Sustainable energy solution developed by rubbish collection

Engineerblogger
July 3, 2012

The Pyroformer overcomes many of the problems other renewable energy solutions have generated

As fuel prices continue to increase, researchers from the European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI) at Aston University, have developed an innovative bioenergy solution that uses waste products to generate cost-effective heat and power and that could reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.

The market opportunities of the equipment – a Pyroformer, developed by Professor Andreas Hornung, of EBRI – also offer business benefits to the West Midlands region. It is anticipated that 35 jobs will be directly safeguarded or created and over 1,000 indirect jobs created in the West Midlands by 2022 as a result. This would see an increase in the turnover of the West Midlands’ regional bioenergy industry and will result in an increase in Net Regional GVA of £105 million by the same date.

The Pyroformer overcomes many of the problems other renewable energy solutions have generated. Tests have shown that unlike other bioenergy plants, the Pyroformer has no negative environmental or food security impacts. It can use multiple waste sources and therefore does not require the destruction of rainforests or the use of agricultural land for the growth of specialist bioenergy crops. In fact biochar - one of its by-products - can even be used as a fertiliser to increase crop yields.

As well as generating heat and power, the Pyroformer also dramatically reduces the amount of material sent to landfill.

Professor Andreas Hornung, Head of the European Bioenergy Research Institute at Aston University, said: “This Pyroformer is the first of its kind in the UK and the first industrial scale plant is now up and running at Harper Adams University College before it is permanently installed on the Aston campus later this year. We are delighted with the tests taking place at Harper Adams which are demonstrating that this really is a low carbon, renewable and sustainable energy source.

“However, this is about more than just energy provision. We believe this bioenergy technology could be a key stimulator of growth and jobs in the region and the reaction of the business community so far has been very enthusiastic. If you are looking for a clean energy source that ensures energy security without damaging people or planet, we already have the solution.”

The Pyroformer is capable of processing up to 100 kg/h of biomass feed and when coupled with a gasifier it will have an output of 400 kWeI – this is the equivalent to providing power for 800 homes[1]. It is currently being tested at Harper Adams University College in Shropshire before moving to its permanent home at EBRI’s new £16.5m ERDF funded laboratories later this year. This facility will showcase the Pyroformer to industry and demonstrate how real-life solutions for tackling biomass based residues and waste can be achieved, with both environmental and financial benefits for households, businesses and local authorities.

Source: Aston University (European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI))

Additional Information: 

• [1] 800 homes based on a consumption of approximately 3000 kwH per home.

Northwestern Researchers Create “Rubber-Band Electronics”

Engineerblogger
July 2, 2012

Yonggang Huang

For people with heart conditions and other ailments that require monitoring, life can be complicated by constant hospital visits and time-consuming tests. But what if much of the testing done at hospitals could be conducted in the patient’s home, office, or car?

Scientists foresee a time when medical monitoring devices are integrated seamlessly into the human body, able to track a patient’s vital signs and transmit them to his doctors. But one major obstacle continues to hinder technologies like these: electronics are too rigid.

Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering, working with a team of scientists from the United States and abroad, have recently developed a design that allows electronics to bend and stretch to more than 200 percent their original size, four times greater than is possible with today’s technology. The key is a combination of a porous polymer and liquid metal.

A paper about the findings, “Three-dimensional Nanonetworks for Giant Stretchability in Dielectrics and Conductors,” was published June 26 in the journal Nature Communications.

“With current technology, electronics are able to stretch a small amount, but many potential applications require a device to stretch like a rubber band,” said Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, who conducted the research with partners at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (South Korea), Dalian University of Technology (China), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “With that level of stretchability we could see medical devices integrated into the human body.”

In the past five years, Huang and collaborators at the University of Illinois have developed electronics with about 50 percent stretchability, but this is not high enough for many applications.

One challenge facing these researchers has been overcoming a loss of conductivity in stretchable electronics. Circuits made from solid metals that are on the market today can survive a small amount of stretch, but their electrical conductivity plummets by 100 times when stretched. “This conductivity loss really defeats the point of stretchable electronics,” Huang said.

Huang’s team has found a way to overcome these challenges. First, they created a highly porous three-dimensional structure using a polymer material, poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS), that can stretch to three times its original size. Then they placed a liquid metal (EGaIn) inside the pores, allowing electricity to flow consistently even when the material is excessively stretched.

The result is a material that is both highly stretchable and extremely conductive.

“By combining a liquid metal in a porous polymer, we achieved 200 percent stretchability in a material that does not suffer from stretch,” Huang said. “Once you achieve that technology, any electronic can behave like a rubber band.”

