Going for Workout? Your Workout can Actually Produce Electricity!

Flexible Film Captures Energy from Motion!

At least once a week, Nelson Sepulveda gets on one of his bikes and rides 35 miles or more. He gets a good workout on those days, but as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, he knows some of it is wasted energy. All of that pedaling could be harnessed and converted into electricity to power his phone or some other electronic gadget.

A paper-thin, flexible material increases its voltage every time it is folded.

This week, Sepulveda and his colleagues report in the journal Nano Energy on a new film-like material capable of turning motion into electricity. The material is similar to other piezoelectrics in that it generates a voltage when it's squeezed or pressed. But what sets this one apart is that it's paper thin and flexible and each time it's folded, the voltage increases.

"This increased voltage upon folding is not possible using other solid piezoelectric materials," Sepulveda told Seeker.

If that voltage could be efficiently directed into a current, it could reduce the nuisance of recharging or even eliminate it.

'What if you could take the mechanical energy from swiping pages on your tablet and use that to charge the battery of the device itself?" said Sepulveda. "That could reduce the time required to recharge your device."

To create the device, Sepulveda and his team used a combination of fabrication techniques and thin layers of substances including silver, polyimide, polypropylene ferroelectret and electrically charged particles onto a silicon wafer, creating a sheet that was peeled away from the chip as if it were a sticker.

The researchers conducted a few tests using different sizes of the piezoelectic sheet to measure its voltage. In one test a palm-sized sheet cranked out about 50 volts was able to power 20 LED lights.

When they folded the film-like piezoelectric material, the voltage increased exponentially.

Although producing a high voltage is promising, said Sepulveda, it's not enough. The researchers need to tweak the material so that its energy potential can be converted into a current. Sepulveda compared the voltage to water contained in a huge tower at the top of a mountain. The water pressure would be enormous.

"But that's just the force," he said.

The water's flow — it's current — depends on the pipes. How big are they? How long are they? What route do they take? If there are no pipes or the pipes take a convoluted route, the pressure may be very small by the time the water reaches a home faucet.

It's the same for voltage. "I could have a million volts and no current," he said.

Sepulveda told Seeker that he and his team have engineered at least one solution to converting the high voltage generated by the device into a flow of charge, but they were still trying to nail down the science of why it worked. He said it was too early to discuss the details.

One day soon, though, he could have a wearable device that attaches to his knee and generates power while he bikes. That would turn his 35-mile ride into an energy-harvesting bonanza.

"That should probably give me enough energy to charge my cellphone," he said.

Source- www.livescience.com

SOLAR ROADWAYS

           

             The dream of using our sun-soaked ribbons of highway to fulfill all our power needs has been batted around for a while. Scott Brusaw’s Solar Roadways, for instance, has been in the works for more than five years (and they just installed a small swath at a rest stop on Route 66 this June) as reported here. Their viral “Solar Freakin’ Roadways” video, which has been viewed more than 21 million times, effectively spread the word, but also inspired a skeptical backlash. Some say sun-drenched space is not so scarce that we need to shoulder the cost of repaving our roads with photovoltaic hexagons. Also, that essential ingredient to a solar panel—glass—is not likely to stand up to the repeated application of 40-ton semis, claim others.

                Now, a French company, Colas, has come up with a new product for creating solar roads that they hope nullifies some of the resistance. Wattway, as it’s called, is made to be road-strong and easy to apply. It’s been in development for about as long as Solar Roadways.

      

          In addition to making Wattway durable, they’ve made it easy-to-put-on-able. There’s no need to rip up asphalt and repave. Instead, Wattway is slapped onto existing road with glue—also proprietar.  The top of the eight layers that make a Wattway strip is roughed-up to be as anti-skid as asphalt. Thanks to this layer, efficiency had to take a hit, but just by two percent. It’s more than made up for by a surprising result: Because the anti-skid surface absorbs light from all directions, the setup is more efficient on cloudy days than in direct sun light.With the glue, the anti-skid surface and the layers for durability, Wattway is still only nine millimeters thick. So the product may very well have applications beyond the street.  “We’ve had a lot of demands for installing Wattway on the roof,” says Griglio. But making it work on the road is the company’s first priority.Griglio says he simply ignores what he calls the “hater reactions.” Taking advantage of pre-cut land is no small matter, he points out. “In the U.S. there was an amusement park that wanted to have a percentage of its power come from solar,” he says. “They tore down a whole forest to install a solar farm. I thought that kind of story was crazy.”

