Tagged: energy

Photo of the Week: Grabbing power from the air

You’re probably not aware of it, but the air around you is a dense cloud of radio frequency signals. And you’d rather be happy about that: they provide your mobile phone with 3G, your laptop with wifi and your TV with digital broadcast. Without going into details –let’s leave that for a physics class — the signals are electromagnetic waves that carry energy from a sending antenna to a receiver. Imagine you could tap of a little bit of the energy of all the waves bouncing around. That’s exactly what Freevolt does.

According to developer Drayson, Freevolt is the first commercially available technology that extracts energy from the ambient radiosignals. It’s extremely efficient thanks to its simplicity: it consists of only three parts, being an antenna to pick up the power out of the air, a rectifier to turn the alternating current into direct current and a power management module to store and ouptut the electricity.

A demo of the Freevolt technology, powering a small speaker (photo: Sebastian Anthony)

A demo of the Freevolt technology, powering a small speaker (photo: Sebastian Anthony)

You are probably wondering how much energy this neat little device could harvest from the surrounding air. I’ll tell you: around 100 microWatts. That may sound little –it actually is, it would take ages to charge your smartphone with it– yet it is sufficient to power small devices such as smoke detectors, small security camera’s, sensors in fridges, parking lots… basically all small devices that could be part of the internet of things.

Imagine you would never have to worry about charging these devices or changing batteries. Freevolt branded it Perpetual Power for a reason. Yet as an engineer I want to get rid of some misunderstandings here. This technology is freewheeling on existing waves boucing around and since in the future we rather will have more than less of them, it may sound like an infinite power source. Too bad there’s the first law of thermodynamics, which tells us that energy cannot be created (nor destroyed). The Freevolt technology is doing nothing more than extracting some energy from the waves, energy that was invested by the sender to emit the wave in the first place.

A developers kit is available for the geeks to play around with the technology. Dryson also developed the Tag, a small sensor that keeps track of the air pollution around you and gathers the data on an the Cleanspace app on your mobile device. It rewards you when helping to improve the air quality, like leaving the car and taking the bike instead. It’s a nice showcase for their technology and hopes to build awareness on air pollution at the same time.

Sources
OffGridQuest
Freevolt website
CleanSpace app

 

 

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Photo of the week: Energy efficiency scorecard

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, ACEEE, is a non-profit organisation aiming for a more energy efficient (American) economy. They’ve made an international scorecard, a ranking of energy efficiency of 16 large economies including Germany, the UK, China, Mexico, the US etc. Countries can earn a maximum of 100%, by scoring points in 31 metrics across four groups of important energy efficiency aspects: nation-wide energy aspects such as energy production and transmission, buildings, industry and transportation. The top three brings no surprises. On the first place comes Germany, followed by Italy and the European Union as a whole. Surprising result: China comes at the fourth place, while the US only comes only at the 13th place of the 16 economies investigated. But there’s still room for improvement: even Germany was rewarded a mere 62 on a scale of 100.

The energy efficiency scorecard of ACEEE, ranking 16 large economies (map: ACEEE)

The energy efficiency scorecard of ACEEE, ranking 16 large economies (map: ACEEE)

 

Source

ACEEE

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Photo of the week: The Desolenator

The Desolenator turns dirty water into clean drinking water solely by solar energy (photo: Desolenator)

Desalination of water usually is an energy-intensive and expensive process. The Desolenator is aiming to change that: it’s a cheap and easy-to-use solution to produce clean drinking water in regions where water scarcity is a problem. With the sun as only driving force, this piece of engineering is able to produce up to 15litres of clean water a day – enough for cooking and drinking of a small family. Not only salt water but also contaminated and dirty water can be transformed. The contaminated water is first heated up by the sun until it reaches boiling temperature, then electricity generated by the soler panel is used to boil it further and to vaporize the water. The condensed vapor is safe to drink. The Desolelanor has a price tag of 450$ but the team is working hard to get the price down so it becomes affordable for families who lack access to clean water. CEO Janssen: “… [water scarity, red.] will get worse—by 2025, close to 3 billion people will deal with water scarcity daily. We want to give them something that’s an affordable, family-sized device.”

Find out more: desolenator.com

Sources:

FastCoexist

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Photo of the week: Holiday lights

By examining the Nuomi NPP data, scientists revealed patterns in light intensity (photo: NASA’s Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen)

By examining the Nuomi NPP data, scientists revealed patterns in light intensity (photo: NASA’s Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen)

By examining data from the Suomi NPP satellite, scientists of NASA have identified interesting patterns in nighttime light intensity during holiday seasons. In the Western World an increase of 30-50% in suburban areas is noted during Christmas and New Year’s time, while an increase is seen in the Middle East during the holy month of Ramadan. The data reveals patterns in the usage of energy in different societies and cultures. When we want to reduce greenhouse gases, it is necessary to understand such social phenomena that drive energy consumption. The data of the Suomi NPP satellite and processed by an algorithm which filters out reflection of the moon and influances of the clouds, will help scientists to do so.

Source

NASA

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