Solar-powered jet fuel (and diesel, and...)

Sounds kind of backwards, I suppose, but there is in fact research happening on creating jet fuel, and other liquid fuels, using solar energy. One of the big advantages of liquid fuels like gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel is the large amount of energy contained in a small mass—much more energy per gram than batteries. Just recently, in fact, one such research group announced that they had produced a jar of jet fuel, starting from sunlight and CO₂.

Taking out the quotes and the hyperbole about revolutionizing anything, what they've done is still pretty neat: turned CO₂, the low energy end state of carbon-based fuel combustion, back into usable fuel.

Because CO₂ is the low energy end state, to get it back into a high energy form such as kerosene (jet fuel) or diesel, a whole lot of energy has to be put into it. In this case, the energy is solar.

Well, the energy is intended to be solar.

Inspired by: bacteria

Here's another one where nature meets engineering on a microscopic scale: tiny submarines small enough to swim through your blood vessels.

Oops, wrong link.

The submarines I'm actually talking about won't carry people, but once built they could be made to carry small doses of medicine, and directed to swim to a specific spot in your body.

The reason this merits a mention in the "nature meets engineering" category is that down at the 10\(\mu\)m scale (which is to say, 100 of these lined up end to end would only reach 1mm long) you can't just build a tiny motor and propeller and expect to have the submarine go anywhere, because at that scale, the physics of it just doesn't work. Instead, what they looked at was how creatures that are actually that small get around.

Folded Solar

Solar electrical is pretty exciting right now, I must say. After my previous post on some of the cool stuff coming up in photovoltaics I let it slide for a while and chased other cool news, but this new thing from late December really caught my attention.

I mean, solar panel stickers? Which you can apply to fabric or paper, bend them, and have them still work?

The researchers say that this technique isn't only good for solar panels but also possibly for electronic circuits, transistors, and even LCDs as well. Maybe you really could have a solar powered, electronically active jacket, including flexible display, one day. Imagine, a self-powered jacket that could show you a map of where you are, among other things.

They tested the solar panels to a bend radius of 7mm without any damage. I don't know if it would handle a crease (if on paper) very well, or crumpled-clothes type bends. From the paper, it doesn't look like they tested its bending abilities to failure.

Solar Technology - The Next Generation

It wasn't so long ago that photovoltaic solar panels were expensive, hard—and dirty!—to produce, inefficient sources of very expensive power.

In the last little while, however, a flurry of advances have improved on all of those problems. So many announcements have come out lately that I've delayed this post repeatedly due to the sheer quantity of new information. But that's not going to stop, so I'll post what I have now, and I may post again later.

For a super-quick summary of first-generation photovoltaic power, the panels were made of silicon using a process that involves toxic chemicals and high temperatures, were very fragile, expensive, and had a low efficiency and limited lifespan.

But now they're becoming cheap, tough, flexible, easy to make, and remarkably efficient and durable.