Mobile Water Purification Offers Hope To Disaster-Hit Regions

Filtration is great if there is a water source handy, but my personal favorite is the water-from-air condensing trailer where you pull water directly from the air at any location. Don’t have the URL handy for that but its out there.

A Japanese team has developed Courier Water, a mobile desalination unit that has tremendous potential for helping people in areas affected by water shortages or natural disasters. The unit’s defining feature is its mobility. With its compact design, Courier Water can be installed on a four-ton truck, allowing it to travel far and wide. It incorporates a pump that produces pressure of about 6 MPa, enough to desalinize seawater, with only a small amount of energy.

On the roof are solar panels that spread to over twice the truck’s width, and two wind turbines. In fair weather the electricity generated from the sun and wind can provide nearly 100% of the power needed, enabling the system to operate even in areas with an inadequate power supply, such as remote or disaster-affected communities.

Courier Water employs a safe coagulant made from natural substances including polyglutamic acid and calcium. Polyglutamic acid is an amino acid polymer widely known to be responsible for the threadlike goo of natto, the traditional Japanese food otherwise known as fermented soybeans. The coagulant is used to clot particles of impurities in the water prior to filtration by reverse osmosis, simplifying the filtration process.

Coagulation significantly improves water quality, as well as reducing the strain on the reverse osmosis membrane. In addition to its safety and efficiency, Courier Water’s coagulant is distinct in that it has little effect on the pH level of the water. This eliminates the need to adjust the pH of the water using sodium hydroxide or other caustic agents, which cannot be handled without a special license. The coagulant also removes any heavy metals contained in the water.

The truck-loaded Courier Water is capable of producing 7.2 tons of drinking water in a day, enough for 3,600 people, assuming that a person drinks 2 liters per day. A container-type system has also been developed. While not mobile, it is capable of purifying several times more water than its mobile counterpart and will be transported to its destination mainly by ship.” – Full Article Source

Omni-car

Man, driving this thing and you pray for no mechanical failures!

“We stumbled onto one of [Nik Melton]’s projects, an Omni-car. It is omnidirectional, meaning it can go any direction at any time without having to turn. The body was designed by him, then printed with a 3D printer.

The control scheme is what interests us though. He has found a simple way to wire it to get the job done. Sure you can see that it suffers from some pretty bad “drift” when trying to go in a straight line, but overall, we think he pulled it off well. You might want to take a few moments to look around his project page.

This guy has done a bunch of fun stuff like delta robots, strange hybrid wheel/leg robots, tesla coils, and arm mounted flamethrowers. Judging by the videos, he’s pretty young too. We think his guy has a bright future ahead of him.” – Full Article Source

How to Avoid Unnecessary Car Costs

I think we’ve all experienced the dread of what a mechanic will quote and sometimes its an emergency and we can’t be hobbling all around town trying to find a better deal.

“A guy walks into a mechanic and asks for a tune-up. “Looks like your car needs a lot of work,” says the mechanic. “After a quick inspection, I estimate about $1000 worth of services.” It may sound like a joke, but car owners are often hit with an unhappy diagnosis like this.

Many of us have little-to-no car expertise. We feel helpless at the sometimes-merciless hand of our mechanic. After all, who are we to say when a spark plug needs changing or steering should be flushed? Jon Bartunek, owner of his family’s Union Street Garage in San Francisco who has worked in the car repair business since he was ten years old, has some empowering tips and guidelines to offer.” – Full Article Source

A 25-Year Battery

Why can’t they build arrays of these or rolled up like capacitors, more surface area means more current?

“Batteries that harvest energy from the nuclear decay of isotopes can produce very low levels of current and last for decades without needing to be replaced. A new version of the batteries, called betavoltaics, is being developed by an Ithaca, NY-based company and tested by Lockheed Martin.

The batteries could potentially power electrical circuits that protect military planes and missiles from tampering by destroying information stored in the systems, or by sending out a warning signal to a military center. The batteries are expected to last for 25 years.” – Full Article Source

IIT boys draw power & water from sewage

The beauty of this is both purification and production of electricity.

