The two discuss what commitment companies have to make to become more energy efficient in the long run. AUTOMATED: In COPA-DATA’s view, how important is energy efficiency for manufacturers and industrial companies? Angerer: With increasing demand and pressure from governments, associations and society to reduce energy consumption, the topic of energy efficiency wil...
They’re predictable, accessible, and loaded with energy, and because the machinery is mostly below the surface nobody can complain about the aesthetics. Also, the majority of human population lives near a coast, so power wouldn’t have to be transmitted long distances. It seems too easy, and yet wave energy remains a small player in the industry. Well, there are severa...
This year’s winner, Delft University’s Prêt-à-Loger, realized that reusing is more sustainable than rebuilding, so the team designed a retrofit skin that turns an existing house into a net-zero energy home. The “skin” consists of passive and active solar elements, including a steel and glass three season porch whose windows can be closed in the winter to create a gree...
The LM5000 series of high-voltage controllers and regulators from Texas Instruments (TI) is built to ensure that your architecture won't fry during a surge. With over 35% of power management ICs rated above 20V, there are many designs that can be improved for safety, robustness, and every day high voltage uses. Although power management ICs have been available for so...
In general, the answers fall into three categories: 1) they have an older relative who’s an engineer; 2) as kids they took things apart to see how they work; or 3) they played with Legos when they were young. (I’m in group 2; my son is in the other two categories.) If you want to get young people interested in engineering, it’s never too early to plant that seed. No...
The 1.6 megawatt photovoltaic array sits atop the Grand Palladium Resort in Hanover, and is expected to generate over 2.3 gigawatt-hours of energy each year, saving the hotel more than $700,000 (US) in annual electricity costs. Hardware With more than 6300 silicon PV panels and 67 grid-tied inverters, the resort generates about 10% of its own electricity, purchasing ...
The reason is simple: their proven track record. HVDC power supply systems tend to be economical and allow for stable bulk power supply across large areas, with minimal transmission losses. For example, the Leyte-Luzon Project in the Philippines (which integrates HVDC technology) has been instrumental in improving the stability of Manila’s AC network. Similarly, an HV...
It’s conceivable that a business could reduce its overall energy consumption but still have a high electric bill because of one massive power draw - possibly due to firing up a group of machines - over the course of the billing period. Energy consultants will point out these flaws and suggest more intelligent power-up procedures, but there may be times when a massive pow...
That’s a 41% increase in solar power capacity in just one year. While PV gets most of the attention due to it being more flexible, concentrated solar power is beginning to shine on a large scale. Let’s take a quick look the advantages and disadvantages of CSP and then check out the utility-scale CSP plants that came online in 2014. Photovoltaic vs Concentrated Solar P...
Failures can be caused by human error, weather, animals, or acts of malevolence, so grid designers must build in safeguards in order to keep faults from taking down major portions of the grid. The National Research Council published two documents that outline the potential problems with the US electrical grid and offer potential solutions based on current or near-future ...
Regardless of what’s creating the baseload electricity, peaker plants are needed to provide quick demand response. When Southern California Edison (SCE) sent out a request for bids on a 100 megawatt peaker plant, they received over 1800 responses. The winner turned out to be AES, an energy company that builds power plants of nearly every flavor: coal, diesel, gas, oil, w...
Perhaps the most significant is the compromise between fast rotational speeds required by the generator and slow rotational speeds needed to prevent rotor and blade damage. It’s possible that superconducting field coils will make that tradeoff a thing of the past. If that's not enough of an enticement, the superconductors could cut the cost of a large turbine by an order...
Noise is quite the opposite; we think we know what it is from childhood, and those of us who study engineering are surprised to find that it is often something else. The dictionary has over a dozen definitions of noise, the one closest to what we expect is ‘ an unwanted signal or disturbance. ' But how unwanted is it really? Three Categories of Noise Scientific typ...
In order to absorb as much sunlight as possible, photovoltaic cells are dark blue - nearly black. Brighter colors would reflect light away from the cells, in effect rejecting the very energy that they use to produce electricity. Building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) products such as solar shingles look like shingles with PV cells inside of them, so a customer is stuck ...
Hamel, MN - A new brochure describes how Tolomatic linear motion solutions for food and beverage processing and packaging automation improve efficiencies and keep production on schedule. Tolomatic offers a variety of actuators designed for corrosion resistance, washdown protection and bacterial growth prevention. A key feature of the brochure is an applications chart, w...
Plastic is set to change the way we design and consume electronic devices, not least in the area of photovoltaics. Solar energy may be a popular source of clean, green, renewable energy, but the materials and manufacturing processes of conventional silicon-based solar cells are far from green. With the increasing strain on the global power grid and the drive towards s...
Several requirements have to be met in order to guarantee the high availability of machine tools. This includes protecting vital cables and hoses against chips, coolants and lubricants. With the IP54-compliant cable carriers from the TKA series, Tsubaki Kabelschlepp offer a high level of protection as well as varied options for convenient cable routing. Cable carri...
The dampened drive-in of two exceptionally large cable railway supply cars into the stations required the designing and installation of special damping solutions. With a payload of 40 tons, moving cable cars must be fast and reliable but also be braked gently when driving into the valley station. To manage this task it was necessary to develop novel internal shock absorb...
