Posts Tagged: "energy"

With the advent of blue LED lighting, it is now possible to create white light devices by combining blue light with red and green. As the Nobel Foundation points out in their background report on the 2014 physics laureates, “Incandescent light bulbs had lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps. The fact that LEDs could supplant all incandescents and fluorescents in lighting applications alone has major implications for energy efficiency in our world. In an LED bulb, about half of the electricity charging the diode is converted into light, whereas incandescent bulbs only convert about four percent of their charge into light.

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, there is a potential 4.15 gigawatts of energy which can be collected from offshore wind collection around the country’s waters. The total electric generating capacity of the entire nation was 1.01 gigawatts as of 2008. All of this energy can be collected from waters within 50 nautical miles of America’s shorelines… Offshore wind farms face unique problems in seafloor depth and corrosion from ocean water which can cause higher operational costs in the form of maintenance team transport and replacement components. Offshore wind technology development projects are needed to develop tools for engineering modeling and analysis which can spur further innovation and lower the facility costs for offshore projects.

Before widespread application of hydrogen in electrical utilities can be addressed, however, a number of shortcomings have yet to be solved. Although hydrogen can be derived from a number of sources, most of the world’s current hydrogen manufacture requires natural gas, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when combusted for these processes. Storing and transportation of hydrogen is also very important as hydrogen, compared to other fuels, has a low energy for its volume even though it has a high energy for its weight. The ability to store and transport hydrogen in cost-effective ways is currently a stumbling block on the path towards greater use of this alternative energy carrier in electrical systems.

Many of these patent references reviewed this week show us Siemens involvement with electrical and Internet systems on all levels, from personal to industrial. For example, one patent application would protect a floating sensor capable of detecting foam formation in industrial liquid production, a symptom of process issues. An issued patent, with an extremely narrow Claim 1, protects a system of analyzing industrial facility processes to identify energy cost savings. On an individual level, one patent application describes a system of creating anonymity among mobile device owners using cloud application resources. Siemens is also involved in medical technology upgrades that aid various bodily systems. One patent application filed with the USPTO would protect a system of training the hearing impaired to better understand speech, even when amplification affects the signal. Finally, we feature one last patent application that discusses a system of measuring heart activity non-invasively.

HyperSolar, Inc. has developed a technology that they claim will produce hydrogen that is renewable and utilizes natural power sources: sunlight and water. Who knows whether the HyperSolar/UC technology will ultimately lead to the dawn of a hydrogen energy economy. What we do know is that without the forward-thinking legislation that gives Universities incentive to partner with the private sector there would be no such potential. As alluring as alternative, cheap, clean energy is, efforts to get from where we are to where we ultimately need to go will be extremely expensive and the research highly speculative. Such high cost and extremely speculative research is realistically only carried out by Universities.