This photograph, by J. Revillard for the Solar Impulse project, speaks well more than a thousand words. It exemplifies the aspirations those of us feel who want to see the skies filled with quiet, efficient aircraft. If the individuals who’ve made this beautiful sight possible want to inspire others, they’ve succeed admirably. Follow the flight of Solar Impulse across America and see more pictures here.
GraphExeter Aims for Power with Transparency
It doesn’t sound much like dispassionate, objective scholarly reporting, but the University of Exeter in England headlines its report on a University-created breakthrough material, “Revolutionary new device joins world of smart electronics.” Layering graphene and the GraphExeter, a material obviously headed for product marketing, gives a “new flexible, transparent, photosensitive device” that can lead to solar-powered clothing able to charge the wearer’s cell phone, “intelligent” windows that can “harvest light and display images,” and just maybe (in this writer’s dreams) help power electric cars and airplanes. GraphExeter, Exeter claims, is the best known room temperature transparent conductor and with graphene – the thinnest conductive material – the pair make for great potential. Researchers developed GraphExeter by sandwiching molecules of ferric chloride in between two layers of graphene. According to the University, “Saverio Russo, Professor of Physics at the University of Exeter said: ‘This new flexible and transparent photosensitive device uses graphene and graphExeter to convert light into electrical signals …
Hey, My Car Needs a Jump Start. May I Borrow Your Cell Phone?
Seriously, think of a battery in your cell phone that could jump start a car, and then be recharged “in the blink of an eye.” That’s exactly what mechanical science and engineering professor William P. King and his team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign claim to have created. The most powerful microbatteries ever documented “outpower even the best supercapacitors” and could be in cell phones and small portable devices in the next few years. “This is a whole new way to think about batteries,” King said. “A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it.” Until now, the need for portable power left one with a sharply-delineated choice – to …
Peel-and-Stick Solar Cells Make Debut
The U. S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Stanford University have teamed up to create what may be the thinnest of thin solar cells – a peel-and-stick decal. One micron thick, the decal-like peel-and-stick, or water-assisted transfer printing (WTP), technologies were developed by Stanford researchers and have been used for nanowire based electronics. Meeting at a conference where both made presentations, Stanford’s Xiaolin Zheng talked about her peel-and-stick technology, and NREL principal scientist Qi Wang spoke on his team’s research in thin-film amorphous solar cells. Zheng realized that the NREL had the type of solar cells needed for her peel-and-stick project, according to the NREL announcement. The NREL press release explains, “The university and NREL showed that thin-film solar cells less than one-micron thick can be removed from a silicon substrate used for fabrication by dipping them in water at room temperature. Then, after exposure to heat of about 90°C for a few seconds, they can …
Floating Over the Danube: The Vision of the Little Tailor of Ulm Lives
The beautiful blue Danube River of Strauss waltz fame, “…Rises in the Black Forest mountains of western Germany and flows for some 1,770 miles (2,850 kilometers) to its mouth on the Black Sea. Along its course, it passes through nine countries: Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1811, Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, a tailor in the city of Ulm near the headwaters of the second longest river in Europe, tried a novel idea – flying across the river on a nicely sewn-together hang glider. His splashdown marked the end of his aeronautical career, but made him famous and an unlikely harbinger of things to come. City fathers have announced, “In the spirit of Berblinger, and continuing his vision, the City of Ulm aims to promote innovative developments in general aviation that makes it possible to perform an environmentally sustainable long-distance flight. The long-distance objective is a competition flight following the course of the Danube along its whole length from source to mouth, as free of …
Small, Quick, and Getting Quicker
Frédéric Laude reports on the Flying Electron blog about his recent flight in the CC01e, a small canard aircraft designed by Claude Chudzik 30 years ago and pulled from storage to see if it could benefit from electric power. After a first, one-lap-around-the-field flight on March 23, Frédéric made a second flight of 15 minutes the following day. On landing, the team found that the batteries still had 60-percent of their full charge remaining. The airplane was stable and easy to fly, despite the presence of a big helicopter that seemed to insist on making the circuits with the petite canard. Problems with the in-line landing gear persisted, though, and the team spent the next several weeks modifying a nose gear that needed strengthening. They replaced a weak aluminum piece with titanium and made changes to the retraction mechanism. On the airplane’s third flight April 13, Frédéric noted, “We still had a little problem with that damn front,” referring to …
Vanadium Oxide/Lithium Batteries Offer Promise of High Power, Long Life
Henry Ford once brought a French metallurgist to Detroit, part of his plan to build cars with lighter, stronger steel. Vanadium, which the French used in their automobiles, offered him the chance to make the Model T lighter and stronger, and its part in the car’s alloyed steel gave the Model T the longevity which followed it through one of the longest production runs in history. Now battery researchers are looking at another quality of this mineral, its ability to form a superior cathode for batteries that “could supply both high energy density and significant power density. Combined with graphene, the wonder material du jour, vanadium oxide (VO2) could couple longevity echoing the Model T’s with charge and discharge rapidity similar to a supercapacitors. Materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan at Rice University created ribbons of vanadium oxide (VO2) thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper, and combined those with atom-thick ribbons of graphene to form cathodes which were built …
Ionic Thrusters Offer Quiet Flight
Gizmag and Science Daily both covered a propulsion system that’s been with us for many decades, but which is just now seeing practical applications in space flight, and may be adapted to terrestrial winged vehicles. Your editor might have passed it over as overhyped, but the research came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was published in The Proceeding of the Royal Academy – two good indicators of veracity. Jennifer Chu of MIT’s News Office explains, “When a current passes between two electrodes — one thinner than the other — it creates a wind in the air between. If enough voltage is applied, the resulting wind can produce a thrust without the help of motors or fuel.” That phrase, “If enough voltage is applied…” is a significant qualification. “Electrohydrodynamic thrust,” or “ionic wind” has been known since the 1960s, but limited to hobbyists and science fair projects. This video from China demonstrates the use of electric thrusters to …
Hydrogen as a Biofuel?
While we’ve written recently about “artificial leaves” that emulate the photosynthesis of their real counterparts, researchers have announced the discovery of a way to extract hydrogen from any plant, which “could help end our dependence on fossil fuels,” according to Y. H. Percival Zhang, associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). The school describes the process as a “breakthrough that has the potential to bring a low-cost, environmentally friendly fuel source to the world.” Zhang has been working on the problem for over seven years, and like many pioneers, has endured the critical appraisal of those not in tune with his aspirations. Esquire magazine in its November 2006 issue labeled Zhang’s early iteration of his idea to break down plant sugars to create cheap cellulosic ethanol and possibly even hydrogen as the “Crazy idea of the year: “sugar cars.” …
Nanowire Solar Cells Surprise and Excite
Long-time friend of the blog, and occasional corrector of the editor’s attempts at incorporating French into the proceedings, Colin Rush sent this link to a story about photonics in the Christian Science Monitor. “Wires 1/10,000th the diameter of a human hair can absorb more of the sun’s power than previously thought possible, a new study in Nature Photonics suggests,” writes David Unger, an energy correspondent for the Monitor. Unger’s lead paragraphs pushed your editor to look up several related terms and look further into the researchers’ own writing. “Although still years away from production, nanowire solar cells could push the conversion efficiency of the sun’s energy past the so-called Shockley-Queisser limit, which for decades has served as a fixed ceiling in solar energy research. “Such a breakthrough would be significant because the sun’s power is wildly abundant, but diffuse, and difficult to harvest. Even increasing the limit by a few percent would go a long way in making solar a more viable alternative to …