Tag: energy

Graphene

Researchers have produced a ground-breaking new material, graphane, which has been derived from graphene. What is huge: 1. Graphene has already has a lot of great properties. Strongest material. Very conductive. 2. Now graphene can be chemically modified to tune the properties even more. Making something highly conductive and highly insulating means all kinds of electrical devices are possible 3. This is opening the door to even more chemical modification. 4. Graphene has already been turned into proof of concept liquid crystal display devices (single pixel) and quantum dots and transistors

Materials science rarely gets the respect it deserves. We really should all bow before these people. They make modern civilization.
2013-03-25: Graphene is nearly here.

A 10000 Farad Supercapacitor is powerful enough to power a Semi Truck while being the size of a paperback novel. Tesla promised to get the price of lithium batteries down to $150 / kWh by 2020, our current cost estimated for this type of graphene based supercapacitor is about $100 / kWh today and we should be able to cut this pricing in half by the end of 2015

2013-07-16: Graphene is one of my bets for most impactful technology of the 21th century.

A new form of Carbon : Grossly warped ‘nanographene’ : The new material consists of multiple identical pieces of “grossly warped graphene,” each containing exactly 80 carbon atoms joined together in a network of 26 rings, with 30 hydrogen atoms decorating the rim. Because they measure slightly more than a nanometer across, these individual molecules are referred to generically as “nanocarbons.”

Odd-membered-ring defects such as these not only distort the sheets of atoms away from planarity, they also alter the physical, optical, and electronic properties of the material.


2015-02-27: A kind of moore’s law for graphene. If you can convince enough of the industry that the roadmap is real, it becomes real due to all the investment it triggers

In an open-access paper published today in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale, more than 60 academics and industrialists lay out a science and technology roadmap for graphene, related 2-dimensional crystals, other 2d materials, and hybrid systems based on a combination of different 2d crystals and other nanomaterials.

The roadmap covers the next 10 years and beyond, intended to guide the research community and industry toward the development of products based on graphene and related materials.

2015-05-21:

The new roll-to-roll manufacturing process described by his team addresses the fact that for many proposed applications of graphene and other 2-D materials to be practical, “you’re going to need to make km2 of it, repeatedly and in a cost-effective manner.”

50cm / min is starting to get interesting.
2016-01-07:

Researchers found a way to incorporate carbon nanotubes and graphene into spider silk. “We measure a fracture strength up to 5.4 GPa, a Young’s modulus up to 47.8 GPa and a toughness modulus up to 2.1 GPa. This is the highest toughness modulus for a fiber, surpassing synthetic polymeric high performance fibres (e.g. Kelvar49) and even the current toughest knotted fibers.”

2017-06-10:

The use of graphene as an additive can give mechanical and electrical benefits to composite materials, making them multifunctional. In a novel fermentation method, Graphene Flagship researchers have developed graphene-containing rubber foams with unusual mechanical and electrical behaviors: when stretched, the composite foams expand and become more conductive. These unexpected properties could be promising for use in smart filters and medical devices.

Alliance Rubber intends to help determine exactly how this super-material could be used in its products. The partnership will explore potential uses for graphene-infused rubber bands for many other characteristics.

  • Graphene-rubber bands could act as bar codes for produce in grocery stores
  • Heat-sensitive bands which change color depending on the temperature.

2022-04-15:

Graphene and carbon nanotubes are undoubtedly the materials of the future. In their perfect form they are the strongest materials that are known to exist, with thermal conductivity among the highest of known materials, and even superconducting electrical properties. However, defects in the lattice structure cause significant decreases in these physical properties; and so quality and purity are of paramount importance. On top of this it is very difficult to make continuous sheets more than a couple of millimeters long, and even harder to wrangle this atomically thin layer into real-world applications. We recommend paying attention to companies that are developing methods to produce graphene and CNTs in larger sizes and for lower costs. And we will be tracking companies that show themselves to be successful at leveraging today’s low-quality graphene flakes to improve existing products, or to develop new capabilities for applying this material in novel ways.

2023-01-17: More C allotropes.

An allotrope is a substance with a defined structure that’s made up of only one element, but differs from another form of the same pure element. Graphite (familiar as pencil “lead”) is a famous allotrope of carbon, and it has the same infinite-stacked-sheets-of-atoms structure. Single isolated sheets, known as graphene, were (famously) isolated a few years ago, and these single-atom-thick are different enough that most people consider them a different allotrope than even graphite, which name is used for the bulk material. So what if you took a structure like graphene, the flat sheet of 6-membered rings, and made a flat sheet of buckyballs instead? That has now been prepared and named “graphullerene”.

