Researchers at Stanford have announced a new class of solar collectors – they’re calling them “photon enhanced thermionic emission” devices.  They’re claiming up to 60% conversion efficiency (theoretically) with fairly standard manufacturing process, but the real benefit is that they can operate at extremely high temperatures.

Regular PV becomes less effective as the temperature increases, making it difficult to do anything with the waste heat generated.  By using this new type of energy conversion, the collecting plate can be kept at high temperatures, providing high-temp ‘waste’ heat, which can then be used for different types of energy storage.  Generally, the bigger the temperature difference between your source (the sun) and sink (the atmosphere), the more efficient energy conversion processes are.

The article doesn’t go into much detail, but guess from the name (specifically the thermionic emission part) I’m guessing these things work similar to how light bulbs work, but in reverse.

These are incredible:

They’re made by an Austin company called Zebra Imaging.  I really want to drop by their office and look at some of them in person…

via Landscape and Urbanism

I’ve seen similar claims in the news before, but I thought I’d post this one.  According to Live Science, researchers here at UT Austin have developed a spray on PV system using nanoparticle CIGS.  They’re still working on the details – they currently only get 1% efficiency, but if they can work out the details this could be an interesting product.

via Inhabitat

Here’s a post about an idea that was in the news a year ago and seems to be maturing into a viable product.  Shawn Frayne started a company called Humdinger Wind Energy to produce a new type of wind generator.  Rather than using a turbine with rotors to generate power, Shawn’s product is essentially a long rigid frame with thin band of material which can oscillate in the wind.  The band is connected at one end to a permanent magnet which induces an electrical charge as it oscillates.  The system has virtually no moving parts and can be built for far less than a typical turbine.  He claims his current models can operate at $1/watt, and he has various sizes from small models you can carry around to large arrays.  His invention is targeted at low-power applications where power is scarce; largely the developing world.

Integrating this into building could be an interesting performative element; they could be used horizontally for shading while providing power, and there’s probably no reason the oscillating piece couldn’t be 30′ wide.

Here’s one for the next structural engineers we work with in California: physicists in france have recently extended their work on sonic invisibility cloaks to encompass buildings and earthquakes, and have proposed a method for designing buildings which are invisible to the shock waves of earthquakes.

Guenneau said that it’s possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren’t there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.

“It’s the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it’s bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock.” The object, or building, is “invisible” to the mechanical waves.

A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. “Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object),” Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each “tuned” to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

Well this is new: it turns out that mixing fresh water and salt water releases energy, in the same way that desalinating salty water requires energy.  Apparently this has been recognized since the 70′s, but until now there hasn’t been a way to take advantage of the fact.  Well, thanks to Doriano Brogioli we can now create electricity simply by mixing water of different salinity levels in the presence of activated carbon (the stuff in your brita water filter).

Brogioli has developed a new approach to salination, a prototype cell that relies on two chunks of activated carbon, a porous carbon commonly used for water and air filtration. Once he jump starts the cell with electric power, all that is required to produce electricity are sources of fresh and salty water and a pump to keep the water flowing. When the separate streams of salty and fresh water mix, energy is released.

A typical cell would require about three dollars worth of activated carbon, and, given a steady flow of water, the cell could produce enough electricity to meet the needs of a small house. It’s the equivalent, in hydroelectric power, of running your appliances from a personal 100 meter (338 feet) high waterfall.

Salination would be an ideal technique for places where fresh and salty waters naturally mix, such as estuaries, according to Brogioli. He said that a coastal community of about a hundred houses could set up a plant with minimal damage to the ecosystem. “A salinity difference plant will be much smaller than a solar plant,” he said. The only waste product is slightly brackish water that can be poured directly into the sea or, Brogioli suggested, into ponds that support estuary-friendly flora and fauna.

How cool is that!?

Riversimple has just announced they will be releasing the plans for their new fuel-cell car under a creative-commons license.  They’ve also set up a collaborative wiki so people who are interested in participating in the design process can download the CAD files, make improvements and submit them to the community for review.

The opensource design approach has had great success in the domain of software design, due mostly to the low cost of implementing software designs and transferring the code base.  There’s been discussion about applying the basic system of production to other fields, but this seems to be the first viable example.  The most interesting aspect of Riversimple’s announcement is that the design was released in a fully-formed state; the collaborative process is starting after a commercial company spent the time engineering the design and making the difficult decisions about what the goals and tactics of the project (this is most often where ‘open-source’ projects break down when the cost of implementing a design is substantial).

This speaks to an argument I’ve made a couple times; designers are paid for their ability to solve problems, not for the end-result of the design process.  Aside from legal issues, there doesn’t seem to be a strong argument against releasing designs after they’ve been completed.  This also ties into my argument earlier that building a system for exchanging architectural details could vastly accelerate the evolutionary process of architectural details.

