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Intercomp Part 140659 CPU Wireless Node-ZigBee

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Facilities Management: An Explanation

Some commentary is so well organized and on point it deserves a wide hearing.  At this blog we tend to look down the road at what might be coming, but.  We have to get down the road in the meantime.  John C. Felmy of the API has thought this through and managed to compress the main concepts with language that anyone can use to good effect.  More surprising is the text that follows is an edited version of an answer given as Mr. Felmy was interviewed.  The youTube video is included below.  Its not a long read, but a good wake up call to getting on with the important matters for our economy.  Now if just 200 million or so American’s would catch on.  BW.

John C. Felmy of the API.

There’s a lot of discussion in Washington these days about energy policy, and  unfortunately a significant amount of it is divorced from the facts. Today’s discussion tends to focus on immature and expensive technologies that hold promise for the future  but do not measure up to the expectations of the American public today.

Here in the United States, consumers expect to have a reliable and affordable supply of  energy that helps them heat their homes and fuel their transportation needs. Consumers today also are grappling with a serious economic environment. Job losses and uncertainty make it difficult to plan for the future. Having a stable source of energy can help. In fact, expanding energy exploration and production can have a positive impact on the U.S. economy and the lives of all Americans.

We have a vast amount of undiscovered oil and natural gas in the United States. If the energy industry were allowed to develop it, it would generate jobs, revenue for the  government, and reduce the trade deficit. And that’s a win-win-win proposition for the American people. But energy discussions tend to focus on just one narrow segment of the energy industry such as renewables. In general, policymakers are talking more about solar, wind and geothermal than they are talking about oil development.

Yes, we are going to need those resources going forward, but solar, wind and geothermal energy are used to generate electricity. Here in the United States, we have 250 million cars that don’t plug in. They’re going to need oil products into the coming decades. We should produce the oil here in the United States where expanded oil development can generate jobs and revenue, and improve the deficit.

This nation needs a rational energy policy. Yes, we’ll need energy efficiency. Yes, we’ll need alternatives, but we’re going to need more oil and natural gas as well. We’re going to need oil for the cars, we’re going to need natural gas for power generation, and we’re going to need coal and nuclear. Nuclear power has a role to play. It’s encouraging to see that our elected officials are reexamining nuclear policy, and we hope that moves forward.

As a nation, we also need to be mindful of the Law of Unintended Consequences. For example, we think it’s important to consider new ways to power vehicles. Advances in battery technology also are likely to help the development and utility of affordable electric vehicles. But the electricity for these vehicles must be generated by power plants that in all likelihood are burning coal. Furthermore, the new batteries contain raw materials, including rare earth minerals from China or lithium from Bolivia, that have to be imported.

It’s quite possible that the United States could find itself trading one import system for another. This means that our policymakers will need to consider whether it’s preferable for U.S. energy security and the trade deficit to import oil or other materials.

Likewise, consideration should be given to nuclear power’s impact on our energy security. Today 80 percent of our nuclear fuel is imported – much of it from former Soviet Union countries.

A well-conceived energy policy also should take care to do no harm to the energy industry, but rather encourage it to make the investments needed to find and develop fuels for the future. Unfortunately, the administration’s proposed 2011 budget contains provisions that would drain $80 billion from the oil and natural gas industry, which would have the perverse impact of reducing investments. This approach was tried back in the 1970s and ‘80s, and it was a colossal failure. It led to a reduction in domestic oil and natural gas production and an increase in imports. The United States should not repeat that mistake.

Likewise, the nation should carefully examine the ramifications of climate policy. Studies show that the Waxman-Markey bill, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year, would uniformly hurt everyone who drives a car, travels by plane, and moves goods and services in a truck by raising energy costs. It also would destroy more than 2 million U.S. jobs and encourage businesses to relocate overseas where stringent environmental regulations do not exist. In this weak economy with the unemployment rate just below 10 percent, this nation should not adopt a policy that exports jobs and increases emissions.

