In today’s world where fossil fuel is enervating and most of the energy is now being utilized from either sun or wind, basically engaging natural resources, everyone is trying to make its resources more energy efficient and environment friendly. Most of the companies are using green technology and many are investing most of their money [...]
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We’ve heard of wind harvesting , wi-fi harvesting , and even corpse harvesting , but who would have thought to harvest the energy from traffic noise and all the other ever-present vibrations of the city? Some researchers at the University of Michigan are putting together a variety of battery that gets its power from irregular, low-frequency vibrations — a person walking up stairs, for instance, or the vibration of a moving car. Since the generator isn’t keyed to a specific frequency, it can harvest power from a variety of sources. Not a lot of power, of course — current yield is about half a milliwatt. But that’s plenty of power for small devices like watches, or pacemakers, replacing the battery of which can be a serious problem. I doubt you and I will see too much of this technology in our day to day lives, but you can be sure it’ll benefit quite a few people down the line.
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File this one under “future toys.” We hear about a lot of these super-low-level advances in processing and storage (whenever I see the word “ holographic ,” I reach for the salt), and while they’re usually at best years away from practice and manufacture, they’re good to keep informed on, if nothing else than as cocktail chatter. “Did you hear about those new nanotube speakers? ” Well. The latest advancement is that IBM is thinking of replacing the conductive copper channels in today’s chips with light. But it’s more than a simple fiber-optic setup or something along those lines; the idea is that a single photon would set off an electron cascade, meaning that a significant charge could be effected on the far side of a gap, for the energy cost of sending out a single photon. The usual “this would enable computers a gazillion times faster” talk follows. I see one major problem with this. We have systems like this in our bodies; IBM’s design is almost biomimetic. Our brains in particular can take a single “photon” (an action potential) and have it effect a huge change on a target neuron — if that neuron is all charged up and ready to receive. But a few action potentials too many and the charged molecules that allow for a rapid multiplication of electrical power will be exhausted, and it takes some time to recharge. You can actually see this for yourself , literally: stare at a light for a second and the little phosphenes that appear before your eyes are a result of certain cells in your eyes being unable to “recharge” fast enough to propagate the correct signal. There would be less risk of that if your eyes were plugged into the wall, of course. But on a scale small enough, there may be issues of heat or charge fatigue that would get in the way as in the brain. Anyhow, there’s not much we can say at this point, since the research is at the “CG explanation on YouTube” stage, meaning we won’t hear from them for another couple years. [via PC World ]
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If you thought solar panels were too expensive to put on your house, wait ’till you hear this one. Bloom Energy , a clean energy start-up in Silicon Valley, said “Hello world” yesterday, unveiling a rather revolutionary solid oxide fuel cell unit. If all goes to plan, it should be able to put your house completely off the grid. There’s a 60 Minutes spot after the jump. The project started way back in 2001, intended for colonizing Mars. Each unit is about the size of a parking space, and can provide upwards of 100kW of power. It has also proven to be much cheaper and more efficient than most other “clean energy” options. You can power it with nearly any fuel you can think of. Bio fuels, natural gas, etc. At $700K a unit, you probably won’t be seeing these things in your neighborhood for a while. Unless your neighborhood includes the campuses of some heavy-hitters like Google or eBay. But reports say that one of the main priorities for Bloom Energy is making these units affordable at a home-owner level. Click over there for a much more detailed explanation of the tech behind it. [ i4U News ]
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If you thought solar panels were too expensive to put on your house, wait ’till you hear this one. Bloom Energy , a clean energy start-up in Silicon Valley, said “Hello world” yesterday, unveiling a rather revolutionary solid oxide fuel cell unit. If all goes to plan, it should be able to put your house completely off the grid. There’s a 60 Minutes spot after the jump. The project started way back in 2001, intended for colonizing Mars. Each unit is about the size of a parking space, and can provide upwards of 100kW of power. It has also proven to be much cheaper and more efficient than most other “clean energy” options. You can power it with nearly any fuel you can think of. Bio fuels, natural gas, etc. At $700K a unit, you probably won’t be seeing these things in your neighborhood for a while. Unless your neighborhood includes the campuses of some heavy-hitters like Google or eBay. But reports say that one of the main priorities for Bloom Energy is making these units affordable at a home-owner level. Click over there for a much more detailed explanation of the tech behind it. [ i4U News ]
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