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Home > News > Globalinforesearch > Energy
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-29   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    First evidence of winds outside black holes throughout their mealtimes

    New research shows the first evidence of strong winds around black holes throughout bright outburst events when a black hole rapidly consumes mass. The study, published in Nature, sheds new light on how mass transfers to black holes and how black holes can affect the environment around them. The research was conducted by an international team of researchers, led by scientists in the University of Alberta's Department of Physics. Using data from three international space agencies spanning 20 years, the scientists used new statistical techniques to study outbursts from stellar-mass black hole X-ray binary systems. Their results show evidence of consistent and strong winds surrounding black holes throughout outbursts. Until now, strong winds had only been seen in limited parts of these events. "Winds must blow away a large fraction of the matter a black hole could eat,'' described Bailey Tetarenko, PhD student and lead author on the study. "In one of our models, the winds removed 80 per cent of the black hole's potential meal." Depending on their size, stellar-mass black holes have the capacity to consume everything within a 3 to 150 kilometre radius. "Not even light can escape from this close to a black hole," explained Gregory Sivakoff, associate professor of physics and co-author. Other, much larger black holes, called supermassive black holes, appear to have affected the formation of entire galaxies. "But even supermassive black holes are smaller than our solar system. While they are small, black holes can have surprisingly large effects," explained Sivakoff. So, what exactly causes these winds in space? For now, it remains a mystery. "We think magnetic fields play a key role. But we'll need to do a great deal of future investigation to understand these winds," explained Craig Heinke, associate professor of physics and co-author. "Strong disk winds traced throughout outbursts in black-hole X-ray binaries" will be published online January 22 in Nature, one of the world's top peer-reviewed scientific publications.   Story Source:   Materials provided by University of Alberta. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-25   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Middle-aged sun observed by tracking motion of Mercury

    Like the waistband of a couch potato in midlife, the orbits of planets in our solar system are expanding. It happens because the Sun's gravitational grip gradually weakens as our star ages and loses mass. Now, a team of NASA and MIT scientists has indirectly measured this mass loss and other solar parameters by looking at changes in Mercury's orbit. The new values improve upon earlier predictions by reducing the amount of uncertainty. That's especially important for the rate of solar mass loss, because it's related to the stability of G, the gravitational constant. Although G is considered a fixed number, whether it's really constant is still a fundamental question in physics. "Mercury is the perfect test object for these experiments because it is so sensitive to the gravitational effect and activity of the Sun," said Antonio Genova, the lead author of the study published in Nature Communications and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The study began by improving Mercury's charted ephemeris -- the road map of the planet's position in our sky over time. For that, the team drew on radio tracking data that monitored the location of NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft while the mission was active. Short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, the robotic spacecraft made three flybys of Mercury in 2008 and 2009 and orbited the planet from March 2011 through April 2015. The scientists worked backward, analyzing subtle changes in Mercury's motion as a way of learning about the Sun and how its physical parameters influence the planet's orbit. For centuries, scientists have studied Mercury's motion, paying particular attention to its perihelion, or the closest point to the Sun during its orbit. Observations long ago revealed that the perihelion shifts over time, called precession. Although the gravitational tugs of other planets account for most of Mercury's precession, they don't account for all of it. The second-largest contribution comes from the warping of space-time around the Sun because of the star's own gravity, which is covered by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The success of general relativity in explaining most of Mercury's remaining precession helped persuade scientists that Einstein's theory was right. Other, much smaller contributions to Mercury's precession, are attributed to the Sun's interior structure and dynamics. One of those is the Sun's oblateness, a measure of how much it bulges at the middle -- its own version of a "spare tire" around the waist -- rather than being a perfect sphere. The researchers obtained an improved estimate of oblateness that is consistent with other types of studies. The researchers were able to separate some of the solar parameters from the relativistic effects, something not accomplished by earlier studies that relied on ephemeris data. The team developed a novel technique that simultaneously estimated and integrated the orbits of both MESSENGER and Mercury, leading to a comprehensive solution that includes quantities related to the evolution of Sun's interior and to relativistic effects. "We're addressing long-standing and very important questions both in fundamental physics and solar science by using a planetary-science approach," said Goddard geophysicist Erwan Mazarico. "By coming at these problems from a different perspective, we can gain more confidence in the numbers, and we can learn more about the interplay between the Sun and the planets." The team's new estimate of the rate of solar mass loss represents one of the first times this value has been constrained based on observations rather than theoretical calculations. From the theoretical work, scientists previously predicted a loss of one-tenth of a percent of the Sun's mass over 10 billion years; that's enough to reduce the star's gravitational pull and allow the orbits of the planets to spread by about half an inch, or 1.5 centimeters, per year per AU (an AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between Earth and the Sun: about 93 million miles). The new value is slightly lower than earlier predictions but has less uncertainty. That made it possible for the team to improve the stability of G by a factor of 10, compared to values derived from studies of the motion of the Moon. "The study demonstrates how making measurements of planetary orbit changes throughout the solar system opens the possibility of future discoveries about the nature of the Sun and planets, and indeed, about the basic workings of the universe," said co-author Maria Zuber, vice president for research at MIT. Story Source: Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-23   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Field trips of the future?

