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LeopoldS

Transformation of concentrated sunlight into laser radiation on small parabolic concent... - 0 views

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    Duncan aND Lionel please check this one
Luís F. Simões

HP Dreams of Internet Powered by Phone Chips (And Cow Chips) | Wired.com - 0 views

  • For Hewlett Packard Fellow Chandrakat Patel, there’s a “symbiotic relationship between IT and manure.”
  • Patel is an original thinker. He’s part of a group at HP Labs that has made energy an obsession. Four months ago, Patel buttonholed former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan at the Aspen Ideas Festival to sell him on the idea that the joule should be the world’s global currency.
  • Data centers produce a lot of heat, but to energy connoisseurs it’s not really high quality heat. It can’t boil water or power a turbine. But one thing it can do is warm up poop. And that’s how you produce methane gas. And that’s what powers Patel’s data center. See? A symbiotic relationship.
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  • Financial house Cantor Fitzgerald is interested in Project Moonshot because it thinks HP’s servers may have just what it takes to help the company’s traders understand long-term market trends. Director of High-Frequency Trading Niall Dalton says that while the company’s flagship trading platform still needs the quick number-crunching power that comes with the powerhog chips, these low-power Project Moonshot systems could be great for analyzing lots and lots of data — taking market data from the past three years, for example, and running a simulation.
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    of relevance to this discussion: Koomey's Law, a Moore's Law equivalent for computing's energetic efficiency http://www.economist.com/node/21531350 http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/2148202/whither-moores-law-introducing-koomeys-law
Tom Gheysens

Cheap battery stores energy for a rainy day : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

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    Thijs interested? quinones are my field
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    I think the major benefit of this system is the low cost of the products involved compared to standard flow batteries. However, two issues still remain, corrosion and size. I think these things need to be big right due to the volumetric storage using quinones? Nevertheless, it is interesting to see where this development will lead to. "The system is far from perfect, however: bromine and hydrobromic acid are corrosive, and could cause serious pollution if they leaked. "The bromine is, right now, the Achilles heel of this particular battery," Aziz says. The answer could be to go completely organic, he adds: "We are working on replacing the bromine with a different quinone." Are there quinones which would not be corrosive but retain good volumetric performance?
annaheffernan

Energy Teleportation Overcomes Distance Limit - 0 views

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    The ability to teleport energy from one location to another could revolutionise the way quantum devices operate, but only if it can be made to work over practical distances. Now physicists think they know how.
Daniel Hennes

The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today - 3 views

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    The enormous solar plant-jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google-opened for business today ... well yesterday, but still impressive!
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    impressive! and google is among the owners.
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    impressive pictures - looking at the 2nd to last and 4th to last one, I am wondering how this distributed individually control of the mirrors works - and idea?
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    Machine learning obviously. Most likely neural networks :P On the other hand: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-is-killing-birds-meltin-1525107821
johannessimon81

Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector - 1 views

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    IceCube detects a neutrino in about every 6 minutes but most are from within the solar system. A small number of very high energy neutrinos have been found though which have energies that cannot be produced by the sun or on Earth.
Thijs Versloot

New Quantum Theory to explain flow of time - 2 views

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    Basically quantum entanglement, or more accurately the dispersal and expansion of mixed quantum states, results in an apparent flow of time. Quantum information leaks out and the result is the move from a pure state (hot coffee) to a mixed state (cooled down) in which equilibrium is reached. Theoretically it is possible to get back to a pure state (coffee spontaneously heating up) but this statistical unlikelihood gives the appereance of irreversibility and hence a flow o time. I think an interesting question is then: how much useful work can you extract from this system? (http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2811) It should for macroscopic thermodynamic systems lead to the Carnot cycle, but on smaller scales it might be possible to formulate a more general expression. Anybody interested to look into it? Anna, Jo? :)
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    What you propose is called Maxwell's demon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) thermodynamics is VERY robust. I guess if you really only want to harness AND USE the energy in a microscopic system you might have some chance of beating Carnot. But any way of transferring harvested energy to a macroscopic system seems to be limited by it (AFAIK).
Daniel Hennes

Japan is planning to build huge floating solar power plants - 4 views

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    Japan has started construction of two floating solar power plants, which will become part of a huge, 60 megawatt floating renewable energy network.
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    They should probably buddy up with the wave energy dudes and create the ultimate reneweable energy plant
Thijs Versloot

