Sub's Alternative Energy Thread

[SubGod22]

Another way to help keep buildings cooler during intense heat waves.

Build Zigzag Patterns On Exterior Walls to Keep Buildings Cooler During Heat Waves

Structural engineers have discovered that if you build an apartment building with angled, shark-fin-shaped protrusions on the side where the Sun’s heat is the strongest, the angles keep the building cooler.

It’s one of a variety of simple new building and design elements being proposed for a world where July and August routinely feature stories of droughts, heat waves, and temperature records.

From the dawn of time, humans have been forced to live in hot environs. From the dawn of construction, humans have figured out how to build buildings in a way that takes advantage of thermodynamics to cool them naturally. Many of these are delightful architectural features visible in buildings from antiquity such as the Roman amphitheaters, the Taj Mahal, and the wind towers of Yazd.

Much of that planning was ignored with the advent of the modern age, and homes, whether those of the lower-middle class or the upper-middle class, took on the same character of modular boxes exposed to the mercy of any element that batters them.

In a study from Purdue and Colombia universities, researchers sought to find a simple way to retrofit boxy buildings with features that could help keep them cooler amid rising global temperatures.

One issue their research encountered is that heat hits most urban buildings from two angles—from the sun, and the ground, where cement and asphalt absorb heat and radiate it upwards all day.

They found that this can keep the interiors over 5 degrees cooler and reduce HVAC energy use by 14%.

[SubGod22]

Startup Replaces 6 Million Plastic Bags with Prototype Made from Corn Waste That Decomposes in 180 Days

An Indian entrepreneur is using sugar, cellulose, and corn fibers to make a plastic-like carrier bag for small Indian businesses.

His company Bio Reform has already replaced 6 million plastic bags in the checkout counters of stores all over India.

Based in Hyderabad, Mohammed Azhar Mohiuddin first got the idea during the general mayhem that arose during the pandemic. Mohiuddin was looking at global environmental issues with the hope of finding one his entrepreneurial spirit had the capacity to tackle.

He would eventually settle on plastic use, the overreliance on it in society, and the dangers of plastic contamination in the form of microplastic particles. Specifically, he wanted to find an alternative to one of the most common plastic products used today: the plastic shopping bag.

Mohiuddin saw the largest brands substituting plastic ones for those made of paper or even jute, but for medium and small businesses that power the majority of the Indian economy, the small increase in costs from using biodegradable bags was too prohibitive.

According to The Better India, he started studying a biodegradable polymer that was first formed and researched in the 1980s called PBAT (Polybutylene adipate-co-terephthalate). At the time, it was made with corn and potatoes.

After dodging scams and government-mandated quarantines to identify a suitable class of machinery to manufacture the PBAT bags in Gujurat, his presentation on PBAT landed nearly $100,000 (RS1 crore) in seed funding that allowed him to launch the project.

[Atxshoxfan]

[SubGod22]

Here's an interesting development in paper production that doesn't require cutting down trees. I know in the US most trees cut down for commercial usage have an equal amount of planting going on to make up for it, but I'm a big fan of having choices/alternatives to just about anything.

This Startup Is Using Dead Leaves to Make Paper Without Cutting Trees

Businesses like to talk about the concept of a closed loop or circular economy, but often they’re trying to close small loops. Releaf Paper takes dead leaves from city trees and turns them into paper for bags, office supplies, and more—which is to say they are striving to close one heck of a big loop.

How big? Six billion trees are cut down every year for paper products according to the WWF, producing everything from toilet paper to Amazon boxes to the latest best-selling novels. Meanwhile, the average city produces 8,000 metric tons of leaves every year which clog gutters and sewers, and have to be collected, composted, burned, or dumped in landfills.

In other words, huge supply and huge demand, but Releaf Paper is making cracking progress. They already produce 3 million paper carrier bags per year from 5,000 metric tons of leaves from their headquarters in Paris.

Joining forces with landscapers in sites across Europe, thousands of tonnes of leaves arrive at their facility where a low-water, zero-sulfur/chlorine production process sees the company create paper with much smaller water and carbon footprints.

It is said of the city of Kyiv that one can walk from one side to the other without ever leaving the shade of horse chestnut trees. Whether Ukrainian founders Alexander Sobolenko or Valentyn Frechka of Releaf Paper ever lived or worked in Kyiv, perhaps this preponderance of greenery influenced their thinking while the pair were coming up with the idea in university.

