Company combines its polymer coating with a small-scale solar device to form a self-contained particle that separates hydrogen from water using only the power of the Sun

HyperSolar, Inc., the developer of a technology to produce renewable hydrogen using sunlight and any source of water, today announced that its first proof of concept prototype is successfully producing renewable hydrogen. By integrating its unique, low-cost polymer coating with a small-scale solar device to form a self-contained particle, the company has proven the scientific validity of its breakthrough technology.

“Using our self-contained particle in a low cost plastic bag, we have successfully demonstrated our ability to mimic photosynthesis to produce renewable hydrogen from virtually any source of water using the power of the Sun,” commented Tim Young, CEO of HyperSolar. “Unlike approaches taken by others in the past, our small-scale solar devices actually float in the water. Our next step is to complete the development of our nanoparticles, extremely small solar devices, optimized to significantly reduce the cost of separating hydrogen from water.”

A video showing the proof of concept prototype is available at the company’s website. The video features the self-contained particle floating in a common baggy filled with wastewater from a pulp and paper mill. The video clearly shows hydrogen bubbles being generated in the small baggy. The company’s next prototype will feature nanoparticles, which can be mass-produced at a low cost and can float freely in large-scale bag systems to generate large quantities of renewable hydrogen, the cleanest and greenest of all fuels, using only sunlight and water.

Young concluded, “We believe we are on the right track to produce the lowest cost renewable hydrogen. Most hydrogen used today is not renewable and not very clean because it is produced from finite hydrocarbon sources, such as oil, coal and natural gas. Renewable hydrogen produced from nearly infinite sources of water and sunlight, is clean and carbon free. The worldwide impact of using renewable hydrogen to generate electricity and power fuel cell vehicles would be extraordinary.”

HyperSolar recently entered into a one-year sponsored research agreement with the University of California, Santa Barbara to help accelerate the development process and assure that the key milestones are reached.

Patrick Dockens

Photo: Patrick Dockens

mallix

Photo:  mallix

Judd McCullum

Photo:  Judd McCullum

Patrick Dockens

Photo: Patrick Dockens

Glenn Riley Meyers

Photo: GR Meyers

One of the world’s largest polysilicon plant is now fully operational

Fluor Corporation announced today that it has completed construction for LDK Solar’s polysilicon plant in Xinyu City, China, one of the largest such production facility in the world. Fluor provided engineering, procurement and construction management services for the plant, which produces solar-grade silicon for the photovoltaic industry.

The first of the three production lines was finished in record time to allow LDK Solar to begin initial production of photovoltaic polycrystalline silicon less than 24 months after the start of construction. Construction of the second line was completed in July 2011 with the third and final line completed in late 2011, which met LDK’s schedule and budget requirements.

“Fluor’s project execution was exemplary and the team responded to changing circumstances in a timely and professional manner while exhibiting the discipline to keep the project on schedule,” said Goran Bye, president and chief executive officer of the LDK Silicon & Chemical Technology Co., Ltd. “The project featured a first-class safety record. Fluor also designed first rate safety features into the polysilicon plant and has continuously transferred knowledge and competency to the benefit of the LDK organization.”

“We are proud of our partnership with LDK Solar to help realize this world-class chemical plant that will lead the photovoltaic industry for years,” says Ken Choudhary, senior vice president of Fluor’s Energy & Chemicals group, who also served as the project director for the facility. “We appreciate LDK Solar’s confidence in Fluor to continue to expand this operation and assist in reducing the total life-cycle facility costs of the plant.”

The production of polysilicon, which consists of small silicon crystals, is the most complicated step in the solar value chain. It is a key component in solar (or photovoltaic) cells, which convert energy from light directly into electricity.

Source: Business Wire

#1 Cascadia Centre for Sustainable Design and Construction; Location: Seattle, Washington, USA, Architects: Miller Hull Partnership

© Miller Hull Partnership

Continuing Seattle’s tradition for being at the forefront of sustainability, the Cascadia Centre is one of the world’s most energy efficient commercial buildings. The building spearheaded the movement for sustainable development and improved people’s awareness of energy efficiency. It was one of the nation’s first commercial buildings to achieve a ‘living building’ status which is a new benchmark for sustainability.

The Cascadia Centre is able to generate 100 percent of its own energy due to an extensive photovoltaic array, features a highly innovative wastewater management system, encourages resource sharing and strongly promotes progressive planning and smart, sustainable growth.  The building was built with the future in mind and is designed to be able to adapt to changing needs and technological developments.

