Environment

By Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office   At cruising altitude, airplanes emit a steady stream of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, where the chemicals can linger to produce ozone and fine particulates. Nitrogen oxides, or NOx, are a major source of air pollution and have been associated with asthma, respiratory disease, and cardiovascular disorders.…

Air Co.’s technology and integrated process helps to combat anthropogenic climate change by transforming carbon dioxide and water into ethanol and oxygen, driven solely by renewable electricity. Climate change is exacerbated by our reliance on burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Plants continue to sequester carbon dioxide via photosynthesis, but we…

By Chris Cogswell, customer consultant and Kane Gu, product manager Elsevier When it comes to the materials we use in industry and daily life, we’re facing a range of new challenges — from shortages to environmental issues, to the need for new materials to support technology innovation. On top of this, consumer awareness is on…

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Although most of the planet is covered by water, only a fraction of it is clean enough for humans to use. Therefore, it is important to recycle this resource whenever possible. Current purification techniques cannot adequately handle the very hot wastewater generated by some industries. But now, researchers reporting in…

New York State today announced the unveiling of a new energy storage project that uses an innovation in lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology. The success of this project will demonstrate the safety and use of commercial energy storage systems that could enable more integration of renewable energy resources into the grid. Located at the New York…

By Colleen MacPherson Many have dreamed of being able to turn straw into gold like the fabled Rumpelstiltskin. While this may not be possible in the literal sense, scientists are using sunlight to turn straw into something more valuable. With the aid of technology from the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan,…

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) has worked for a long time to iron out all issues around the energy efficiency, durability, product yield rate and cost of dye-sensitized cells (DSC), a replacement for battery power sources in indoor applications. Their efforts have brought about a production facility capable of producing 2700 m2 (120,000 pieces) of…

 By Theresa Duque We rely on water to quench our thirst and to irrigate bountiful farmland. But what do you do when that once pristine water is polluted with wastewater from abandoned copper mines? A promising solution relies on materials that capture heavy metal atoms, such as copper ions, from wastewater through a separation process…

By Kimberly A Askey From soda bottles to car bumpers to piping, electronics and packaging, plastics have become a ubiquitous part of our lives. Advancements in materials have made plastics low cost, flexible, hygienic, lightweight, durable and readily available. While some plastics are recyclable, only a fraction — about 8.4% nationally in 2017, according to…

By Manette Fisher, [email protected] For responding with innovative solutions during the pandemic, developing solar cell and hydrogen research technology and creatively working with companies, Sandia National Laboratories won six prestigious regional 2020 Federal Laboratory Consortium awards. The awards for the Mid-Continent and Far West regions put a spotlight on Sandia successes in transferring technology, partnerships…

By Chris Adam, [email protected]  A Purdue University innovator and his team are among the quarterfinalists in a national solar desalination innovation contest. They received the recognition for a technology to use solar power to purify high salinity water, such as treating desalination brine or produced water from oil and gas extraction. The team includes two…

Dow (NYSE:DOW) announced the winners of the 2020 Packaging Innovation Awards recognizing breakthrough packaging achievements in design, technology, sustainability and user experience. The highest honor, the Diamond Award, went to Henkel’s  Social Plastic Ecosystem in collaboration with Plastic Bank. To create a new line of sustainable cosmetic packaging, Henkel conducted a pilot program that utilized recycled…

Superclean Glass has developed a new technology that has potential to reduce the cost of solar energy: New generation of electrostatic based self-cleaning technology for increasing energy yield from dusty solar panels. The original concept was used by NASA to prevent Martian dust deposition on solar panels of the Mars rovers, where the screen of…

By David L. Chandler, MIT News Office Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have significantly boosted the output from a system that can extract drinkable water directly from the air even in dry regions, using heat from the sun or another source. The system, which builds on a design initially developed three years ago at MIT…

by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Membrane separations have become critical to human existence, with no better example than water purification. As water scarcity becomes more common and communities start running out of cheap available water, they need to supplement their supplies with desalinated water from seawater and brackish water sources. LLNL researchers have created carbon…

Water rushes through tubes and computer racks, providing a warm-water cooling system and keeping the high-performance computers from overheating at Sandia National Laboratories’ newest data center. (Photo by Bret Latter) Sandia National Laboratories is being recognized by the Department of Energy and the Green Building Council for its efforts to support green and sustainable building…

By Karen K Dunlap Prometheus Fuels has licensed an ethanol-to-jet-fuel conversion process developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The ORNL technology will enable cost-competitive production of jet fuel and co-production of butadiene for use in renewable polymer synthesis. The mission of Prometheus Fuels, a startup based in Santa Cruz,…

by University College London Extremely energy-efficient artificial intelligence is now closer to reality after a study by University College London researchers found a way to improve the accuracy of a brain-inspired computing system. The system, which uses memristors to create artificial neural networks, is at least 1,000 times more energy efficient than conventional transistor-based AI…

by Rutgers University-New Brunswick Rutgers researchers have created a miniature device for measuring trace levels of toxic lead in sediments at the bottom of harbors, rivers and other waterways within minutes – far faster than currently available laboratory-based tests, which take days. The affordable lab-on-a-chip device could also allow municipalities, water companies, universities, K-12 schools,…

UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle PET plastic waste, such as soda or water bottles, into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage. Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources, such as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty and…

Energy Exploration Technologies (EnergyX) and ProfMOF announce a partnership between their companies to promote the use of Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs), a relatively new class of nanotechnology materials suitable in the development of projects involving renewable energy and large-scale lithium-ion production and battery storage. ProfMOF is the world leader in the research and development of…

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced $40M in funding over five years for a new research center aimed at developing hybrid photoelectrodes for converting sunlight into liquid fuels. Chemists from DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory will be key partners in this effort, dubbed the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels…

By Theresa Duque In the fight against climate change, scientists have searched for ways to replace fossil fuels with carbon-free alternatives such as hydrogen fuel. A device known as a photoelectrical chemical cell (PEC) has the potential to produce hydrogen fuel through artificial photosynthesis, an emerging renewable energy technology that uses energy from sunlight to…

Dow (NYSE: DOW) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) shared the results of their inaugural Carbon Challenge to mark the one-year anniversary of the project’s announcement. The challenge received a total of 63 entries across 16 cities in Northern Asia covering about 7.5 million square meters. Jointly, these 63 buildings saved 38,000 metric tons…

A research proposal submitted by the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and Nuclear Science and Technology (NST) Department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, with the startup Forge Nano as a partner, has been selected as a 2020 Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) project. Of the 82 technologies selected from among more…