In an internal combustion engine, fuel is burned to power the engine, but as a result a lot of heat is also produced. Most of that heat in ordinary vehicles is wasted; but what if you could catch the energy from the heat, turn it into electricity, and use it to increase your fuel efficiency?
More...
In a bid to promote renewable energy following the country's worst nuclear accident, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan Wednesday laid out the blueprint for a new energy policy, seeking to increase the share of green energy to 20% of total power supply by the early 2020s.
More...
Google plans to serve live traffic from the world’s first seawater-cooled data center in Finland in the fall of this year, according to Google’s Joe Kava. Kava plans to discuss Google’s data center efficiency innovations at the search giant’s second Data Center Efficiency Summit in Zurich, Switzerland on Tuesday.
More...
Sixteen undergraduate students at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) may now be Harvard's resident experts on geothermal energy. For their capstone project in the course ES 96: Engineering Design Seminar, these students conducted an in-depth analysis of the geothermal heating and cooling system that serves Radcliffe's Byerly Hall.
More...
An old confusion about the electrical properties of water's surface has ended, thanks to scientists at Pacific Northwest and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The conflict arose because two types of measurements gave two radically different interpretations of what was happening at the surface of water.
More...
On April 3, 2011, Dr. Ralph L. Webb, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, passed away in State College, Pennsylvania at the age of 77. Dr. Webb made significant contributions in the field of enhanced heat transfer with applications in the areas of boiling, condensation, fouling, air-cooled heat exchangers, electronic equipment cooling, and forced convection for gases...
More...
Efficiency is a problem with today's solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years.
More...
Some forms of technology — think, for example, of computer chips — are on a fast track to constant improvements, while others evolve much more slowly. Now, a new study by researchers at MIT and other institutions shows that it may be possible to predict which technologies are likeliest to advance rapidly, and therefore may be worth more investment in research and resources.
More...
A study led by the UB researcher Giancarlo Franzese and published in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests that hydrophobic nanoconfinement can alter the thermodynamics of water at supercool temperatures. These findings may have important applications in fields related to conservation at cryogenic temperatures (around -100 ºC) -- for example, in the preservation of stem cells, blood and food products...
More...
"I have a slide that has a photo of a cornfield and a big photovoltaic array," says Robert Blankenship, a scientist who studies photosynthesis at Washington University in St. Louis. "When I give talks I often ask the audience which one is more efficient. Invariably the audience votes overwhelmingly in favor of photosynthesis." They are wrong. This question and its surprising answer (below) is the point..
More...
