Salt of the Earth gets empowered new meaning

Cheap material made from DIRT can convert heat directly to electricity: New discovery could revolutionise power generation

By Damien Gayle
MailOnline
28 November 2012

• Thermoelectric material converts differences in temperature directly to electrical voltage
• It is not the first, but previous ones have been derived from rare and sometimes toxic elements via costly synthesis procedures
• Researchers say their discovery could pave the way for low-cost, environmentally friendly electricity generation

An incredible new material made from common dirt can take heat and directly convert it into an electrical current, a study claims.

Researchers say they produced the groundbreaking substance using commonly found materials and that it can be cheaply manufactured. 

They believe the it could spark a revolution in eco-friendly power generation by taking waste heat from a range of common sources and converting it directly to electricity.

Raw material: The breakthrough new thermoelectric material is made from natural minerals called tetrahedrites which are found in dirt pretty much everywhere on the planet

So-called thermoelectric materials are able to directly convert differences in temperature to electrical voltage, and vice versa. This are potentially important, scientists say, because the vast majority of heat that is generated from, for example, a car engine, is lost through the tail pipe. It's the thermoelectric material's job to take that heat and turn it into something useful, like electricity.

Supercritical CO2 tech nearly doubles generator efficiency

Although this tech was intended for small-scale nuclear reactors, it offers promising efficiency gains for more benign local heat sources such as biomass burners, solar furnaces and LENR (cold fusion) devices as well. - Ed.

A 50% Efficient Turbine Solution

Sandia’s Closed Loop Carbon Dioxide Gas Turbine.
Click image for a larger view.

newenergyandfuel.com
September 11, 2012

A steam turbine that drives a generator is usually only about 30% efficient.  Based on the Brayton-cycle system, developed by George Brayton more than 100 years ago, an air or steam system heats the air or water in a confined space and then releases the compressed air or steam to turn a turbine generator.

The Brayton-cycle is the same principle used in a jet engine, which burns fuel to run a turbine and then shoots the compressed air out the back to thrust a plane forward.  It’s a common system.

Sandia National Laboratories has developed a turbine system that could substantially improve energy efficiency in small modular nuclear reactors.  The Lab is already seeking an industry partner to market the technology.

What goes around comes around: gas from air

Encouraging breakthrough on several fronts; see also cute update at end: "Company that made petrol from air 'shudders' at prospect of Big Oil investment" - Ed.

Pioneering scientists turn fresh air into petrol
in massive boost in fight against energy crisis

Steve Connor
The Independent
19 October 2012

A small British company has produced the first "petrol from air" using a revolutionary technology that promises to solve the energy crisis as well as helping to curb global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced five litres of petrol since August when it switched on a small refinery that manufactures gasoline from carbon dioxide and water vapour.

The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant capable of producing a ton of petrol a day. It also plans to produce green aviation fuel to make airline travel more carbon-neutral.

Tim Fox, head of energy and the environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, said: "It sounds too good to be true, but it is true. They are doing it and I've been up there myself and seen it. The innovation is that they have made it happen as a process. It's a small pilot plant capturing air and extracting CO2 from it based on well known principles. It uses well-known and well-established components but what is exciting is that they have put the whole thing together and shown that it can work."

New High Efficiency Home Energy Systems

We include this piece to indicate the exciting technical creativity bubbling in the youthful reaches of the engineering world and to introduce the excellent solarnovus.com solar power info website. Both bear watching as fertile sources of post-corporate energy innovations and news of their fate. - Ed.

Hybrid System Makes Rooftop Hydrogen from Sunlight
by Nancy Lamontagne
Solar Novus Today
10 August 2011 
 
Duke University engineer Nico Hotz has proposed and analyzed a hybrid system in which sunlight heats a mixture of water and methanol in a maze of tubes on a rooftop. After two catalytic reactions, the system produces hydrogen that can be stored and used on demand in fuel cells.

A schematic of the hybrid system. Credit: Nico Hotz. The hybrid device contains series of copper tubes coated with a thin layer of aluminum and aluminum oxide and partly filled with catalytic nanoparticles. A combination of water and methanol flows through the vacuum-sealed tubes.