“It was while working on microbes that can be used as purifying agents that Manoj Mandelia, a fourth year student of biotech engineering, stumbled upon the idea that if a bio cell can be developed to treat sewage water for use, it would solve one of the biggest problems of the present times. The idea is simple. The specially designed bio cell (LOCUS) will be set up in the form of a plant, through which the sewage water of a housing complex would be flowed in.

The genius of this invention which is awaiting patent lies in the design of the cell that will automatically grow millions of anaerobic bacteria that multiply through respiration. The bacteria clean up the sewage water and in the process generate free electrons. If harnessed, these electrons can generated electricity. The cell, at this stage, can clean up 50,000 litres of sewage water, about the amount generated by 100 flats in a day.

The water produced this way can be compared with that supplied provided by a civic body, the students say. “The purified water has been tested and has been certified to be clean and fit for household use. It is, however, not fit for drinking,” Mandelia explained. The IIT-Kgp team has even produced electricity with the bio cell. “A township of 100,000 people needs about 2.3 megawatts of electricity a day. It will be years before we reach that stage. But we have already been able to generate electricity. By next year, we aim to generate 350 units, enough to meet 50% of the demand of a 100-flat complex. When we say this we are not taking airconditioners into consideration,” said Prateek.” – Full Article Source

Solasyphon cuts costs of Solar Heaters

Another brilliant idea worth tax incentives;

“The Solasyphon is set to revolutionise the option of solar water heating by making the cost of installation cheaper. The product was developed to remove the need for householders to replace their existing hot water tank when installing solar panels and was driven by the cost of installing the new tank and the waste involved in scrapping the old one. The result is a significant drop in the cost of switching to solar power that is set to dramatically increase the uptake of the technology.

Our clever clogs device doesn’t rely on nasty fossil fuels for energy, so while you’re boiling your water, you won’t be boiling the planet! And, you’ll save up to 30% of the installation costs of a similar solar cylinder because the Solasyphon is fitted to your existing hot water storage cylinder.

The Willis Solasyphon can be connected to the existing hot water cylinder with two simple connections. This is quicker, cheaper and much more environmentally friendly than the alternative. The unique and innovative feature of the Willis Solasyphon is the way in which it delivers solar heated water directly to the top of the existing water hot water cylinder where it stratifies ready for use at a useable temperature.” – Full Article Source

Dealing with data center heat

This makes total sense;

Cooling Bags Could Cut Server Cooling Costs By 93% – “UK company Iceotope has launched liquid-cooling technology which it says surpasses what can be done with water or air-cooling and can cut data centre cooling costs by up to 93 percent. Announced at Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon, the ‘modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Server’ technology wraps each server in a cool-bag-like device, which cools components inside a server, rather than cooling the whole data centre, or even a traditional ‘hot aisle.’ Earlier this year, IBM predicted that in ten years all data centre servers might be water-cooled.” – Full Article Source

however, why not convert that heat to electricity;

Finland Taps Server Heat To Power City – “Helsingin Energia (HE) is going to use a new heating and cooling pump to recycle excess heat from a large data center to generate serious amounts of energy. The data center is being built in an old bomb shelter connected directly to HE’s direct heating system — a set of pumps that move boiling water through a system of pipes to heat homes around the city. How It Works – First, cold water is pumped through the data center to cool the servers; this warmer water is then drawn into a large pump, where it is then further heated to boiling temperatures. Once the water is hot enough to actually heat a building, it is pumped through buried pipes to Helsinki’s residential districts to heat homes. It is then pumped back to the server room to restart the cycle. This system is extremely efficient, as it is 5 times cheaper than traditional energy sources. The idea is that you have hot air that needs to be cooled in the data center in close proximity to cold air (inside residential spaces) that needs to be heated. By using water as the transport medium, Helsingin Energia can provide more energy at a cheaper price. Putting It Into Perspective – This technology is not limited to Helsinki though. Not in the least. In fact, the people at Helsingin Energia want business leaders worldwide to know that this technology can be applied in a variety of settings and can be installed on a mass scale. When you consider that about .5% of the world’s total energy use is dedicated solely to cooling IT servers, you can see how much power could be saved by making this type of HVAC system smarter. It’s innovations like these that almost seem too simple. There are no overly-complex power transfer locations or new infrastructures to install; rather, people have found a way to use the power they are already producing in the smartest and most efficient way.” – Full Article Source