#2 ASU Polytechnic Academic Buildings; Location: Mesa, Arizona, UAS, Architects: Lake|Flato Architects in collaboration with RSP Architects

© Bill Timmerman

The design completely transformed a discontinued airbase to considerably increase the space of the Arizona State University Polytechnic Campus. The building is separated into five different spaces which provide environmentally sound practices designed to maximize visibility, delighting and the sense of community while significantly reducing energy usage. Intentional environmental designs such as narrowing the various sections of the building and introducing shading devices and solar placement has allowed for 90 percent of the spaces to be effectively daylit.

#3 Urban Remediation and Civic Infrastructure Hub; Location: São Paulo, Brazil, Architects: Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, Urban Think Tank, Brazil

© Holcim Foundation

With an estimated 100,000 inhabitants residing in Grotão, the Paraisópolis favela of São Paulo is one of the world’s largest informal communities. Lead architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner propose transforming this barren landscape into a dynamic, multifunctional public space.  Largely cut off from the social and cultural infrastructure of the centre of São Paulo, this particular area has been subject to erosion and dangerous mudslides over the years and preventing this in the future was at the forefront of the project.

The building aims of bring the community together and provide it with more opportunities and features areas for urban agriculture, a water management system which has been created to use rain water and an improved transport infrastructure. The vertical structure creates a number of different spaces which have been used to cater for educational and cultural needs by featuring a music school, a small concert hall and sports facilities.

#4 Sustainable LEED Gold Office Tower; Location: Warsaw, Poland, Architects: Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

© Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

Easily identifiable and certain to stand out in the Warsaw skyline due to its elegant design, this building has sustainability at its heart and aims to reduce energy consumption to attain the highest levels of sustainability.

The façade is constructed from glass elements which deliver high levels of transparency and fully integrated sun shading and light reflection systems. The roof is created to collect and harvest the rainwater that falls on the sloped designed roof. A strong emphasis is placed on passive elements and intelligent management of the building in order to reach total sustainability.

#5 Centre for Life Science; Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Architects: Tsoi/Kobus & Associates

© Ed Wonsek

One of the first buildings to be entered into the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Core and Shell Pilot Project and has been pre-certified Gold. The Centre for Life Science demonstrates that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and this approach to sustainability allowed the team to overcome a number of challenges during the project.

The building focuses on reducing water wastage and can save as much as 1 million gallons of water each year thanks to a combination of a reclaim tank which collects falling rainwater and lab processes which reject water for reuse in the core toilets.

This guest post was provided by Jay-Jay Stephens, writing for Kingfisher Windows, designing, manufacturing, and installing energy efficient windows.

Pictured are Dr. Peter Eisner, Dr. Michael Menner and Andreas Malberg. They have developed a cooling lubricant from aqueous biopolymers. Astonishing was the lubricant industry by finding: "water lubricates like oil."

Metalworking plays a key role in industry. Drilling, milling, turning and grinding operations all use lubricants to prevent work pieces and tools from overheating and from excess wear. Standard lubricants today are based on mineral oil. This has drawbacks: fossil mineral oils come from finite resources, transport relatively little heat away from the work piece, are harmful to health and are flammable. All of this calls for extreme technical efforts, for occupational safety, fire safety and disposal, for example. So there’s a need for alternative lubricants.

Renewable raw materials as a lubricant additive

The idea hatched by Andreas Malberg, Dr. Peter Eisner and Dr. Michael Menner from the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Freising sounds simple as well as surprising: lubricate with water, not oil. “At IVV here in Freising, we have been looking at the issue of cooling lubricants for some considerable time”, explains Michael Menner. ”In two projects supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, we have successfully replaced oil with water. One surprising thing we found was that water is no worse a lubricant than oil, the key to it all being the additives.” Adding natural polymers to water can dramatically improve its lubricating properties. The Freising-based researchers set about testing renewable raw materials such as celluloses, starches or bacterial polysaccharides and improving their use as lubricant additives. Their aim: to make water more viscous by adding biopolymers, so it lubricates better.

For the idea to become a marketable product, other partners were brought on board: the Institute for Machine Tool Engineering and Production Technology at the University of Braunschweig, and Carl Bechem GmbH – a lubricant manufacturer from Hagen, Germany. The basic fluid made by the IVV, the viscous water, was improved by adding water-soluble additives so it could be used as an anti-corrosion agent, for example. That’s how it meets the requirements during processing: withstanding high temperatures and shearing stresses.

Benefits: Easy on the environment and on gentle to the skin, does not burn

In addition to the significantly lower impact on the environment and the high raw material efficiency, the new lubricant also offers technological benefits. It reduces wear and prolongs tool life, for example. The processed components are also easier to clean. This cuts costs and improves the cost-efficiency of the entire production process. Converting to the new lubricant is very easy for companies to carry out”, explains Peter Eisner. “In principle, once thoroughly cleaned, the same machine tool circulation systems can be used.” In addition, the use of the aqueous lubricant improves occupational health and safety and hygiene: no formation of oil mists, addition of fewer biocides, it smells better and is gentler on the skin.

