TWO BLOGS IN ONE:
Fresh Approach AND/OR Old Defenses...
I love cool, new advances in science. Like that unreal scanning, printing replicator I recently blogged about!
Well, here goes again.
Socket To Me
This time, scientists from the National Physical Laboratory, an organization that slipped under this blog jockey's radar, have discovered a heretofore unused energy source. If you didn't know it was there before, it's a discovery, right? Well, close enough.
As reported everywhere, including here in Views and Ways, an entire neighborhood in a San Bruno suburb exploded. The Gas Energy Provider, it turns out, couldn't find records of the latest maintenance. In fact, it has pretty much nothing reliable in its maintenance records at all. Your neighborhood could be next. Or mine. No records...
The keen minds at NPL have researched ways to harness energy unused in its first attack, or initial effort. It's the runoff stuff that our fellow bright minds have taken a second look at. They have scrutinized its source for energy that is otherwise wasted - dissipated as vibration, motion, uncaptured heat, even the vibrations of sound.
One of the ways mentioned, in a recent report on harnessing unused energy, is the use of a thermoelectric generator. A researcher explained, "...if you warm two metal plates up by rubbing your hands, getting friction and thus generating heat," he said, "it then will be turned into electrical power,"
"If it is ultimately determined that we were
responsible for the cause of this incident, we will
take accountability," a Gaseous Explosion Person
said. "Our thoughts go out to everyone affected by
this terrible situation."
Thoughts?
Other basic actions were sorted out as examples. "The second device is somebody pedaling on a bicycle connected to a generator, and a third system is a piezoelectric device - if you squeeze it or bend it, you put a strain on it and it produces an electrical signal and you can capture that."
None of these technologies are new, but today, it is becoming more and more economically important to capture energy instead of wasting it.
And some forward thinking companies are already doing it.
Here's what those thoughts amount to. In what must
be a new low in the preoccupation of becoming a
limbo lawyer, it was suggested that the Giant,
Gaseous Energy monopoly's legal firm will sue its
own customers, somehow holding the grieving San
Bruno residents responsible for those horrifying gas
pipeline explosions that disintegrated their
neighborhood.
Volkswagen, for instance, is using a piezoelectric generator connected to the exhaust to capture the heat produced by a car's engine.
At two train stations in Tokyo, power-generating mats have been installed under the floors to capture the vibrations from tens of thousands of commuters and then renew this energy as electricity.
Getting more from less. That's another way of saying it and not a new idea, either. But discovering ways to do tap energy unused so far can happen all the time, any time.
--0--