A Swedish Company Claims It Has Built The World's Most Efficient Solar Panel That Tracks The Sun.

A Swedish technology company has installed a new solar electricity generation system in South Africa’s sun-soaked Kalahari desert, saying it’s not only the most efficient system of its kind in the world, but it doubles the efficiency of standard solar panels.

The system, which features a pair of huge, 12-metre mirror dishes, runs on a Stirling engine - a type of closed-cycle regenerative heat engine that was invented way back in 1816, and uses trapped gas instead of water to propel the internal pistons and flywheel. The dishes are slowly rotated throughout the day to capture the maximum amount of solar rays and focus them into a specific point, which kicks the Stirling engine into gear.

Room With The Lowest Magnetic Field In The Solar System.

Some experiments, especially in fundamental physics, require the complete absence of magnetic fields. The only places you would find such a spot would be either in intergalactic space or inside a superconductor. Now an international team of researchers claim to have created such a space with a magnetic field that is the weakest in the solar system.

In the Journal of Applied Physics of 14 May the researchers report that by building a box consisting of metal shields arranged in a "Russian nesting doll" structure, they have been able to attenuate changes in the ambient magnetic field caused by man, such as passing cars, or of natural origin, such as solar flares, by a million fold, a factor they have increased to seven million since the acceptance of their paper. In practical terms, the shielded box can reduce magnetic disturbances from passing cars to below one pico Tesla. In comparison, the magnetic field of the Earth averages 48 microtesla at the surface.

This million-fold attentuation is an increase of two orders of magnitude over the previous best magnetically shielded space, the BMSR-2 in Berlin, explains Peter Fierlinger, a physicist at the Technical University Munich, Germany. "There is a very fundamental experiment that we are intending to do.  It will allow us to look at the origin of the universe much closer to the Big Bang than the Large Hadron Collider," says Fierlinger.

The team of 19 researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United Sates used an industrial alloy of nickel and iron, Magnifer, that responds to external magnetic fields by becoming easily magnetized and redirecting the magnetic field lines towards the inside of the metal. The complete magnetic shield has a large external chamber consisting of three alloy shields and an aluminum shield for stopping RF radiation. A second box, also consisting of three Magnifer shells, called the "insert," is mounted on rails and can be rolled in and out of the external shield.  The total space available for experiments is slightly more than 4 m3.

"You can lock yourself in this room, but you will be the most magnetic item inside," says Fierlinger.

Although such magnetic shields have been built in the past, an efficient design, with optimized spacing and thickness of the metal sheets, became possible with advances in numeric modeling over the last few years, explains Fierlinger.  "It took us several years of elaborate work to achieve this improvement," he says.

The magnetic field the researchers achieved is now low enough to tackle an experiment that will  allow them to probe the Standard Model of Particle Physics beyond the capabilities of the LHC.

"We are trying to measure the electric dipole moment of the neutron, and this is a very fundamental quantity, it is a quantum effect inside the neutron which is forbidden by the laws of nature that are part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but it is an effect required to explain physics beyond our Standard Model,”  says Fierlinger. “And this physics must exist because it would explain why the universe, as we see it, has more matter than antimatter."

However, he is quick to add that their magnetically shielded room will profit other areas of science and technology, such as measuring magnetic signals from the brain with SQUIDs, the design and testing of SQUIDs, superconducting detectors, and low-noise electronics.  "Our chamber will not be a user facility, but experiments will be collaborative."

Diamond+Graphene Engineered to Reduce Friction To Almost Zero.

Friction is an important fact of life, robbing efficiency from anything where two surfaces interact with each other, such as engines and wheels. Lubrication can reduce the amount of friction, but it's never possible to get rid of it entirely.

In some rare cases, however, it's been possible to get the coefficient of friction to drop dramatically. A phenomenon called superlubricity occurs when two perfectly flat surfaces with incompatible crystal structures slide past each other. It's only been observed in extremely small samples, however, as larger surfaces have imperfections that tend to get stuck as they slide around.

Now, researchers have managed to create superlubricity in a large sample. They do so by getting graphene to wrap around nanoscopic diamonds, creating something akin to tiny ball bearings.

The authors of the new paper, a team from Argonne National Lab, were initially intending to study the traditional type of superlubricity. They reasoned that graphene and diamonds would have incompatible surfaces, and hoped that coating two surfaces with them would allow them to slide with minimal friction. Although friction was low, it didn't fall into the superlubricity category.

By looking at the surfaces afterwards, however, they found that small sheets of graphene had peeled off one of the surfaces and rolled up, creating scrolls in the debris. However, as graphene is only a single atom thick, these scrolls weren't very robust, and they ended up crunched between the two surfaces. In order to give the graphene more staying power, the team then turned to a rather robust substance: diamonds. The authors expected that the diamonds would act like tiny ball bearings, allowing the graphene scrolls to roll while the two surfaces slid past each other.

