Forget exploiting carbon nanotubes electrochemically, and just wind them up like clockwork if you want to store energy. This is not quite the message that researchers at the University of Maryland Baltimore County are delivering, but it might as well be as a team from there is storing 2.1MJ/kg in twisted carbon nanotubes – more, weight-for-weight, than Li-ion chemistry can ...
Tag Archives: energy
Energy harvester dc-dc can run from two ambient sources
E-peas has created a power IC that can mediate between two energy harvesters, a 5V charger, a power store and a load. AEM13920 can work from any combination of two sources including: photo-voltaic cells, thermo-electric generators, RF energy harvesters or kinetic pulsed sources. “For instance, a remote control could have separate PV cells on its front and rear, to maintain ...
300kW wave energy generator back-on-track
CorPower Ocean has resumed the deployment of its commercial-scale C4 wave energy generator, following repairs at Portugal’s Aguçadoura offshore wave energy test site. Earlier this year, CorPower found cable damage at the site, recovered the cable using remotely-operated vehicles and construction vessels, and refurbished the link. “With the site infrastructure restored, CorPower Ocean has resumed the deployment programme by testing ...
Anglia is now carbon-neutral
Cambridgeshire distributor Anglia Components has achieved Carbon Neutral Scheme accreditation, in partnership with ClimatePartner, by offsetting carbon emissions due to its business operations and committing to further emission reductions. This is on top of maintaining an ISO 14001 compliant environmental management system. “When customers started to ask us about carbon offsetting, we took the decision that this was a concept ...
Anchor ready for 300kW wave energy buoy
The first anchor has been installed for CorPower’s 9m diameter 300kW C4 wave power converter. The custom anchor, dubbed Umack, has been installed 4km off the coast of northern Portugal at Aguçadoura, where the giant buoy will be part of the HiWave-5 wave power demonstration project. C4 generates power by bobbing up and down along the axis of its single ...
CorPower builds first giant hull for wave energy converter
CorPower Ocean has revealed the first 9m diameter hull for its 300kW C4 wave energy converter. The hull was built composite machinery specialist Autonational and composite tank specialist CPT Tankwell, in Portugal using a custom-built machine in an environmentally controlled work cell. Yes, it is that big “The C4 hull has been designed with a low-cost sandwich structure comprising of ...
What needs to be done to make useful Li-CO2 batteries?
Lithium-carbon dioxide batteries have theoretical promise, including in aviation where the lightweight materials are desirable – it might might make good use of Mars’ 96% CO2 atmosphere, for example. Headline figures are a theoretical specific energy density of 1,876Wh/kg and a ~2.8V discharge potential, but in practical terms the technology has not even reached infancy. To build a solid foundation for its development, a ...
Liquid silicon for grid-scale energy storage
White-hot liquid silicon could be the key to storing the vast amounts of energy needed to run a renewables-based national power grid, according to MIT, which claims it “would be vastly more affordable than lithium-ion batteries” and “would cost about half as much as pumped hydroelectric storage, the cheapest form of grid-scale energy storage to date”. Liquid silicon has been ...
Organic solar cells face large scale tropical test
Heliatek has installed the second phased of organic photovoltaic solar cells on its Singapore pilot project. The opaque organic solar film was installed on the west façade of a building called Cleantech I on steel panels with 56 2m-long films and 45 films of 3.25m-long laminated into 15 glass sheets. Prior to this, 87 soar films were mounted on glass ...
EW: Harvesting chips run from 80mV
Analog Devices has introduced energy harvesting chips for thermoelectric and photovoltaic sources. Called ADP5091 and ADP5092, they are based on the similar ADP5090, released over a year go. “We have optimised what we had, improved the start-up circuit, and added an adjustable voltage regulator”, company technical director Uwe Brockelmann told Electronics Weekly at Embedded World in Nuremberg. The extra adjustable regulator is ...