The United States has fueled its economy on affordable and reliable energy for many decades. It can continue to thrive and provide a much needed boost to the economy by expanding the development of traditional energy resources,including oil and natural gas, while investing in energy resources for tomorrow.

John Felmy is the chief economist and manager of statistics at the American Petroleum Institute (API) in Washington, D.C.

Prepared by:
Jane Van Ryan
Senior Manager, Communications
vanryanj@api.org

American Petroleum Institute (API)
Check out our blog at http://blog.energytomorrow.org/

The original post: New Energy and Fuel

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Honeywell RTH221B Basic Programmable Thermostat

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Geo-Thermal Power Plant, Svartsengi, Iceland Photographic Poster Print by Kim Hart, 12×16

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Keep your library information center functioning to its greatest potential with this unique handbook written by a library manager and experienced facilities manager.

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Your site and facilities, whether a beautiful building, a welcoming camp setting, or a natural wilderness area, are a large part of what draws participants to your property.

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Last week Houston investment banker and peak oil prognosticator Matt Simmons popped a plan to use wind, the generated electricity and air to manufacture ammonia. Then just use it to fuel cars.  The price to start up is “only” $25 billion plus a new generation of cars for consumers to buy.  Is ammonia, NH3, remotely practical?

Ammonia Molecule in 3D 1 Blue N and 3 Gray H

Lets compare with first fossil petroleum, at less than $5 per barrel in the Middle East to more than $50 from oil sands and some offshore production, petroleum products sell profitably at prices that consumers can pay and keep a reasonably healthy economy intact. It’s the major source for now and subject to risk for pricing in the future, which risks the whole of the world’s economy.

Next would be biomass sources as in methanol and ethanol.  Both are, or can be used with existing consumer products in fuel mixes, the infrastructure is already partly in place and the carbon cycle is current, using airborne CO2 and returning it for reuse.  Light alcohols are undeniably energy positive, although much calculation gives wide variations.  Light alcohols also are candidates for Direct Alcohol Fuel Cells that should offer simple and cheap means to get from fuel to electricity to motion.

Hydrogen, liquefied or stored as a gas, could be burned in internal combustion engines with little engine modification, but quite large portable and stationary storage costs are required.  Hydrogen must also be ‘made,’ requiring energy and capital, for water electrolysis and then cryogenic storage or very high-pressure vessels or media to hold the hydrogen that use energy to function.

Ammonia then is interesting as it is a storage media with the ability to be both burned or used in a fuel cell.  Ammonia holds 18% hydrogen by mass, more than cryogenically formed liquid hydrogen, and far beyond what sensible compression technology allows in comparable volumes.  Is easy to store and stable.  But:

Ammonia is a noxious, caustic vapor at room temperature requiring pressure and cooling to past 8 atmospheres for liquid containment at less energy by volume than ethanol or methanol.  The hydrogen can be freed from ammonia as needed by catalysis at 500º C or simply be burned.  Yet burning usually leaves 20% unburned and produces nitrous oxides, problems that technology should fix and exploit handily given time and resources.

There are more interesting pathways.  The Danish Technical University is developing a system called “Amminex.”  Amminex is an ammonia-based solid-state hydrogen storage solution: a tablet that can be held in your hand. The tablet is a metal ammine complex that stores 9.1% hydrogen by weight in the form of ammonia absorbed efficiently in magnesium chloride: Mg(NH3)6Cl2. The storage is completely reversible, and by adding an ammonia decomposition catalyst, hydrogen can be delivered at temperatures below 347º C (656º F). The tablets can be recharged with additional ammonia.  The team is finding that the kinetics of ammonia adsorption and desorption with the metal ammine complexes are reversible and fast, and that the complex is simple to manufacture and easy to handle.

