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Thermoelectric Paint Harvests Electricity from Waste Heat
A research team at UNIST (Korea) has succeeded in developing a technique that can be used to turn industrial waste heat into electricity for vehicles and other applications. The team, led by Professor...
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Coffee Perk: Grounds Remove Lead from Water
Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the U.S., which makes for a perky population — but it also creates a lot of used grounds. A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology in...
View ArticleStepping on the Gas: Scrubbing 95% of Mercury Emissions with no Waste
Mercury: a pervasive toxic contaminant Fact: Removal of 1 kilogram of mercury from industrial flue gas results in more than 20 tons of contaminated solids. Whether we like it or not, the world’s...
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Nano-Coated Solar Collectors Revolutionize Heating & Cooling
The Concept: a Finnish company uses an innovative combination of nano-coatings, improved mechanical design, and larger panels to provide unprecedented solar thermal efficiency at the district level....
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A Glass Act: Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces Fast-Charging,...
It’s reassuring to see that that significant technology breakthroughs don’t always come from the young technology whiz crowd. A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the...
View ArticleFatal Attraction: Seaweed Hydrogels for Ant Control
We’ve talked about algae and seaweed use for renewable energy generation, but scientists at the University of California, Riverside have developed an inexpensive, biodegradable, seaweed-based ant bait...
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Targeting that Fracking Wastewater
The hydraulic fracturing (fracking) industry doesn’t have a lot of positives to show for itself. While the technology has helped to wean the US from dependence on foreign oil, it is responsible for the...
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“Magic Sponge” Soaks Up Water Contaminants
The concept: deploy a re-useable massive sponge with absorbent nano-fibers to soak up oil and chemicals from bodies of water and the high seas. It sounds like a late-night kitchenware commercial, but a...
View ArticleTurning Electronics Heat into a Fuel Source
There has been a good deal of discussion recently about larger scale thermal energy storage and how it needs to be part of our renewable energy landscape. New work is also happening on a smaller scale....
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Beam It Up, Scottie: A/C Using No Electricity
The concept: Air conditioning and cooling are a major requirement for industry and residential areas, but use significant amounts of energy that tax the grid at peak hours. Stanford scientists have...
View ArticlePlaying Ball Creates High-Capacity True Lithium Battery
Lithium ion batteries have become the go-to energy storage medium for everything from EVs to renewable energy reservoirs at the substation level. While flow batteries and other devices are being...
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A Pressing Matter: Densified Wood Stronger Than Steel
We often think of wood as a natural resource that may be chopped for kindling or hammered together for construction. However, engineers at the University of Maryland have created a wood that is as...
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Revised Recipe for Redox Doubles Effectiveness
Here at Cleantech Concepts we’re a proponent of educating the industry about the virtues of redox flow batteries as a grid-scale storage solution. We are seeing more pilots of the technology in large...
View ArticleCleantech Clothing Conversion: Chanel to Gel
A few years ago, I read a fascinating and lively description of what happens to used T-shirts in our current global trading environment. Pietra Rivoli’s “Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy”...
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Squeezing Solar: Tracker Innovation Boosts Market
The per watt decline in cost of solar cells has led to unprecedented growth in solar energy generation. While the industry is nowhere near to overtaking fossil fuel energy, the combination of solar and...
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Stopping Styrofoam Insulation: “Nanowood” Blocks More Heat
Styrofoam, a trademarked product of Dow Chemical and a form of polystyrene foam, has been a necessary evil for many years, offering a lightweight insulation for many applications. Besides being used in...
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Squeezing Solar Cells for More Power
Sometimes it takes some out-of-the-box thinking to come up with a what seems like a simpler solution to a problem. Physicists at the University of Warwick have published new research in the journal...
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Smart Coating Neutralizes VOCs Indoors
The amount of time we spend indoors (90% of our lives) in our homes, offices and schools has recently received a lot of attention, in part because air quality is typically 5 times worse indoors than...
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EVs and Child Labor: Time for a More Ethical Battery
[Image source: CBS News] As green energy becomes an increasingly hot topic in our modern world, a few vital questions have emerged that deserve our attention: What are the human costs of obtaining...
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Is E.coli Key to More Efficient Solar?
E.coli and solar are not usually two terms we mention in the same sentence. E.coli bacteria are responsible for some of the worst food poisoning outbreaks in the world, while solar power, conversely,...
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