Centauri's Thoughts

This is potentially great news. A laptop battery with 2 hours of life could have 20, and an electric car with a 100 mile range could have 1,000. It will be interesting to see how all this develops.

Reference: NewScientist

I came across an interesting article in New Scientist today, and its something I have pondered for a while, specifically the trapping. A charged particle (electron, proton, positron, or anti-proton) can all be trapped magnetically, but an atom of anti-hydrogen is neutral.

It's a problem ATRAP and ALPHA are still working on. "Capturing antihydrogen atoms is the current frontier, and it's a challenge," says Rolf Landua, a physicist at CERN who advised on the Angels and Demons movie and is rumoured to be the inspiration for Leonardo Vetra, an antimatter scientist in the original story. "So far nobody has managed to do it, but I'm pretty sure we will." Still, encasing a smouldering chunk of antimatter in a portable antihydrogen trap as happens in the book is a quite a way off, he says.

See the entire article here

Lithium Ion batteries can be made to charge MUCH faster by changing part of the process of how they are made

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

This is a factor of 18, so a laptop that takes 2 hours to charge now would only be 6.66 minutes. A large Lithium Ion battery (say for a hybrid or EV car) needing an 8 hours charge would be reduced to 26 minutes.

The whole article is here and another reference here.

Update: now up by factor of a 100

Now Kang and Ceder have found that coating each ball with a thin layer of lithium phosphate accelerates this process even further, perhaps because the coating is an excellent conductor of lithium ions, swiftly transporting them to and from the surface of the nanoballs.

If cellphone batteries can be made using the material, they could charge in 10 seconds flat, the researchers calculate (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07853). Bigger batteries for plug-in hybrid electric cars could charge in just 5 minutes - compared with about 8 hours for existing batteries - though this would require a very high-powered charger.

Reference: newscientist.com

We have been taking advantage of the sun-harvesting planet for eons. Either in living form as food, or as trees and shrubs we cut down and use for fire. Farther down the chain is hydrocarbons as gas and oil.

Our efforts at harvesting sunlight so far could be improved, and there are a few techniques which are being looked at or experimented with.

One sure method is concentrating the solar energy onto a smaller cell. Of course this has (thermal) limits, but it generally a good idea.

One of the biggest problems with solar cells is the light bandwidth in which they convert light to power. Of all the whole color spectrum of light, PV cells are very narrowband in what they can convert. The obvious solution should be to convert much of the incoming light (via prismatic lens or something similar, so that as much light power can be extracted.

This technique could be used for all PV cells whether on Earth or in space.

In Fluxworld, after designing pre-programmed failures into the equipment after some set amount of time (10,000 hrs usually), it became apparent that with all of this built at roughly the same time, it was all failing about the same time.

To slow or change this, a new verb was added for maintainers, called refurbish. It pays almost as well as a true fix, but is based on the MBTF (Mean Time Between Failure) and the actual hours since the last fix or refurbish. If actual time in use is 5,000 hours on something with a 10,000 MTBF then 50% of the fix amount is paid.

This optional verb can be used to clean up some older equipment to prevent a string of failures on the Grid. This also adds to some of the realism of the simulation, as the goal is to keep the grid up and running at capacity or better.

TheGrid always evolves as we add power sources and drains to it, from the solar sources which have to account for daytime and cloud cover, the the windmills which must be ever-mindful of the breezes.

Just learning how to manage the Grid on an hourly and daily basis is useful instruction.

While working within the FluxWorld power grid, and enhancing the system, I have come to understand some interesting things while simulating a live power grid with loads.

Even though my system knows all of the loads and all of the sources (which a real-time power grid may not), there is always room for management. I can see why the implementation of a “smart-grid” is so important.

I spend my time managing turning sources on and off as needed, for maximum efficiency.

Even though my loads dont change from day to night, they very well could, and because of solar and wind power, my sources change as well.

The effective management of energy resources on the grid by not putting more power than is needed on the wires, and yet, not having insufficient power (causing brown-outs or black-outs) is indeed an interesting ad tricky balance. Of course, the “brute-force” method of ensuring there is never a black out is to over-power the grid all the time. Unused power sits on the wires as “potential”, but it was still generated and used resources to put it there.

None of this, of course, speaks of storage. TheGrid is TheGrid, and has never utilized storage (like a battery). There are a few methods I have heard of, like pumping water up into a reservoir at night, to generate power during the day, but thats about it. There is just no good (efficient) way to save off terawatts or petawatts of energy at this time.

As we use more and more energy, all of this will become more critical, if we are to survive.

I came across this a few days ago, but its worth mentioning:

Researchers at The Pennsylvania State University have determined a way to use arrays of nanotubes in a solar-based process to convert carbon dioxide and water into methane and other hydrocarbon fuels. Their method may provide a new way to reduce carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere—rising due to our planet's heavy use of fossil fuels—as well as produce alternative fuels.

The entire article is here at physorg.com

This is great! The more processes they find to liberate hydrogen, the better.

This one uses two sets of specially formulated aluminum, one acts as a base, and one as an acid, and they break the bonds in water molecules to liberate the hydrogen.

This process happens at room temperature and without input of more energy.

Read the full details on physorg.com here.

This looks interesting:

Imagine a self-powering cell phone that never needs to be charged because it converts sound waves produced by the user into the energy it needs to keep running. It's not as far-fetched as it may seem thanks to the recent work of Tahir Cagin, a professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University.

Specifically, Cagin and his partners from the University of Houston have found that a certain type of piezoelectric material can covert energy at a 100 percent increase when manufactured at a very small size – in this case, around 21 nanometers in thickness.

I see many potential uses for this, in particular, against sound walls by the nations freeways in cities.

The entire article is here.

In a world where bigger is usually better, here is the ultimate of downsizing:

(PhysOrg.com) -- Underground nuclear power plants no bigger than a hot tub may soon provide electricity for communities around the world. Measuring about 1.5 meters across, the mini reactors can each power about 20,000 homes.

"Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world," said John Deal, CEO of Hyperion. "[The nuclear plants] will cost approximately $25 million each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home."

read the whole thing here.