Batteries, biofuels, green hydrogen, solar cells. All these technologies, and not just them, are needed to reduce carbon emissions in the transport sector in Brazil and thus contribute to the mitigation of climate change. More precisely, it is necessary to look at the local reality and find the most appropriate technologies for each application: passenger cars, long-distance buses, rural vehicles, ships, etc. This was one of the main conclusions of […]
Clean energy sources like the sun and wind are renewable, free and inexhaustible, but they are intermittent. Therefore, to store the generated energy and use it when there is no sunlight or wind, it is necessary to have good storage systems, in which supercapacitors can be very important parts. Indeed, these devices vastly outperform batteries in terms of their power, which is the speed at which they store energy (charge) […]
Two members of the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR) visited CINE between the 20th and 24th of March: Prof. Abhaya Datye (University of New Mexico), Director of International Programs at CISTAR, and Prof. Denise Driscoll (Purdue University), Director of Diversity and Inclusion. Since last year, CINE has maintained a cooperation with CISTAR. Both CINE and CISTAR are multi-institutional engineering research centers dedicated to decarbonization technologies […]
A body of recent research is accelerating the development of perovskite solar cells. These studies monitored, in real time and in detail, the changes that occur in perovskite films during processes that influence their early degradation – one of the main obstacles to the commercialization of this emerging photovoltaic technology. The studies, several of which were carried out in Brazil in the context of CINE, are based on the use […]
A CINE team has developed a method to determine accurately and in a few seconds the amount of energy stored within a battery – the state of charge. The technique can also be used to supervise battery aging. The method is applicable to batteries of all types, rechargeable or not, from lithium batteries, which are widely used today, to sodium or lithium-sulfur technologies, which are still under development. Another advantage […]
CINE researchers took an important step forward in the development of an efficient photoelectrolyzer for the generation of green hydrogen. Photoelectrolyzers are equipment that split the water molecule (H2O) using sunlight as an energy source. Their main components are the photoanode and the photocathode, which absorb light and transform it into charges. When they reach the surface of the material, these charges promote oxidation and reduction reactions of water, which […]
A computational study carried out by CINE researchers allowed us to understand how carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules are absorbed in an innovative material based on an ionic liquid (a family of salts that are liquid at room temperature). The research contributes to the development of strategies for capturing this greenhouse gas and, therefore, it is part of the worldwide efforts to have a set of technologies that help reduce carbon […]
A research work carried out with the participation of CINE researchers advances the improvement of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). These devices can become increasingly important in the context of the energy transition because they are very efficient to generate electricity from a fuel, with zero or low carbon emissions. The technology is already used, for example, in the ethanol electric car, whose prototype was launched by the automaker Nissan […]