Bacteria help create renewable biofuels
Non-renewable sources of energy is now depleting all over the world.
With modern day urbanization, the consumption of energy has increased with the number of vehicles and electrical gadgets increasing day by day. This has in turn led to the decrease in fuel resources and an increase in global warming.
This is why researchers from across the world has set about looking for alternate forms of renewable energy to meet the energy needs of the future.
One such source of renewable energy is biofuels that is produced from food crops, with the help of specially engineered bacteria. This breakthrough was achieved by a group of German scientists who were looking for an efficient means of producing a renewable source of energy.
Biofuel or biodiesel is an alternate source of energy that is made in a large scale in many countries today. However the method used to create this biodiesel today is very expensive. Basically, plant oils from seeds of oilseed crops like soy or rapeseed is used for producing biodiesel.
And to produce this biofuel, lots of land or acreage is required. This is a factor that is today limiting the widespread production and use of biodiesel. In addition to this factor, in many countries, the production of biodiesel competes with the production of food. This tends to raise some ethical concerns in many countries.
However in the latest process of producing the biofuel a new product, micro diesel, is the result of this process. This is a biofuel that is produced in different methods where not only is the same plant oils used for its production, even bulk plant materials and recycled waste paper can be used for its production if its production strain is done with advanced engineering methods.
Solar Ponds. The low cost and low tech approach
With dwindling sources of fossil fuels, scientists all over the world are looking for alternate forms of energy that can be used by the common man. And one of the most feasible and best forms of alternate energy is solar energy that is available for free to everyone.
One of the best ways of harnessing solar energy is through solar ponds.
A solar pond is basically a pool of water that collects and also stores solar energy. The peculiarity of the solar pond is that it has layers of salt solutions of differing concentration and thus, different densities to a certain depth. Once this depth is reached, you find water with uniform, high salt concentration.
The solar pond is a relatively low tech and low cost approach for harvesting solar energy which is done very easily. To make a solar pond, you have to first fill a pond with three layers of water where the top layer has a low salt content in it. Next comes the intermediate insulating layer that has a salt gradient that has a density gradient. It is this density gradient that helps in preventing heat exchange with the natural convection of water.
The bottom layer of the solar pond has a high salt content that reaches temperatures reaching 90 degrees Celsius. It is because of these different salt contents in the different layers of water that the different layers have different densities. With the different densities in the water, the development of convection currents is prevented, which would have transferred heat to the surface of the pond, and then to the air above.
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