Research Laboratory news

Today, heat pumps are increasingly developing into a sustainable and efficient alternative to furnaces in climates with moderate heating and cooling needs. Heat pumps are systems that move heat from one place to another by using a compressor and a circulating structure of liquid or gas refrigerant, through which heat is extracted from outside sources and pumped indoors. As heat pumps only move heat, heat pumps enable space conditioning...

The lithium-ion battery is one of the most common battery types for all sorts of technical devices. It can be used to power cell phones, laptops, power tools or electric vehicles. It is small wonder, therefore, that businesses around the world invest billions to make this industry grow. For many years now, scientists have been searching for electrode materials and electrolytes that can help improve lithium-ion batteries so that they...

Greenhouse gases are one of the main contributors to climate change. They have increased in concentration over the last century and are a very common air pollutant. To reduce environmental pollution scientists have come up with numerous ideas for reducing greenhouse gases in our environment. Some proposed using lab-grown minerals which suck carbon dioxide out of the air while others favour reactors which are capable of transforming CO2...

Producing sustainable and environmentally friendly fuels has been one of the main interests of scientific research for many years. Scientists have come up with many effective solutions to achieve this goal. One of the most promising technologies is harvesting solar energy with the help of semiconductors which can initiate surface electrochemical reactions. This kind of reaction needs extremely stable and active catalysts, particularly...

For many years scientists have been looking for a new generation of highly efficient, low-cost and easy-to-process solar cells. To improve the materials for solar cells researchers need to get a better understanding of how these materials function at the atomic and electronic scales. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) based on methylammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3) have shown outstanding performance in the recent years. Owing to their...

The thin-film solar cell is a device which converts light into electrical energy and is made up of layers of a photon-absorbing material deposited over a flexible substrate. Thin-film solar cells were originally developed in the 1970s and have improved over the years so that now the global thin-film solar cell market is growing at an unprecedented rate. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a commonly used III-V semiconductor compound for...

The synthesis of catalysts with flexible properties and sizes has made a big step forward thanks to new nanotechnologies which can help tune the catalytic activity to suit the requirements of the chemical reaction. Scientists have long been researching new selective catalysis with solution-dispersed or supported-metal nanocatalysts. However, several challenges remain, particularly concerning the structural stability of the catalytic...

Today, many research organisations are investigating new methods to achieve a clean transition from fossil energy to renewable fuels. The ETH Zurich and the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt; DLR) have discovered a thermochemical pathway to produce liquid fuel by means of concentrated solar energy. The SUN-to-LIQUID project, which is funded by the EU and Switzerland, has succeeded in synthesising solar...

Turning biomass into useful energy products such as biofuels or renewable natural gas has been one of the chief interests of scientists for many years. Forest residue, which includes all parts of the tree, can be converted into solid, liquid or gaseous biofuels that can then be burnt for energy or used as fuel substitutes for transportation or industrial processes. Now (2019), the Gas Technology Institute has developed a site-specific...

In a recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, plant biology has helped design a method to transform water into hydrogen and oxygen. During this chemical process, two membrane-bound protein complexes were made to react using energy from the sun. The method is based on prior research (2011) which was conducted on the protein complex Photosystem I. This protein complex forms a membrane that uses...