Using Computer Chip Heat To Cool Computer Chips: Chip Mounted Sterling Engine
As a person trained in computer science I can tell you that computers are fascinating. They are some of the most amazing things human beings have ever invented, the problem is that they are not very eco-friendly. They use a lot of nasty chemicals when you make them, and when you run them they make a lot of heat. The part of a computer that makes a lot of that heat is the CPU (central processing unit). This “brain” of the computer usually has a big noisy fan attached to it, which just blows the hot air out the back of the computer where it goes towards making your room really hot in the summer.
While the fans that are attached to these fans are pretty efficient, a much more efficient use of the heat of the chip to power a device that would cool the fan.
This little guy is a sterling engine, this is not the first time we have covered these sort of things, you can use much larger ones, and a lot more heat to make a lot of energy, see here, here and here.
The heat from the chip causes the engine to circulate and cool a heat transfer liquid. There is no electricity used, only the natural heat caused by the chip doing it’s thing. Pretty neat. I worry that the wear and tear might be a bit much on such a complicated thing, and I also worry that the thing might be really loud, but who knows, my current fan is pretty loud, and uses electricity. A loud electricity free fan might be a step forward.
This Fifth Grader Is Smarter Than You: Builds His Own Air Powered Car
This kid (and his father, you know his dad helped) built this freaking sweet air car.
All that and catchy music. It also looks like it uses a fair amount of bicycle parts, making it even cooler. I wish I had learned how to weld in fifth grade. According to the Youtube page it can go about half a mile and goes about 9mph, not going to change the world, but still pretty awesome for a fifth grader. My science fair project in fifth grade was a stupid volcano made with vinegar and baking soda. To my credit it did have a cut away model showing the magma chamber, but still it was no air car.
Greenpeace Tries To Find A “Green” Laptop At Cebit, Fails.
It is not surprising that Greenpeace was unable to find a green laptop, even a CeBit the largest show of its kind in the world. It is the sad truth that all the fun electronic gizmos that we love so much are absolutely horrible for the environment. They are full of lead, mercury, arsenic, BFR (Brominated flame retardant), PVC (a nasty cancer causing plastic), and a host of other baddies. This is before you consider all the energy and water that it took to make the product in the first place.
The most obvious answer to these problems is to buy less crap. The second solution is to pressure companies to make greener products. The third is to buy less, of highly green products.
Lets be honest, people who have lots of money (America, Europe, Parts of Asia) are going to buy lots and lots of gadgets. It’s just the sad fact. So what we need to do is make it both economically and socially unacceptable to produce products that are bad for the earth.
This is not as hard as you might think. Public policy, industry standards, and public pressure can go a long way towards changing the products that people buy (No one in America fills up with leaded gasoline anymore, when was the last time you got anything with asbestos in it?)
The power is in our hands, lets use it.
The Shape Of Things To Come: The Money Maker Pump
As rain fall becomes more and more unpredictable, farmers in many countries are going to have to turn to irrigation, the Money Maker pump from Kick Start allows they to do so without electricity, or burning fossil fuels to run pumps. I am thinking a lot of rather, shall we say “husky”, Americans should get one of these to water the lawn with. It would save a lot of energy, and keep us in better shape. You know it would save water as well because if you had to pump your own water you would use less of it.
Very cool project, and very cool use of music to spread knowledge. Reminds me of this little gem.
(first video via the Smashingly awesome AIDG)
(Second video via BostonBiker.org also awesome, but not as cool as AIDG)
A (Dangerous) Waste Of Energy
So we all know that old fashion incandescent bulbs are wasteful. What we might not realize is how they are wasteful. Have you ever looked into a toaster? You will see little glowing red lines, these glowing heaters work on the same principle that electric stoves do. Push electricity through a metal wire, the wire heats up, and you get toast. You can see the wires in the toaster because if you heat them up enough they glow a dull red.