Oil Declines

The upcoming IEA World Energy Report will say that global oil supplies are falling faster than expected, and massive investments are required just to (almost) stand still. Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1%

Water cooled Solar

By cooling such devices with liquids can concentrate 2300x as much sunlight on a cell as nature normally provides, while maintaining that cell at 85°C. Without the cooling system, its temperature would rapidly exceed 1500°C, causing it to melt. With cooling, the cells can manage an output of 70 watts / cm2—a record.

Oil to $150

It turns out that for the past 30 years, we’ve had a George Costanza Energy policy — every decision we have made as a country has worked to drive energy prices higher. Had we made the opposite decisions, Crude Oil prices would be much lower than they are today ($130.17 as I type this). What follows is a list of energy-related policies of the United States. On many of these, I have no opinion — but I wanted to list as many as I could to demonstrate why Oil is where it is

for the delusional who think prices will soon go back down, a list of why not.

Railroad Resurgence

The freight railway industry is enjoying its biggest building boom in 100 years, a turnaround as abrupt as it is ambitious. It is largely fueled by growing global trade and rising fuel costs for 18-wheelers. In 2002, the major railroads laid off 4700 workers; in 2006, they hired more than 5000. Profit has doubled industry-wide since 2003, and stock prices have soared. The value of the largest railroad, the Union Pacific, has tripled since 2001. This year alone, the railroads will spend $10b to add track, build switchyards and terminals, and open tunnels to handle the coming flood of traffic. Freight rail tonnage will rise 90% by 2035.

a resurgence. it should be straightforward to fully automate trains, overcoming the industry workforce problems

Fuel efficiency

Europe / Japan have higher standards today than the US is shooting for in 2020. all to prop up detroit. the best thing that could happen is for all of detroit to go bust.
2008-11-11:

Critics might more justifiably flay the Big 3 for failing long ago to seek a showdown with the UAW to break its labor monopoly. In truth, though, politicians have repeatedly intervened to prevent the crisis that would finally settle matters. Even better would be to dump CAFE altogether and replace it with an intellectually honest gas tax. Mr. Obama promised to transcend the old stalemates — let him begin with the 30-year-old fraud that our fuel-economy rules represent.

Superconductivity

293 Kelvin, but at > 200 gigapascal, so not deployable. this is the kind of pressure that breaks diamond anvils. Earlier milestones: 200 Kelvin, 185 Kelvin – the field has improved by ~100 kelvin since i started paying attention in the early 90s.
Graphene superconductors exist, as of 2019:

his lab at MIT had found superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene — a 1-atom-thick sheet of carbon crystal dropped on another one, and then rotated to leave the 2 layers slightly askew. The discovery has been the biggest surprise to hit the solid-state physics field since the 2004 Nobel Prize–winning discovery that an intact sheet of carbon atoms — graphene — could be lifted off a block of graphite with a piece of Scotch tape. And it has ignited a frenzied race among condensed-matter physicists to explore, explain and extend the MIT results, which have since been duplicated in several labs. The observation of superconductivity has created an unexpected playground for physicists. The practical goals are obvious: to illuminate a path to higher-temperature superconductivity, to inspire new types of devices that might revolutionize electronics, or perhaps even to hasten the arrival of quantum computers. But more subtly, and perhaps more important, the discovery has given scientists a relatively simple platform for exploring exotic quantum effects. “There’s an almost frustrating abundance of riches for studying novel physics in the magic-angle platform”

Also as of 2019, new states of superconductivity are being found:

Superconductivity has been shown in monolayer crystals of, for example, molybdenum disulphide or tungsten disulfide that have a thickness of just 3 atoms. ‘In both monolayers, there is a special type of superconductivity in which an internal magnetic field protects the superconducting state from external magnetic fields’. Normal superconductivity disappears when a large external magnetic field is applied, but this Ising superconductivity is strongly protected. Even in the strongest static magnetic field in Europe, which has a strength of 37 Tesla, the superconductivity in tungsten disulfide does not show any change. However, although it is great to have such strong protection, the next challenge is to find a way to control this protective effect, by applying an electric field.

Superinsulators

When they tried to pass a current through the material, the researchers noticed that its resistance suddenly increased by a factor of 100K once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold. The same sudden change also occurred when the researchers decreased the external magnetic field. Like superconductors, which have applications in many different areas of physics, from accelerators to magnetic-levitation (maglev) trains to MRI machines, superinsulators could eventually find their way into a number of products, including circuits, sensors and battery shields.