Graphene coated silicon super-capacitors for energy storage - 1 views

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    Recharge in seconds and efficiently store power for weeks between charges. Added bonus is the cheap and abundant components needed. One of the applications they foresee is to attach such a super-capacitor to the back of solar panels to store the power and discharge this during the night
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    very nice indeed - is this already at a stage where we should have a closer look at it? what you think? With experience in growing carbon nanostructures, Pint's group decided to try to coat the porous silicon surface with carbon. "We had no idea what would happen," said Pint. "Typically, researchers grow graphene from silicon-carbide materials at temperatures in excess of 1400 degrees Celsius. But at lower temperatures - 600 to 700 degrees Celsius - we certainly didn't expect graphene-like material growth." When the researchers pulled the porous silicon out of the furnace, they found that it had turned from orange to purple or black. When they inspected it under a powerful scanning electron microscope they found that it looked nearly identical to the original material but it was coated by a layer of graphene a few nanometers thick. When the researchers tested the coated material they found that it had chemically stabilized the silicon surface. When they used it to make supercapacitors, they found that the graphene coating improved energy densities by over two orders of magnitude compared to those made from uncoated porous silicon and significantly better than commercial supercapacitors. Transmission electron microscope image of the surface of porous silicon coated with graphene. The coating consists of a thin layer of 5-10 layers of graphene which filled pores with diameters less than 2-3 nanometers and so did not alter the nanoscale architecture of the underlying silicon. (Cary Pint / Vanderbilt) The graphene layer acts as an atomically thin protective coating. Pint and his group argue that this approach isn't limited to graphene. "The ability to engineer surfaces with atomically thin layers of materials combined with the control achieved in designing porous materials opens opportunities for a number of different applications beyond energy storage," he said.
pacome delva

Information converted to energy - physicsworld.com - 4 views

  • By tracking the particle's motion using a video camera and then using image-analysis software to identify when the particle had rotated against the field, the researchers were able to raise the metaphorical barrier behind it by inverting the field's phase. In this way they could gradually raise the potential of the particle even though they had not imparted any energy to it directly.
  • "Nobody thinks of using bits to boil water," he says, "but that would in principle be possible at nanometre scales." And he speculates that molecular processes occurring in nature might already be converting information to energy in some way. "The message is that processes taking place on the nanoscale are completely different from those we are familiar with, and that information is part of that picture."
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    crazy, the Maxwell's demon at work !
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    crazy indeed
nikolas smyrlakis

EUROPA - Press Releases - Investing in the future: Commission calls for ad... - 0 views

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    an additional investment of €50 billion in energy technology research will be needed over the next 10 years. This means almost tripling the annual investment in the European Union, from €3 to €8 billion
Juxi Leitner

Martian Projects Shall Use Nuclear Energy - 0 views

  • Since current rocket technologies are not sufficient for the future exploration of Mars and the whole Solar system, and since no alternative energy resources have been found as of now, the only possible way to implement those projects would be by using nuclear energy, Lopota said at an academic conference on aerospace.
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    blablabla
Tobias Seidl

Green Car Congress: BMW Introduces Intelligent Alternator Control with Regenerative Bra... - 0 views

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    I know, it is not a new concept, but apparently the guys from BMW put some money into it to make is series-proof. Could we - in principle - put something like that onto a spacecraft to solve thermal and energy problems at the same time?
ESA ACT

IRENA Conference - 0 views

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    the currently official website of IRENA - the new international renewable energy agency just created in Bonn
ESA ACT

Solar Company Says Its Tech Can Power 90 Percent of Grid and Cars | Wired Science from ... - 0 views

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    interesting energy/SPS paper
santecarloni

[1101.6015] Radio beam vorticity and orbital angular momentum - 1 views

  • It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.
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    It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental techniques for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons in well-defined, pure orbital angular momentum (OAM) states, that twisted light and its pertinent optical vorticity and phase singularities began to come into widespread use in science and technology. We have now shown experimentally how OAM and vorticity can be readily imparted onto radio beams. Our results extend those of earlier experiments on angular momentum and vorticity in radio in that we used a single antenna and reflector to directly generate twisted radio beams and verified that their topological properties agree with theoretical predictions. This opens the possibility to work with photon OAM at frequencies low enough to allow the use of antennas and digital signal processing, thus enabling software controlled experimentation also with first-order quantities, and not only second (and higher) order quantities as in optics-type experiments. Since the OAM state space is infinite, our findings provide new tools for achieving high efficiency in radio communications and radar technology.
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    and how can we use this?
LeopoldS

energy utilities paying attorneys to help prevent regulation - 2 views

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    where real power sits ...
annaheffernan

Laser shines a new light on isotope separation - 0 views

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    A new method of separating nuclear isotopes that exploits the slight differences in their electronic energy levels has been developed by physicists in the US. The energy-efficient separator was used to create isotopically pure lithium-7, which is used in some nuclear reactors. Good news for any future nuclear powered space missions perhaps? It could potentially replace the current (and much less energy efficient) methods that were developed in the 1950's
Thijs Versloot

Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy - 3 views

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    Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form - naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.
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