Head Blaze

I have always believed that everything we need to live and thrive can be found on the earth and I don’t mean just food and shelter.  It just takes someone with the ability to see what is already there to make it happen.  I think we dismiss nature too much in favor of man made technology and ignore simple and effective solutions to problems that have already been solved, by nature.

Some interesting examples:

How Fishy Technology Could Power the Future

Think like a fish not like a bird, say researchers trying to harvest energy from water currents. Their new fish-inspired power generator can work in slow-moving currents where traditional turbines are less effective.

Tidal streams and moving rivers in the United States could generate 140 billion kilowatt-hours per year, or about 3.5 percent of the nation’s electricity demand, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

Most of the attempts to tap this potential have employed underwater windmills. These so-called tidal turbines use the force of lift to turn their blades.

“We live in air so we are used to lifting surfaces that support birds, sail boats and airplanes,” said Michael Bernitsas of the University of Michigan.

In water, however, Nature has devised a different strategy. Most natural swimmers — from tiny sperm to giant whales — create vortices (or little whirlpools) that they push off of to propel themselves forward.

RoboClam

The simple razor clam has inspired a new MIT robot that could lead to a “smart” anchor that burrows through the ocean floor to reposition itself and could even reverse, making it easier to recover.

The so-called RoboClam is being developed to explore the performance capabilities of clam-inspired digging, as well as to shed light on the behavior of the real animal.

This could be a real breakthrough to increase solar panel efficiency.  We need more innovations like this to make solar and other alternative energy competitive with oil.

Coating helps solar panels soak up more of the sun

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new type of reflective coating can make solar panels far more efficient, soaking up nearly all available sunlight from nearly any angle, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Current solar panels — which convert energy from the sun into electricity — absorb only about two-thirds of available sunlight.

But surfaces treated with a coating developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, can harvest 96.2 percent of sunlight.

“That is a tremendous savings,” Rensselaer’s Shawn-Yu Lin, whose study appears in the journal Optics Letters, said in a telephone interview.

I’ve several various engine designs for compressed air engine vehicles.  I really believe this has merit as some of them are proving to be a viable alternative to fuel based engines.  They probably won’t see mass acceptance for general use but they have promise for specifc applications.

Air Cars: A New Wind for America’s Roads?

A new carmaker has a plan for cheap, environmentally friendly cars to be built all over the country

An air-powered car? It may be available sooner than you think at a price tag that will hardly be a budget buster. The vehicle may not run like a speed racer on back road highways, but developer Zero Pollution Motors is betting consumers will be willing to fork over $20,000 for a vehicle that can motor around all day on nothing but air and a splash of salad oil, alcohol or possibly a pint of gasoline.

I particularly like this rotary engine design

Significant new rotary engine design runs on compressed air

There is no other motor as efficient as the Di Pietro Rotary Air Engine. It is 100% more efficient than any other air powered engine built to date and its high torque makes it the first air engine suitable for mobile applications. The invention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention has the capacity to revolutionise transportation, plus offer a multitude of energy-saving benefits in stationary applications.

Here’s an interesting device to take advantage of those bumpy roads to generate electricity.

Bike Generator Harnesses Power From Bumps on the Road

TreeHugger has shown all kinds of generators for bicycles, but here is a novel approach that would do well where I ride. Industrial designer Deco Goodman takes advantage of our crumbling infrastructure and pothole-filled roads by installing a piezo-electric generator in a shock absorber built into the seat post. Every tooth-jarring bump now is a little bit softer as the energy is converted to electricity and stored in the battery.

Here’s some interesting research on generating hydrogen:

Researchers generate hydrogen without the carbon footprint
A greener, less expensive method to produce hydrogen for fuel may eventually be possible with the help of water, solar energy and nanotube diodes that use the entire spectrum of the sun’s energy, according to Penn State researchers.

“Other researchers have developed ways to produce hydrogen with mind-boggling efficiency, but their approaches are very high cost,” says Craig A. Grimes, professor of electrical engineering. “We are working toward something that is cost effective.” Continue Reading »

Like the discovery of vulcanizing rubber, accidents can have some interesting results.