     Virtual reality has nothing on nature. Just ask the UC Santa Barbara students who one recent day trekked to a forest before dawn to listen to a chorus of early birds. They had hiked into the woods for that very purpose as part of a field study course, tasked with identifying as many species as possible by their vocalizations. After 20 minutes, most had picked up the territorial call of the a red-shouldered hawk and two acorn woodpeckers chattering in the trees. A few careful listeners detected the twitter of a hummingbird. Amid their discussion of birds, no one expected to meet up with a mammal cameo. But when UCSB biologist Douglas McCauley, who co-teaches the class with Hillary Young -- an associate professor in the campus's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology -- emerged from the bushes with the small rodent in hand, he delivered a brief impromptu lecture about its features and then let it go. That kind of spontaneous encounter -- and the feeling it evokes -- would be next to impossible to reproduce in a virtual reality (VR) setting. It's the kind of unpredictable thing nature does best, inspiring awe and wonder -- and hopefully a love of learning outdoors. In a new paper in the journal Science, McCauley discusses the pros and cons of VR and augmented reality (AR) as environmental science teaching tools. "While they have a place in the pedagogical toolbox, the newest technologies aren't necessarily the best options," he said. "It's unclear whether they improve on more traditional methods like taking students outside before dawn to listen to birds." Rapid advancements in VR and AR have recently opened up a new genre of "electronic field trips" that mimics hikes, dives and treks through nature. Half a dozen UCSB seniors enrolled in McCauley's Laboratory and Fieldwork in Vertebrate Biology course, however, said they wouldn't have traded the experience of seeing their professor wrangle a rodent for staying in bed and using VR goggles to "recreate" the encounter at their leisure. In fact, many said the field trip marked the first time in years they had sat quietly in nature, listening and learning, for more than a couple minutes. Nonetheless, according to McCauley, both VR and AR have their potential upsides, such as the capacity to move back and forth in time. "With virtual reality we could have transported the students on our birding trip back to a Pleistocene dawn in those same woods when they were full of 20-foot-tall ground sloths and hungry saber-tooth tigers," McCauley said. "Or we could have taken them forward in time to a climate-altered future where bird migrations had been disrupted." In the paper, McCauley argues that AR holds some promise if not used heavy-handedly. Consider Harvard University's AR simulation of Black's Nook Pond in Massachusetts, in which users can take photos of pond wildlife, catch bugs in the mud, measure virtual weather, collect population data and sample water chemistry using their smartphone. At certain points predetermined by GPS coordinates, a digital teaching assistant appears, who might prompt participants on how to take a water sample. Or, when the smartphone is shown a plant, the program could supply an animation of a carbon atom moving through the plant during photosynthesis. "You have this augmented experience of looking at a detail or process you can't see in real life," McCauley explained. "I think there's an interesting possibility there to enhance the outdoor experience. But how far do you push that before you lose some of the core values of being in nature: the opportunity to chat with the person next to you rather than staring at your phone, or the capacity to actually see the plant and experience nature with your own eyes rather than on a digital screen."   Story Source:   Materials provided by University of California - Santa Barbara. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-19   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Lifespan of fuel cells maximized using small amount of metals

    Fuel cells are key future energy technology that is emerging as eco-friendly and renewable energy sources. In particular, solid oxide fuel cells composed of ceramic materials gain increasing attention for their ability to directly convert various forms of fuel such as biomass, LNG, and LPG to electric energy. KAIST researchers described a new technique to improve chemical stability of electrode materials which can extend the lifespan by employing a very little amount of metals. The core factor that determines the performance of solid oxide fuel cells is the cathode at which the reduction reaction of oxygen occurs. Conventionally, oxides with perovskite structure (ABO3) are used in cathodes. However, despite the high performance of perovskite oxides at initial operation, the performance decreases with time, limiting their long-term use. In particular, the condition of high temperature oxidation state required for cathode operation leads to surface segregation phenomenon, in which second phases such as strontium oxide (SrOx) accumulate on the surface of oxides, resulting