Assessment of the household energy demand underpinning the case for solar photovoltac investment in Africa is the subject of a new paper.
Potential of households’ solar PV consumption in South Africa, Silas K. Mulaudzi, Steve Bull and Rudzani A. Makhado, African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development (2021) 1-10.
Our work on the combined effects of fatigue loading on the lifetime of materials for offshore structures is now published. This is part of ongoing work on the development of tidal turbines for renewable energy generation.
Fatigue Damage Analysis of GFRP Composites Using Digital Image Correlation, H.I Gonabadi, A. Oila, A. Yadav and S.J. Bull, J. Ocean Engineering and Marine Energy, 7 (2021) 25-40.
Our work of reducing chemomechanical effects by ion beam treatments has bow been published:
Investigation of Chemomechanical Effects on Sapphire Surfaces Modified by Ion- implantation-induced Carbon Impurities, A. Yadav, N. Moharrami and S.J. Bull, J. Bio- Tribo-corrosion., (2021) 7:52.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40735-021-00490-y.
Today I attended the first annual celebration meeting for the North East Institute of Technology (NEIOT) at New College Durham, the first in-person I have been to in over a year! The IOTs are collaborations between local FE colleges, Universities and Industry employers aimed at training the technical support that will be needed in the coming years. In the North East we are focussing on advanced manufacturing, construction and digital skills.
An explanation of IOTs can be found at https://youtu.be/Mis2YMNJvos
Looking east out over the North Sea at Whitley Bay where I live on the afternoon of Monday 30th November 2020 I saw the following:
It was fascinating to see how bright it is within the primary rainbow and how this illuminates the sea at its end.
The primary rainbow forms from refraction and a single reflection inside the raindrops.In large drops (>1mm) red, green and violet are brightest but this is not the case here so I think we are looking at half millimetre or greater sized drops.
The secondary rainbow involves two reflections in the raindrops and is separated by about 10 degrees from the first, about five times the angular separation between red and violet in the primary rainbow.
Congratulations to Aumber Abbas who has just got a paper published in Scientific Reports for his work on using biomass waste (spent tea) to make graphene quantum dots. For more information see:
Abbas, A., Tabish, T.A., Bull, S.J. et al. High yield synthesis of graphene quantum dots from biomass waste as a highly selective probe for Fe3+ sensing. Sci Rep 10, 21262 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78070-2
Last night I attended the regional dinner for Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering hosted by the Materials Processing Institute (MPI – https://www.mpiuk.com/). The dinner was held in the boardroom of the Cleveland Institution of Engineers (https://www.iom3.org/cleveland-institution-engineers) which is one of the oldest engineering institutions in the world and is affiliated to The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). An excellent meal with plenty of stimulation discussion on topics from decarbonisation to industrial strategy.