The graduate student Shuodao Wang at Northwestern University is a co-author of the paper.

Source: Northwestern University

The world’s largest offshore wind farm: The Big Project London Array

The Engineer
June 25, 2012

Providing power: electricity is taken from the turbines and transferred to the shore

Of all the components that will make up the UK’s new energy landscape in the coming decades, wind is perhaps the most contentious. Supporters and opponents are seemingly entrenched in their positions, with the intermittency of wind being the biggest stumbling block to the acceptance of wind turbines and farms.

For the supporters of wind energy, the potential of offshore wind is the trump card; stronger, more sustained in magnitude and direction, and much less intermittent than onshore wind, the wind out to sea is said to offer real possibilities for the reliable generation of renewable power.

But it’s far more difficult to build off shore than on shore, and, as yet, there are no really large offshore wind farms. The current largest is Walney Island, off the coast of Cumbria, whose 102 turbines have a combined capacity of 367.2MW and power some 320,000 homes in the north west. Even that is a newcomer to the UK’s energy mix, coming on stream less than a fortnight before The Engineer went to press.

But Walney is fairly modest in size. A far larger installation, billed by its developers as the world’s first truly industrial-scale wind farm, is currently under construction. The London Array, sited in the outer Thames Estuary between the Kent and Essex coasts, will have a generating capacity of 1,000MW, making it the first wind farm to have a capacity comparable to a land-based power station; for comparison, the Sizewell B nuclear power station has a capacity of almost 1,200MW.

The site for the London Array is between two bastions of the British seaside resort, Margate and Clacton, around seven miles off the shore and in water up to 25m deep. Covering an area of about 230km2 (90 square miles), the array will, when complete, consist of 341 separate turbines, each with a capacity of 3.6MW.

The story of the London Array began in 2001, when a survey of the estuary identified the area as being suitable for a large wind farm, having high wind speeds; a range of water depths suitable for turbine installation; nearby ports for construction, operation and maintenance; suitable ground conditions; an accessible high-voltage network connection; and, not least, a ready demand for electricity. When complete and fully online, the array will generate enough electricity for 750,000 homes, its developers claim, which is about a quarter of Greater London’s population.
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Breakthrough could reduce costs for the consumer: Researchers' discovery to improve efficiencies in fuel, chemical and pharmaceutical industries

Engineerblogger
June 3, 2012

The research team built their prototype of the new catalyst using ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets. They used a unique process to encourage growth of these nanosheets at 90-degree angles, similar to building a house of cards.

University of Minnesota engineering researchers are leading an international team that has made a major breakthrough in developing a catalyst used during chemical reactions in the production of gasoline, plastics, biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals. The discovery could lead to major efficiencies and cost-savings in these multibillion-dollar industries.

The research is to be published in the June 29, 2012 issue of the leading scientific journal Science.

“The impact of this new discovery is enormous,” said the team’s lead researcher Michael Tsapatsis, a chemical engineering and materials science professor in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. “Every drop of gasoline we use needs a catalyst to change the oil molecules into usable gasoline during the refining process.”

This research improves efficiencies by giving molecules fast access to the catalysts where the chemical reactions occur. Tsapatsis compared it to our use of freeways and side streets in our daily lives.

“It’s faster and more efficient to use freeways to get where we want to go and exit to do our business compared to driving the side streets the entire way,” he explained. “The catalysts used today are more like all side streets. Molecules move slowly and get stuck. The efficiencies of these new catalysts could lower the costs of gasoline and other products for all of us.”

The research team built their prototype of the new catalyst using highly optimized ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets. They used a unique process to encourage growth of these nanosheets at 90-degree angles, similar to building a house of cards. The house-of-cards arrangement of the nanosheets makes the catalyst faster, more selective and more stable, but can be made at the same cost (or possibly cheaper) than traditional catalysts.

With faster catalysts available at no extra cost to the producer, production per manufacturing dollar will increase. With a higher output, it is conceivable that consumer costs will drop.

This new discovery builds upon previous discoveries at the University of Minnesota of ultra-thin zeolite nanosheets used as specialized molecular sieves for production of both renewable and fossil-based fuels and chemicals. These discoveries, licensed by the new Minnesota start-up company Argilex Technologies, are key components of the company’s materials-based platform. The development of the new catalyst is complete, and the material is ready for customer testing.

