Past Programs
Energy - 2008
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2000 | 1999
Hydrogen produced from water using aluminium and gallium
17/05/2008
Jerry Woodall describes a method of producing hydrogen using water, aluminium and gallium.
Nano technology in energy generation and use of resources
05/04/2008
Nano technology has applications in energy production - solar cells - and light generation. Solid state lights, as light emitting diodes, use nano technology and are expected to last for up to 25 years.
Engineering's big challenge in the 21st century
23/02/2008
It is expected energy from solar cells will soon become competitive with energy from fossil fuels. The sun sends 10,000 times the energy we need for our use each day. So there's plenty of energy. Collecting it and converting it to forms to replace all fossil fuels is the challenge. Ray Kurzweil argues a key thing happens when an industry or technology goes from a pre-information era to a post-information era. The example is the human genome, where progress is now exponential. It took five years to sequence HIV. SARS was sequenced in 31 days. Now a virus can be sequenced in one or two days. Power doubles each year. The future of solar engineering is nano-engineered materials which incorporate information technology.