in decrease in electrode performance. The detailed mechanism of this phenomenon and a way to effectively inhibit it has not been suggested. Using computational chemistry and experimental data, Professor WooChul Jung's team at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering observed that local compressive states around the Sr atoms in a perovskite electrode lattice weakened the Sr-O bond strength, which in turn promote strontium segregation. The team identified local changes in strain distribution in perovskite oxide as the main cause of segregation on strontium surface. Based on these findings, the team doped different sizes of metals in oxides to control the extent of lattice strain in cathode material and effectively inhibited strontium segregation. Professor Jung said, "This technology can be implemented by adding a small amount of metal atoms during material synthesis, without any additional process." He continued, "I hope this technology will be useful in developing high-durable perovskite oxide electrode in the future." The study co-led by Professor Jung and Professor Jeong Woo Han at Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Seoul was featured as the cover of Energy and Environmental Science in the first issue of 2018.   Story Source:   Materials provided by The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-17   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Steep slopes on Mars reveal structure of buried ice on Red Planet

    Researchers using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have found eight sites where thick deposits of ice beneath Mars' surface are exposed in faces of eroding slopes. These eight scarps, with slopes as steep as 55 degrees, reveal new information about the internal layered structure of previously detected underground ice sheets in Mars' middle latitudes. The ice was likely deposited as snow long ago. The deposits are exposed in cross section as relatively pure water ice, capped by a layer one to two yards (or meters) thick of ice-cemented rock and dust. They hold clues about Mars' climate history. They also may make frozen water more accessible than previously thought to future robotic or human exploration missions. Researchers who located and studied the scarp sites with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on MRO reported the findings today in the journal Science. The sites are in both northern and southern hemispheres of Mars, at latitudes from about 55 to 58 degrees, equivalent on Earth to Scotland or the tip of South America. "There is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, which records the recent history of Mars," said the study's lead author, Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. "What we've seen here are cross-sections through the ice that give us a 3-D view with more detail than ever before." Windows into underground ice The scarps directly expose bright glimpses into vast underground ice previously detected with spectrometers on NASA's Mars Odyssey (MRO) orbiter, with ground-penetrating radar instruments on MRO and on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, and with observations of fresh impact craters that uncover subsurface ice. NASA sent the Phoenix lander to Mars in response to the Odyssey findings; in 2008, the Phoenix mission confirmed and analyzed the buried water ice at 68 degrees north latitude, about one-third of the way to the pole from the northernmost of the eight scarp sites. The discovery reported today gives us surprising windows where we can see right into these thick underground sheets of ice," said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Tucson, a co-author on today's report. "It's like having one of those ant farms where you can see through the glass on the side to learn about what's usually hidden beneath the ground." Scientists have not determined how these particular scarps initially form. However, once the buried ice becomes exposed to Mars' atmosphere, a scarp likely grows wider and taller as it "retreats," due to sublimation of the ice directly from solid form into water vapor. At some of them, the exposed deposit of water ice is more than 100 yards, or meter, thick. Examination of some of the scarps with MRO's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) confirmed that the bright material is frozen water. A check of the surface temperature using Odyssey's Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera helped researchers determine they're not seeing just thin frost covering the ground. Researchers previously used MRO's Shallow Radar (SHARAD) to map extensive underground water-ice sheets in middle latitudes of Mars and estimate that the top of the ice is less than about 10 yards beneath the ground surface. How much less? The radar method did not have sufficient resolution to say. The new ice-scarp studies confirm indications from fresh-crater and neutron-spectrometer observations that a layer rich in water ice begins within just one or two yards of the surface in some areas. Astronauts' access to Martian water The new study not only suggests that