05.09.2010

“Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.

One of the problems with harvesting sunlight is that the sun’s rays can be highly destructive to many materials. Sunlight leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it. But plants have adopted an interesting strategy to address this issue: They constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun’s energy are, in effect, always brand new.

That process has now been imitated by Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and his team of graduate students and researchers. [...]”

Source/article: PhysOrg

22.08.2010

“A LUNG-inspired hydrogen fuel cell can cut the amount of expensive catalyst needed and increase efficiency, its designers claim.

Despite decades of research, hydrogen fuel cells have failed to replace combustion engines in cars, thanks in large part to the cost of their platinum catalysts, says Signe Kjelstrup at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo.

So Kjelstrup’s team designed a cell that uses less platinum. It uses channels modelled on the bronchial structure of the lungs to supply hydrogen and oxygen gas to their respective electrodes. This helps to spread the gases more uniformly across the catalyst than current channel designs and provides a greater surface area so less platinum is needed, Kjelstrup claims (Energy & Fuels, DOI: 10.1021/ef100610w). [...]”

Source/article: News Scientist