A company called U3K has patented technology (USPTO 7,140,187) (the u3kenergy.com link has lapsed) can convert urea (in a white solid form) to either ammonia or hydrogen for delivery to internal combustion engines and fuel cells in stationary or mobile applications.  U3K’s system can provide internal combustion engines with ammonia or fuel cells with hydrogen “on demand.”

Urea Molecule 3D Balls CO(NH2)2

U3K’s claimed urea advantages are it is non-toxic, clean burning, non-explosive, and is more economical than refined petroleum products. Urea can fit into the existing liquid based fueling infrastructure. Existing engines can be retrofit cheaply. The capital cost of urea fueling stations is significantly less than the cost of existing gasoline stations. With current urea manufacturing technology, urea has a “well to wheel” efficiency that exceeds gasoline. And urea can be stored as a solid or a liquid.

So far we know that H2 can be effectively stored using alcohols, ammonia and to be complete, natural gas methane.  From a system perspective methane is entrenched, both for fuel in homes, cars and electricity generation.  Light alcohols are gradually becoming competitive without supports from government.  Ammonia is still far underdeveloped.

For burning or oxidizing ammonia is at a disadvantage.  But when considered from a fuel cell perspective ammonia has advantages.  For systems development, ammonia might have a powerful role in stranded or isolated wind or solar installations as the concentration level is superior.  Electrolysis can be comparatively efficient from a financial perspective when the cost of transmission lines is considered.  Flowing ammonia vapor or liquid might be a low cost way to move stored energy in hydrogen.

At the use end all the fuels must be one means or another be stripped of the carbon or nitrogen atoms and in some fuels oxygen for the fuel cells to use the hydrogen.  This step is where the crux of the competition may lie.  Last year saw a paper in Science magazine reveal an alternative to stripping out the oxygen that might work across alcohols and for air batteries.  Further checking shows that paths are being blazed to strip the hydrogen off fuels both in a process step and during the operation of some fuel cell designs.  Lab units seem expensive, but with material development, commercial scale, and fuel price considerations, all of the light carbon based and ammonia fuels look like contenders.

Ammonia has an incredible advantage, the energy source could be free sunlight or dirt-cheap solar or wind.  The alcohols need land surface area.  Straight hydrogen is a devil to handle and contain.  Methane is abundant now, but over time as more use is made of it the price will rise.

The key in ammonia and its disadvantage is the lack of any carbon, which adds to the energy content.  There is little expectation that ammonia as a combustion motor fuel will make a market for itself on the merits.  For fuel cell use the field is still pretty wide open, but the bio-based alcohols head start has made great strides.

From an electrical power generator to ammonia then on to fueling power generation ammonia makes sense.  But can the economic case be made until fuel cell progress promotes demand?

The answer is ammonia can be a viable fuel.  The next question is will the research and development make economic competitiveness possible.

Source: New Energy and Fuel

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Source: Home Controls

The need for free hydrogen in industry and fuels is huge and the potential when a low cost method arrives, staggering.  Methane is nothing more than a carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms, so any production that comes up with hydrogen at low cost is going to be a breakthrough.  Professor Thomas Nann and colleagues at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK may have it.  They have a new technique that can convert 60 per cent of sunlight energy absorbed by an electrode into the inflammable fuel.  And that’s just the discovery rating.

Nann is saying in a New Scientist article, “In fact the 60% figure is probably a worst-case scenario. This is still a preliminary study.”  At 60% performance, 20% work efficiency from the hydrogen would yield 12%, as good as affordable photovoltaic solar cells.  Run it through an 80% efficient fuel cell and that’s 48%, a dream for photovoltaic.

This can be a truly disruptive technology.  Hydrogen can be stored for short terms.  One could just burn it inside a facility or home, as the effluent is only water vapor.  The technology boffins of Britain have to be mighty proud today.

Photon Powered Solar Hydrogen Production Element. Click image for more info.

