Group items tagged

Now Santhakumar Kannappan at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea and a few pals say they have a solution based on the wonder material of the moment–graphene. These guys have built high-performance supercapacitors out of graphene that store almost as much energy as a lithium-ion battery, can charge and discharge in seconds and maintain all this over many tens of thousands of charging cycles.

LONDON, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Demand for copper goods has picked up over the past month, but consumers are learning to live with low stocks as a slow economic recovery is on the cards, copper fabricator Luvata told Reuters on Thursday. The worst economic recession since the 1930s has seen copper product consumers slash their inventories as demand collapsed. The de-stocking cycle now seems to have ended. "We see the worst is now behind us and our economic analysis shows a slow but hopefully sustainable recovery," said Bob Kickham, Luvata's senior vice president of procurement.

Three types of risk The expert group put together by the Commission has already identified three types of risks: Import risk, where raw materials are imported from a politically instable region or from a country where the market economy does not work. "That is relatively easy to do as the World Bank has put together governance indexes which measure the political and economic stability index of countries," the EU official explained.    Production risk within the EU, with potential problems such as land access. "If we are in a country for example where the population density is very high, where urbanisation is very high, obviously access will be weak," the EU official explained. Environmental risk, based on indicators such as air or soil pollution, where the impact of raw materials use is measured from an environmental point of view. "This is innovative compared to other studies," the EU official said. "We have just launched a life-cycle analysis to determine what the environmental impact is for each raw material in terms of exploitation, use, treatment, recycling etc., for air or soil pollution as well as emissions of greenhouse gases."

Our objective is to develop the measurement methodology, standards and analysis necessary for the U.S. auto industry and base metal suppliers to transition to advanced lightweight materials for auto body components without wasteful trial-and-error development cycles, and successfully transfer this technology to our customers in industry. With this knowledge, the U.S. automotive industry will be able to transition to new advanced and lightweight materials more easily, as more accurate data and material models will lead to more accurate die designs, reducing die tryouts and new model development costs. 

The pair has carried out a life cycle assessment (LCA) of 2MW wind turbines in order to identify the net environmental impact of the production and use of such devices for electricity production