Article: Plastics unite to make unexpected ‘metal’Jamming the right two pieces of plastic together creates a thin but strongly conducting channel along the junction that acts like a metal, say Dutch researchers. The discovery could lead to a whole new way of making electronics from non-metallic materials, and even new superconductors.

Alberto Morpurgo’s team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands attached a micrometer-thick crystal of the organic polymer TTF to a similarly thin organic crystal of the polymer TCNQ.

The thin, flexible crystals conform to each other’s shape and stick together due to van der Waals forces, says Morpurgo. Continue Reading »

Magic in a test tube, this is definitely something to keep an eye on.

Article: Harvard Team Creates the World’s 1st Synthesized Cells

A single cell is the most awesomely sophisticated molecular machine yet produced. A self-directing, self-replicating micro-factory capable of complex constructions, automated repair and even (like all good sci-fi-sounding devices) self-destruct. The first cells, however, were much less “complex mechanisms” and significantly more “Shake and Bake” - a model that we’re now ready to build ourselves.

These proto-cells didn’t have any sophisticated cellular functions, consisting of nothing more than a fatty cell wall just dense enough to have an inside and an outside, with a speck of DNA on the “not-outside” side. This child’s model of a cell drifted in the chemical soup that created it until the correct nucleotides were absorbed and allowed it to replicated the DNA. Continue Reading »

I think we are all hoping for a breakthrough, but which one will it be?

Article: New Fuel Cell System ‘Generates Electricity with Only Water, Air’

Genepax Co Ltd explained the technologies used in its new fuel cell system “Water Energy System (WES),” which uses water as a fuel and does not emit CO2.

The system can generate power just by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes, respectively, the company said at the press conference, which took place June 12, 2008, at the Osaka Assembly Hall.

The basic power generation mechanism of the new system is similar to that of a normal fuel cell, which uses hydrogen as a fuel. According to Genepax, the main feature of the new system is that it uses the company’s membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water. But compared with the existing method, the new process is expected to produce hydrogen from water for longer time, the company said. Continue Reading »

Next we will be printing entire libraries on the “head” of an atom.

Article: ‘Electron turbine’ could print designer molecules

A carbon nanotube that spins in a current of electrons, like a wind turbine in a breeze, could become the world’s smallest printer or shrink computer memory, UK researchers say.

The design is simple. A carbon nanotube 10 nanometres long and 1 nm wide is suspended between two others, its ends nested inside them to form a rotating joint. When a direct current is passed along the tubes, the central one spins around.

That design has as yet only been tested using advanced computer simulations by Colin Lambert and colleagues at Lancaster University, Lancashire, UK.

But Adrian Bachtold of the Catalan Institute for Nanotechnology, who was not involved in the work, intends to build the electron turbines and says it should be straightforward.

Researchers have made or designed a range of small-scale motors in recent years, using everything from DNA to light sensitive molecules to cell-transport proteins.

The Lancaster design is one of the simplest yet. Imagined applications for nanomotors range from shrinking optical communications components to new forms of computer memory.

Will this year be the turning point where governments finally realize we have to find and promote alternative energy sources?

Article: World’s biggest solar farm at centre of Portugal’s ambitious energy plan

From a distance the bizarre structures sprouting from the high Alentejo plain in eastern Portugal resemble a field of mechanical sunflowers. Each of the 2,520 giant solar panels is the size of a house and they are as technically sophisticated as a car. Their reflective heads tilt to the sky at a permanent 45 degrees as they track the sun through 240 degrees every day.

The world’s largest solar photovoltaic farm, generating electricity straight from sunlight, is taking shape near Moura, a small town in a thinly populated and impoverished region which boasts the most sunshine per square metre a year in Europe.

When fully commissioned later this year, the £250m farm set on abandoned state-owned land will be twice the size of any other similar project in the world, covering an area nearly twice the size of London’s Hyde park. It is expected to supply 45MW of electricity each year, enough to power 30,000 homes.