            To offer an alternative to such behavior, Colas is currently negotiating to install 100 square meters in the U.S. One possible impediment, though, is our snowplows. “You guys have a lot of snow compared to winter here in France,” says Griglio,” Here we don’t have very big snow plows, whereas yours are huge, like a tank. The blade can be quite damaging for Wattway.” They may develop a second product that’s even stronger, or, perhaps, they could convince a road crew to carve a few millimeters out of roads, so the solar panels would rest on a lower surface than where the plow’s blade does its work.Ignoring the plow issue, a mere 20 square meters of Wattway is enough to power a single home (not including heat). So it may not be too long before we’re gluing Wattway to our roads by the mile. “We want to implement it in every climate,” says Griglio. “Not only in the U.S., France, and Europe, but across the world.”

HANDWRITING ROBOTS

Thanks to the number of computers in my childhood (and an unnaturally short attention span), my handwriting has always hovered between awful and indecipherable. So clearly, what I need is a machine to do my writing for me.

Axidraw is a “personal writing and drawing machine” created by Evil Mad Scientist. It can hold anything from a fountain pen to a Sharpie, and using a computer input, draw or write whatever you want on any A4-sized area.

Sure, that sounds suspiciously like a very simplified printer, but it’s smarter than that—you’d never have to smudge another thank-you note, or sign a cheque for that matter.

 The Axidraw is primarily powered through free vector program Inkscape, but it’s also fully open-source, so you can write your own applications. Add on a camera so I can tap an area on a document, then add my signature without .

The AxiDraw is a simple, modern, precise, and versatile pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat surface. It can write with your favorite fountain pens, permanent markers, and other writing implements to handle an endless variety of applications. Its unique design features a writing head that extends beyond the machine, making it possible to draw on objects bigger than the machine itself.

Source-
Chris Mills,
www.gizmodo.com

What's the Real Potential of Fusion Energy?

                              Hydrogen plasma inside a fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X.

For centuries, humans have dreamed of harnessing the power of the sun to energize our lives here on Earth. But we want to go beyond collecting solar energy, and one day generate our own from a mini-sun. If we're able to solve an extremely complex set of scientific and engineering problems, fusion energy promises a green, safe, unlimited source of energy. From just one kilogram of deuterium extracted from water per day could come enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes.

Since the 1950s, scientific and engineering research has generated enormous progress toward forcing hydrogen atoms to fuse together in a self-sustaining reaction – as well as a small but demonstrable amount of fusion energy. Skeptics and proponents alike note the two most important remaining challenges: maintaining the reactions over long periods of time and devising a material structure to harness the fusion power for electricity.

As fusion researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, we know that realistically, the first commercial fusion power plant is still at least 25 years away. But the potential for its outsize benefits to arrive in the second half of this century means we must keep working. Major demonstrations of fusion’s feasibility can be accomplished earlier – and must, so that fusion power can be incorporated into planning for our energy future.

Unlike other forms of electrical generation, such as solar, natural gas and nuclear fission, fusion cannot be developed in miniature and then be simply scaled up. The experimental steps are large and take time to build. But the problem of abundant, clean energy will be a major calling for humankind for the next century and beyond. It would be foolhardy not to exploit fully this most promising of energy sources.

Why fusion power?

In fusion, two nuclei of the hydrogen atom (deuterium and tritium isotopes) fuse together. This is relatively difficult to do: Both nuclei are positively charged, and therefore repel each other. Only if they are moving extremely fast when they collide will they smash together, fuse and thereby release the energy we're after.

This happens naturally in the sun. Here on Earth, we use powerful magnets to contain an extremely hot gas of electrically charged deuterium and tritium nuclei and electrons. This hot, charged gas is called a plasma.

The plasma is so hot – more than 100 million degrees Celsius – that the positively charged nuclei move fast enough to overcome their electrical repulsion and fuse. When the nuclei fuse, they form two energetic particles – an alpha particle (the nucleus of the helium atom) and a neutron.

