Energy and Environment

An international team, led by Penn State’s Institute of Energy and the Environment Director Bruce Logan, has developed a new reactor design that efficiently converts carbon dioxide and renewable electricity into methane — the primary component of natural gas — while scaling the system up by roughly an order of magnitude without sacrificing performance.

By Patricia Craig

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State research team was recently awarded a $4.99 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop and assess advanced separation technologies for the extraction and recovery of rare earth elements and other critical materials from coal, coal wastes and coal by-products.

 Recycling does not necessarily prevent an item from eventually ending up in a landfill, according to Enrique Gomez, interim associate dean for equity and inclusion and professor of chemical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering. Instead, recycling simply delays its end of life. Plastic bottles that are recycled and then turned into carpet, for example, eventually end up in the landfill when the carpet gets worn out and is thrown away.

By Matthew Carroll

Perovskites, a family of materials with unique electric properties, show promise for use in a variety fields, including next-generation solar cells. A Penn State-led team of scientists created a new process to fabricate large perovskite devices that is more cost- and time-effective than previously possible and that they said may accelerate future materials discovery.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Reconfigurable antennas — those that can tune properties like frequency or radiation beams in real time, from afar — are integral to future communication network systems, like 6G. But many current reconfigurable antenna designs can fall short: they malfunction in high or low temperatures, have power limitations or require regular servicing.