Electrochemistry News Items & Facts - October 2024

Every day, we all use battery powered devices at home, drive vehicles, eat packaged foods, and drink clean water. These are a few examples of the countless aspects of our modern lifestyles which are reliant on electrochemistry - broadly defined as the study of how electricity interacts with materials.

As an electrochemistry instrumentation company, Admiral Instruments proudly serves our customers who are among the millions of scientists, engineers, & technicians around the world using potentiostats and battery cyclers to uncover new ways electrochemistry may benefit us all.

To celebrate how electrochemistry has shaped the past, touches our present-day lives, and influences the future, every month Admiral Instruments posts five notable news articles, publications, & trivia somehow related to electrochemistry. Click on each entry to read more from the source article!

Electrochemistry News Items & Facts for October 2024:

1. The energy lost annually from the accumulation of dust on photovoltaic solar panels is highly variable based on geography, amounting to as little as 7% in parts of the United States to as high as 50% in the Middle East.
   

2. MIT researchers have developed a waterless, brushless method of removing dust from solar panels using electrostatic repulsion with an electrode passing over the surface.
   

3. The superconductor with the highest critical temperature at 1 atmosphere is Mercury Barium Thallium Copper Oxide. This record was set in 1995, with a critical temperature of 139 K.
   

4. In 1911, physicist Heike Onnes was the first to observe superconductivity when using liquid helium to cool mercury into a solid below 4.2 K to study its electrical properties.
   

5. Lightning strikes are up to 2x more frequent over shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, attributed to aerosol emissions from ships in these lanes changing the physical properties of storm clouds.