underground water ice lies under a thin covering over wide areas, it also identifies eight sites where ice is directly accessible, at latitudes with less hostile conditions than at Mars' polar ice caps. "Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need," Byrne said. The exposed ice has scientific value apart from its potential resource value because it preserves evidence about long-term patterns in Mars' climate. The tilt of Mars' axis of rotation varies much more than Earth's, over rhythms of millions of years. Today the two planets' tilts are about the same. When Mars tilts more, climate conditions may favor buildup of middle-latitude ice. Dundas and co-authors say that banding and color variations apparent in some of the scarps suggest layers "possibly deposited with changes in the proportion of ice and dust under varying climate conditions." This research benefited from coordinated use of multiple instruments on Mars orbiters, plus the longevities at Mars now exceeding 11 years for MRO and 16 years for Odyssey. Orbital observations will continue, but future missions to the surface could seek additional information. "If you had a mission at one of these sites, sampling the layers going down the scarp, you could get a detailed climate history of Mars," suggested MRO Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "It's part of the whole story of what happens to water on Mars over time: Where does it go? When does ice accumulate? When does it recede?" The University of Arizona operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, leads MRO's CRISM investigation. The Italian Space Agency provided MRO's SHARAD instrument, Sapienza University of Rome leads SHARAD operations, and the Planetary Science Institute, based in Tucson, Arizona, leads U.S. involvement in SHARAD. Arizona State University, Tempe, leads the Odyssey mission's THEMIS investigation. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the MRO and Odyssey projects for the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, built both orbiters and supports their operation.   Story Source:   Materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-17   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Perovskite solar cells: Perfection not required

    Metal-organic perovskite layers for solar cells are frequently fabricated using the spin coating technique on industry-relevant compact substrates. These perovskite layers generally exhibit numerous holes, yet attain astonishingly high levels of efficiency. The reason that these holes do not lead to significant short circuits between the front and back contact has now been discovered. The early metal-organic perovskites exhibited efficiency levels of only a few per cent (2.2 per cent in 2006). That changed quickly, however: the record level now lies considerably above 22 per cent. The equivalent efficiency increase in the current commercially dominant silicon solar cell technology took more than 50 years. The fact that thin films made of low cost metal-organic perovskites can be produced on a large scale for example by spin coating and subsequently baking (whereby the solvent evaporates and the material crystallizes), makes this technology additionally attractive. Holes in the perovskite film Nevertheless, the thin perovskite film that results from spin coating on compact substrates is generally not perfect, but instead exhibits many holes. The samples from the pioneering perovskite group headed by Prof. Henry Snaith exhibit these holes as well. The problem is that these holes could lead to short circuits in the solar cell by the adjacent layers of the solar cell coming into contact. This would reduce the efficiency level considerably, which is not observed. Thin layer is built up Now Marcus Bär and his group, together with the Spectro-Microscopy group of the Fritz Haber Institute have carefully examined samples from Henry Snaith. Using scanning electron microscopy, they mapped the surface morphology. They subsequently analysed the sample areas exhibiting holes for their chemical composition using spectromicrographic methods at BESSY II. "We were able to show that the substrate was not really exposed even in the holes, but instead a thin layer is being built up essentially as a result of the deposition and crystallization processes there that apparently prevents short circuits," explains doctoral student Claudia Hartmann. .. and prevents short circuits The scientists were able to ascertain at the same time that the energy barrier the charge carriers had to overcome in order to recombine with one another in the event of a direct encounter of the contact layers is relatively high. "The electron transport layer (TiO2) and the transport material for positive charge carriers (Spiro MeOTAD) do not actually come into direct contact. In addition, the recombination barrier between the contact layers is sufficiently high that the losses in these solar cells is minute despite the many holes in the perovskite thin-film," says Bär.   Story Source:   Materials provided by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.  