Heating the plasma to such a high temperature takes a large amount of energy – which must be put into the reactor before fusion can begin. But once it gets going, fusion has the potential to generate enough energy to maintain its own heat, allowing us to draw off excess heat to turn into usable electricity.

Fuel for fusion power is abundant in nature. Deuterium is plentiful in water, and the reactor itself can make tritium from lithium. And it is available to all nations, mostly independent of local natural resources.

Fusion power is clean. It emits no greenhouse gases, and produces only helium and a neutron.

It is safe. There is no possibility for a runaway reaction, like a nuclear-fission "meltdown." Rather, if there is any malfunction, the plasma cools, and the fusion reactions cease.

All these attributes have motivated research for decades, and have become even more attractive over time. But the positives are matched by the significant scientific challenge of fusion.

Progress to date

The progress in fusion can be measured in two ways. The first is the tremendous advance in basic understanding of high-temperature plasmas. Scientists had to develop a new field of physics – plasma physics– to conceive of methods to confine the plasma in strong magnetic fields, and then evolve the abilities to heat, stabilize, control turbulence in and measure the properties of the superhot plasma.

Related technology has also progressed enormously. We have pushed the frontiers in magnets, and electromagnetic wave sources and particle beams to contain and heat the plasma. We have also developed techniques so that materials can withstand the intense heat of the plasma in current experiments.

It is easy to convey the practical metrics that track fusion's march to commercialization. Chief among them is the fusion power that has been generated in the laboratory: Fusion power generation escalated from milliwatts for microseconds in the 1970s to 10 megawatts of fusion power (at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) and 16 megawatts for one second (at the Joint European Torus in England) in the 1990s.

A new chapter in research

Now the international scientific community is working in unity to construct a massive fusion research facility in France. Called ITER (Latin for "the way"), this plant will generate about 500 megawatts of thermal fusion power for about eight minutes at a time. If this power were converted to electricity, it could power about 150,000 homes. As an experiment, it will allow us to test key science and engineering issues in preparation for fusion power plants that will function continuously.

ITER employs the design known as the "tokamak," originally a Russian acronym. It involves a doughnut-shaped plasma, confined in a very strong magnetic field, which is partly created by electrical current that flows in the plasma itself.

Though it is designed as a research project, and not intended to be a net producer of electric energy, ITER will produce 10 times more fusion energy than the 50 megawatts needed to heat the plasma. This is a huge scientific step, creating the first "burning plasma," in which most of the energy used to heat the plasma comes from the fusion reaction itself.

ITER is supported by governments representing half the world’s population: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. It is a strong international statement about the need for, and promise of, fusion energy.

The road forward

From here, the remaining path toward fusion power has two components. First, we must continue research on the tokamak. This means advancing physics and engineering so that we can sustain the plasma in a steady state for months at a time. We will need to develop materials that can withstand an amount of heat equal to one-fifth the heat flux on the surface of the sun for long periods. And we must develop materials that will blanket the reactor core to absorb the neutrons and breed tritium.

The second component on the path to fusion is to develop ideas that enhance fusion's attractiveness. Four such ideas are:

1) Using computers, optimize fusion reactor designs within the constraints of physics and engineering. Beyond what humans can calculate, these optimized designs produce twisted doughnut shapes that are highly stable and can operate automatically for months on end. They are called "stellarators" in the fusion business.

2) Developing new high-temperature superconducting magnets that can be stronger and smaller than today’s best. That will allow us to build smaller, and likely cheaper, fusion reactors.

3) Using liquid metal, rather than a solid, as the material surrounding the plasma. Liquid metals do not break, offering a possible solution to the immense challenge how a surrounding material might behave when it contacts the plasma.

4) Building systems that contain doughnut-shaped plasmas with no hole in the center, forming a plasma shaped almost like a sphere. Some of these approaches could also function with a weaker magnetic field. These "compact tori" and "low-field" approaches also offer the possibility of reduced size and cost.

Government-sponsored research programs around the world are at work on the elements of both components – and will result in findings that benefit all approaches to fusion energy (as well as our understanding of plasmas in the cosmos and industry). In the past 10 to 15 years, privately funded companies have also joined the effort, particularly in search of compact tori and low-field breakthroughs. Progress is coming and it will bring abundant, clean, safe energy with it.

