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Category: sustainability – Page 165

Meyers Manx, the original maker of the Volkswagen Beetle-based, fiberglass-bodied beach buggy from the 1960s, just published the starting price for its all-new, all-electric Manx 2.0 electric buggy, and it’s not exactly cheap.

Revealed last year at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, the company’s first all-new vehicle in nearly 20 years starts at $74,000 for the base variant with the 20-kilowatt-hour battery pack and yet-to-be-released performance figures. That’s almost as expensive as the recently introduced Tesla Model S Standard Range, which starts at $78,490 and offers a 320-mile range.

The base MSRP came with no extra information and was casually thrown in a sentence at the end of the press release for the company’s new Resorter Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV), which debuted last week at The Quail, so we still don’t know how much the top-of-the-line model will set prospective customers back.

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In a recent advance, researchers have created a novel battery charger that can support present and future generations of battery packs for EVs across a vast range of voltages: anything between 120 and 900 volts. The new tech is described in a study published in the September edition of theIEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.

These next-generation batteries will bring shorter charging times while also weighing less, which means that EVs can be ready to drive sooner and travel farther on a full charge. “However, charging these high-voltage batteries with existing chargers degrades the efficiency, due to operating at twice the rated voltage,” says Deepak Ronanki, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in Chennai, India, and an IEEE senior member who was involved in the study.

Ronanki and doctoral research scholar Harish Karneddi created a universal charger capable of supporting voltages between 120 and 900 V—something they say had not yet otherwise been achieved.

Ronanki and Karneddi’s battery charger is actually a two-stage charger, with a front-end boost-buck power factor correction (PFC) circuit followed by a reconfigurable DC-DC converter. As the term “boost-buck” suggests, the battery charger can boost the voltage when the battery voltage is greater than the input voltage and, conversely, buck the voltage when the battery voltage is less than the input voltage.

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People living in dry but foggy areas can benefit from this technology.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a system that captures fog in the atmosphere and simultaneously removes contaminants while running using solar power.

The harvesting and water treatment system consists of a metal wire mesh with a solar-light-activated reactive coating that captures the fog. The droplets of water then trickle down into a container below. The mesh is coated with a mixture of specially selected polymers and titanium dioxide, which acts as a chemical catalyst and breaks down the molecules of the pollutants into harmless particles.

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Flexible polymers made with a new generation of the Nobel-winning “click chemistry” reaction find use in capacitors and other applications.

Society’s increasing demand for high-voltage electrical technologies – including pulsed power systems, cars, electrified aircraft, and renewable energy applications – requires a new generation of capacitors that store and deliver large amounts of energy under intense thermal and electrical conditions.

A new polymer-based device that efficiently handles record amounts of energy while withstanding extreme temperatures and electric fields has now been developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Scripps Research. The device is composed of materials synthesized via a next-generation version of the chemical reaction for which three scientists won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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Creating novel materials by combining layers with unique, beneficial properties seems like a fairly intuitive process—stack up the materials and stack up the benefits. This isn’t always the case, however. Not every material will allow energy to travel through it the same way, making the benefits of one material come at the cost of another.

Using cutting-edge tools, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Warsaw have created a new layered structure with 2D materials that exhibits a unique transfer of energy and charge. Understanding its may lead to advancements in technologies such as solar cells and other optoelectronic devices. The results were published in the journal Nano Letters.

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of materials structured like sandwiches with . The meat of a TMD is a , which can form with electrons on their outermost orbit or shell, like most elements, as well as the next shell. That metal is sandwiched between two layers of chalcogens, a category of elements that contains oxygen, sulfur, and selenium.

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Researchers have developed “smart rust,” iron oxide nanoparticles that clean water by attracting pollutants such as oil, nano-and microplastics, glyphosate, and even estrogen hormones.

Pouring flecks of rust into water typically makes it dirtier. However, a groundbreaking development by researchers has led to the creation of “smart rust,” a type of iron oxide nanoparticle that can purify water. This smart rust has the unique ability to attract various pollutants, such as oil, nano-and microplastics, and the herbicide glyphosate, depending on the particles’ coating. What makes it even more efficient is its magnetic nature, which allows easy removal from water using a magnet, taking the pollutants along with it. Recently, the team has optimized these particles to capture estrogen hormones, which can be detrimental to aquatic life.

Presentation and Significance.

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Led by the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) and backed by the UK government, FlyZero has concluded that green liquid hydrogen is the optimum fuel for zero-carbon emission flight and could power a midsize aircraft with 280 passengers from London to San Francisco directly, or from London to Auckland with just one stop.

FlyZero, the UK study into zero-carbon emission commercial air travel, has published its vision for a new generation of aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen, today Thursday 17th March.

The report “Our Vision for Zero-Carbon Emission Air Travel” marks the conclusion of a 12-month study which set out to consider the feasibility of zero-carbon emission aircraft. The project concludes aviation can achieve net zero 2050 through the development of both sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and green liquid hydrogen technologies.

To secure market share on new hydrogen-powered aircraft, UK companies must be ready to demonstrate technologies by 2025. This timescale is key for new zero-carbon emission aircraft to enter service by 2035 and to achieve the net zero 2050 target.

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