“This breakthrough can have a major impact on both the conversion of natural gas to higher value chemicals and fuels, and on bio- and petroleum refiners,” said Cesar Gonzalez, CEO of Argilex Technologies. “Using catalysts made by this novel approach, refiners will be able to obtain a higher yield of desirable products such as gasoline, diesel, ethylene and propylene. At Argilex, we envision this catalyst technology platform to become a key contributor to efficient use of natural resources and improved economics of the world’s largest industries.“

Researchers on the team are from around the globe. In addition to the University of Minnesota, researchers are from institutions in Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, Korea and Sweden.

Primary funding for this research is from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center for Catalysis and Energy Innovation, an Energy Frontier Research Center. The University of Minnesota is a partner in this multi-institutional research center at the University of Delaware. Other funding for this research is from the National Science Foundation Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation Program, the University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, and the Abu Dhabi-Minnesota Institute for Research Excellence (ADMIRE) partnership between the University of Minnesota and the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Institute.

Read the full research paper entitled “Synthesis of Self-Pillared Zeolite Nanosheets by Repetitive Branching,” on the Science website: http://z.umn.edu/catalyst.

Source:  University of Minnesota

Energy: Novel Power Plants Could Clean Up Coal

Engineerblogger
June 24, 2012

Cleaner coal: This pilot plant in Italy uses pressurized oxygen to help reduce emissions from burning coal. Credit: Unity Power Alliance

A pair of new technologies could reduce the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and help utilities comply with existing and proposed environmental regulations, including requirements to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Both involve burning coal in the presence of pure oxygen rather than air, which is mostly nitrogen. Major companies including Toshiba, Shaw, and Itea have announced plans to build demonstration plants for the technologies in coming months.

The basic idea of burning fossil fuels in pure oxygen isn't new. The drawback is that it's more expensive than conventional coal plant technology, because it requires additional equipment to separate oxygen and nitrogen. The new technologies attempt to offset at least some of this cost by improving efficiency and reducing capital costs in other areas of a coal plant. Among other things, they simplify the after-treatment required to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

One of the new technologies, which involves pressurizing the oxygen, is being developed by a partnership between ThermoEnergy, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the major Italian engineering firm Itea. A version of it has been demonstrated at a small plant in Singapore that can generate about 15 megawatts of heat (enough for about five megawatts of electricity).

The technology simplifies the clean-up of flue gases; for example, some pollutants are captured in a glass form that results from high-temperature combustion. It also has the ability to quickly change power output, going from 10 percent to 100 percent of its generating capacity in 30 minutes, says Robert Marrs, ThermoEnergy's VP of business development. Conventional coal plants take several hours to do that. More flexible power production could accommodate changes in supply from variable sources of power like wind turbines and solar panels.

Marrs says that these advantages, along with the technology's higher efficiency at converting the energy in coal into electricity, could make it roughly as cost-effective as retrofitting a coal plant with new technology to meet current EPA regulations, while producing a stream of carbon dioxide that's easy to capture. The technology also reduces net energy consumption at coal plants, because the water produced by combustion is captured and can be recycled. This makes it attractive for use in drought-prone areas, such as some parts of China.

The other technology, being developed by the startup Net Power along with Toshiba, the power producer Exelon, and the engineering firm Shaw, is more radical, and it's designed to make coal plants significantly more efficient than they are today—over 50 percent efficient, versus about 30 percent. The most efficient power plants today use a pair of turbines: a gas turbine and a steam turbine that runs off the gas turbine's exhaust heat. The new technology makes use of the exhaust by directing part of the carbon dioxide in the exhaust stream back into the gas turbine, doing away with the steam turbine altogether. That helps offset the cost of the oxygen separation equipment. The carbon dioxide that isn't redirected to the turbine is relatively pure compared to exhaust from a conventional plant, and it is already highly pressurized, making it suitable for sequestering underground. The technology was originally conceived to work with gasified coal, but the company is planning to demonstrate it first with natural gas, which is simpler because it doesn't require a gasifier. The company says the technology will cost about the same as conventional natural gas plants. Shaw is funding a 25-megawatt demonstration power plant that is scheduled to be completed by mid-2014. Net Power plants to sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies to help improve oil production.

The technologies may be "plausible on paper," says Ahmed Ghoniem, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, but questions remain "until things get demonstrated." (Ghoniem has consulted for ThermoEnergy.) The economics are still a matter of speculation. For one thing, it is "an open question" how much money the technologies could save over conventional pollution control techniques, he says. As a rule, "any time you add carbon dioxide capture, you increase costs," he points out. "The question is by how much." Selling the carbon dioxide to enhance oil recovery can help justify the extra costs, he says, and retrofitting old power plants might help create an initial market. But he says the new technologies won't become widespread unless a price on carbon dioxide emissions is widely adopted.

