SunnyBot is about the size of a large desk lamp and is equipped with an on-board mirror that continuously adjusts to reflect the sun’s rays on a chosen area. It is integrated with a dual-axis microcomputer that’s powered by a row of solar cells and comes with an optional feedback system. The device redirects 7,000 lumens (equal to a single 500 watt halogen lamp) with a range at just over 656 feet.
Dear Folks,
As a man thinks within himself, so he is. — The Bible, Proverbs 23:7, Solomon
There are some qualities society expects you to have (although, only at a minimum level) and there are qualities you strive to garner for yourself. What would you put on your personal list of essential Self-contained qualities? Would Sheltering be one of them?
SHELTERING
Definition: (1) protecting or defending <especially a loved one> from danger, violence, injury, annoyance, or attack; (2) securing or rendering safe; harboring
Derivation: Middle English, “bodyguard”
Symbols: 1) a roof; 2) a house
SELF‑CONTAINED
Definitions: (1) having within oneself all necessary qualities; self‑possessed; (2) functioning independently; self‑sufficient; (3) formal and reserved in manner
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The house itself has been designed to be airtight and well insulated to cut energy costs and produce net zero carbon emissions. It has also been designed with its eventual sustainable deconstruction in mind.
An ‘off-site modular construction method’ will be used to build the house, which will see parts being built offsite and then being assembled on the plot. This method is intended to provide ‘greater control over cost, waste produced and supply chain accreditation’, and to reduce potential delays caused by problems such as bad weather.
Over winter break, Cornell students began building an affordable and environmentally sustainable model house in Nicaragua. The students, who are part of Cornell University Sustainable Design — an organization that promotes sustainability through design — traveled to Nagarote, Nicaragua to build the house. The house will serve not only as a home for a family, but also as a platform to demonstrate ideal eco-friendly housing initiatives, said Kai Keane ’14, one of the students who led the project.
The house and its landscaping — part of the Sustainable Neighborhoods Nicaragua project — are the product of more than three semesters’ worth of research on designing sustainable and affordable housing for low-income Nicaraguan families, according to Keane. The house is scheduled to be completed around mid-February 2013, according to SNN’s press release.
The Optical Cavity Furnace is a relatively new type of furnace that uses light and optics rather than other sources to create silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) cells. The new process uses only half the amount of energy to make conventional PVs.
The recent innovation uses a series of lamps in a reflective chamber to create temperature uniformity at high-heat levels throughout the chamber. It’s so uniform that, when heated up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, the entire furnace interior only varies by a few degrees. The heat is used to convert silicon wafers into fully functional photovoltaic cells.
Light Has Multiple Advantages in Furnaces. Photons have special qualities that prove useful in creating solar cells. When light is shined on silicon atoms that are bonded electronically to each other it changes their potential.
The Optical Cavity Furnace shines visible and near-infrared light to heat the solar cell, and also shines ultraviolet light to take advantage of photonic effects that occur deep within the atomic structure of the cell material. This combination offers unique capabilities that lead to improved device quality and efficiency.
Iron and other impurities can degrade the silicon quality quickly. But shining the right light on it can remove that impurity from the silicon. Optics can also make a lot of things happen at the interfaces in a cell, where, for example, metal can reflect the light and speed the diffusion of impurities. The lamps in the furnace help fool the impurities in the silicon into moving out of the way, by creating vacancies.
Bhushan Sopori, NREL Principal Engineer said “We call it injecting vacancies.” A vacancy refers to the lack of a silicon atom. “If the atom is missing, you have a vacancy here, an empty space.” Those spaces prompt the impurities such as iron to feel much more like moving – and they do so at a much lower temperature than would otherwise be required. The iron moves in with the aluminum, creating an aluminum-iron mix that, happily, is needed anyway as a contact point.
Removing impurities can change a cell’s efficiency from 13 percent to 17 percent. What that means is that 17 percent of the photons that hit the improved cell are converted into usable electricity.
The absence of cooling water and confinement of energy in the OCF proves to be a big advantage for lowering the energy payback time of solar cells.
Other advantages of the photonic approach:
Silicon cells often have silver contacts in front and aluminum contacts in back. They usually are fired simultaneously as the cell is being formed. The OCF by selectively heating the interfaces of silicon and metal can better control the process, and thus create stronger field surfaces and improved cell performance.
