Green Building & Manufacturing Articles

Turning Down the Noise in Graphene
ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2010) - Graphene is a two-dimensional crystalline sheet of carbon atoms -- meaning it is only one atom thick -- through which electrons can race at nearly the speed of light -- 100 times faster than they can move through silicon. This plus graphene's incredible flexibility and mechanical strength make the material a potential superstar for the electronics industry.
However, whereas the best electronic materials feature a strong signal and weak background noise, attaining this high signal-to-noise ratio has been a challenge for both single and bi-layers of graphene, especially when placed on a substrate of silica or some other dielectric. One of the problems facing device developers has been the lack of a good graphene noise model.
Working with the unique nanoscience capabilities of the Molecular Foundry at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a multi-institutional team of researchers has developed the first model of signal-to-noise-ratios for low frequency noises in graphene on silica. Their results show noise patterns that run just the opposite of noise patterns in other electronic materials.
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Engineers Use Rocket Science to Make Wastewater Treatment Sustainable
ScienceDaily (July 26, 2010) - Within the sludge of wastewater treatment plants is an invisible world teeming with microbes. Here, diverse species of bacteria convert solid and liquid wastes into gases, some of which contribute to global warming.
Now two Stanford University engineers are developing a new sewage treatment process that would actually increase the production of two greenhouse gases -- nitrous oxide (aka, "laughing gas") and methane -- and use the gases to power the treatment plant.
"Normally, we want to discourage these gases from forming," said Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. "But by encouraging the formation of nitrous oxide, we can remove harmful nitrogen from the water and simultaneously increase methane production for use as fuel."
Criddle, an expert in wastewater management, has joined forces with Brian Cantwell, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, who has spent the last five years designing rocket thrusters that run on nitrous oxide.
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ULE 880: Introducing Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations
Worldchanging contributor Joel Makower has announced an exciting new project: ULE 880 - Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations, a new sustainability rating standard for companies, developed in partnership between UL Environment, a division of Underwriters Laboratories, and Joel's colleagues at GreenBiz.com.
He describes the rating system:
ULE 880 covers five domains of sustainability:
* Sustainability Governance: how an organization leads and manages itself in relation to its stakeholders, including its employees, investors, regulatory authorities, customers, and the communities in which it operates
* Environment: an organization's environmental footprint across its policies, operations, products and services, including its resource use and emissions
* Workplace: issues related to employee working conditions, organization culture, and effectiveness
* Customers and Suppliers: issues related to an organization's policies and practices on product safety, quality, pricing, and marketing as well as its supply chain policies and practices
* Social and Community Engagement: an organization's impacts on its community in the areas of social equity, ethical conduct, and human rights
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Scaling Up Solar: The Global Implications of a New Study that Says Solar Power Is Cost Competitive with Nuclear Power
The sunshine of North Carolina, a state on America's Atlantic seaboard, has long been a draw for tourists seeking a little southern warmth on the region's beaches. But holiday companies are not the only ones trumpeting a good local deal. The price of the state's solar-generated electricity has fallen so far that it is now cheaper than new nuclear power, according to a report published in July by researchers at the state's Duke University. The authors say their figures indicate a "historic crossover" that significantly strengthens the case for investment in renewable energy – and weakens the arguments for large-scale, international nuclear development.
Solar power is usually branded as a clean but expensive energy source, incapable of competing on economic grounds with more established alternatives, such as nuclear. The outspoken pro-nuclear stance adopted by a raft of iconic environmental figures – James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, Patrick Moore – has helped to instill in policy making circles the sense that this is the only power source that can restructure our energy supply at the pace, scale and price required by the pressures of rapid climate change. This study, which was co-authored by former chair of Duke University's economics department John Blackburn and commissioned by NC Warn, a clean-energy NGO with a firm anti-nuclear bent, challenges that view. "This report should end the argument for risking billions of public dollars on new nuclear projects," says Jim Warren, NC Warn director.
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Free Solar Panels to 2.5 Million UK Households
HomeSun, a British solar company, has announced that it will spend £1 billion (US$1.6 billion) on a free solar panel giveaway to British households. The method behind HomeSun's billion-dollar madness is to promote home solar power in the UK. The free installations will be spread out over the next three years and will add solar energy to an estimated 2.5 million homes.
HomeSun plans to recoup its massive investment through earnings from government feed-in tariffs to promote solar power installation. Any excess energy produced by the free-paneled homes will be collected by HomeSun and sold back to the national grid at a premium.
