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Links Of Interest
JR Company is always on the look-out for new and innovative construction and related technologies. Check out these links to
some interesting concepts.
Junk In, Power Out
The cow is a model power generator: Each day it expels enough methane to run your home furnace for 24 hours. At Purdue University, a team of nearly two dozen researchers has built a portable device that mimics this natural metabolic process to create electricity. The "biorefinery," which is three years and $850,000 in the making, can digest ordinary kitchen scraps and other trash to produce ethanol and a composite gas and use them to fuel an electrical generator.
The Prophet of Garbage
It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I’m sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol, Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab, which contains a glowing caldera of “plasma” three times as hot as the surface of the sun. Every few minutes there’s a horrific clanking noise—grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue makes when it first ignites.
A Robotic Cable Crawler
Burying power cables underground has uncluttered the streets and kept lights on through storms, but water seepage, natural disasters, and general wear and tear can still cut power. As a result, a large utility company typically employs 4,000 workers and spends up to $200 million annually to monitor and maintain tens of thousands of miles of subterranean cables. Soon, instead of sending a crew to put a cable through high-voltage stress tests every time there's a mishap, companies could deploy a robot to pinpoint the problem. Researchers at the University of Washington have invented the Robotic Cable Inspection System, or Cruiser, a four-foot-long, train-like 'bot that crawls along power cables buried in utility tunnels, sniffing out trouble spots along the way.
Algae tested to fight warming, grow fuel
How's this for a green idea: Remove carbon dioxide, a gas that many scientists tie to global warming, by having algae turn it into clean fuel?
It's actually more than an idea, and the state of New York along with independent power producer NRG Energy and GreenFuel Technologies will be testing the technology.
Fly-Ash Bricks Pass Commercial Tests
The ISGS program, now in its commercial testing phase, benefits the brick, coal, and utility industries in Illinois by providing an alternative use for the roughly 3 million tons of fly ash generated by coal combustion in Illinois each year. The successful commercial production of the bricks containing fly ash could save brick manufacturers up to 70% of their total cost for raw materials while reducing waste disposal costs for utilities and thereby improving the marketability of Illinois coal.
Quiet Thunder
Kicking the tires of the $92,000 Tesla, which goes from 0 to 60 in four seconds, the author learns the Silicon Valley saga of big dreams, technical snags, and Aha! moments that could spell the end of the internal-combustion engine.
The Desktop Factory
As a child, Hod Lipson lost Lego pieces constantly. Now the 39-year-old director of Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab can build replacement parts on the spot. Completed last year, Lipson’s fabrication machine, called a “fabber,” can print thousands of three-dimensional objects, everything from toy parts to artificial muscles, using dozens of materials, including PlayDoh, peanut butter and silicone, by following simple directions sent to it by a PC. About the size of a microwave, the fabber costs $2,300 to assemble—roughly one tenth the cost of commercial 3-D printers. Lipson and his graduate student Evan Malone recently launched a Web site called Fab@Home (fabathome.org) to teach people how to build their own fabbers and encourage them to share their blueprints online. As a result, amateur inventors worldwide are now manufacturing their creations from the comfort of their own homes. The duo’s next step is to make a desktop machine that prints other machines, such as robots, complete with circuit boards. As soon as a robot walks out of the printer, Lipson says, Malone can walk out of the lab with his Ph.D.
A mobile bioreactor turns trash into electricity for U.S. troops
Joseph Longo's Plasma Converter turns our most vile and toxic trash into clean energy—and promises to make a relic of the landfill
This snake-like ’bot detects damage to underground power cables so people don’t
New York state, two partners will capture carbon dioxide, make biofuel
A new method of manufacturing stronger bricks is moving closer to commercial reality. These bricks, which have better insulating properties than traditionally produced bricks, are manufactured from a solid waste produced by Illinois coal-burning power plants.
Who in his right mind would finance an auto company start-up? Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of PayPal, the guy with a nasa contract for the next space shuttle, also expects to put a sold-out (to the likes of George Clooney, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin) fleet of electric sports cars on the road this summer.
Roboticist Hod Lipson wants you to stop shopping and use his portable 3-D printer to make your own stuff
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