Style of Design

A little while ago we’ve shown you a PS3 controller coffee table that was made by a highschool student as a school project. Today we have another similar tablet, a gaming-based design that will bring a huge NES Coffee Table in your living room. The NES Coffee Table even comes with a controller hidden in the opening lid, just like the real thing. But the coffee table itself feels just a little too chuncky for my taste so getting such a design might not be such a good idea especially if you and your friends aren’t really into retro gaming. The NEC Coffee Table is however a spectacular design, I’ll give you that, so if you are a former hardcore NES gamer, then this home project might just be the thing for you. Via Flickr

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If you thought grading was for old ladies then the Tonino Lamborghini will surely change this misconception. The sports car makers are now zooming on to the home garden market by joining hands with IKRA. The <a href="http://www.tonino-lamborghini-garden.com"
http://www.tonino-lamborghini-garden.com>Tonino Lamborghini series of garden tools includes chainsaws, hedge trimmers, grass trimmers and so on. Who knows, maybe these super chic tools may just inspire those who like living life in the fast lane to try their hand at gardening!

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The Zikmu Wireless Stereo Speakers by Parrot reconciles creativity with functionality flawlessly. The set of two speakers in ABS and PMMA resins with acoustically transparent cloth grills bring a contemporary sense of style into the home theater continuum and are a refreshing change from the usually trite black boxed counterparts. The speaker set ships with a remote control and can be purchased from Emmo Home for $1,600.00.

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Industrial designer Harry Thaler meshes his wit with his design sensibility and the end result is the quirky Pressed Chair. This pressed aluminum chair can be shaped into a super-light stackable chair since its been manufactured from a 2.5mm sheet and hence has all the trappings of being a “future classic” according to the Tent London Tent Selects program.

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Self Repairing Solar Cell

Solar cells, the ones that make electricity from sunlight, are pretty inefficient.  Really good ones currently on the market are about 15% efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.  By comparison converting sunlight into heat is very efficient, 85 – 90% with just good quality spray paint.  So we have a long way to go with the efficiency of photovoltaic cells.

To address this discrepancy, researchers from MIT took a new look at solar cells and the conversion of sunlight to energy and they discovered that by mimicking plants they could increase the efficiency of solar cells while at the same time creating self-healing photovoltaic structures.

Chemical engineering professor Michael Strano “I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism,” he told MITNews. To mimic this process, he and his team began work on self-repairing molecules called phospholipids. These molecules can turn sunlight into energy and reassemble themselves even after breakdown. The new phospholipids create a structural support that responds to light and can realign the system once electrons are “knocked loose” by the particles of light.

With a grant from the MIT Energy Initiative, Strano and his team built and tested a prototype of the synthetic molecules and discovered the system to be 40% efficient (!)

This is about double to triple the efficiency of cells currently on the market. In one trial the phospholipids cells were repeatedly assembled and disassembled and showed  no efficiency lost.

Strano also said his new photovoltaic technology could one day near 100% efficiency, which frankly sounds too good to be true.

Strano recovers nicely by stating “We’re basically imitating tricks that nature has discovered over millions of years”

Nature is a great inspiration for efficient, self repairing, low cost and organic ways to design the future.

After discovering thousands of unwanted malware files corrupting our vast SDU servers we took the time to scrub our hard drives clean and start up with new bits and bytes.

SDU will now return to our regular and semi-regular publishing of all things sustainable, with particular emphasis on mass market appropriate technologies.

Hope all of you had a great summer.

jsbarrie

Termite + Cellulose = Biofuels!

Biofuel startup ZeaChem has begun building a biofuel pilot plant that will turn cellulosic feedstocks such as switch grass and wood chips into ethanol via a novel biomimetic process that uses microbes found in the guts of termites. It makes perfect sense to use the termite model to turn hard to digest cellulosic materials into simple sugars.  Termintes have been happily munching wood millions of years.  They have a proven process.

The company says the ethanol yields from the sugars of its cellulosic feedstocks are significantly higher than the yields from other biofuel production processes. ZeaChem says its process also has the potential to produce a plastic feedstock.

From Technology Review:

Bugging out: A pilot scale cellulose to ethanol plant is under construction by ZeaChem and partner Hazen Research in Golden, CO. The plant will soon pump out 250,000 gallons of fuel per year.

ZeaChem employs a hybrid approach that uses a combination of thermochemical and biological processes. It first uses acid to break the cellulose into sugars. Then, instead of fermenting the sugars into ethanol with yeast, as is typically done, the company feeds the sugars to an acetogen bacteria found in the guts of termites and other insects. The bacteria converts the sugar into acetic acid, which is then combined with hydrogen to form ethanol.

“It’s a little more complicated than a conventional process. It’s not the obvious, direct route, but there is a high yield potential,” says Jim McMillan of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO.

In more conventional biofuel processes, much of the carbon content locked up in the sugars is lost to the formation of carbon dioxide when the sugars are fermented into ethanol. Converting the sugars into acetic acid and then ethanol, however, yields no carbon dioxide. As a result, this method has the potential to raise biofuel yields by as much as 50 percent, according to ZeaChem.

Via: Technology Review

Cambodia Starts Jatropha BioDiesel Production

Garbage = BioFuel

New Process Promises Better and Cheaper Ethanol

Are Biofuels Economically Feasible?

Dr. Muller Explains Engine

I’ve worked with Dr. Norbert Muller on a variety of projects.  (Note: my role on these projects has always been modest).  But what I have noticed about Norbert’s work over the years is the intellectual rigor that goes into his designs and his absolute dedication to creating a sustainable future.  Norbert is one person you should watch.  A variety of very cool, affordable and sustainable technologies are in the works in his labs.