Daniel Green, head of HomeSun, aims to boost renewable energy production in Britain while helping the European Union meet its carbon reduction goals on schedule. He pointed out that Germany already produces half of the world's solar energy, but the UK has yet to show much progress in the field. He wants HomeSun, "the free power company," to catapult Britain onto the global solar power front.
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Texas Petrochemical Emissions Down, but Still Underestimated, Says Study
ScienceDaily (Aug. 11, 2010) - A thick blanket of yellow haze hovering over Houston as a result of chemical pollution produced by manufacturing petroleum products may be getting a little bit thinner, according to a new study.
But the new findings -- which have implications for petrochemical-producing cities around the world -- come with a catch, says a team of scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The problem is that industry still significantly underestimates the amounts of reactive chemicals being released into the air, according to airplane measurements made by the research team as part of the study. Inaccuracies in the reporting of emissions pose big challenges for the reduction and regulation of emissions coming from petrochemical plants. The emissions are important to monitor, because some chemicals released from the plants react to form ground-level ozone that can be harmful to human health and agricultural crops.
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Charcoal Takes Some Heat Off Global Warming: Biochar Can Offset 1.8 Billion Metric Tons of Carbon Emissions Annually
ScienceDaily (Aug. 12, 2010) - As much as 12 percent of the world's human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could be sustainably offset by producing biochar, a charcoal-like substance made from plants and other organic materials. That's more than what could be offset if the same plants and materials were burned to generate energy, concludes a study published August 10 in the journal Nature Communications.
"These calculations show that biochar can play a significant role in the solution for the planet's climate change challenge," said study co-author Jim Amonette, a soil chemist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "Biochar offers one of the few ways we can create power while decreasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And it improves food production in the world's poorest regions by increasing soil fertility. It's an amazing tool."
The study is the most thorough and comprehensive analysis to date on the global potential of biochar. The carbon-packed substance was first suggested as a way to counteract climate change in 1993. Scientists and policymakers have given it increasing attention in the past few years. The study was conducted by Dominic Woolf and Alayne Street-Perrott of Swansea University in Wales, U.K., Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., Stephen Joseph of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Amonette.
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For the Love of PETE: Stanford University Reveals Groundbreaking Solar Technology
Engineers at Stanford University have run successful tests on a new solar conversion process that boasts efficiency upwards of 60% -- and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.
The process, called "photon enhanced thermionic emission" or PETE, is a fundamentally different way of harnessing energy -- especially in the realm of solar.
"This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak," said Nick Melosh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research group.
What's PETE and How Does it Work?
Solar energy conversion takes one of two processes:
1. Quantum - which uses the large per-photon energy of solar radiation to excite electrons, as in photovoltaic cells.
2. Thermal - which uses concentrated sunlight as a thermal-energy source to indirectly produce electricity using a heat engine.
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Dear EarthTalk: What are some simple things I could do to green the office I work in?
No matter how green your office may be already, there is surely room for improvement somewhere. Here are 10 suggestions to help get you and your co-workers further along on the path to office sustainability:
(1) Take your Office's Green Footprint: The website TheGreenOffice.com, an online retailer specializing in green office products, makes available a free Office Footprint Calculator to gauge what kind of effect you and your co-workers are having on the environment and identify how to make improvements.
(2) Save Trees: The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year. Refrain from printing when you can, use both sides of a sheet, and recycle so that the recycling industry will have raw material.
(3) Power Down: Artificial lighting accounts for almost half of all office electricity use. Turn off lights that are not being used. Better yet, install motion sensors that do it automatically when no one is in the room. Also, shut down computers overnight, and set them to go into sleep mode when sitting idle.
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AK1000: World's most powerful tidal turbine unveiled in Scotland
Atlantis Resources Corporation has unveiled the most powerful and largest tidal turbine ever built, at Invergordon in Scotland. Dubbed AK1000, the new turbine will be installed at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, Scotland, later this summer.
AK1000 is able to generate 1MW electricity, being enough to power more then 1000 homes. It also has a cutting edge technology from suppliers across the globe, weighs 130 tons (stands at a height of 22.5 meters) and is equipped with an 18-meter in diameter rotor.
According to company officials, the giant turbine will have zero impact on the surrounding environment due to a low rotation speed whilst in operation (six to eight revolutions per minute).
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