Group items tagged

What about battery charging by walking on them ?

Somewhat older talk from 2011 on using viruses to grow batteries.

read this

" However, Dr. Konig also found copper vases plated with silver in the Baghdad Museum, excavated from !!!Sumerian!!! sites in southern Iraq, dating back to at least 2500 BCE. When the vases were lightly tapped, a blue patina or film separated from the surface, which is characteristic of silver electroplated onto copper base. It would appear then that the Parthians inherited their batteries from one of the earliest known civilizations." ... they just mistyped the name ...

Storing energy with flywheels instead of batteries. This is not a new idea, but i just put it on here so you are aware of it.

watch the nice video...

European researchers have built prototypes that combine plastic solar cells with ultrathin, flexible batteries.

It's an article from April, now that we got Anreij's Google thing though is more actual - Unusually, the search giant designs its own servers. For the first time, Google unveils one publicly, showing a surprise built-in battery. Read this blog post by Stephen Shankland on Business Tech.

interesting wrt our space4energy grid study ....

These features lead to a high heat-to-electricity energy conversion efficiency of 5.7% when cycled between 10 and 60 °C, opening a promising way to utilize low-grade heat.

Maybe something to look at for Ricarda? Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices. "There's no need for heat or light to fix the crack or break in a circuit or battery, which is often required by previously developed self-healing materials." Yu and his team created the self-healing gel by combining two gels: a self-assembling metal-ligand gel that provides self-healing properties and a polymer hydrogel that is a conductor.

Ricarda??

After a series of rapid developments, the researchers claim their fluid can now hold 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is double the the energy capacity of Tesla's Powerwall batteries, according to the NBC.

Interesting research. Bit hyped in the article though. The actual paper says the promising stuff is in the 83-160Wh range. So maybe not double Tesla's Powerwall batteries?

We had a short discussion yesterday about using nuclear isomers as batteries for spacecraft. The principle is that energy is stored as an excitation of the nucleus which can then release the energy as a gamma-photon. However angular momentum has to be conserved an this suppresses the decay strongly - making these states stable up to 10^35 longer than a typical decay.

The key is the triggering of the dacay wheras the triggering comsumes less energy than the decay provides. The x-ray based triggering of the gamma photon decay turned out to be quite controversial and needs significantly more scientific attention.

I think that there should be some references and traces of the discussions we had on this on the shared drive or wiki ... One other aspect: converting the omnidirectional gamma bursts into useful energy ....

some biomimicry used in energy systems... maybe it sparks some ideas

not much new that has not been shared here before ... BUT: we have done relativley little on any of them. for good reasons?? don't know - maybe time to look into some of these again more closely Energy Efficiency( Termite mounds inspired regulated airflow for temperature control of large structures, preventing wasteful air conditioning and saving 10% energy.[1] Whale fins shapes informed the design of new-age wind turbine blades, with bumps/tubercles reducing drag by 30% and boosting power by 20%.[2][3][4] Stingray motion has motivated studies on this type of low-effort flapping glide, which takes advantage of the leading edge vortex, for new-age underwater robots and submarines.[5][6] Studies of microstructures found on shark skin that decrease drag and prevent accumulation of algae, barnacles, and mussels attached to their body have led to "anti-biofouling" technologies meant to address the 15% of marine vessel fuel use due to drag.[7][8][9][10] Energy Generation( Passive heliotropism exhibited by sunflowers has inspired research on a liquid crystalline elastomer and carbon nanotube system that improves the efficiency of solar panels by 10%, without using GPS and active repositioning panels to track the sun.[11][12][13] Mimicking the fluid dynamics principles utilized by schools of fish could help to optimize the arrangement of individual wind turbines in wind farms.[14] The nanoscale anti-reflection structures found on certain butterfly wings has led to a model to effectively harness solar energy.[15][16][17] Energy Storage( Inspired by the sunlight-to-energy conversion in plants, researchers are utilizing a protein in spinach to create a sort of photovoltaic cell that generates hydrogen from water (i.e. hydrogen fuel cell).[18][19] Utilizing a property of genetically-engineered viruses, specifically their ability to recognize and bind to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), researchers have developed virus-based "scaffolds" that

intriguing but of little interest for space it seems to me

Charged like your electric toothbrush by lowering the receiving coils to 4cm above the ground.

nice; there are similar trials ongoing a bit all over; there is one I know of in Mannheim, where i think they have quick charging coils at each stop to reduce the battery mass they need to carry; I have seen a demonstration of this in Kyoto university about 13 years ago on a normal car - even one where they had an entire road equipped with these chargers and tested with charging as you go , charing at traffic stops, parking etc ....

I am also looking into this idea since some time and it seems NASA is already ahead, awarding two contract to investigate magnetoshell aerocapture. This could be interesting for probes that want to enter eg Marsian atmospheres at relatively high velocity. Or for multiple re-entry s/c at Earth. The idea of the experiment, The satellite will carry a copper coil, powered by a lithium-ion battery, that generates a magnetic field around the probe. As it descends, the spacecraft will eject a small amount of plasma. This gets trapped in the magnetic field, creating a protective bubble that stops air molecules colliding with the craft and producing heat.

A few years back Mimmo has worked on this, rather from the theory side if I remember well ...

The power requirements for such a thing must be HUGE!

Both graphene and 3d printing has been around for quite a while, but combined they could provide unique properties of materials, eg in the use of high performance 3d batteries. This paper gives a nice overview of what has been done in the field up to now.

By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. With as extra bonus: Besides providing high levels of passive insulation, AgNW-coated clothing can also provide Joule heating if connected to an electricity source, such as a battery. The researchers demonstrated that as little as 0.9 V can safely raise clothing temperature to 38 °C, which is 1 °C higher than the human body temperature of 37 °C. How about that for personal comfort during the cold winter months

sounds almost like the asbestos story re-started :-)

Found an European project that takes care of the environmental, health and safety aspects of nanomaterials http://phys.org/news/2015-04-unleash-full-potential-nanomaterials.html