Research

Underwriters Laboratories, a US non-profit standards development organisation, will carry out research into the operating and safety profile of Queensland company Redflow’s redox flow batteries under nominal and off-nominal conditions.

What can wave energy converters do that no other form of renewable energy can? Well, they can remove waves’ energy. For a country like Australia, where much of our population and wealth is concentrated on coastlines evermore frequently battered by extreme weather, this proposition is particularly attractive. Especially if the technology is able to offer both protection and green electricity without radically altering marine ecosystems and aesthetics. “No one has looked at what we’re looking at before: combining power generation with coastal protection and trying to control it,” Professor Richard Manasseh told pv magazine Australia.

Scientists in Australia have developed an optimisation framework for building-integrated photovoltaics that allows the selection of design variables according to user preferences. Their model considers PV-related features such as tilt angle, window-to-wall ratio (WWR), PV placement, and PV product type, as well as objective functions and constraints such as the net present value and the payback period.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory launched a new catalyst based on nitrogen and carbon to extract hydrogen from hydrogen storage materials at mild temperatures and under normal atmospheric conditions. Furthermore, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the country is working on attracting new investments in electric vehicles and hydrogen and Norwegian consultancy and classification society DNV launched, together with 18 industry partners, a new Joint Industry Project (JIP) to enhance the standardisation for hydrogen production systems that use renewable energy-powered electrolysis to produce green hydrogen.

Temple University researchers have found that managed sheep grazing on an acre of recovering agricultural soil with native plants may sequester 1 ton of carbon per year, which could accumulate for 12 to 15 years before reaching saturation.

Scientists in South Korea developed a porous carbon material that, when applied as a coating to the separator film in a lithium-sulfur battery, was shown to reduce an unwanted side effect and improve the battery’s performance and reliability. The coating is based on methylene blue, a type of salt commonly used in textile dying.

Australia’s electricity retailers have been ranked from best to worst in terms of green credentials, igniting calls for retailers to make emissions information public and transparent.

Perovskite-silicon tandem cells offer one of the surest pathways to much higher solar efficiencies, one that has moved close to commercialisation in the past few years. Much of the work getting to this stage has naturally focused on developing a viable perovskite top cell. Optimisations to the silicon layer underneath, however, will also be important to the overall device function and efficiency. Scientists in Germany examined five different silicon cell concepts similar to those in mass production today, finding that with a few optimisations these could reach efficiencies up to 30.4%.

A pair of researchers from the University of California San Diego have proposed to precompute certain data when the grid is flooded with solar or wind power, and then store it on servers for later use.

Researchers from Finland and Sweden have reviewed different ways to store compressed gaseous hydrogen, including storage vessels, geological storage, and other underground options.