For the mineral oil-free lubricant made of aqueous biopolymer solutions for use in metalworking applications, Dr. Peter Eisner, Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Malberg and Dr. Michael Menner will receive one of the 2012 Joseph-von-Fraunhofer awards.

The newly developed lubricant is already being distributed by Carl Bechem GmbH under the product name of BERUFLUID and is in use in various metalworking companies in the manufacturing of tools, mechanical engineering, in the automotive and aviation industry and in medical technology.

Source: AAAS EurekAlert

Photo: Dirk Mahler / Fraunhofe

Flower pollination is essential to maintaining the high crop yields needed to ensure that food remains affordable for the majority of people. When we consider that the European Crop Protection Association claim that “honey bees are the valuable pollinators of agricultural crops worldwide,” news that their populations are in decline should be a major cause for concern.

There is no conclusive proof as to exactly why, not only honey bees, but a wide variety of other species of bee, find themselves dwindling in numbers. However, loss of habitat certainly seems to have something to do with it. In Britain, for example, over the last 60 years 97 percent of wild meadows have been lost. This massive impact on the natural habitats of many bees is certainly part of the problem.

However, this trend is not the only worry ecologists have with regards to the plight of bees. There is an increasing body of evidence that the use of pesticides on land that is being used for ‘monocropping’ (intensive industrial agriculture) is harming bees.

Various studies have suggested a wide number of issues are caused by bees coming into contact with certain chemicals commonly used by farmers, with the group of substances known neonicotinoids being a particular problem. They appear to have a severely negative effect on bees’ ability to navigate back to the hive with food and produce new queens, contributing to what is know as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) where bees simply disappear from their hives.

This isn’t just bad for bees. The impact on human well being if the trend continues could be grave. According to some estimates, if we lose our bee populations, food production will drop by roughly third. This would be disastrous, not just in terms of what it would mean in terms of shortages and inflated food prices, but what it would do to the economy as a whole by inevitably lowering spending on other consumer goods. (Thought of this way, the figure placed on the global annual value of pollination of $202 billion might be seen as extremely conservative.)

However, avoiding this disaster is far from straight forward. Modern farming on the scale that is required to maintain the status quo isn’t possible without pesticides. Getting rid of them could potentially help bee populations to rise, but it would also open the door to organisms that would blight the crop. Indeed, most estimates predict that without pesticides about a third of the crops farmers grew would be lost to predators.

It appears to be a lose-lose situation and one that highlights the importance of lowering our dependencies of unsustainable farming practices such as monocropping.

If, wherever possible, permaculture and organic farming can be used, demand for intensively farmed crops will be lessened, and pesticide use can be reduced.

Environmentalists often argue that industries should price their products to reflect the wider costs of their production techniques. In the case of pesticides effects on bees, it seems this wider cost will, ironically, be reflected almost exactly if yields do fall (and food prices rise). By using neonicotinoids we may be protecting roughly 30% of crop yields, but the cost is diminishing bee populations…responsible for roughly 30% of crop yields.

Steve Waller is the man behind Greensteve.com. In his blog he tracks his own efforts to live in a more sustainable way and, looking at the bigger picture, offers his take on a variety of key environmental issues.

Photo: Steve A Johnson

No flying cars yet, but some pretty cool new technology is available right here

Conference date: Thursday, May 24, 2012 from 6 to 9 p.m. at Phipps Conservatory, One Schenley Park in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood

Clean energy matters. Seriously. And Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future (PennFuture) has the conference to prove it.

At this event on May 24, 2012 from 6 – 9 p.m. at Phipps Conservatory, attendees will see displays of the hottest new technology for renewable energy and hear from the real live green energy entrepreneurs who will be discussing how the average yinzer can make all our futures brighter by buying and/or installing clean energy.

The evening’s featured speaker is Andrea Luecke, who leads The Solar Foundation. She is responsible for developing and implementing national educational initiatives and high-level research that promote the widespread adoption of solar energy.

Additional speakers include:

• Richard Piacentini, Executive Director, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens;
• Heather Sage, Vice President, PennFuture;
• Patrick Sweeney, Vice President Business Development Manager, Pepco Energy Services, to discuss thermal storage and landfill methane recovery;
• Frank Bursic, Mid Atlantic Regional Director, Rentricity, to speak about hydrokinetic energy recovery; and
• Dan Lagiovane, EverPower Wind, to talk about the importance of buying Pennsylvania wind through Choose PA Wind.

The evening will also include exhibits of all the technologies discussed and information about western Pennsylvania’s burgeoning solar industry.

Cost, which includes drinks and hors d’oeuvres, is $20 for the general public, $15 with student ID, and free for PennFuture members. Register at  this online location or by calling 412-258-6682.

Source: Business Wire