Stewart Prager, Professor of Astrophysical Science, former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University and Michael C. Zarnstorff, Deputy Director for Research, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University.

Source: www.livescience.com

SOLAR COOLER

                   

                                                    KEEPING  IT COOL

                        Looking up into the sky can remind us of some of humanity’s greatest achievements. The moon landing is one. And though you may need a telescope to see it, the planet Mars reminds us of the next possible frontier in space. But our universe potentially offers us so much more without ever leaving the ground. That we haven’t taken more advantage of that medium-sized star in the center of our solar system surprises Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.

“                    The universe presents an enormous thermodynamic resource and there doesn’t seem to be a large amount of work that looks into it and tries to explore it,” he says. “We’ve known for a long time about what the universe can do and yet it’s been this way.”

                     According to Fan, the solar industry is an incredibly fast-growing industry and the advantage of solar cells can be utilized to a much greater degree. But even though the sun is involved, the strange thing about these cells is that greater efficiency can actually be achieved by keeping the cells cooled, something that is not such an easy task.

                    You would think Fan's team of researchers opted to work on the roof of the electrical engineering building just to get closer to the sun, but it was actually chosen for its construction: flat and smooth, just like they needed to put their work to the test. They put silicon material over a solar absorber, which Fan says has a similar makeup to a solar cell, and waited to see if cooling would take effect.

                      It was within minutes that we saw the cooling effect but the experiment ran for several hours where we had the structure on the roof and recorded the temperature of the structure,” he says. “We found it had a temperature of about 13 degrees Celsius, which is truly much cooler relatively speaking when compared to the structure without the layer on top of it. This is not a solar cell experiment, but if one can lower the temperature of a cell by even 10 degrees Celsius then that would translate into an efficiency enhancement of perhaps more than one percentage point. That would be very significant, and it could save a great deal of money, especially when you consider solar is a billion-dollar industry.”

                           The absorber was partly inspired by an earlier radiated cooling project of which Fan was a participant.”When you look at a practical solar cell, every layer serves a number of different purposes,” he says. “The overlayer typically is used for protection purposes and what we point out in our work is, it’s inefficient to do protection. For the functionality for these overlayers, a longer term challenge is designing overlayers for cooling purposes but also to be able to preserve all the other functionality for these overlayers.”

                          The potential applications for their work are numerous, he says. “We’re talking about a category we call lower preserving cooling,” he says. “An absorption property of a given object, for example. Think of color and solar and the effect on temperature. For example, let’s say you have a red automobile, which means it absorbs a certain amount of sunlight. But you want it as cold as possible under the sun. This work may help that. Again, the universe is offering up answers, we just have to take advantage of it.”

These two solar absorbing s

 “It was within minutes    

The absorber was partl

Transportation engineering

                                     Transportation engineering


                      Transportation engineering or transport engineering is the application of technology and scientific principles to the planning, functional design, operation and management of facilities for any mode of transportation in order to provide for the safe, efficient, rapid, comfortable, convenient, economical, and environmentally compatible movement of people and goods (transport). It is a sub-discipline of civil engineering.The importance of transportation engineering within the civil engineering profession can be judged by the number of divisions in ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) that are directly related to transportation. There are six such divisions (Aerospace; Air Transportation; Highway; Pipeline; Waterway, Port, Coastal and Ocean; and Urban Transportation) representing one-third of the total 18 technical divisions within the ASCE (1987).

                                    The planning aspects of transportation engineering relate to elements of urban planning, and involve technical forecasting decisions and political factors. Technical forecasting of passenger travel usually involves an urban transportation planning model, requiring the estimation of trip generation (how many trips for what purpose), trip distribution (destination choice, where is the traveler going), mode choice (what mode is being taken), and route assignment (which streets or routes are being used). More sophisticated forecasting can include other aspects of traveler decisions, including auto ownership, trip chaining (the decision to link individual trips together in a tour) and the choice of residential or business location (known as land use forecasting). Passenger trips are the focus of transportation engineering because they often represent the peak of demand on any transportation system.


