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12 Sep

Floating ‘artificial leaves’ ride the wave of clean fuel production

by TMR Desk
Education, Engineering
Researchers have developed floating 'artificial leaves' that generate clean fuels from sunlight and water, and could eventually operate on a large scale at sea. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, designed ultra-thin, flexible devices, which take their inspiration from photosynthesis -- the process by which plants convert sunlight into food. Since the low-cost, autonomous devices are light enough to float, they could be used to generate a sustainable alternative to petrol without taking up space on land. Outdoor tests of the lightweight leaves on the River Cam -- near iconic Cambridge sites including the Bridge of Sighs, the Wren Library and King's College Chapel -- showed that they can convert sunlight into fuels as efficiently as plant leaves. This is the first...
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12 Sep

Cheaper hydrogen fuel cell could mean better green energy options

by TMR Desk
Technology
Imperial researchers have developed a hydrogen fuel cell that uses iron instead of rare and costly platinum, enabling greater use of the technology. Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity with water vapour as the only by-product, making them an attractive green alternative for portable power, particularly for vehicles. However, their widespread use has been hampered in part by the cost of one of the primary components. To facilitate the reaction that produces the electricity, the fuel cells rely on a catalyst made of platinum, which is expensive and scarce. Now, a European team led by Imperial College London researchers has created a catalyst using only iron, carbon, and nitrogen -- materials that are cheap and readily available -- and shown that it...
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11 Sep

Plastic upcycling: From waste to fuel for less

by TMR Desk
Education
Problem plastics could be diverted from landfills and converted into fuel sources with new technology A plastics recycling innovation that does more with less, presented today at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago, simultaneously increases conversion to useful products while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. "The key discovery we report is the very low metal load," said Pacific Northwest National Laboratory chemist Janos Szanyi, who led the research team. "This makes the catalyst much cheaper." The new method more efficiently converts plastics to valuable commodity chemicals -- a process termed "upcycling." In addition, it produces much less methane, an undesirable greenhouse gas, as a byproduct, compared with other reported methods. "It was very interesting to us that there had been...
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