energy bursts
Rotor-Schooner
Nothing is as fuel
efficient as a sailboat—after all, they require nothing but a steady
breeze. Now engineers in Mississippi want to use wind power to propel
a ship even on the calmest day.
The trick is to ditch the sails and instead use a high-tech wind turbine
to power the craft.
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| Pontoons on this catamaran would store wind energy in the form of compressed air. |
Hunt Aviation, based in Pass Christian, has designed a wind turbine that
rotates along the vertical axis, rather than the horizontal axis used
by conventional turbines that face into the wind. The unconventional design
enables the turbines to be mounted in places where horizontal-axis machines
would be inappropriate.
But the most innovative application is the wind turbine-powered boat.
Preliminary plans call for a disc-like wind turbine to sit between an
elevated deck and the hull of a catamaran. As the blades turn, they provide
energy to a compressor, which fills the two pontoons with compressed air.
This air is later released to run the propulsion system.
Hunt Aviation officials say they hope to have a prototype built by the
end of the summer.
The Shape of Soot
When
engineers work to reduce particulate emissions from diesel engines, they
try any number of approaches. But almost all of them have made the same
fundamental assumption—that the particles are round.
But recent research from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has shown
that these particles are clumpy blobs that vary in shape, depending on
the speed of the engine and the load it labors under.
The Argonne researchers captured the particles directly from a diesel
exhaust pipe and subjected them to an electron microscope and spectrometer.
The research, by mechanical engineer Raj Sekar and others at Argonne,
also showed that the particles grow in size as they leave the tailpipe.
Smaller particles glom to one another to form relatively large flakes
of soot.
The researchers hope this information will enable engineers to build systems
that can clear particles from the exhaust more efficiently.
H2 in 12 Seconds
A tank of gasoline
has an enormous amount of stored energy. Now researchers at the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., have developed a quick
way to turn this energy source into hydrogen for fuel cells. Up to now,
the process of converting gasoline into hydrogen, known as reforming,
has required up to 15 minutes to warm up.
By creating a chemical reactor riddled with microchannels, the research
team was able to induce faster catalytic reactions between the gasoline
and high-temperature steam. This enabled them to reduce the overall size
of the fuel processor, down to less than one cubic foot.
With this and other advances, the reformer's overall start-up time
can be reduced to as little as 12 seconds.
Green Home
If you want to study
how the global ecology is put together, the last place you want to do
it is in an environmental nightmare. That's the philosophy behind
the new home for the Global Ecology Department of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington.
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The building, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., was designed
with an eye toward efficiency.
Cooling, a huge energy draw, is performed through a circulated water system
that draws heat through pipes in the ceiling and radiates it from the
rooftop in the cool of the evening. Sliding glass panels take advantage
of breezes to further reduce cooling loads.
All told, the climate system is expected to use 54 percent less energy
than standard cooling systems.
That's green, and beautiful.
This section was written by Editor Jeffrey Winters.