Incandescent bulbs work on this same principle. The little tungsten wire in the bulb heats up so much that it doesn’t just glow red, but a vibrant white. The problem being that most of the energy you put into an incandescent bulb goes towards producing heat (something like 80%) and only a little bit ends up as light. Incandescent bulbs are basically really bright toasters. CFL’s on the other hand make more light with less because they use a different method to produce light. They use a florescent gas that glows bright (and cool) when electricity is passed through it. That is why CFL’s don’t heat up, and use so much less energy.
Anyone who has touched a hot bulb knows that they are nothing to mess around with. Well recently I found this little gem.
Not only was this tiny bathroom like a sauna as the bulbs were left on all the time, but it is clear they are placed too close to the ceiling. This room is in desperate need of some CFL’s. Do you have any examples of pictures like this? Not only waste, but dangerous waste? If so please contact us and we will post them.
NASA’s New Catalytic Converter Reduces Pollution 30%
Via Techwatch, NASA’s show about how they are using space tech to solve earth problems.
This looks pretty cool, yet another reason we should have a well funded science and space program in this country. It apparently can work at lower temperatures meaning it kicks in sooner and is more effective throughout it’s use. 30% is a huge reduction, lets hope that these sort of devices make it to the market sooner rather than later.
(video via)
The Rocket Box: AIDG Rolls Out Super Efficient Wood Stove
The good people over at AIDG have once again come up with an amazing (low cost, appropriate, and sustainable) invention to help the people of the developing world. Introducing the Rocket Box.
The Rocket Box stove is a lightweight portable stove, recently developed by AIDG’s R&D interns as a lower-cost, pre-fabricated alternative to common masonry stove models.
The Rocket Box uses 50-60% less firewood than traditional cookstoves and fires. This provides a huge costs savings for families that buy fuel wood. For instance, women we interviewed at San Alfonso, a cooperative in Guatemala, reported spending 28-56% of their monthly income on wood.
This stove design shows similar fuel efficiency to masonry stoves, but is up to 50% cheaper. Being portable, it is particularly useful in communities where residents are living in temporary housing and/or want more flexibility in where the stove is placed in their home. Like most good ‘improved’ stoves, it comes equipped with a chimney that vents smoke out of the home and thus cuts exposure to the ‘killer in the kitchen’.
Obviously if you can get the same amount of heating and cooking done for less wood it’s great. What I really liked about how they built this device is that they didn’t just get a bunch of scientists in a lab and figure out the mathematically perfect way to make this stove. They took into account the actual day to day and culture values that a stove has to have in order for it to be used.
No one is going to use the stove if it doesn’t cook the food the right way. Would you use a device if it made french fries turn to mush, or turned hamburgers into charred black balls?
They also built it out of things that the locals can get their hands on, making it a sustainable and local business model. Find pictures specs and much more here.
Never Forget 1-31-07
So if you are not from Boston you might not have caught this story (warning fox news link), but last year around this time, a couple of crazy hippies were out putting up LED light up signs for a silly movie based on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters the Mooninites.
Now besides being highly energy efficient, (LED”s are an excellent way to produce low power consumption light), these signs were harmless. The Boston police department however FREAKED OUT. They actually shut down large parts of the city, got the bomb squad out, and BLEW UP several of the signs. A myopic idiot could have figured out from looking at the things that they were, harmless, and based on a cartoon show. The incident cost the city MILLIONS of dollars, and in general made the city look silly.
To commemorate this fine waste of public resources a couple of jokesters have gone and put up some more signs this year. 1-31-07, never forget (ha ha)
Vist them:
- osamabinladenite - Google street view.
- bushinite - Google street view.
- samtravisewenite - Google street view.
- berdovskynite - Google street view.
IBM Wants To Make The World Better
IBM has been doing some interesting things as of late. Recently they started taking flawed computer chips and turning them into solar panels (isn’t that nice).