Last Fall he showed me a sketch for an engine that uses shock waves instead of pistons to compress a fuel-air mixture.  An engine that takes the best from “wave rotor” technology and turbine engines such that the engine has only one moving part, it doesn’t need water cooling and it uses fuel much more efficiently than anything on the market.  Check it out:

From Michigan State University:

Associate professor of mechanical engineering Norbert Mueller believes his wave disk engine could signal a breakthrough for hybrid electric vehicles. Mueller leads a team of Michigan State University engineers and scientists that recently received a $2.5 million federal stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build and develop their engine.

The engine uses turbo combustion “shock wave” technology to convert either liquid fuel or compressed natural gas or hydrogen into electrical power. Fuel efficiency for hybrid vehicles could increase five times compared to internal combustion engines while reducing costs by 30 percent.

“Well, it’s lighter than an (internal combustion) engine, it’s smaller and it’s cheaper to produce because it’s all you need to produce,” Mueller said.

“It has no valvetrains, it has no overheads, it has no radiator, and all these things, and no water cycle, it’s pretty easy and simple. You only need to connect a generator on the back, which we call a pot-sized generator and that would be, basically be the engine which drives your full utility vehicle.”

The goal of Mueller’s team is to produce an engine that would give hybrid vehicles a 500-mile driving range and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 95 percent.

“That’s what we want to do, and we are committed to do in the next two years,” Mueller said. “I want to see you in three years, driving this full or hybrid electric vehicle with this engine in there.”

Related Posts:

Green Battery Design

Thermoacoustic Engine Explained

Carbon Nanotube Springs = Batteries?

Green Car Update

Solar Power in Slum Cities

92 mpg DIY Diesel Insight

The Electric Airplane – Clean Green Air Transport

The Appropriate Technology Collaborative has provided construction drawings of our sustainable, affordable and low cost technologies to 1,200 nonprofits (NGOs), individuals and Governments in the last 15 months.  We have had feedback from a couple dozen organizations who are using our technologies but with so many downloads we would like to get a better idea of how many groups are using our designs (that are always Open Source and free).

If you are an organization or individual or you know of someone using our designs we would appreciate a short note sent to:  info (at) apptechdesign (dot) org.

If you have an interest in new sustainable appropriate technologies please check out www.apptechdesign.org

Your help with this is much appreciated.  We are updating our ability to collect data on the efficacy of our work and making a Google Earth map of where our technologies are being used around the planet.

Thank you,

John Barrie, Executive Director, The Appropriate Technology Collaborative

ATC + and Michigan State University Solar Vaccine Refrigerator

The Appropriate Technology Collaborative has entered the NASA Tech Briefs Create The Future Contest with our Solar Vaccine Refrigerator.  Please visit the Tech Briefs Site and vote for our entry.

Vote for the ATC Solar Vaccine Refrigerator Here.

From the Competition Website:

The Problem:

About 2 million people around the world die each year of diseases preventable by widely used vaccines. In Africa and parts of Asia over half of all vaccines that require refrigeration spoil before they can be administered. Millions of lives and billions of dollars are lost due to a lack of refrigeration.

Solution:

For vaccines to be safely administered in rural parts of Africa and Asia one needs a novel inexpensive, easy to maintain refrigerator that provides World Health Organization and UNICEF compliant “chain-of-cold” storage of vaccines. It should run on free non-polluting solar energy and it should be built in-country.

Description:

The Appropriate Technology Collaborative (ATC) worked with engineering students and professors at Michigan State University to create a unique refrigeration technology.
The ATC Solar Vaccine Refrigerator is a robust, easy to maintain technology that can be made in the country or region where it is to be used. It is made out of simple materials that can be found in most cities: steel, charcoal and ethanol or methanol. The finished product has no moving parts that need maintenance and it doesn’t use electricity of any kind. One simply places it in sunlight and it freezes. Period. (Note: If the sun doesn’t shine it can run on biofuels)

Design:

Simplicity and sustainability guided the design of the Solar Vaccine Refrigerator. There are only a few parts connected together by pipe. A steel box filled with activated charcoal, a series of pipes with cooling fins and a container of ethanol. There are no valves in the system.

How it Works:

The steel box is the solar collector/adsorber. The box is painted black so that it converts sunlight to heat. When the solar collector gets hot in sunlight the charcoal rejects ethanol vapor. The rejected ethanol vapor flows into the condenser, which is a series of pipes with cooling fins. The temperature of the ethanol vapor is reduced to the ambient air temperature and it condenses into a liquid. The liquid then flows by gravity into the evaporator which is located inside an insulated box. At the end of the day we have liquid ethanol in the evaporator and cool charcoal in the adsorber. Cool charcoal can absorb ethanol vapor once again. At night some of the liquid ethanol is adsorbed back into the charcoal. The ethanol that remains behind in the evaporator becomes very cold and the temperature in the insulated box gets down to our pre-determined design temperature of 0 to -10 degrees Celsius.

Once each day the refrigerator goes through one cooling cycle. Thermal mass inside the insulated box keeps the internal temperature even throughout daily temperature swings.

Refinements:

We have also changed the geometry from the original prototype to use steel pipes filled with activated charcoal instead of the steel box. The round shape of pipe is structurally superior to a flat box so we can use thinner material and have fewer joints that need to be welded.

To vote they ask you to register with the site   However the last time we did this we didn’t get any spam   Your support is greatly appreciated.