Ghoniem adds that even if the technology for capturing carbon proves economical, it's still necessary to demonstrate that it's feasible and safe to permanently sequester carbon underground. The challenges of doing that were highlighted by a recent study suggesting that earthquakes could cause carbon dioxide to leak out.

 Source: Technology Review

Science: Breaking the limits of classical physics

Engineerblogger
June 24, 2012

In the quantum optical laboratories at the Niels Bohr
Institute, researchers have conducted experiments that show
that light breaks with the classical physical principles. The
studies show that light can have both an electrical and a
magnetic field, but not at the same time. That is to say, light
has quantum mechanical properties.

With simple arguments, researchers show that nature is complicated! Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have made a simple experiment that demonstrates that nature violates common sense – the world is different than most people believe. The experiment illustrates that light does not behave according to the principles of classical physics, but that light has quantum mechanical properties. The new method could be used to study whether other systems behave quantum mechanically. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.

In physics there are two categories: classical physics and quantum physics. In classical physics, objects, e.g. a car or a ball, have a position and a velocity. This is how we classically look at our everyday world. In the quantum world objects can also have a position and a velocity, but not at the same time. At the atomic level, quantum mechanics says that nature behaves quite differently than you might think. It is not just that we do not know the position and the velocity, rather, these two things simply do not exist simultaneously. But how do we know that they do not exist simultaneously? And where is the border of these two worlds? Researchers have found a new way to answer these questions.

Light on quantum mechanics

“Our goal is to use quantum mechanics in a new way. It is therefore important for us to know that a ‘system’ really behaves in a way that has no classical explanation. To this end, we first examined light,” explains Eran Kot, PhD-student in the research group, Quantum Optics at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Based on a series of experiments in the quantum optics laboratories, they examined the state of light. In classical physics, light possesses both an electric and a magnetic field.

“What our study demonstrated was that light can have both an electric and a magnetic field, but not at the same time. We thus provide a simple proof that an experiment breaks the classical principles. That is to say, we showed light possesses quantum properties, and we can expand this to other systems as well” says Eran Kot.

Classical and non-classical mechanics

The aim of the research is both to fundamentally understand the world, but there is also a practical challenge in being able to exploit quantum mechanics in larger contexts. For light it is no great surprise that it behaves quantum mechanically, but the methods that have been developed can also be used to study other systems.

“We are endeavoring to develop future quantum computers and we therefore need to understand the borders for when something behaves quantum mechanically and when it is classical mechanics,” says professor of quantum physics Anders S. Sørensen, explaining that quantum computing must necessarily be comprised of systems with non-classical properties.

Source: University of Copenhagen

• In the Physical Review Letters, "Breakdown of the Classical Description of a Local System."

Mold-making technology could speed up product development

Engineerblogger
June 23, 2012

3D solid model for a vacuum form tool created in Mechanical Desktop. Credit porenstein.com

 A new way of rapidly producing prototype molds for vacuum-forming processes could help make product development quicker and cheaper.

The system uses a grid of adjustable pins to quickly create different shapes that function as molds for plastic vacuum forming, rather than the now-conventional method of rapid prototyping that involves building molds layer by layer (additive manufacturing).

The inventor of the prototype technology, Brunel University student Patrick Bion, said the system would enable product developers to make changes to prototypes much more quickly than with additive manufacturing.

‘Many companies now use additive manufacturing for making molds, but rather than having four hours of making a mould to then vacuum form onto and then needing to change something and repeat that process we’re looking for instantaneous molding,’ he said.

‘You can update the CAD data and have the pins reconfigured in a matter of 18 minutes. We’re trying to redefine “rapid” in rapid prototyping while making the technology attainable to industry.’

Once commercialized, the system should be much cheaper than existing technology that functions in a similar way but positions the pins hydraulically rather than electrically, Bion added.

‘That system weighs about 20 tonnes and costs millions of pounds. The whole objective was to develop a system architecture that would bridge the gap between reconfigurable tooling technology and commerce.

‘So we’re trying to develop a low-cost, compact system that can compete financially with additive manufacturing systems.’

The 2mm pins are adjusted using a linear actuator running CAD data and held in place using polyethylene foam, then clamped into place for the vacuum forming before being covered by neoprene or silicon interpolation material to smooth the surface of the mold.

Bion hopes to develop the scalable system to produce larger and more detailed molds using smaller pins.

‘The next step is finding a more technically advanced foam that will enable us to position those pins with higher accuracy,’ he said. ‘At the moment, it can position them within 0.5mm.’

Source: The Engineer