To generate the gas a gold electrode with a special coating is dipped into water and exposed to light.  Clusters of indium phosphide 5 nanometers wide on its surface absorb incoming photons and pass electrons bearing their energy on to clusters of a sulfurous iron compound.  This material combines those electrons with protons from the water to form gaseous hydrogen. A second electrode – plain platinum this time – is needed to complete the circuit electrochemically.

The all-inorganic method solves the organic material issue of short life spans.  The inorganic materials used in the Nann system are more resilient. The first generation proof of concept is “a major breakthrough” in the field, they say, thanks to its efficiency of over 60% and the ability to survive sunlight for two weeks without any degradation of performance.

Nann describes that the high efficiency is largely thanks to the indium phosphide clusters being better at grabbing photons than organic molecules. “Think of them as a butterfly net for catching photons.”

Nann explains in using a standard measure of the probability that a material will absorb a photon that hits it, each cluster is 400 times better at netting photons than the organic molecules used in previous systems. “That’s why it works so well,” he says.

The team now plans to refine the system, including lowering the cost by making it with less expensive materials. “There is no major reason for using gold or platinum,” he said. The chosen materials were used simply because they are common in the laboratory.  The other potential materials may be better.  For certain the gold and platinum used need replacements.

As New Scientist is noting, others have welcomed the announcement.  Vincent Artero at the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France is quoted saying, “It’s a significant result, my overall appreciation of this work is highly positive, both regarding the scientific level and the promises that are held by the new result.”

Licheng Sun at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, agrees. “It will certainly provide future research topics for water splitting,” he said.

For those of you interested in the published paper, it’s at Angewandte Chemie International, DOI: 10.1002/anie.200906262.

There are all the questions of scaling up, commercial production matters, costs to install, and a wealth of other milestones to cross before one might put a kit on the roof.  But the energy input, solar energy is still free, and without organics the lifespan should be quite long.  If this pencils out as a disruptive technology it could get very widespread very fast indeed.

Hydrogen used quickly, or bound up with carbon has immense value.  We’re witnessing one more step in a chain from sunlight to powered work.  Just how sunlight gets to heating, cooling and moving us isn’t so important as what it costs.  The Brits look to be on to something, lets hope it works out and quickly.

Congratulations, too!  When someone does the math on the “yield” per square meter there’s going to be a lot more news about this.

The original is here: New Energy and Fuel

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Hands-On ZigBee: Implementing 802.15.4 with Microcontrollers

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Original post: Home Controls

The researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed, fabricated and demonstrated a PHEV traction drive power electronics system that provides significant mobile power generation and vehicle-to-grid support capabilities. (The Oak Ridge press release isn’t specific, but here PHEV seems to mean Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle, not parallel hybrid EV.)  The device acts as the vehicle charger.

Oak Ridge PHEV Controller. Click image for the largest view. A high resolution image is on the Oak Ridge press release page.

The effort has yielded an interesting take on the potential that an EV controller offers when there is substantial storage and some generation ability.  Have a seat – this hasn’t occurred to many – the Oak Ridge controller provides more power than typical freestanding portable generators; the PHEV can be used in emergency situations such as power outages and roadside breakdowns or leisure occasions such as camping. Day-to-day, the PHEV can be used to power homes or businesses or supply power to the grid when the power load is high.

In the midst of freezing rain, ice storms and “snowmageddon” the press release seems prescient or well planned, perhaps.  But the idea positioning has serious emergency value merits.  It would not be much of an expense to wire one’s home charge arrangement such that emergency power would be available from the car.

Oak Ridge likes to say it as “An advancement in hybrid electric vehicle technology is providing powerful benefits beyond transportation.”  That’s a little strong, but lets look at what information is available.

Gui-Jia Su of ORNL’s Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center says, “The new technology eliminates the separate charging mechanism typically used in PHEVs, reducing both cost and volume under the hood. The PHEV’s traction drive system is used to charge the battery, power the vehicle and enable its mobile energy source capabilities.”  Wait a minute . . . That remark would mean to this writer that wall current would be the connection to the EV, not a charger.  Not a special plug.  If so, that does simplify things, one would need either a 110 volt or 220 volt extension cord for the personal infrastructure investment for EV ownership.