Diamonds have two other properties that make them an excellent choice. For one, they provide the same sort of surface that the authors had already reasoned would slide past graphene with minimal resistance. It's also possible to create incredibly small diamonds, which the authors refer to as nanodiamonds.

So, the authors coated a surface with graphene, coated another with diamond-like carbon, and sprinkled nanodiamonds in between. This dropped the coefficient of friction down to near zero, indicating the superlubricity had been achieved. Electron micrographs of the surface revealed that, as expected, graphene sheets had wrapped themselves around the nanodiamonds, which acted a bit like a ball bearing.

The authors tried a variety of conditions, changing the temperature, varying the load on the surfaces, and increasing their relative velocity. In all cases, the nanodiamonds retained superlubricity. The only exception came when the increased the relative humidity to 30 percent, which caused friction to increase dramatically. Apparently, water vapor can make its way into the space between the two surfaces and act as a bridge between them, creating transient bonds that need to be broken to shift the surfaces.

This is the first time that superlubricity's been demonstrated for something other than two microscopic, defect-free surfaces. So, in that sense, it represents significant progress, and may point a way forward to getting rid of some of the friction that robs us of energy.

Using Human Cells to Develope 3D Printed Ears.

3D printing has taken another huge step forward with engineers and physicians successfully creating a prosthetic human ear by using injectable moulds.

The injectable moulds contain living cells that were used to mould the shape of the ear. Over three months, the collagen used to mould them is replaced by cartilage once implanted. The discovery was made by scientists and biomedical engineers in Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical College and detailed in online peer review journal PLOS ONE.

The process starts with a digitised image of an ear for the printer. The file instructs the printer to mould the ear accordingly and then injects the gel containing living cells.

The whole procedure is quite fast. The mould takes roughly half a day to print and 30 minutes to inject the gel. It is then trimmed and left to culture in ‘nourishing cell culture media’ for a number of days before it is implanted on to a person.

The manufactured ear could help babies who have been born with ear deformities and in the long run be used to help people who lost their hearing later in life, whether through injury or illness, explains Dr Jason Spector.

Spector is the directorof the Laboratory for Bioregenerative Medicine and Surgery in New York and associate professor of plastic surgery with Weill Cornell. His colleague and co-lead author of the study, Lawrence Bonassar who is the associate professor of biomedical engineering also stated: “This is such a win-win for both medicine and basic science, demonstrating what we can achieve when we work together.”

Virtual Flowmeters: A Low-Cost Alternative

The use of virtual flowmeter (VFM) systems can help lower the costs and improve the reliability of subsea multiphase metering efforts. However, despite the maturation of VFM technology and the widespread use of VFM models as backups to physical meters, the industry has still not accepted it as an alternative to the physical meter or even as a tool to supplement physical meter measurements, an expert said. Speaking at a technical section on Tuesday at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Amin Amin, senior technical adviser at the Letton-Hall Group, discussed the study his group conducted into the viability of VFM systems. Amin compared five commercially available VFM software packages by using production data from a subsea well with a subsea multiphase flowmeter. He ran three rounds of evaluation. The first was an “out of the box” test, where the models were tested without any modifications. In the second round, the meters were tuned using elemental computing parameters for subsea multiphase meters such as total mass flow rate, gas volume fraction, and water/liquid ratio. In the third round, Amin factored fluid property errors into his measurements. “We really wanted to have a complete vote of confidence of VFMs,” Amin said. “Here was a real test case for us.” After the first round of testing, Amin noted that the real production data were valuable in comparing the methodologies used by each flow model to arrive at the given flow rates measured by the subsea multiphase flowmeter. In the second round, he found that the gas volume fraction could be estimated to a sufficient degree of accuracy by tuning the total mass flow rate in each model. Though the gas flow rate predictions grew increasingly uncertain over time, each package was consistent with regards to the anchoring role that the total mass flow rate parameter played in the VFM tuning process. The flow rate predictions from all participating models showed less than a 5% deviation from the measured oil flow rate and less than a 10% deviation from the measured gas flow rate. Adjusting the models to account for fluid properties did not change the results much. The deviation of individual phase densities had little effect on the flow rate projection, provided that the total mass flow rate used in the tuning process was accurate. Amin said the dependency of VFM models on the mixture density measurement at a given point for the purpose of defining the total mass flow rate is greater than it would be on the individual phase densities. Amin found that the presence of anomalous input data can impair the flow rate predictions of VFM systems, but with only one case study of note, it is hard to determine if this is a serious concern. He said more work is needed to establish a systematic approach to understand and interpret VFM systems in order to identify anomalous devices. “The systematic errors can be compromising, so the detection of these errors may not be as easy as one might expect from this system,” he said.