Energy & Green Tech
The renewable energy sector is facing a quandary: how Australia will dispose of 80 million solar panels in an environmentally friendly way when they reach the end of their life.
Mar 21, 2023
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Engineering
The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can ...
Oct 30, 2023
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240
Energy & Green Tech
Hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis of water, ideally with solar cells or wind power providing the electrical energy required. This "green" hydrogen is expected to play an important role in the energy system of the future. ...
Mar 20, 2023
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Energy & Green Tech
Last year, the world built more new solar capacity than every other power source combined.
May 12, 2023
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Engineering
If you want to improve the output of solar energy systems, why not also run them at night? That's the question researchers in Qatar and Jordan addressed as they successfully devised a system that promises to more than double ...
Engineering
The promotion of electric cars has dramatically increased the demand for lithium-ion batteries. However, cobalt and nickel, the main cathode materials for the batteries, are not abundant. If the consumption continues, it ...
Apr 1, 2021
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Robotics
A team of researchers at Beihang University, working with colleagues at Imperial College London and Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, has developed a quadcopter drone that is capable of flying ...
Engineering
Scientists have found that concrete's compressive strength can be increased by 4.1% and its flexural strength by 3.4% by adding a small amount of coconut shell (only 5%). The material's performance increased by 6.1% compared ...
Oct 10, 2023
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Engineering
Membrane technologies can provide efficient purification of unclear water sources to address a growing water shortage. However, when engineers develop state-of-the-art membranes, they are constrained by a lack of selectivity ...
Energy & Green Tech
Scientists in Australia and China are hoping to make the world's first safe and efficient non-toxic aqueous aluminum radical battery.
Jul 4, 2023
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Material is synonymous with Substance, and is anything made of matter - hydrogen, air and water are all examples of materials. Sometimes the term Material is used more narrowly to refer to substances or components with certain physical properties which are used as inputs to production or manufacturing. In this sense, materials are the pieces required to make something else, from buildings and art to stars and computers.
A material can be anything: a finished product in its own right or an unprocessed raw material. Raw materials are first extracted or harvested from the earth and divided into a form that can be easily transported and stored, then processed to produce semi-finished materials. These can be input into a new cycle of production and finishing processes to create finished materials, ready for distribution, construction, and consumption.
An example of a raw material is cotton, which is harvested from plants, and can then be processed into thread (also considered a raw material), which can then be woven into cloth, a semi-finished material. Cutting and sewing the fabric turns it into a garment, which is a finished material. Steelmaking is another example—raw materials in the form of ore are mined, refined and processed into steel, a semi-finished material. Steel is then used as an input in many other industries to make finished products.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
