. There are only some technologies that we don't fully understand where they draw their energy from...
A researcher has come up with a concept that may solve many of the problems that grounded the Concorde.
"Through calculations, Busemann found that a biplane design could essentially do away with shock waves. Each wing of the design, when seen from the side, is shaped like a flattened triangle, with the top and bottom wings pointing toward each other. The configuration, according to his calculations, cancels out shock waves produced by each wing alone."
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the future according to robotics researchers, robots will likely fight our wars, care for our elderly, babysit our children, and serve and entertain us in a wide variety of situations.
"But as robotic development continues to grow, one subfield of robotics research is lagging behind other areas: roboethics, or ensuring that robot behavior adheres to certain moral standards. In a new paper that provides a broad overview of ethical behavior in robots, researchers emphasize the importance of being proactive rather than reactive in this area."
Andrea Rossi, an Italian inventor has developed and is now commercializing a cold fusion reactor that produces heat at a very high power density, roughly comparable to today's nuclear fission plants.
The reaction uses nickel and hydrogen, which fuse to produce copper. This energy rich but extremely clean process is used to heat water. The resulting steam can be used directly as a carrier of heat or be converted to electricity.
There is much development work to be done still but the technology has shown its potential and is being offered in containered 1 megawatt plants.
10 kW home units are planned but not yet available.
A radical new camera that lets you adjust the focus after you take a picture began shipping this week.
"The consumer point-and-shoot camera has just been reinvented -- not tweaked, or remodeled, but actually re-thought from top to bottom," said Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal.
My comment:
That camera is one of the very few instances where an important new development actually finds its way to the users. Point and shoot - change focus after you have downloaded the pictures to your computer...
Sterling Allan reports on his recent trip to South Africa to visit a company who has developed a 5 kilowatt Fuel Free Generator that will be available beginning March for their existing customers.
Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) (magneto fluid dynamics or hydromagnetics) is an academic discipline which studies the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids. Examples of such fluids include plasmas, liquid metals, and salt water or electrolytes. The word magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) is derived from magneto- meaning magnetic field, and hydro- meaning liquid, and -dynamics meaning movement. The field of MHD was initiated by Hannes Alfvén,[1] for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970.
The fundamental concept behind MHD is that magnetic fields can induce currents in a moving conductive fluid, which in turn creates forces on the fluid and also changes the magnetic field itself.
My comment:
Does anyone have knowledge of technical developments on this being made publically available? It seems that there is little information on technical progress on this, indicating that the whole field may have been "put under lock and key" - perhaps it is too disruptive to a certain energy monopoly that is still largely in control of energy policy and that is profiting from how we make energy today ...
Physicists at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales have built a transistor from a single atom of phosphorous precisely placed on a bed of silicon, taking another step towards the holy grail of tech research: the quantum computer.
We can obtain renewable, clean, safe, cheap energy by annihilation, for example, of an electron with an anti-electron (positron). An electron and positron are obtained by extracting them from atoms; the extraction consumes a negligible amount of energy. Then, the two particles are brought near one another (collision).
The phenomenon of annihilation occurs when particle rest mass is converted totally into energy (gamma photons). Gamma photons occur as much as needed to retrieve the total energy of the electron and positron...
"Some people spend their life watching the tube, but Daryl Oster is spending his trying to get people to travel in one."
"To be fair, Evacuated Tube Travel might be even bigger — Oster is proposing uisng magnetic levitation to send car-sized capsules through giant long vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 4,000 miles per hour."
"The passenger vehicle is pressurized and has plenty of air, but moves through the airless tube on a magnetic track and all movement is controlled by manipulating the magnetic forces that are at play between the track and the capsule, according to Discovery."
"Oster and his team are selling licenses for the rights to build the tracks and tubes, but says the ultimate network will need both private and public funding. He also plans to start a Kickstarter campaign in hopes of raising funds for a documentary about ETT."
This is a short item about a solid state electric generator that could power electronics...
