adminAerospace engineers are developing dual-rotor technology to improve the energy harvest of wind turbines. The idea to look for better performance by adding a second rotor to wind turbines came from a previous study. The researchers used wind tunnel tests to see how hills, valleys and the placement of turbines affected the productivity of onshore wind farms.
AENewsEnergy Inventions | Wind Power | Wind TurbinesSri Lankan inventor Leelananda Jayasuriya just sent us this concept for a Lateral Axis Wind Turbine. The turbine functions just like a Ferris Wheel, with the blades orbiting in an epicyclical path around the central shaft. Leelananda believes there are many advantages to his design: it can rotate with the direction of the wind, it […]
AENewsEnergy Industry | Wind Power | Wind TurbinesThe 126 year old Eiffel Tower is going green! A pair of camouflaged VisionAIR5 wind turbines were installed inside the scaffolding on the second floor, and are expected to generate 10,000 kilowatt hours of electricity every year. That’s enough to power the tower’s entire first floor; including history exhibits, a souvenir shop and restaurants. The […]
AENewsEnergy Inventions | Wind Power | Wind TurbinesA French company called New Wind is installing tree-shaped wind turbines at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France. The company’s founder, Jérôme Michaud-Larivière came up with the idea while in a Paris square, when he “saw the leaves tremble when there was not a breath of air.” He hopes the trees can be […]
An alternative technology to Li-ion has been designed for application in specific sectors. The researchers have developed the first battery using sodium ions in the usual “18650” format, an industry standard. The main advantage of the prototype is that it relies on sodium, an element far more abundant and less costly than lithium. The batteries have displayed performance levels comparable to their lithium counterparts, and this new technology is already attracting industrial interest. It could be used to store renewable energies in the future, say researchers.
Zoe SchlangerThis story was originally published by Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s official: No year on record has ever been as hot as 2015. And it broke the temperature record, just set in 2014, by an unusually large margin. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the news on Wednesday morning, after both agencies separately analyzed global temperature data and came to the same conclusion. 2015 broke temperature records by a wide margin, amid a wave of other more localized climate anomalies around the world.NOAA / NASA The record was set by a full tenth of a degree Celsius (or nearly a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit), a much larger margin than usual, as temperature records are commonly broken by…
adminSuccess of the energy turnaround will depend decisively on the extended use of renewable energy sources. However, their efficiency partly is much smaller than that of conventional energy sources. The efficiency of commercially available photovoltaic cells, for instance, is about 20 percent. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have now published an unconventional approach to increasing the efficiency of the panels. Optical invisibility cloaks guide sunlight around objects that cast shadows on the solar panel.
