Category: New Inventions

The system directly addresses clean water shortages and crop devastation worldwide.

By Monisha Ravisetti

While generating green energy, solar panels usually create excess heat that goes unused. But with a new, innovative design, scientists have found a way to harness those precious leftovers to give the power producers a second purpose: pulling water out of thin air.

Basically, the self-contained system lays solar panels on a special gel that can collect airborne water vapor. As soon as surplus heat coming from the panels touches the gel, the substance releases a sort of mist into a metal box. Within that container, the gas gets condensed into droplets of water.

The team’s motivation is to provide energy and water that’s cheap, clean and off-grid to residents of remote and especially dry-climate areas.

“Our goal is to create an integrated system of clean energy, water, and food production, especially the water-creation part in our design, which sets us apart from current agrophotovoltaics,” Peng Wang, an environmental engineer at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, said in a statement.Wang is the senior author of a study on the invention published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Continue reading… “New Solar Panel Design Uses Wasted Energy to Make Water From Air”

By MICHELLE SHEN 

MIT researchers have developed a new material that’s as strong as steel but as light as plastic.

It can be easily manufactured in large quantities, and the use cases range from lightweight coatings for cars and phones to building blocks for massive structures such as bridges, according to Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of a new study.

“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things,” he said in a statement from MIT. “It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that.”

The material is several times stronger than bulletproof glass, and the amount of force needed to break it is twice that of steel, despite the fact that the material has only about one-sixth the density of steel, according to MIT.

Continue reading… “MIT researchers create new material as strong as steel and light as plastic”

Air suspension wheels for mining trucks and wheel loader.

By Nick Thomas

Global Air Cylinder Wheels (GACW), an Arizona-based startup, has literally reinvented the wheel. They developed a new type of wheel that ditches the need for pollutive rubber tires.

Many companies have tried to create new tire solutions, such as Tesla possibly moving toward airless tires on its Model 3, but none have succeeded so far.

The so-called Air Suspension Wheel (ASW) is the brainchild of serial inventor and structural dynamic engineer Dr. Zoltan Kemeny. The patented ASW is a mechanical wheel constructed mostly of steel with in-wheel pneumatic suspension through cylinders. It is both environmentally friendly as well as cost-efficient. The ASW is engineered to have the same lifespan as the vehicle it is mounted on. After that, unlike rubber tires, it can be reconditioned or can be completely recycled.

Continue reading… “Arizona-based startup has literally reinvented the wheel”

3D printed materials treated with a reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) agent have been shown to self-heal under UV lights.

by Neil Martin

UNSW engineers have demonstrated a way to help 3D printed plastic heal itself at room temperature using only lights.

Professor Cyrille Boyer and his team, Dr. Nathaniel Corrigan and Mr Michael Zhang, in the UNSW School of Chemical Engineering have shown that the addition of “special powder” to the liquid resin used in the printing process can later assist with making quick and easy repairs should the material break.

This can be done very simply by shining standard LED lights on the printed plastic for around one hour which causes a chemical reaction and fusion of the two broken pieces. 

The entire process actually makes the repaired plastic even stronger than it was before it was damaged, and it is hoped that further development and commercialisation of the technique will help to reduce chemical waste in the future.

That is because broken plastic parts would not need to be discarded, or even recycled, and could be mended simply even when remaining embedded in a component including many other materials.

The results of the team’s research have now been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Continue reading… “Self-healing 3D printed plastic can repair itself using only light”

Pilot condenser used at ETH Zurich.

Fresh water is scarce in many parts of the world and must be obtained at great expense. Communities near the ocean can desalinate sea water for this purpose, but doing so requires a large amount of energy. Further away from the coast, practically often the only remaining option is to condense atmospheric humidity through cooling, either through processes that similarly require high energy input or by using “passive” technologies that exploit the temperature swing between day and night. However, with current passive technologies, such as dew-collecting foils, water can be extracted only at night. This is because the sun heats the foils during the day, which makes condensation impossible.

Continue reading… “Harvesting water from the air, 24 hours a day, with no energy input”