The Optical Cavity Furnace uses photons of light to remove weak, cracked wafers from the processing line. Photons can more easily produce a thermal stress in a wafer and screen out bad wafers. The photon process tests the wafers’ integrity right after they are cut. The conventional method requires physical twisting and bending of the wafers to test for weakness.
“Its main purpose is to process the wafers into solar cells. We have developed the furnace configurations for major steps used in silicon solar cell fabrication, junction formation, oxidation, and metallization firing,” Sopori said.
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The lamps of yesteryear, incandescents, produce light when electricity heats a thin filament. This causes it to glow. The quality of light is pleasing to many. But the lamps only last about 1,500 hours at best. They’re also inefficient. Roughly 90 percent of the energy is emitted as heat rather than light. Full, partial, or pending bans on incandescants are now in effect for much of the world, including the European Union. So, for now, expect incandescents to become harder to find.
At present the most widely used alternative to incandescents is the spiral-shaped compact fluorescent lamp, or CFL. It is filled with gas that creates light when electrons from the power source flow into the tube and collide with the gas excitable molecules. CFLs have acquired a bad reputation. There were exaggerated longevity claims, the bulbs don’t dim, they produce an unappealing color, and they contain toxic mercury.
Enter the future. LEDs are digital, they are easier to dispose of, and they last longer. They are following an innovation curve akin to other high-tech items like computers and digital cameras. LEDs are semiconductors, and like all solid-state technology, they tend to get better and cheaper as time passes. Organic LEDs, or OLEDs, have carbon based diodes. These lights could be powered for decades on a single small battery. They could be produced on flexible plastic sheets to hang virtually anywhere. They also don’t require an old fashioned socket. For this reason, developing nations are likely to be the first adopters, with Europe and the US playing catch-up.
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One of the green concept homes showcased at the Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon now has a permanent address in Washington, DC. The design is based on several net-zero energy systems that reach peak efficiency when they are joined together.
A rainwater harvesting system captures water from the roof and adjacent land, minimizing the water that drains into public sewers. It features a roof garden and vegetable window boxes. The design won the Solar Decathlon’s first Affordability contest.
Empowerhouse was designed and constructed by a team of more than 200 graduate and undergraduate students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology. They worked with Habitat for Humanity of Washington, D.C. (DC Habitat), and the DC Department of Housing and Community Development to move the original design to Washington’s Deanwood neighborhood and expand it into a two-family home.
Deanwood is a primarily working-class, African-American community that is known as one of the greenest areas in Washington, DC. The community recently participated in CarbonFree DC’s “Extreme Green Neighborhood Makeover,” which retrofitted low and moderate-income homes.
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Wouter Kalis and Corinne de Korver are two Dutch designers who have long been aware of the overall importance of sustainable accommodations throughout the world. Based in Amsterdam, the duo are dedicated to socially-conscious designs that incorporate simple and often recyclable elements, such as their most recent piece, “Social Unit.” Devised as a solution for aid organizations in Holland, the cupboard bed space is part sleeping compartment, part storage space that fits the basic sustainability criteria: they are compact, inexpensive, durable and easy to maintain. The Social Units are produced entirely from consumer plastic waste such as bottle caps and beer crates, manufactured using woodworking techniques no more complicated than sawing, drilling or cutting.
The design was a response to the conditions of homeless shelters in Amsterdam. Although shelters offer people a single room in the Netherlands, the rooms often are full of broken, chaotic interiors with not enough storage space for all the personal belongings people carry around. The designers decided to help people find their way back into society, and concluded an interior should also be inviting and with positive signals.
They talked to the staff of Salvation Army and were told furniture should be easy to clean and ‘gorilla proof’, really strong. They found this recycled consumer waste plastic, made of bottle caps and beer crates, and that triggered it. They made a design that was functional, durable and green. It’s a modern version of the historical Dutch ‘cupboard bed’, that was traditionally built into a wall to preserve warmth and have some privacy in large families. And, it has a built in psychological side effect: it makes people feel secure and comfortable by giving them their own private space.
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Make the stove and the insulating bricks.
A Michigan man moves massive blocks in his backyard using simple contraptions.
Visit W. T. Wallington’s website at: http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/