SolarWindTrees
crochetted_tree-jpg?
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And slow it goes
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Small New York Apartment to Receive Radical Revamp with LifeEdited Competition
http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2010/11/small-new-york-apartment-to-receive-radical-revamp-with-lifeedited-competition.php
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Solar Wind Trees Next?
By Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California
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Photo via Envision Solar
By Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California
on September 24, 2009
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 If you think planting trees is going to save the planet from global warming, you’re thinking in the right direction but a problem — we may call it a problem due to the situation we have gotten ourselves in — with mother nature is it takes its own good time to show results. It doesn’t mean that we should stop planting new trees and stop all efforts at forestation. Everything artificial doesn’t have to be bad for Earth; a London based company called Solar Botanic intends to use Energy Harvesting Trees to generate solar as well as wind energy. The solution is unique in a sense that the same installation can use two alternative energy sources to produce clean electricity.
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FRANK, HOW TO YOU THINK THIS WAS MADE? I FOUND IT ON THE INTERNET. YOU CROCHET. ETHELYN
_I think they might have made a serious of long colored squares ,in colored sequence ,in different sizes then sewed them together around branches trunk etc.-----------
or they had one thousand third world people who could climb trees sit there and crochet pieces,for one year ---------------
or Harry Potter did it ---------------
or that it is a tree that was recently discovered in a remote area of the Amazon -------------
or it was done by talented terrorist who did not want to make bombs ---------------
or it is part of a world wide movement to protect trees from the ozone fall out (new statistics )
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whoever did this is trying to get help in the name of ART! ------------
or this is the beginning of a project to cover all the threes growing on the south slope of Annapurna in the Himalayas ------------
or according to the Seventh Day Advent Church it is the sign that they have been waiting for after it happens they will not be able to proselytize ---------------
or its Tibetan Prayer Flags that just went to far ---------------
or the tree was done in the institute for long term craft syndrome ------------
or it is part of a message left in Mexico City to cheer them up after the Day of The Dead ----------------
or it is the product of many obsessive compulsive personalities -------------------
it was done to see if they could protect that tree from spreading the deadly tent caterpillar (you known confuse it !) -------------------
these are all of the things I thought of but are probably not right ! -------
if you have any ideas please feel free to e-mail me !!!!!! After all that it was probably done on the computer ! FRANK
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Images via Yanko
http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/11/16/is-it-light-is-it-night/
It seems like there's hardly anything new under the sun when it comes to solar power ideas these days. The Day Shade Night Light
http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/11/16/is-it-light-is-it-night/is one such design. The patio umbrella gathers sunlight during the day while providing shade, stores the energy in batteries in its stand, and provides a canopy of light during the evening. While not novel, the design does have some improved features over past ideas.
We've been seeing similar designs since 2005
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/05/solar_umbrella.phpand earlier, so the idea itself isn't new.
However, the slickness of the designs are definitely getting better.
For example, compare the Powerbrella:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/powerbrella-makes-practical-use-of-solar-power-and-poolside-accessories.php
Way less stylish than the canopy of solar cells made by the DSNL. And as for lighting, the soft illumination that comes from flexible OLED panels on the interior is much more stylish than this patio umbrella we found back in 2006: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/06/solarpowered_li.php
Plus, it looks like you can also hang the umbrella -- doesn't seem like a terribly useful feature, but it could come in handy if you want to get a stand out of the way during evening parties.
With the use of new technology like low energy OLED lighting, the solar canopy makes sense -- even with just a few hours of direct sunlight, the canopy can likely gather enough energy for several hours of evening illumination. The DSNL concept puts a nice modern edge on a fairly old idea.
Follow Jaymi on Twitter http://twitter.com/jaymiheimbuch for more stories like this
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Power from motion and vibrations
Forget about batteries.
The ability to harness electricity from tiny vibrations
could power a new generation of electronic devices.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
February 16, 2010
This is the second of a series about MIT research on harnessing micro-sources of power (part one can be read here).
