When it comes to making repairs around the house, having the right tools can make or break the project. This guide will provide you with the tools you'll need to start your own home tool kit.
The latest from city park accessory master Art Lebedev, the Urnus-14 design is a compact and easy-to-service trash can. The stark metal structure is barely-there compared to other monolithic garbage bin designs but depending on color of the trash bag used, it can also stand out.
It’s also easier to reset by maintenance personnel. A built-in rubber band holds the bag rim in place, ensuring it doesn’t slip out of the grooved holder. One perk is that it doesn’t require additional cleaning – only removal of the bag.
I’m not sure how well it will contain items from outdoor critters, or how much people will enjoy visible garbage bags, but as far as being expertly minimalist goes… it’s a winner!
Just as the name suggests, the Connected Stool explores an entirely new, interactive construction method and the result is stunning! Connected by a tough cord, 4 flat, planar elements transform into a handsome and useful three dimensional object.
The final shape is reminiscent of and inspired by a traditional Korean instrument called jang gu. Like tensile cord found in the in instrument, the Connected Stool’s colorful rope makes for a bright and playful accent against the cozy wood. For a finishing touch, it’s fit with a leather strap and brass buckle that keeps the rope taut. Easy to deconstruct for storage or moving, this flat-packed puzzle is as convenient as it is fun to put together!
MIT researchers have developed a new system that could potentially be used for converting power plant emissions of carbon dioxide into useful fuels for cars, trucks, and planes, as well as into chemical feedstocks for a wide variety of products.
The new membrane-based system was developed by MIT postdoc Xiao-Yu Wu and Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and is described in a paper in the journal ChemSusChem. The membrane, made of a compound of lanthanum, calcium, and iron oxide, allows oxygen from a stream of carbon dioxide to migrate through to the other side, leaving carbon monoxide behind. Other compounds, known as mixed ionic electronic conductors, are also under consideration in their lab for use in multiple applications including oxygen and hydrogen production.
Carbon monoxide produced during this process can be used as a fuel by itself or combined with hydrogen and/or water to make many other liquid hydrocarbon fuels as well as chemicals including methanol (used as an automotive fuel), syngas, and so on. Ghoniem’s lab is exploring some of these options. This process could become part of the suite of technologies known as carbon capture, utilization, and storage, or CCUS, which if applied to electicity production could reduce the impact of fossil fuel use on global warming.
The membrane, with a structure known as perovskite, is “100 percent selective for oxygen,” allowing only those atoms to pass, Wu explains. The separation is driven by temperatures of up to 990 degrees Celsius, and the key to making the process work is to keep the oxygen that separates from carbon dioxide flowing through the membrane until it reaches the other side. This could be done by creating a vacuum on side of the membrane opposite the carbon dioxide stream, but that would require a lot of energy to maintain.
In place of a vacuum, the researchers use a stream of fuel such as hydrogen or methane. These materials are so readily oxidized that they will actually draw the oxygen atoms through the membrane without requiring a pressure difference. The membrane also prevents the oxygen from migrating back and recombining with the carbon monoxide, to form carbon dioxide all over again. Ultimately, and depending on the application, a combination of some vaccum and some fuel can be used to reduce the energy required to drive the process and produce a useful product.
The energy input needed to keep the process going, Wu says, is heat, which could be provided by solar energy or by waste heat, some of which could come from the power plant itself and some from other sources. Essentially, the process makes it possible to store that heat in chemical form, for use whenever it’s needed. Chemical energy storage has very high energy density — the amount of energy stored for a given weight of material — as compared to many other storage forms.
At this point, Wu says, he and Ghoniem have demonstrated that the process works. Ongoing research is examining how to increase the oxygen flow rates across the membrane, perhaps by changing the material used to build the membrane, changing the geometry of the surfaces, or adding catalyst materials on the surfaces. The researchers are also working on integrating the membrane into working reactors and coupling the reactor with the fuel production system. They are examining how this method could be scaled up and how it compares to other approaches to capturing and converting carbon dioxide emissions, in terms of both costs and effects on overall power plant operations.
In a natural gas power plant that Ghoniem’s group and others have worked on previously, Wu says the incoming natural gas could be split into two streams, one that would be burned to generate electricity while producing a pure stream of carbon dioxide, while the other stream would go to the fuel side of the new membrane system, providing the oxygen-reacting fuel source. That stream would produce a second output from the plant, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide known as syngas, which is a widely used industrial fuel and feedstock. The syngas can also be added to the existing natural gas distribution network.
The method may thus not only cut greenhouse emissions; it could also produce another potential revenue stream to help defray its costs.
The process can work with any level of carbon dioxide concentration, Wu says — they have tested it all the way from 2 percent to 99 percent — but the higher the concentration, the more efficient the process is. So, it is well-suited to the concentrated output stream from conventional fossil-fuel-burning power plants or those designed for carbon capture such as oxy-combustion plants.
“It is important to use carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide for the conversion of sustainable thermal energies to chemical energy,” says Xuefeng Zhu, a professor of chemical physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Dalian, China, who was not involved in this work. “Using an oxygen-permeable membrane can significantly reduce the reaction temperature, from 1,500 C to less than 1,000 C, indicating a great energy saving compared to the traditional carbon dioxide decomposition process,” he says. “I think their work is important to the field of sustainable energy and membrane processes.”
The research was funded by Shell Oil and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
by: Sustainable Design News, 2017-11-02 19:13:49 UTC The Deep Blue Bag is a sustainably-sourced up-cycled urban adventure bag, designed by Yves Behar in collaboration with Mafia Bags.
by: TreeHugger Science, 2017-11-28 21:04:12 UTC
SOURCE is a solar-powered and self-contained device capable of harvesting up to 10 liters of clean drinking water per day from the air.
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2017-11-09 03:47:44 UTC
After peeling back the curtain on an electrified version of its iconic Vespa at EICMA last year, Piaggo has now revealed a few key specs for the 2017 event. The silent and stylish Vespa Elettrica leads the storied scooter brand's charge into electric mobility, and offers some of the connected bells and whistles that we've come to expect from vehicles in that space.
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2017-11-09 06:36:24 UTC
A new device called the sKan has won the 2017 international James Dyson Award. The sKan makes heat maps of the skin to identify anomalies associated with melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, to enable earlier detection.
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2017-11-09 15:43:46 UTC
A thermoplastic material made exclusively from renewable resources is based on lignin, a natural polymer which is formed by photosynthesis and makes ...
SOURCE is a solar-powered and self-contained device capable of harvesting up to 10 liters of clean drinking water per day from the air.
Turning a problem into a solution for the building industry, on a large scale.
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