Industrial Equipment

Environmentalists, politicians and businesses around the world have been celebrating the dramatic rise of the solar industry in the past decade, as the technology has gone from an interesting engineering innovation and a novelty for a few committed individuals to a sizable part of the global energy picture. But a recent New York Times piece shone a light on some of the problems the solar industry has started to have as it struggles with its rapid expansion.

With new leadership taking charge in the Department of Energy, the federal government could start to focus more engineering research on the often-overlooked opportunities of  carbon capture, according to MIT's Technology Review.

After years of dodging outside assessment of his technique, Italian researcher Andrea Rossi has had his engineering innovation in cold fusion independent tested, returning remarkably positive results.

Wind turbines have been cropping up all around the country thanks to a growing emphasis on renewable energy, but there are still questions about how well the technology can compete with well-developed fossil fuels. The traditional wind mill-like approach is not the only means of producing electricity from wind, though, and one company believes that its new engineering innovation could completely reshape the market for wind energy.

A new power engineering solution developed by General Electric could bring the market for wind energy to entirely new heights, thanks to a new approach to energy storage.

Despite the fascination with engineering innovations in renewable energy technologies like solar, wind and geothermal, a new report from GreentechMedia suggests that the biggest changes could come from a more understated part of the clean energy industry - efficiency.

As much as world leaders and many environmental advocates have been pushing for broader adoption of renewable energy in recent years, many critics still argue that the technologies are simply too expensive at current prices to compete on their own merits with coal and natural gas. They suggest that further engineering research and development is needed in order to bring the technologies up to a competitive level.

The U.S. has seen somewhat of a revival in its manufacturing sector in recent years, thanks to rising costs abroad as well as the increasing technical requirements of many manufacturing processes. But Scientific American notes that if the country is going to reemerge as a dominant manufacturing power, its industries will need to find a way to implement one of the more significant engineering innovations in recent years - additive manufacturing.

Though the company is better known for its prominent role as a top military contractor, Lockheed Martin recently announced that it has agreed to develop a type of renewable energy plant off the southern coast of China that will use only the temperature differential of ocean water.

The debate over U.S. gun laws has raged almost unabated since the tragic shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. But there may be an engineering solution to this difficult situation, however, as researchers at the University of Michigan are working on a system that could help detect weapons in public areas where they are not allowed.