Credit: Flinders University
Waste cooking oil, sulfur and wool offcuts have been put to good use by green chemists at Flinders University to produce a sustainable new kind of housing insulation material.
The latest environmentally friendly building product from experts at the Flinders Chalker Lab and colleagues at Deakin and Liverpool University, has been described in a new paper published in Chemistry Europe ahead of Global Recycling Day (18 March 2021)
The insulating composite was made from the sustainable building blocks of wool fires, sulfur, and canola oil to produce a promising new model for next-generation insulation - not only capitalising on wool s natural low flammability but also to make significant energy savings for property owners and tenants.
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IMAGE: In terms of efficiency, perovskite solar cells have caught up on silicon solar cells, but some of their properties are not yet understood completely. view more
Credit: Markus Breig, KIT
Photovoltaics decisively contributes to sustainable energy supply. The efficiency of solar cells in directly converting light energy into electrical energy depends on the material used. Metal-halide perovskites are considered very promising materials for solar cells of the next generation. With these semiconductors named after their special crystal structure, a considerable increase in efficiency was achieved in the past years. Meanwhile, perovskite solar cells have reached an efficiency of up to 25.5 percent, which is quite close to that of silicon solar cells that are presently dominating the market. Moreover, the materials needed for perovskite solar cells are rather abundant. The solar cells can be produced easily and at low cost and they can be used for various appli
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Cing-Dao Kan, Professor/Director, Center for Collision Safety and Analysis (CCSA), and Dhafer Marzougui, Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy, received $575,316 from the U.S. Department of Transportation for the project: DOT IDIQ Roadside Safety Research and Federal Outdoor Impact Laboratory (FOIL) Technical Support Services. In this program, the research team at CCSA will conduct modeling and simulation analyses and conduct vehicle crash impact tests for highway safety research.
Funding for this project began in March 2021 and will end in late February 2024. This is first portion of funding of this multiyear effort.
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George Mason University is Virginia s largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls 38,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity and commitme