MIT Researchers are Printing Solar Cells on Sheets of Paper Published on August 20, 2011 by admin · No Comments Geek.com Solar power is a great alternative energy source, but it’s unfortunately a rather expensive one. However, researchers at MIT are working on a new and less-expensive way to make solar cells which involves printing them directly on to fabric or paper. We’re not talking about any fancy paper or fabrics. The MIT researchers discovered the printing process works on just about any paper, from regular printer paper, to tissue paper, and even to already-printed newspaper.
However, printing the cells is not as simple. It must be done in a vacuum-tight room where the special “ink” is deposited on the paper. It’s a much easier method than the current one, which needs super high-temperature liquids at several hundred degrees Celsius to create the cells. Read Entire Article HERE. 3D printing with ocean plastic waste. Green Housing. Photosynthesis Fuel Company Gets a Large Investment. Green tea: Joule Energy’s SolarConverter turns carbon dioxide and sunlight into ethanol fuel at a pilot plant in Leander, Texas.
Joule Unlimited, a startup based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has received $70 million to commercialize technology that uses microörganisms to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. The company claims that its genetically engineered bacteria will eventually be able to produce ethanol for as little as $1.23 a gallon or diesel fuel for $1.19 a gallon, less than half the current cost of both fossil fuels and existing biofuels. The new funding comes from undisclosed investors and will allow the company to expand from an existing pilot plant to its first small-scale production facility, in Hobbs, New Mexico. Joule Unlimited has designed a device it calls the SolarConverter, in which thin, clear panels circulate brackish water and a nitrogen-based growth medium bubbling with carbon dioxide. ‘Artificial leaf’ makes fuel from sunlight.
Researchers led by MIT professor Daniel Nocera have produced something they’re calling an “artificial leaf”: Like living leaves, the device can turn the energy of sunlight directly into a chemical fuel that can be stored and used later as an energy source. The artificial leaf — a silicon solar cell with different catalytic materials bonded onto its two sides — needs no external wires or control circuits to operate. Simply placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, it quickly begins to generate streams of bubbles: oxygen bubbles from one side and hydrogen bubbles from the other.
If placed in a container that has a barrier to separate the two sides, the two streams of bubbles can be collected and stored, and used later to deliver power: for example, by feeding them into a fuel cell that combines them once again into water while delivering an electric current. The creation of the device is described in a paper published Sept. 30 in the journal Science. Boyan Slat - Plastic & ocean. We dump 8 million tons of plastic into the ocean each year. Where does it all go? What happens to all our plastic bottles and lids and containers after we toss them out? Every single ocean now has a massive swirling plastic garbage patch The vast majority of plastic trash ends up in landfills, just sitting there and taking thousands of years to degrade.
A smaller fraction gets recycled (about 9 percent in the United States). But there's another big chunk that finds its way into the oceans, either from people chucking litter into waterways or from storm-water runoff carrying plastic debris to the coasts. Now we can finally quantify this problem: A new study in Science calculates that between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic waste made it into the ocean in 2010 alone.
Plastic debris in the Mediterranean Sea. And here's another surprise twist: We still don't know where most of that ocean plastic actually ends up. Yet those patches accounted for less than 1 percent of the plastic thought to be in the oceans — and no one quite knows where the other 99 percent went. 'Mutarium' prototype is the perfect farm for edible plastic-eating fungi. The Plastic Bank: harvesting waste. Ocean clean-up robots. The Ocean cleanup. THE OCEAN CLEANUP - Feasibility Study. How the oceans can clean themselves: Boyan Slat at TEDxDelft. The EKOCYCLE Cube, A 3D Printer That Uses Post-Consumer Waste Like Plastic Bottles as Printing Material.