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Did Researchers Create Lifetime Batteries?
May 4, 2016 by admin
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Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) have accidentally – yes, accidentally – discovered a nanowire-based technology that could lead to batteries that can be charged hundreds of thousands of times.
Mya Le Thai, a PhD candidate at the university, explained in a paper published this week that she and her colleagues used nanowires, a material that is several thousand times thinner than a human hair, extremely conductive and has a surface area large enough to support the storage and transfer of electrons.
Nanowires are extremely fragile and don’t usually hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. They expand and grow brittle in a typical lithium-ion battery, but Le Thai’s team fixed this by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and then placing it in a Plexiglas-like gel to improve its reliability. All by accident.
The breakthrough could lead to laptop, smartphone and tablet batteries that last forever.
Reginald Penner, chairman of UCI’s chemistry department, said: “Mya was playing around and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it.
“She discovered that just by using this gel she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity. That was crazy, because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.”
The battery-like structure was tested more than 200,000 times over a three-month span, and the researchers reported no loss of capacity or power.
“The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said. “This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”
The breakthrough also paves the way for commercial batteries that could last a lifetime in appliances, cars and spacecraft.
British fuel-cell maker Intelligent Energy Holdings announced earlier this year that it is working on a smartphone battery that will need to be charged only once a week.
Did Researchers Create Batteries That A Lifetime? : :: TheGuruReview.net ::
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Can Robots Run On (NH2)2CO?
November 19, 2013 by admin
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Scientists have discovered a way to power future robots using an unusual source — urine.
Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol and the University of Bristol collaborated to build a system that will enable robots to function without batteries or being plugged into an electrical outlet.
Based on the functioning of the human heart, the system is designed to pump urine into the robot’s “engine room,” converting the waste into electricity and enabling the robot to function completely on its own.
Scientists are hoping the system, which can hold 24.5 ml of urine, could be used to power future generations of robots, or what they’re calling EcoBots.
“In the city environment, they could re-charge using urine from urinals in public lavatories,” said Peter Walters, a researcher with the University of the West of England. “In rural environments, liquid waste effluent could be collected from farms.”
In the past 10 years, researchers have built four generations of EcoBots, each able to use microorganisms to digest the waste material and generate electricity from it, the university said.
Along with using human and animal urine, the robotic system also can create power by using rotten fruit and vegetables, dead flies, waste water and sludge.
Ioannis Ieropoulos, a scientist with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, explained that the microorganisms work inside microbial fuel cells where they metabolize the organics, converting them into carbon dioxide and electricity.
Like the human heart, the robotic system works by using artificial muscles that compress a soft area in the center of the device, forcing fluid to be expelled through an outlet and delivered to the fuel cells. The artificial muscles then relax and go through the process again for the next cycle.
“The artificial heartbeat is mechanically simpler than a conventional electric motor-driven pump by virtue of the fact that it employs artificial muscle fibers to create the pumping action, rather than an electric motor, which is by comparison a more complex mechanical assembly,” Walter said.
Data Center Emissions Concerns Citizens
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Some residents of Quincy, Washington, the location of massive data centers operated by Microsoft, Yahoo and others, are growing concerned about pollution from backup diesel generators at the data centers, and on Wednesday they’ll have the chance to discuss the issue.
The Washington State Department of Ecology is conducting a public meeting on Wednesday evening in Quincy for residents to voice their concerns over on an application from Dell for permission to use 28 generators powered by diesel engines.
Quincy, a town of around 6,000 people, will have 141 back-up generators once those belonging to Dell, and others that have been permitted or are in line for permission, are put in place. While the generators are designed to be used only in the rare case of an electricity outage, the data center operators turn them on regularly for testing.
On average, the companies are permitted to turn on each generator for 103 hours per year. If they use that maximum running time, data center generators in Quincy would run for the equivalent of 40 hours per day on average.
The Department of Ecology says diesel emissions, when breathed in, have been known to create or worsen a variety of health problems, including heart disease, asthma and
lung cancer.
Some residents, including former mayor Patty Martin, wonder about the health impact of the diesel emissions on the community. She thinks the generators should use the same types of devices to reduce emissions that are required by other Washington cities such as Olympia and Moses Lake.
Such devices aren’t necessary in Quincy, said Karen Wood, section supervisor for air quality in Eastern Washington for the Department of Ecology. Because Olympia is a much bigger city it already has high diesel emissions from other sources, so a new data center there was required to reduce its emissions, she said.