Imagine being able to provide power on the circuit board to each component that needs power, continuously, from the surroundings, so that no battery is required; and no charging of the device is needed. Imagine no heating issues from the power, no overcharge; and all this being cheaper than the present method of using batteries and power supplies.
Latest news from Sterling about it:
I received the following input about the EEFG: "They have the next generation now and it knocks the socks off the first ones with much greater power generation. This will be the power source for the next 100+ years. I'm really excited."
This is decidedly low tech, but very efficient. Nat Mulcahy has invented a simple system that allows the burning, not of the wood itself, but of the gas that comes out of the wood when heated.
This results in a clean burn and a high use (over 90 %) of the energy contained in the combustible substance. Pellets of wood or other biological material are best to use. What is left over after combustion is biochar, the empty "shell" of the biological material, dry carbon that is great as a fertilizing substance for agriculture. With time, it forms what is known as "terra preta", very fertile high carbon soil.
The video is in Italian, but there are English subtitles...
Printing three dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using 'two-photon lithography'. With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated.
Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have now made a major breakthrough in speeding up this printing technique: The high-precision-3D-printer at TU Vienna is orders of magnitude faster than similar devices (see video). This opens up completely new areas of application, such as in medicine.
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation.
“Hydrogen is considered to be clean fuel compared to fossil fuel because there is no carbon emission, but the hydrogen currently used is not generated cleanly,” said Ke Sun, a PhD student in electrical engineering who led the project.
By harvesting more sun light using the vertical nanotree structure, Wang’s team has developed a way to produce more hydrogen fuel efficiently...
Physicists have built a graphene battery that harvests energy from the thermal movement of ions in solution...
The copper ions, which have a double positive charge, move through the solution at a rate of about 300 metres per second thanks to the thermal energy of the solution at room temperature.
When an ion smashes into the graphene strip, the collision generates enough energy to kick a delocalised electron out of the graphene.
The electron then has two options: it can either leave the graphene strip and combine with the copper ion or it can travel through the graphene strip and into the circuit.
It turns out that the mobility of electrons is much higher in graphene than it is through the solution, so the electron naturally chooses the route through the circuit. It is this that lights up the LED.
Cement making is very energy intensive. Materials have to he heated to 1,400 degrees C, so this new way of making cement without having to heat it, is certainly something that will help. Actually, it's not so new - the Egyptians and the Romans already used such cement, and their buildings are still standing...
from the article:
Drexel’s “green” variety is a form of alkali-activated cement that utilizes an industrial byproduct, called slag, and a common mineral, limestone, and does not require heating to produce. According to Dr. Michel W. Barsoum, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, this alternative production method and the ubiquity of the mix ingredients, lessens the cost of materials for Drexel’s cement by about 40 percent versus Portland cement and reduces energy consumption and carbon dioxide production by 97 percent.
interesting video on research that found cavitation bubble collapse to stimulate iron into releasing some of its nuclear energy without the production of radiation. Comparison with a conventional uranium reactor showed the iron reaction to be more energetic than the currently used uranium fission reaction.
When applied to radioactive thorium, the piezoelectric cavitation was found to *reduce* radioactivity, speeding up decay 1000-fold, indicating that the technology may be applied to cleaning up nuclear materials from conventional nuclear reactors.
How can we harness nature to produce sustainable building materials? This stool is made by microbes cementing together loose mineral material into solid forms. Without the use of harmful additives or lots of energy, A Radical Means proposes a vision of materials and manufacturing technologies able to produce unique form, colour and pattern by sustainable means.
Stefan Hartmann of Overunity.com has posted two videos of a Russian group (friends of Tariel Kapanadze) apparently powering a stand-alone engine on water. They drink from a bottle of water (of course, it could be Vodka), then pour the liquid into what appears to be a fuel tank. Then they start up the engine.
As it's running, they show the exhaust being clean. As they hold a cup at the exhaust, it collects liquid (assumed to be water), which they then drink.
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