“In a city, it’s a green waste that should be collected. Really, it’s a good solution because we are keeping the balance—we get fiber for making paper and return lignin as a semi-fertilizer for the cities to fertilize the gardens or the trees. So it’s like a win-win model,” Frechka, co-founder and CTO of Releaf Paper, told Euronews.

There's about a seventy second video at the bottom of the article that gives a brief overview of the concept.

[SHOXJOCK]

3 days of overcast and drizzle, all my water tanks with solar pumps are dry.

I hope last nights rain helped.

[pinstripers]

3 days of overcast and drizzle, all my water tanks with solar pumps are dry.

[SubGod22]

This is interesting. I sometimes wonder how people come up with certain ideas.

A Recipe for Zero-Emissions Fuel: Soda Cans, Seawater, and Caffeine

A team from MIT has discovered a fascinating chemical reaction that could allow ships or submarines to power themselves with zero-emissions hydrogen via a combination of aluminum pellets and the seawater through which they sail.

Several clever tweaks allowed for this process to generate a not-insubstantial amount of hydrogen gas—the kind being used as an alternative to fossil fuels in heavy machinery like construction equipment, trains, and planes.

The tweak was, if one can believe it, a dash of coffee grounds, making the whole process tantalizingly sustainable as the aluminum came from old soda cans.

Hydrogen is being tested in all kinds of applications, and is extremely exciting as a potential replacement for diesel because it has completely zero carbon emissions—the only output is hydrogen dioxide—also known as water.

However, hang-ups exist as to the safety of carrying large tanks of hydrogen gas aboard vehicles due to its volatile nature. Aly Kombargi, a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and his colleagues on the project envisioned using seawater as the hydrogen source, and aluminum pellets as the on-board fuel, a little like how coal was shoveled into steamships once upon a time.

“This is very interesting for maritime applications like boats or underwater vehicles because you wouldn’t have to carry around seawater—it’s readily available,” says Kombargi, lead author on the paper published with the experiment’s results.

The reaction works like this: pure aluminum, when dropped into water, causes a straightforward reaction that generates hydrogen gas. To reduce costs, aluminum soda cans can be used, but only if pretreated with a rare and expensive alloy called gallium indium because the non-pure aluminum in soda cans develops a protective oxide barrier upon exposure to oxygen in the air that prevents the reaction from taking place.

Somehow there's an ingredient in coffee grounds/caffeine that when mixed in create what's needed so it's no longer crazy expensive.

They estimate that 1 gram of these aluminum pellets would create 1.3 liters of hydrogen in 5 minutes. They believe that 40 pounds of these pellets could power a small underwater craft for about 30 days.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses. It could potentially be a way for some to save costs and be cleaner on/in the ocean. Being able to use the seawater as a main source to create the hydrogen needed is pretty genius and it's quite abundant as long as you have the pellets on board.

[WstateU]

Also posted this in the movie thread…

Good for Hollywood and director Lee Isaac Chun.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/twiste...reach-audience

[pinstripers]

Put this in the category of “not shocked” We have covered this story closely and reported on the environmental threat posed by wind turbines. /Vineyard Wind shut down after turbine failure sends "sharp fiberglass shards" onto Nantucket beaches - CBS Boston

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https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/nantucket-beaches-closed-vineyard-wind/

[Atxshoxfan]

Because if you go through the records, there's NEVER been a 4th of July on a Thursday where the temperature was an EXTREME 80+ degrees due to man made global warming while a Democrat was in office and a hurricane was hovering over Cancun while the Chiefs were the reigning Super Bowl champions.

It's never happened!!

That explains it. How stupid of me!

[WstateU]

[WuDrWu]

It's LITERALLY never happened.

[Kung Wu]

Call me stupid, but how is it record setting if it's happened as bad or worse prior.

Because if you go through the records, there's NEVER been a 4th of July on a Thursday where the temperature was an EXTREME 80+ degrees due to man made global warming while a Democrat was in office and a hurricane was hovering over Cancun while the Chiefs were the reigning Super Bowl champions.

It's never happened!!

[Atxshoxfan]

I was watching the weather on one of the main stream media national broadcasts the other day when they said that the heatwave was record breaking. Followed by, we haven't seen a heatwave like this in over 18 years.
Call me stupid, but how is it record setting if it's happened as bad or worse prior.

[ShockerPrez]

I wasn't alive during the dust bowl years, but I'm guessing it was worse then. I know that there were other issues with the land/farming, etc that contributed, but still. I'll take this climate.