"This set-up allows up to 95% of the sunlight to be absorbed with very little being lost as heat to the surroundings," Hotz said. "This is crucial because it permits us to achieve temperatures of well over 200 ºC within the tubes. By comparison, a standard solar collector can only heat water between 60 and 70 ºC."
Once the evaporated liquid achieves a high enough temperature, tiny amounts of a catalyst are added.

The combination of high temperature and catalysts produces hydrogen very efficiently, Hotz said. The hydrogen can be immediately directed to a fuel cell to provide electricity to a building during the day, or compressed and stored in a tank to provide power later.

The Forbidden Education

La Educación Prohibida is a remarkable 145 min Latin American doc on the modern educational enterprise. Filmed in 15 countries with hundreds of collaborators, it tracks the hijacking of schooling to serve the corporate state, analyzes its evolutionary & psycho-social toll, and outlines a series of paths to liberation for students, teachers and the wider world. This is a conversation the US, Japan and other industrial nations desperately need to be having, and the fact over 5 million people have viewed it since August on various sites gives hope we finally will. - Ed.

Legal downloadable copy here.

Fuel - the film

Now nearly 5 years old, this documentary remains one of the finest and most hopeful responses to our global suicide pact with the fossil fuel industry. If you want less analysis & Veggie Van nostalgia and more concrete solutions, skip to the last 30 minutes where a sane post-corporate vision is laid out in considerable detail. - Ed.

Fuel by Josh Tickell

New biofuel fermentation tech yields over 70% energy recovery

New biofuel process creates 20 times more energy than existing methods

By: Anne Seccombe
Examiner.com
July 15, 2012

A new biofuel production process created by Michigan State University researchers produces 20 times more energy than existing methods.

The results, published in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology, showcase a novel way to use microbes to produce biofuel and hydrogen, all while consuming agricultural wastes.

Dr Gemma Reguera, an Assistant Professor at MSU with PhDs in both biology and microbiology and a post-doctoral Fellowship at Harvard, runs a laboratory which studies the adaptive responses of microbes to their natural environment and exploits this knowledge to find novel biotechnological applications for microbial processes. Her team has developed bioelectrochemical systems known as microbial electrolysis cells, or MECs, using bacteria to breakdown and ferment agricultural waste into ethanol. Reguera’s platform is unique because it employs a second bacterium, which, when added to the mix, removes all the waste fermentation byproducts or nonethanol materials while generating electricity.

Mondragon in Depth

Many social justice activists are at least vaguely aware of the famous Mondragon experiment in worker ownership in Spain's Basque country. The web page below reviews five books on the phenomenon and is the best one-stop introduction to Mondragon history and economics we've run across thus far. 

Now a federation of 256 cooperatives with nearly 100,000 participants and over 12 billion Euros in annual sales, Mondragon deserves deep scrutiny by anyone trying to envision a post-corporate world. One aspect we particularly like is that the average size of all cooperatives is about 330 members - well within our maximum ideal org size of 500 or three standard dunbar deviations from perfect human-scale relatedness. - Ed.

Worker-owner in Mondragon coop factory

Mondragon as a Bridge to a New Socialism

by Carl Davidson
Solidarity Economy Network

Something important for both socialist theory and working-class alternatives has been steadily growing in Spain’s Basque country over the past 50 years, and is now spreading slowly across Spain, Europe and the rest of the globe.

It’s an experiment, at once radical and practical, in how the working-class can become the masters of their workplaces and surrounding communities, growing steadily and successfully competing with the capitalism of the old order and laying the foundations of something new—it’s known as the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC).

Just what that ‘something new’ adds up to is often contested. Some see the experiment as a major new advance in a centuries-old cooperative tradition, while a few go further and see it as a contribution to a new socialism for our time. A few others see it both as clever refinement of capitalism and as a reformist diversion likely to fail. Still others see it as a ‘third way’ full of utopian promise simply to be replicated anywhere in whatever way makes sense to those concerned.

The reality of an experiment on the scale on Mondragon, involving more than 100,000 workers in 120 core industrial, service and educational coops, is necessarily complex. It can contain all these features contending within itself at once. 

Read full article at
http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2011/03/16/mondragon-as-a-bridge-to-a-new-socialism/