Highefficiency

You know when you pour milk into a bowl of breakfast cereal and the floating cereal tends to clump together? In fluid mechanics, that phenomenon is known as the ‘Cheerios effect,’ and it’s inspired the development of a unique but more efficient water-harvesting system that could be particularly useful in arid regions.Researchers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, coated a surface with a lubricant film and found that it caused water droplets to combine faster, akin to the…

A group of MIT researchers who use AI to mitigate traffic congestion applied ideas from that domain to tackle the problem of multiple robots in a warehouse setting.By breaking an intractable problem into smaller chunks, a deep-learning technique identifies the optimal areas for thinning out traffic in a warehouse.Hundreds of robots zip back and forth across the floor of a colossal robotic warehouse, grabbing items and delivering them to human workers for packing and shipping. Such warehouses are increasingly becoming part…

Assisted by AI methods, researchers are striving to improve the manufacturing processes for highly efficient perovskite solar cells. Credit: Amadeus Bramsiepe, KITArtificial intelligence techniques assist scientists in enhancing manufacturing procedures for highly efficient solar cells, serving as a blueprint for various other research fields.Perovskite tandem solar cells represent an advanced hybrid technology, merging a perovskite solar cell with a traditional solar cell, often made of silicon. This innovative approach…

Researchers have made progress in the development of iridium-based catalysts used in proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE), a process used to generate green hydrogen from renewable energy sources. The team has discovered a lattice-water-assisted mechanism that can increase the efficiency of an iridium oxide catalyst by 5-12%, resulting in higher energy output and less energy consumption.Scientists have enhanced the efficiency of iridium-based catalysts used in green hydrogen production by 5-12%. This reduces…

Microplastics are a growing environmental problem, but now researchers in Korea have developed a new water purification system that can filter out these tiny fragments, as well as other pollutants, very quickly and with high efficiency.Given the ubiquity of plastic in the modern world, it’s not surprising that tiny flakes of the stuff can be found basically everywhere on Earth, even in environments thought to be pristine. Microplastics have been detected from pole to pole, from the deepest ocean trenches to the tallest…