Right now organic solar cells, although cheap, are too inefficient to compete with silicon-based ones. A team of researchers from Wake Forest University in North Carolina have developed a practical method of doubling the efficiency of organic (or dye-sensitized) solar cells by adding a layer of upright optical fibers acting as sunlight traps.
Originally designed for studying astrophysics, a fusion reactor of the MIT from the 1970s, called "Alcator", could be the base of another one to be installed in Russia and managed by Bruno Coppi. The new reactor is called Ignitor and, as far as the plans sound, it is ready to surpass ITER as both performance and time to go into production.
Daniel Nocera, a face we see more and more often on the stage of alternative energy, along with postdoctoral researcher Mircea Dinca and graduate student Yogesh Surendranath, discovered a material that can work efficiently and sustainably as an oxygen...
FEV showed off their LiiOn-drive (modded) Fiat 500 at the Vienna Motor Symposium last week. It is a plug-in hybrid that was presented at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit last year.
Sewage treatment plants always consume energy to filter water (around 44 watt-hours per day per person). They use three types of bacteria and energy to pump oxygen for the first type of bacteria and methanol for the second. Adding the fact that methanol is also produced through an energy-intensive process... you can pull the conclusions.
GM is currently in talks with Google for a joint venture to develop an integrated car system based on the Android OS, of which you may have heard lately. They also say Android is going to be animating Chevy Volt's interface.
As electric vehicles seem to increase their market share in the next few years, alternative energy companies think of methods to store the excess power produced during the night, when electricity utilities don't buy their energy, because of reduced consumption.
Their newly-invented treated glass features a transmittance of at least 97 percent, which could be good for using in solar panels. The company says that the use of their glass could enhance the efficiency of solar cells by 2 to 3 percent.
After sleeping for a while, energy-producing shock absorbers appear in the news again. Levant Power, a company from Massachusetts, produces such shock absorbers that are developed by Cambridge. The company claims that their product can lower fuel consumption by 1.5 to 6 percent, depending on the vehicle and driving conditions.
Lithium ion batteries have been on the mainstream of electricity storage for a while, providing power for applications ranging from mobile phones to electric/hybrid cars. Still, lithium ion batteries need further development that would further increase their capacity and lifetime.