When the roof first glided over Wimbledon's illustrious Centre Court on 29th June 2009, allowing the fourth round singles match between Amélie Mauresmo and Dinara Safina to continue, it was the landmark occasion for the world's most prestigious tennis tournament. The Grand Slam Championship, which enjoys huge global television audiences, was often at the mercy of Britain...
Guidelok holds a cable carrier’s upper and lower runs apart over long distances when they would normally glide on top of one another. This means metal debris cannot settle between the two runs and cause abrasion. The new cable carrier system is already being used successfully by one machine-tool manufacturer, who replaced a heavy steel chain with Guidelok to avert poten...
Switching electrical power or signals has been a basic function for decades. One of the devices that perform this operation is a snap action based switch, manufactured in very large quantities by multiple manufacturers. The largest market segment in power switching (up to 15 Amps) is for applications with simple requirements, mostly in appliance related applications. A s...
The company performs around two-billion test cycles at more than 50 test machines every year. Long life for moving parts is a fundamental requirement for both OEMs and MROs when integrating machinery. Yet many suppliers only speculate about the service life of their parts—they either don’t carry out tests, or the tests they do perform aren’t consistent with the mechanica...
In a day and age when you can shop for everything from fasteners to centrifuges over the Internet, shouldn't you be able to buy a fully optimized micro motor system online? MICROMO thinks so. That's why we've launched our Motion System Selector. It’s an extremely powerful, interactive parametric search tool that helps OEMs and design engineers quickly and easily spec...
LIVERMORE, CA — “These results introduce MOFs as a new class of thermoelectric materials that can be tailored and optimized,” said Sandia physicist François Léonard. “This discovery brings us a step closer to realizing the potential of MOFs in practical applications.” The results were published in “Thin Film Thermoelectric Metal–Organic Framework with High Seebeck Coe...
From subsea drilling 6,000 feet below the surface to pipelines that cross many landscapes to intense refining processes, the range of conditions for oil and gas installations is very broad. w0As a design engineer, you may be involved with many types of projects with very different requirements. How then do you approach selecting the right cable for an oil and gas applica...
The intelligent electronic device (IED) that was installed 15 years ago to monitor the status of the transformer is still out there. No one is even going to think about upgrading that IED until it or the transformer fails. This means the outdated serial port on the IED is going to be the main way to communicate to that device for quite a long time. This begs the questio...
One of the tracks in the conference portion of the event is “Defending the Grid.” The prominence of the topic at this show, along with recent high-profile hacking attacks (Sony, Target) that have caught the attention of top management in all industries, add up to one thing – it’s time to look at or review the state of cyber defenses at your substations. It’s not a sur...
Around the year 1400 or so, my family moved from Saxony (or somewhere like that) to England, and we were lamp makers. My British grandfather spent his entire life trying to convince himself that our last name was not German. My British dad quietly gave up the mis-translation. Now a lamp in 1400 was little changed from the pot of oil with a wick in it which goes back to ...
It was the first cable designed specifically for digital video. We won lots of awards at NAB and other shows for this cable. Of course, you can't use a cable without a connector, so in the months leading up to NAB we handed out rolls and rolls of the new cable to all our connector friends. Some people even doubted that anyone could make a BNC connector for this new cable...
This new white paper - Security Requirements for Embedded Devices – What is Really Needed? can be downloaded here http://www.iconlabs.com/security-requirements-whitepaper/ “Many of today’s modern embedded devices and systems are complex connected computers charged with performing critical functions,” explains Alan Grau, President of Icon Labs. “Including security in t...
The electrical research event most people know of is Benjamin Franklin’s Kite & Key. The legend goes that Benjamin Franklin tied a key to a kite and flew that kite in a lightning storm to prove electricity was a natural occurrence. This act of reckless abandon to understand our world, although not historically accurate, is respected because of the bravery. Several his...
Most electronics buyers evaluate their suppliers’ performance and give them monthly or quarterly scorecards that rate them on the cost, quality, and delivery of the parts those suppliers manufacture. Some scorecards also include how quickly a supplier responds to delivery or quality issues and how well the supplier develops new technology and shares its technology roa...
As the components that pull two connections together to complete a circuit, and that use electrical currents to turn devices on and off, respectively, relays and switches are two electronic products that are seeing healthy demand in 2015. For example, Robyn Jenzen, a project specialist with electronic contract manufacturer Quantronic Corporation in Minneapolis, says her ...
Restructuring at the top three LED makers in 2014 may pave the way for improved margins and potentially lower product prices for consumers, according to a new report from research firm IHS. In a white paper titled “Top Lighting and LEDs Trends for 2015,” the firm points to the changes and some resulting trends in the LED market for this year and beyond. “For the big t...
Many electronics industry suppliers will start 2015 as larger organizations thanks to a wave of mergers and acquisitions this year. Whether expanding their reach into growing markets such as the automotive industry or strengthening their coverage in promising products categories such as sensors, electronic component manufacturers and distributors are betting on their gro...
Read: The World's First All-Electric Satellite The milestone is a significant step towards the early 2015 launch of the satellites ABS-3A and Eutelsat 115 West B, the first-ever all-electric propulsion satellites scheduled to enter service. Boeing has successfully mated two 702SP (small platform) satellites in a stacked configuration in preparation for the first-ev...