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-17   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    New study shows producers where and how to grow cellulosic biofuel crops

    According to a recent ruling by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 288 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel must be blended into the U.S. gasoline supply in 2018. Although this figure is down slightly from last year, the industry is still growing at a modest pace. However, until now, producers have had to rely on incomplete information and unrealistic, small-scale studies in guiding their decisions about which feedstocks to grow, and where. A new multi-institution report provides practical agronomic data for five cellulosic feedstocks, which could improve adoption and increase production across the country. "Early yield estimates were based on data from small research plots, but they weren't realistic. Our main goal with this project was to determine whether these species could be viable crops when grown on the farm scale," says D.K. Lee, associate professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and leader of the prairie mixture portion of the study. The project, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Sun Grant Initiative, began in 2008 and includes researchers from 26 institutions. Together, they evaluated the bioenergy potential of switchgrass, Miscanthus, sorghum, energycane, and prairie mixtures in long-term trials spanning a wide geographical area. Due to shortages in plant materials, Miscanthus and energycane were grown on smaller plots than the other crops, but researchers say the new results are still valuable for producers. "Although making real-world decisions and recommendations based on performance data from small plots is less desirable than from field-scale plots, we feel comfortable with the Miscanthus results since they were based on 33 data sets collected from five sites over seven years," says Tom Voigt, professor in the crop sciences department at U of I and leader of the Miscanthus portion of the study. Crops were grown for five to seven years in multiple locations and with varying levels of nitrogen fertilizer. Although most of the crops are known to tolerate poor soil quality, the researchers found that they all benefitted from at least some nitrogen. For example, Miscanthus did best with an application of 53.5 pounds per acre. "When we didn't fertilize with any nitrogen, yields dropped over time. But if we used too much, 107 pounds per acre, we were increasing nitrous oxide emissions and nitrate leaching," says Voigt. "There is some need for fertilization, but it should be tailored to specific locations." Prairie mixtures, which were grown on land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), also benefitted from added nitrogen. Yield kept increasing with the addition of up to 100 pounds per acre, but Lee says producers would have to weigh the yield benefit against the cost of the fertilizer. "Even though it increased yield, it is economically not profitable to use more than 50 pounds of nitrogen per acre." And although most of the crops are somewhat drought-tolerant, precipitation made a difference. "Miscanthus production was directly related to precipitation," Voigt says. "In areas where precipitation was down, yields generally dropped. However, it did depend on timing. If there was a good amount of water in the winter, plants could get going pretty well in the spring. But if we had little rainfall after that, that hurt yields." Lee says prairie mixtures, which are normally made up of hardy grasses, suffered from the severe droughts in 2012 and 2013 in some locations. "In one year in our Oklahoma location, they didn't even try to harvest. Yield was too low." No one feedstock "won" across the board. "It depends so much on location, nitrogen application rate, and year variability," Voigt says. Instead of highlighting specific yields obtained in good years or locations, a group of statisticians within the research team used field-based yield and environmental data to create maps of yield potential for the five crops across the U.S. Dark green swaths on the maps represent areas of highest yield potential, between 8 and 10 tons per acre per year. According to the new results, the greatest yield potentials for lowland switchgrass varieties are in the lower Mississippi valley and the Gulf coast states, whereas Miscanthus and prairie mixture yields are likely to be greatest in the upper Midwest. Lee says the prairie mixtures, which are typically grown on CRP land to conserve soil, didn't live up to their potential in the study. "We know that there are higher-yielding switchgrass varieties today than were included in the CRP mixtures in the study. If we really want to use CRP for biomass production, we need to plant highly productive species. That will bump yield up a lot higher. "One of the biggest concerns now is that CRP enrollment is shrinking. When we started, we had 36 million acres nationwide. Now we're down to 26 million. Farmers feel they could make more money by using that land for row crops. We need to find some solution if we want to save the soil. Biomass could provide revenue for farmers, if they were allowed to harvest it," Lee says. Energycane could reach very high yields, but in a relatively limited portion of the country. However, the crop that shows the highest potential yields in the greatest number of locations is sorghum. The annual crop is highly adaptable to various conditions and might be easier for farmers to work with. "It fits well in the traditional annual row-crop system; better than perennial crops. It may not be environmentally as desirable as perennial