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which traverses hundreds of miles of some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, must be monitored almost constantly for potential problems like corrosion or cracking. Humans do some of this work â€" surveying the pipeline from the air and inspecting it more closely in the areas that can be easily accessed by roads â€" but the bulk of it is done by mechanical "pigs," sensor-laden robots that travel inside the pipeline looking for flaws.
A simpler process might involve outfitting remote stretches of the pipeline with sensors that would automatically radio a warning of impending problems. But the need to periodically change the batteries on! such sensors lessens the appeal of that option. For electronic devices in remote or inaccessible situations like this, including environmental or mechanical monitoring sensors as well as some kinds of biomedical monitors, it can be inconvenient or even impossible to replace batteries.
But what if batteries weren't necessary?
Systems that could provide power for such sensors just by harvesting the normal vibrations of the pipeline (or bridges or industrial machinery and so on), eliminating or reducing the need for a battery, are being developed by Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT's Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley professor of electrical engineering and director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and his former student Yogesh Ramadass SM '06, PhD '09.
They have been working for years on the development of ways to harness small amounts of power from ambient vibrations. A paper describing their latest work on a new contro! l circuit for such systems, which can quadruple the amount of power th ey produce, appeared last month in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
Big steps toward tiny power
There are a number of different approaches to harnessing vibrational energy, some using magnetic or electric fields. But the new control circuit Ramadass and Chandrakasan developed is designed to work with piezoelectric systems — ones that use voltage generated by stress in a crystalline material, such as lead-zirconate-titanate.
It has been known for well over a century that some materials, including some crystals and ceramics, will produce an electrical current when subjected to stress by squeezing or bending. To harness the energy of motion or vibration, such a material is coupled to a spring, pendulum or other mechanism that converts the motion into pressure.
Chandrakasan and Ramadass envision applications in such things as implantable medical diagnostic or treatment devices that could be powered indefi! nitely by the person's own natural movements, or distributed sensors to monitor structural elements on bridges or the pressure in truck tires and transmit the data to a central receiver, powered by the vibrations of ordinary traffic.
Existing devices for harvesting energy from vibrations tend to be tuned to very specific frequencies, Chandrakasan says, but "in many practical applications, we need something more general. That's still a technical question to be addressed."
For now, such systems can't deliver enough power to run consumer devices such as cell phones, Ramadass explains. "The power levels for a cell phone are way up from what we can generate now" from a person's natural movements, he says, although some simpler devices, such as an mp3 music player, might be within the available range. He is currently working with semiconductor leader Texas Instruments to develop commercial applications of ultra-low power systems and solutions.
! David Lamb, chief operating officer of Camgian Microsystems, a company that produces a variety of low-power, lightweight semiconductor chips, says enabling new, low-power distributed sensor and security systems will depend on improving the efficiency of energy-harvesting techniques, including the power-producing system as well as control and storage systems. Because low-power systems are still a relatively new area of research, he says, "typical power management approaches are not well suited to energy harvesters, and there are still a lot of unsolved challenges," But devices such as the company's remote surveillance system are designed to operate on very low power, he says, and "if efficient interface and control circuits can be developed, this microsystem can be continuously powered by energy harvesting."
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has provided support for this research, which also holds promise for monitoring military equipment in remote locations.
The team has also been developing sys! tems to derive small amounts of power from temperature differences (as described in part one of this series), and Chandrakasan says that in the future, some applications might make use of systems that combine both the heat- and vibration-harvesting devices to produce more power, or to work in situations where these energy sources are variable and one or the other might not always be available.
Some parts of such a system, such as the electronic control circuits and transmitters for relaying the collected data, could be connected to both the heat and vibration generating systems (as well as additional sources of power, such as a solar cell), Ramadass says. "You could have one set of electronics that interfaces" with multiple inputs, he says.
For the future, the researchers are working on ways to improve the integration of the various components, and on making the systems as versatile as possible. "We want to make them adaptable over a broad range" of ! operating conditions, Chandrakasan says. In addition, they are working on improving the devices' overall efficiency. "We want to get to the maximum theoretically possible achievable energy," Ramadass says
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| I Will Present My Solar Wind Trees Soon |
Last Update 2010-11-30 | Copyright© Charles Mingus 2008 | |  |
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