Researchers have ‘hacked’ the earliest stages of photosynthesis, the natural machine that powers the vast majority of life on Earth, and discovered new ways to extract energy from the process, a finding that could lead to new ways of generating clean fuel and renewable energy. We didn’t know as.
Researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology and Southern University of Science and Technology have fabricated bifunctional flexible electrochromic energy-storage devices based on silver nanowire flexible transparent electrodes.
Publishing in the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, the team used silver nanowire flexible transparent electrodes as the current collector for a bifunctional flexible electrochromic supercapacitor.
This bifunctional flexible device can exhibit its energy status through color changes, and can serve as an energy supplier for various wearable electronics, such as physiological sensors. The findings could have a widespread impact on the future development of smart windows for energy-efficient buildings.
Plants use photosynthesis to harvest energy from sunlight. Now researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have applied this principle as the basis for developing new sustainable processes which in the future may produce syngas (synthetic gas) for the large-scale chemical industry and be able to charge batteries.
Syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, is an important intermediate product in the manufacture of many chemical starter materials such as ammonia, methanol and synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. “Syngas is currently made almost exclusively using fossil raw materials,” says Prof. Roland Fischer from the Chair of Inorganic and Organometallic Chemistry.
A yellow powder, developed by a research team led by Fischer, is to change all that. The scientists were inspired by photosynthesis, the process plants use to produce chemical energy from light. “Nature needs carbon dioxide and water for photosynthesis,” says Fischer. The nanomaterial developed by the researchers imitates the properties of the enzymes involved in photosynthesis. The “nanozyme” produces syngas using carbon dioxide, water and light in a similar manner.
Scientists at the University of Groningen used a silver sawtooth nanoslit array to produce valley-coherent photoluminescence in two-dimensional tungsten disulfide flakes at room temperature. Until now, this could only be achieved at very low temperatures. Coherent light can be used to store or transfer information in quantum electronics. This plasmon-exciton hybrid device is promising for use in integrated nanophotonics (light-based electronics). The results were published in Nature Communications on 5 February.
Tungsten disulfide has interesting electronic properties and is available as a 2-D material. “The electronic structure of monolayer tungsten disulfide shows two sets of lowest energy points or valleys,” explains Associate Professor Justin Ye, head of the Device Physics of Complex Materials group at the University of Groningen. One possible application is in photonics, as it can emit light with valley-dependent circular polarization—a new degree of freedom to manipulate information. However, valleytronics requires coherent and polarized light. Unfortunately, previous work showed that photoluminescence polarization in tungsten disulfide is almost random at room temperature.
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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about a potential discovery of a new way to generate energy using an unusual protein found in bacteria.
Links:
https://theconversation.com/electricity-from-thin-air-an-enz…ere-200432
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05781-7
#bacteria #energy #enzymes.
0:00 Source of electricity we currently use.
3:15 New discovery: incredible enzyme from bacteria.
4:07 More about the Mycobacterium.
5:20 Enzyme that they use to generate energy.
6:50 More about the protein and what it could do for us.
8:45 Additional questions.
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Photosynthesis drives all life on Earth. Complex processes are required for the sunlight-powered conversion of carbon dioxide and water to energy-rich sugar and oxygen. These processes are driven by two protein complexes, photosystems I and II. In photosystem I, sunlight is used with an efficiency of almost 100%. Here a complex network of 288 chlorophylls plays the decisive role.
A team led by LMU chemist Regina de Vivie-Riedle has now characterized these chlorophylls with the help of high-precision quantum chemical calculations—an important milestone toward a comprehensive understanding of energy transfer in this system. This discovery may help exploit its efficiency in artificial systems in the future.
The chlorophylls in photosystem I capture sunlight in an antenna complex and transfer the energy to a reaction center. There, the solar energy is used to trigger a redox process—that is to say, a chemical process whereby electrons are transferred. The quantum yield of photosystem I is almost 100%, meaning that almost every absorbed photon leads to a redox event in the reaction center.
Hugely powerful lasers are shining light on the cosmos and can generate energy using the same process that occurs in the scorching interior of stars.
A team of researchers at UT Wein in Austria have developed an innovative oxygen-ion battery that is cleaner and safer than lithium-ion.
Researchers at Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) in Vienna, Austria, have made an oxygen-ion battery that could be used in large energy storage systems instead of lithium-ion batteries. Even though the energy density of an oxygen-ion battery is not quite as high as that of a lithium-ion battery, it has some important advantages.
Unlike lithium-ion batteries, the storage capacity of the oxygen-ion battery does not decrease over time, as it can be regenerated. This could enable an extremely long service life for the battery.
The secret to a perfect croissant is the layers—as many as possible, each one interspersed with butter. Similarly, a new material with promise for new applications is made of many extremely thin layers of metal, between which scientists can slip different ions for various purposes. This makes them potentially very useful for future high-tech electronics or energy storage.
Until recently, these materials—known as MXenes, pronounced “max-eens”—were as labor-intensive as good croissants made in a French bakery.
But a new breakthrough by scientists with the University of Chicago shows how to make these MXenes far more quickly and easily, with fewer toxic byproducts.
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It’s incredibly rechargeable, made from safe materials, and—get this—not going to catch on fire.