Worldchanging reports that a chinese company has been developing an algae farming system similar to what we’ve been discussing in the office; clear tubes filled with algae and salt water.  Brad’s idea about bubbling CO2 through the mixture seems to be the impetus for the project; they’re using the algea to create biofuel from CO2 produced by underground coal gassification:

At ENN’s research campus in Langfang, an hour’s drive from Beijing, scientists are testing microalgae to clean up the back-end of a uniquely integrated process to extract and use coal more efficiently and cleanly than is possible today.

Coal is first gasified in a simulated underground environment. The carbon dioxide is extracted with the help of solar and wind power, then “fed” to algae, which can be then used to make biofuel, fertiliser or animal feed.

…

“Algae’s promise is that its population can double every few hours. It makes far more efficient use of sunlight than plants,” said Zhu Zhenqi, a senior advisor on the project. “The biology has been proven in the lab. The challenge now is an engineering one: We need to increase production and reduce cost. If we can solve this challenge, we can deal with carbon.”

The algae must be harvested every day. Extracting the oily components and removing the water is expensive and energy intensive.

So this is mostly just cool.  A researcher at IBM has just developed a way to perform computational algorithms on encrypted data, ‘homomorphic encryption‘ in the crypto-parlance.  For example, you could upload encrypted photos to Flickr and Flickr could adjust the color balance without ever decrypting the photo.  This isn’t a particularly useful example, but the general point here is that data being stored in ‘the cloud’ can now be stored and modified in an encrypted form.  Some comments from Forbes:

Homomorphic encryption, like any encryption, mathematically scrambles data so thoroughly that the unscrambling can be done only by someone possessing a secret key. But even though the encryption seems to produce chaos, it might preserve certain mathematical relationships among the possible inputs. If the encrypted version of input x, multiplied by the encrypted version of input y, equals the encrypted version of x times y, then the process is said to be homomorphic with respect to multiplication.

Fully homomorphic encryption would preserve not just multiplication but also addition. What’s the point of that tweak? Any computer algorithm–whether it sorts your mail or figures out whether you qualify for a tax deduction–boils down to a series of arithmetic steps. If an encryption scheme allowed any number of additions or multiplications, any computing application would be possible without decrypting data.

The idea of fully homomorphic encryption was first posited in a paper three decades ago by Ronald Rivest, an MIT professor and the coinventor of the famous RSA encryption scheme now ubiquitous in business transactions. Rivest and his two coauthors also suggested it was probably impossible.

The downside is that the initial aproach is extremely expensive computationally; something on the magnitude of 18 orders of magnitude for large datasets.  Hopefully future developments will reduce this…

From worldchanging:

Existence is the ultimate proof of the possible. Every time a bold new project is tried, and works, we advance our sense of the achievable. Given how much transformation we need in order to meet the challenges we face, we need many more attempts at innovation, and we’re not getting them. The achievable is not advancing quickly enough.

…

In his recent Long Now talk (MP3 here), economist Paul Romer tells a story. In the early 1970s, China was stuck in a societal inertia after the death of Mao. However, right next door, Hong Kong (administered by the British) was a thriving city-state based on trade and innovative manufacturing. Chinese leaders decided to see if they could copy Hong Kong’s success on a limited scale, and set up four “Special Economic Zones” where foreign investment was encouraged and capitalism was unconstrained. The experiments were so successful economically that their rules soon more or less became the guiding principles of the Chinese miracle. As Romer says, “Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history.”

In many ways, the Global North is as hamstrung in the face of bright green challenges as China was in the face of capitalism. What if the answer is a sustainability and social innovation equivalent of China’s answers: a sort of “Special Innovation Zone”?

Imagine a place — perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood — where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

There’s also an interesting comment from Sean FitzGerald:

And now I realise why I find WorldChanging so frustrating.

The biggest barriers to social innovation are values, belief systems and world views.

Until you have a transformation of consciousness at all levels of society – individual, community, business and government – those institutional, legal and regulatory barriers will stay in place.

WorldChanging keeps pumping out innovative technologies, processes and systems and all I can think is: “Great, but it will never be implemented in time to save civilisation unless *we* change.”

…

I keep hearing from the technological optimists “All we need to do is swap out oil-based transport for electrified transport” or “All we need to do is retrofit our urban environments into paragons of sustainability” or now, “All we need to do is change the regulations that are holding innovation back”.

But it’s not “All we need to do.” You skip right over the very important step of having to change people first (or concurrently, at least). Until we change people’s values the latest, greatest sustainability-enhancing widget, technological breakthrough or grand social plan will stay on the drawing board.

To which ‘Brad’ comments:

True, Sean, the institutional, legal and regulatory barriers Alex describes derive from values, belief systems and world views, and it is those that need to change.However, in order to change those, you need to be able to propose a constructive vision based on differing world views by way of example.

Which gets to the heart of why this seems like an interesting idea to me; it allows the development of new models.  I see a lot of potential pitfalls here, most of the ‘restrictive’ building codes cities adopt are responding to catastrophic failures in the past – throwing these out opens the door to all sorts of unanticipated consequences.  The chinese free zones that are mentioned had one enormous benefit; they were duplicating a model which had already been tried and shown to work.