Through this new reclamation process IBM is now able to more efficiently remove the intellectual property from the wafer surface, making these wafers available either for reuse in internal manufacturing calibration as “monitor wafers” or for sale to the solar cell industry, which must meet a growing demand for the same silicon material to produce photovoltaic cells for solar panels. IBM intends to provide details of the new process to the broader semiconductor manufacturing industry. It is currently in use the Burlington, VT facility and in the process of being implemented at IBM’s East Fishkill, NY, semiconductor fabrication plant.
“One of the challenges facing the solar industry is a severe shortage of silicon, which threatens to stall its rapid growth,” said Charles Bai, chief financial officer of ReneSola, one of China’s fastest growing solar energy companies. “This is why we have turned to reclaimed silicon materials sourced primarily from the semiconductor industry to supply the raw material our company needs to manufacture solar panels.”
IBM and others in the industry use silicon wafers both as the starting material for manufacturing microelectronic products — from cell phones to computers to consumer electronics — and to monitor and control the myriad of steps in the manufacturing process. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, worldwide 250,000 wafers are started per day across the industry. IBM estimates that up to 3.3% of these started wafers are scrapped. In the course of the year, this amounts to approximately three million discarded wafers.
3 million wafers:
* Stretch for 375 miles if placed end-to-end
* Cover 22.5 acres of area
* Weigh 187.5 tons
* Generate 13.5 megawatts of solar energy
* Produce 57 million kilowatt hours in solar panels (12-hour day x 365 days)
* Power 6,000 houses (9,500 kWh per year per house)
Pretty interesting to think of trash not in terms of weight, or cost, but in terms of how much clean renewable energy it could make.
Now they have five innovations they claim will transform how people around the world will work and live in the next five years.
From helping to create a more green environment to improving cell phones, the IBM “Next 5 in 5″ list is based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s labs around the world. The five areas in which IBM expects to see technological improvements include: energy, cell phone functionality, traffic congestion, food intake and medical tools for doctors.
Interesting stuff. Click here (pdf) for more info about the 5 in 5 plan.
Google Announces Renewable Energy Initiative
Google today announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, known as RE “We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers,” said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. “We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal. There has been tremendous work already on renewable energy. Technologies have been developed that can mature into industries capable of providing electricity cheaper than coal. Solar thermal technology, for example, provides a very plausible path to providing renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are also very interested in further developing other technologies that have potential to be cost-competitive and green. We are aware of several promising technologies, and believe there are many more out there. With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.” (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.) If we meet this goal,” said Page, “and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.” Coal is the primary power source for many around the world, supplying 40% of the world’s electricity. The greenhouse gases it produces are one of our greatest environmental challenges. Making electricity produced from renewable energy cheaper than coal would be a key part of reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions. “Cheap renewable energy is not only critical for the environment but also vital for economic development in many places where there is limited affordable energy of any kind,” added Sergey Brin, Google Co-founder and President of Technology. “Lots of groups are doing great work trying to produce inexpensive renewable energy. We want to add something that moves these efforts toward even cheaper technologies a bit more quickly. Usual investment criteria may not deliver the super low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, “Google.org’s hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal.” Working with RE Today’s announcement represents just the latest steps in Google’s commitment to a clean and green energy future. Google has been working hard on energy efficiency and making its business environmentally sustainable. Last spring the company announced its intention to be carbon neutral for 2007, and is on track to meet that goal. To this end, the company has taken concrete steps to reduce its carbon footprint and accelerate improvements in green technology, including: * Developing cutting-edge energy efficiency technology to power and cool its data centers in the U.S. and around the world. For more information on Google’s commitment to a clean energy future, click here. Want to work for Google as they make renewable energy cheap and easy? Click here for more information on recruitment for RE
* Generating electricity for its Mountain View campus from a 1.6 Megawatt corporate solar panel installation, one of the largest in the U.S.
* Accelerating development and adoption of plug-in vehicles through the RechargeIT initiative, including a $10 million request for investment proposals
* Joining with other industry leaders in 2007 to form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium that advocates the design and use of more energy-efficient computers and servers.
* Working on policies that encourage renewable energy development and deployment, such as a U.S. Renewable Energy Standard, through Google.org.
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