crops, but people could borrow money in winter to buy seed and supplies, then plant, and sell in the fall to pay back their loans. It's the annual cycle that corn and beans are in," Voigt says. Lee adds, "In terms of management, sorghum is almost the same as corn. It germinates and grows so quickly, weed control is not a big issue. If you plant by early June, it will be 15-20 feet tall by September. It also has good drought tolerance." Downsides to the biomass champ? It's wet at harvest and can't be stored. It also requires nitrogen and can lodge, or collapse, prior to harvest in wet or windy conditions. "Still, it's a really spectacular plant," Voigt says. The researchers made all the raw data from the study available online for anyone to access. Lee says it can be useful for everyone: scientists, policymakers, and producers. "It should be helpful for number of different stakeholders," he says.   Story Source:   Materials provided by University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-12   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Single metalens focuses all colors of the rainbow in one point

    Metalenses -- flat surfaces that use nanostructures to focus light -- promise to revolutionize optics by replacing the bulky, curved lenses currently used in optical devices with a simple, flat surface. But, these metalenses have remained limited in the spectrum of light they can focus well. Now a team of researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has developed the first single lens that can focus the entire visible spectrum of light -- including white light -- in the same spot and in high resolution. This has only ever been achieved in conventional lenses by stacking multiple lenses. The research is published in Nature Nanotechnology. Focusing the entire visible spectrum and white light -- combination of all the colors of the spectrum -- is so challenging because each wavelength moves through materials at different speeds. Red wavelengths, for example, will move through glass faster than the blue, so the two colors will reach the same location at different times resulting in different foci. This creates image distortions known as chromatic aberrations. Cameras and optical instruments use multiple curved lenses of different thicknesses and materials to correct these aberrations, which, of course, adds to the bulk of the device. "Metalenses have advantages over traditional lenses," says Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the research. "Metalenses are thin, easy to fabricate and cost effective. This breakthrough extends those advantages across the whole visible range of light. This is the next big step." The Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD) has protected the intellectual property relating to this project and is exploring commercialization opportunities. The metalenses developed by Capasso and his team use arrays of titanium dioxide nanofins to equally focus wavelengths of light and eliminate chromatic aberration. Previous research demonstrated that different wavelengths of light could be focused but at different distances by optimizing the shape, width, distance, and height of the nanofins. In this latest design, the researchers created units of paired nanofins that control the speed of different wavelengths of light simultaneously. The paired nanofins control the refractive index on the metasurface and are tuned to result in different time delays for the light passing through different fins, ensuring that all wavelengths reach the focal spot at the same time. "One of the biggest challenges in designing an achromatic broadband lens is making sure that the outgoing wavelengths from all the different points of the metalens arrive at the focal point at the same time," said Wei Ting Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and first author of the paper. "By combining two nanofins into one element, we can tune the speed of light in the nanostructured material, to ensure that all wavelengths in the visible are focused in the same spot, using a single metalens. This dramatically reduces thickness and design complexity compared to composite standard achromatic lenses." "Using our achromatic lens, we are able to perform high quality, white light imaging. This brings us one step closer to the goal of incorporating them into common optical devices such as cameras," said Alexander Zhu, co-author of the study. Next, the researchers aim to scale up the lens, to about 1 cm in diameter. This would open a whole host of new possibilities, such as applications in virtual and augmented reality. This paper was coauthored by Vyshakh Sanjeev, Mohammadreza Khorasaninejad, Zhujun Shi, and Eric Lee. It was partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This work was performed in part at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation.   Story Source:   Materials provided by Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Original written by Leah Burrows. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-11   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Weighing massive stars in nearby galaxy reveals excess of heavyweights

