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How Artificial Leaves Could Generate Clean Hydrogen
An anonymous reader writes "At Imperial College London, researchers have embarked on a £1m project to study, and eventually mimic, photosynthesis. Part of the 'artificial leaf' project involves working out exactly how leaves use sunlight to make useful molecules. The team then plans to build artificial systems that can do the same to generate clean fuels such as hydrogen and methanol. These would then be used in fuel cells to make electricity or to directly power super-clean vehicles."
Not news. Fark.
I hereby announce that I am studying how bees fly. I plan on creating a bee suit to let 300 pound people fly.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Obviously we'll need somewhere to put them. Possibly we could clear some woodlands to make room for them.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Linky to Wikipedia
Less is more.
He was correct. Certain steps in the photosynthetic process are very efficient, but the fact that only part of sunlight is photosynthetically active, the fact that plants don't process all light that hits them, and that not all energy they produce goes into biomass, generally limits the total biomass yield to 3-6%. Food crops generally yield between a fraction of a percent and a couple percent of the solar energy that hits them as food, but practical growth limitations make that even lower (by a good margin). To give an example of how that comes into play, sugarcane is a rare photosynthesis exception, at about 8% efficiency turning sunlight to biomass, but only 0.13% solar efficiency to ethanol. That's 4000 liters per hectare of 225W/m^2 insolation land. That's 7.1e13 joules of solar energy to prduce 9.36e10 joules of ethanol. Awful efficiency, no?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."