Category Environment/Geology

Pyroelectric catalysis (pyro-catalysis) can convert environmental temperature fluctuations into clean chemical energy, like hydrogen. However, compared with the more common catalysis strategy, such as photocatalysis, pyro-catalysis is inefficient due to slow temperature changes in the ambient environment...

Credit: Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)

Professor Park Chi-Young’s team successfully developed an atypical porous polymer material that can completely remove phenolic organic contaminants in water at ultra-high speeds. The porous material developed can efficiently remove not only microplastics in the water but also very small-sized volatile organic compounds (VOCs) based on photothermal effect. At the same time, it is expected to be utilized as a high-efficiency adsorption material that can be commercialized in the future as it has cost competitiveness based on raw materials and enables a solar-based water purification process.

Water pollution caused by the rapid development of the chemical industry is a pressing problem, and various water purificatio...

Emerging forms of thin-film device technologies that rely on alternative semiconductor materials, such as printable organics, nanocarbon allotropes and metal oxides, could contribute to a more economically and environmentally sustainable IoT, a KAUST-led international team suggests.

Their paper is published in the journal Nature Electronics.

The IoT is set to have a major impact on daily life and many industries...

Different light spectra serve different needs for agrivoltaics. People are increasingly trying to grow both food and clean energy on the same land to help meet the challenges of climate change, drought and a growing global population that just topped 8 billion. This effort includes agrivoltaics, in which crops are grown under the shade of solar panels, ideally with less water.

Now scientists from the University of California, Davis, are investigating how to better harvest ...