    An international team of astronomers has revealed an 'astonishing' overabundance of massive stars in a neighbouring galaxy. The discovery, made in the gigantic star-forming region 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, has 'far-reaching' consequences for our understanding of how stars transformed the pristine Universe into the one we live in today. The results are published in the journal Science. Lead author Fabian Schneider, a Hintze Research Fellow in the University of Oxford's Department of Physics, said: 'We were astonished when we realised that 30 Doradus has formed many more massive stars than expected.' As part of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS), the team used ESO's Very Large Telescope to observe nearly 1,000 massive stars in 30 Doradus, a gigantic stellar nursery also known as the Tarantula nebula. The team used detailed analyses of about 250 stars with masses between 15 and 200 times the mass of our Sun to determine the distribution of massive stars born in 30 Doradus -- the so-called initial mass function (IMF). Massive stars are particularly important for astronomers because of their enormous influence on their surroundings (known as their 'feedback'). They can explode in spectacular supernovae at the end of their lives, forming some of the most exotic objects in the Universe -- neutron stars and black holes. Co-author Hugues Sana from the University of Leuven in Belgium said: 'We have not only been surprised by the sheer number of massive stars, but also that their IMF is densely sampled up to 200 solar masses.' Until recently, the existence of stars up to 200 solar masses was highly disputed, and the study shows that a maximum birth mass of stars of 200-300 solar masses appears likely. In most parts of the Universe studied by astronomers to date, stars become rarer the more massive they are. The IMF predicts that most stellar mass is in low-mass stars and that less than 1% of all stars are born with masses in excess of ten times that of the Sun. Measuring the proportion of massive stars is extremely difficult -- primarily because of their scarcity -- and there are only a handful of places in the local Universe where this can be done. The team turned to 30 Doradus, the biggest local star-forming region, which hosts some of the most massive stars ever found, and determined the masses of massive stars with unique observational, theoretical and statistical tools. This large sample allowed the scientists to derive the most accurate high-mass segment of the IMF to date, and to show that massive stars are much more abundant than previously thought. Chris Evans from the Science and Technology Facilities Council's UK Astronomy Technology Centre, the principal investigator of VFTS and a co-author of the study, said: 'In fact, our results suggest that most of the stellar mass is actually no longer in low-mass stars, but a significant fraction is in high-mass stars.' Stars are cosmic engines and have produced most chemical elements heavier than helium, from the oxygen we breathe every day to the iron in our blood. During their lives, massive stars produce copious amounts of ionising radiation and kinetic energy through strong stellar winds. The ionising radiation of massive stars was crucial for the re-brightening of the Universe after the so-called Dark Ages, and their mechanical feedback drives the evolution of galaxies. Philipp Podsiadlowski, a co-author of the study from the University of Oxford, said: 'To quantitatively understand all these feedback mechanisms, and hence the role of massive stars in the Universe, we need to know how many of these behemoths are born.' Fabian Schneider added: 'Our results have far-reaching consequences for the understanding of our cosmos: there might be 70% more supernovae, a tripling of the chemical yields and towards four times the ionising radiation from massive star populations. Also, the formation rate of black holes might be increased by 180%, directly translating into a corresponding increase of binary black hole mergers that have recently been detected via their gravitational wave signals.' The team's research leaves many open questions, which they intend to investigate in the future: how universal are the findings, and what are the consequences of this for the evolution of our cosmos and the occurrence of supernovae and gravitational wave events?   Story Source:   Materials provided by University of Oxford. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
    in:  Energy   |  2018-01-09   |  by:  GlobalInfoResearch

    Strong El Niño events cause large changes in Antarctic ice shelves-

    A new study published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience reveals that strong El Nino events can cause significant ice loss in some Antarctic ice shelves while the opposite may occur during strong La Nina events. El Niño and La Niña are two distinct phases of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a naturally occurring phenomenon characterized by how water temperatures in the tropical Pacific periodically oscillate between warmer than average during El Niños and cooler during La Niñas. The research, funded by NASA and the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, provides new insights into how Antarctic ice shelves respond to variability in global ocean and atmospheric conditions. The study was led by Fernando Paolo while a PhD graduate student and postdoc at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Paolo is now a postdoctoral scholar at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Paolo and his colleagues, including Scripps glaciologist Helen Fricker, discovered that a strong El Niño event causes ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica to gain mass at the surface and melt from below at the same time, losing up to five times more ice from basal melting than they gain from increased snowfall. The study used satellite observations of the height of the ice shelves from 1994 to 2017. "We've described for the first time the effect of El Niño/Southern Oscillation on the West Antarctic ice shelves," Paolo said. "There have been some idealized studies using models, and even some indirect observations off the ice shelves, suggesting that El Niño might significantly affect