                     

Highway engineering

                 

• Handle the planning, design, construction, and operation of highways, roads, and other vehicular facilities as well as their related bicycle and pedestrian realms.
• Estimate the transportation needs of the public and then secure the funding for the project.
• Analyze locations of high traffic volumes and high collisions for safety and capacity.
• Use civil engineering principles to improve the transportation system.
• Utilizes the three design controls which are the drivers, the vehicles, and the roadways themselves.

Tunnel

      

A tunnel may be for foot or vehicular road traffic, for rail traffic, or for a canal. The central portions of a rapid transit network are usually in tunnel. Some tunnels are aqueducts to supply water for consumption or for hydroelectric stations or are sewers. Utility tunnels are used for routing steam, chilled water, electrical power or telecommunication cables, as well as connecting buildings for convenient passage of people and equipment.

Rail transport

                        Rail transport is a means of conveyance of passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, also known as tracks. It is also commonly referred to as train transport. In contrast to road transport, where vehicles run on a prepared flat surface, rail vehicles (rolling stock) are directionally guided by the tracks on which they run. Tracks usually consist of steel rails, installed on ties (sleepers) and ballast, on which the rolling stock, usually fitted with metal wheels, moves. Other variations are also possible, such as slab track, where the rails are fastened to a concrete foundation resting on a prepared subsurface.

                         Rolling stock in a rail transport system generally encounters lower frictional resistance than road vehicles, so passenger and freight cars (carriages and wagons) can be coupled into longer trains. The operation is carried out by a railway company, providing transport between train stations or freight customer facilities. Power is provided by locomotives which either draw electric power from a railway electrification system or produce their own power, usually by diesel engines. Most tracks are accompanied by a signalling system. Railways are a safe land transport system when compared to other forms of transport. Railway transport is capable of high levels of passenger and cargo utilization and energy efficiency, but is often less flexible and more capital-intensive than road transport, when lower traffic levels are considered.

Water transportation

Water transportation is the intentional movement of water over large distances. Methods of transportation fall into three categories:

• Aqueducts, which include pipelines, canals, and tunnels,
• container shipment, which includes transport by tank truck, tank car, and tank ship, and
• towing, where a tugboat is used to pull an iceberg or a large water bag along behind it.
  

Due to its weight, the transportation of water is very energy intensive. Unless it has the assistance of gravity, a canal or long-distance pipeline will need pumping stations at regular intervals. In this regard, the lower friction levels of the canal make it a more economical solution than the pipeline. Water transportation is also very common along rivers and oceans.

Air

A fixed-wing aircraft, commonly called airplane, is a heavier-than-air craft where movement of the air in relation to the wings is used to generate lift. The term is used to distinguish this from rotary-wing aircraft, where the movement of the lift surfaces relative to the air generates lift. A gyroplane is both fixed-wing and rotary-wing. Fixed-wing aircraft range from small trainers and recreational aircraft to large airliners and military cargo aircraft.

Two things necessary for aircraft are air flow over the wings for lift and an area for landing. The majority of aircraft also need an airportwith the infrastructure to receive maintenance, restocking, refueling and for the loading and unloading of crew, cargo and passengers. While the vast majority of aircraft land and take off on land, some are capable of take off and landing on ice, snow and calm water.

The aircraft is the second fastest method of transport, after the rocket. Commercial jets can reach up to 955 kilometres per hour (593 mph), single-engine aircraft 555 kilometres per hour (345 mph). Aviation is able to quickly transport people and limited amounts of cargo over longer distances, but incur high costs and energy use; for short distances or in inaccessible places helicopters can be used.As of April 28, 2009 The Guardian article notes that, "the WHO estimates that up to 500,000 people are on planes at any time.

3D Printing Could Help to Reduce Global Oil Consumption

 3D printers and electric vehicles can help to reduce oil consumption—to a greater degree than has been predicted by the International Energy Agency (IEA), according to Thina Margrethe Saltvedt, a Norwegian analyst for Swedish financial services group Nordea. According to Saltvedt, 3D printing could reduce oil consumption by increasing the local production of goods, reducing the need for a fuel-demanding import and export system. With more businesses able to fabricate items on location using 3D printers, the world could see a reduction in energy consumption across land, sea, and air.
Saltvedt is actually arguing against the IEA, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization that acts as an energy policy adviser to members states and other countries, recently predicted the continued growth of global oil consumption due to increased demand for aircraft, shipping, trucks, and petrochemical products.