Hydrogen gas is the most clean-burning gas known to man. Yet methane, even if it's a sibling of petrol, got its way through the alternative fuels industry, and it is more widely used nowadays, as fuel prices oscillate between skyscrapers and small houses. Methane is also one of the cleanest burning fuels, and that makes it viable for a while. Methane reservoirs still exist all around the world, and there's plenty of it to help make a clean transition to hydrogen.
Lockheed Martin, specialized in building rockets and aircraft engines, is surprisingly taking over this niche of energy production. They spent the last year studying how to make a big and long fiberglass pipe to sink it into the ocean.
South Korean professor Jaephil Cho (and, of course, a team of his students) from Hanyung University have developed a lithium-ion battery that lasts eight times longer than the actual models do.
Quantumsphere, on the other hand, presented last september a Li-Ion battery with a new that lasts five times more than traditional ones.
Do you know that electrons can be "cooled"? The cooling of an electron, in lay language, is the transitory state in which the electron passes from a high-oscillation state to a low-oscillation, normal state. The high oscillation state is given by an external stimulus, i.e. electric voltage.
G.D. Botto, an Italian inventor and physicist, performing experiments on a technique for hydrogen generation, has discovered that a chain of iron and platinum wires, wrapped around a wooden stick and alternately connected as thermocouples, can be used to convert a temperature difference into an electric voltage.
Unlike incinerators, which use combustion to break down garbage, there is no burning, or oxidation, in this process. The heat from plasma converters causes pyrolysis, a process in which organic matter breaks down and decomposes. Plasma torches can operate in airtight vessels. Combustion requires oxidization; pyrolysis does not.
A team of UCLA scientists (Yang Yang and Richard Kaner), located at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), have discovered a technology of making graphene sheets in big quantities and at a low price. Graphene is being used to soak up hydrogen and store it efficiently.
Dean Kamen, a UK inventor, has just released to the public a modified electric Ford Th!nk, hacked in his DEKA labs. DEKA is his company located in Manchester Millyard. Kamen's modified electric car has a Stirling engine onboard, into the trunk. He uses the stirling engine mainly to defrost and heat the car, because the systems doing that are huge power consumers.
Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology developed a new type of small-scale electric power generator, based on stretching and releasing zinc oxide wires encapsulated in a flexible plastic with two ends bonded.
For whoever laughed at those inventions and inventors claiming that they run their cars on hydrogen, or improve their mileage using hydrogen generated on-board their cars, here's a piece of news that's going to raise an eyebrow.