some of these shelves, but we had no actual ice-shelf observations. Now we have presented a record of 23 years of satellite data on the West Antarctic ice shelves, confirming not only that ENSO affects them at a yearly basis, but also showing how." The opposing effects of El Niño on ice shelves -- adding mass from snowfall but taking it away through basal melt -- were at first difficult to untangle from the satellite data. "The satellites measure the height of the ice shelves, not the mass, and what we saw at first is that during strong El Niños the height of the ice shelves actually increased," Paolo said. "I was expecting to see an overall reduction in height as a consequence of mass loss, but it turns out that height increases." After further analysis of the data, the scientists found that although a strong El Niño changes wind patterns in West Antarctica in a way that promotes flow of warm ocean waters towards the ice shelves to increase melting from below, it also increases snowfall particularly along the Amundsen Sea sector. The team then needed to determine the contribution of the two effects. Is the atmosphere adding more mass than the ocean is taking away or is it the other way around? "We found out that the ocean ends up winning in terms of mass. Changes in mass, rather than height, control how the ice shelves and associated glaciers flow into the ocean," Paolo said. While mass loss by basal melting exceeds mass gain from snowfall during strong El Niño events, the opposite appears to be true during La Niña events. Over the entire 23-year observation period, the ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea sector of Antarctica had their height reduced by 20 centimeters (8 inches) a year, for a total of 5 meters (16 feet), mostly due to ocean melting. The intense 1997-98 El Nino increased the height of these ice shelves by more than 25 centimeters (10 inches). However, the much lighter snow contains far less water than solid ice does. When the researchers took density of snow into account, they found that ice shelves lost about five times more ice by submarine melting than they gained from new surface snowpack. "Many people look at this ice-shelf data and will fit a straight line to the data, but we're looking at all the wiggles that go into that linear fit, and trying to understand the processes causing them," said Fricker, who was Paolo's PhD adviser at the time the study was conceived. "These longer satellite records are allowing us to study processes that are driving changes in the ice shelves, improving our understanding on how the grounded ice will change," Fricker said. "The ice shelf response to ENSO climate variability can be used as a guide to how longer-term changes in global climate might affect ice shelves around Antarctica," said co-author Laurie Padman, an oceanographer with Earth & Space Research, a nonprofit research company based in Seattle. "The new data set will allow us to check if our ocean models can correctly represent changes in the flow of warm water under ice shelves," he added. Melting of the ice shelves doesn't directly affect sea level rise, because they're already floating. What matters for sea-level rise is the addition of ice from land into the ocean, however it's the ice shelves that hold off the flow of grounded ice toward the ocean. Understanding what's causing the changes in the ice shelves "puts us a little bit closer to knowing what's going to happen to the grounded ice, which is what will ultimately affect sea-level rise," Fricker said. "The holy grail of all of this work is improving sea-level rise projections," she added.   Story Source:   Materials provided by University of California - San Diego. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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Chemical

On: 2018-04-23

In Global Market, the consumption of Foundry Binder increases from 1737.4 K MT in 2012

In global market, the consumption of Foundry Binder increases from 1737.4 K MT in 2012 to 1974.3 K MT in 2016, at a CAGR of 3.25%. In 2016, the global Foundry Binder market is led by China, capturing about 35.83% of global Foundry Binder consumption. Europe is the second-largest region-wise market with 19.72% global production share. At present, the major manufacturers of Foundry Binder are concentrated in ASK, HA, Jinan Shengquan, BASF, Kao Chemicals, Suzhou Xingye, Mancuso Chemicals Limited, Foseco, Imerys, RPMinerals, United Erie, Eurotek, REFCOTEC, John Winter, J. B. DeVENNE INC, SI Group. ASK is the world leader, holding 9.94% production market share in 2016. Browse Related Reports: Global (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa) Foundry Binder Market 2017 Forecast to 2022   Global Foundry Binder Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 In application, Foundry Binder downstream is wide and recently Foundry Binder has acquired increasing significance in various fields of Core Sand Casting and Mold Sand Casting. The Foundry Binder market is mainly driven by growing demand for Mold Sand Casting which accounts for nearly 66.06% of total downstream consumption of Foundry Binder in global. In the future, global market is expected to witness significant growth on account of rising applications, so in the next few years, Foundry Binder production will show a trend of steady growth. In 2022 the consumption of Foundry Binder is estimated to be 2484.6 K MT. On product prices, the slow downward trend in recent years will maintain in the future. GLOBAL INFO RESEARCH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED     Contact us: Tel:00852-58197708 (HK)    Email:sales@globalinforesearch.com  
by: GlobalInfoResearch
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