Su also offers the charging system concept, which is market ready, could also be used to enhance the voltage stability of the grid by providing reactive power.  Some clever folks out there with smart meters are thinking they might hedge the power company; take current overnight, give back current during the afternoon.  Whether the pricing will make that viable isn’t a topic yet – it had better be soon.

The controller is the work of The Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center, the DOE’s broad-based research center, charged and funded for helping lead the nation’s advancing shift from petroleum-powered to hybrid-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. The center’s efforts directly support DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Program and its goal to provide Americans with greater freedom of mobility and energy security while lowering costs and reducing impacts on the environment.

From the photo above some interesting features are visible.  The controller is built on a production DSP universal controller board.  It’s using a Texas Instruments chip.  And it’s cooled with a fluid system seen to the right side.  It’s not especially big either.  As a lab unit it’s not been optimized for production, but the row of 10mm Phillips headed cap screws denote the diminutive size.

By no means is this all there is to controlling the power in an EV though.  The controller Oak Ridge is proposing is more of an interface controlling device between the battery or capacitor pack and line in or grid source.  There seems to be no facility to control the vehicle itself.  Which is just as well.  That is an area if intense engineering interest to auto manufacturers worldwide.

That suggests the Oak Ridge controller would be an option in an EV design.  Should the offering actually simplify the charging at home and reduce the infrastructure cost for someone to switch over, the market should be very welcoming indeed.  But that’s not to say that every EV would have one, or that every buyer would understand why or why not they’d want one.

Building the technology is one thing.  Teaching consumers how it is their interest might be much harder.  But I’d be game; power went down a couple days here, having the furnace run would nave been really nice.

Author: New Energy and Fuel

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Swedish and American researchers have succeeded in producing a new type of lighting component that’s inexpensive to produce and can be fully recycled. Using the new super material graphene, the invention as an example could pave the way for glowing wallpaper made entirely of plastic.  The emerging field of “organic” or “plastic” electronics has already brought low-voltage, ultrathin, and energy-efficient lighting and displays to market as organic light-emitting diode (OLED) televisions and displays in cameras and mobile phones.

But these are not fully organic; they usually contain a transparent electrode made of the metal alloy indium tin oxide.  The indium alloy presents a problem because indium is both rare, expensive and is complicated to recycle.

An OLED consists of a light-generating layer of plastic placed between two electrodes, one of which must be transparent. Now researchers at Linköping and Umeå universities, working with American colleagues at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rutgers University, are presenting an alternative to OLEDs, an organic light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC). It’s inexpensive to produce, and the transparent electrode is made of the carbon material graphene.

Graphene Cathode in a Light Emitting Electrochemical Cell. Click image for the largest view.

The research group is utilizing chemically derived graphene for the transparent cathode in an all-plastic sandwich-structure device.  Using a screen-printable conducting polymer as a partially transparent anode and a micrometer-thick active layer solution-deposited from a blend of a light-emitting polymer and a polymer electrolyte, they’ve demonstrated a light-emitting device based solely on solution-processable carbon-based materials. The results demonstrate that low-voltage, inexpensive, and efficient light-emitting devices can be made without using metals. In other words, electronics can truly be “organic”.

Nathaniel Robinson from Linköping University says, “This is a major step forward in the development of organic lighting components, from both a technological and an environmental perspective. Organic electronics components promise to become extremely common in exciting new applications in the future, but this can create major recycling problems. By using graphene instead of conventional metal electrodes, components of the future will be much easier to recycle and thereby environmentally attractive.”

All of the new LEC’s parts can be produced using fluid solutions, making it possible to make LECs in a roll-to-roll process such as a printing press in a highly cost-effective way.

Ludvig Edman from Umeå University says, “This paves the way for inexpensive production of entirely plastic-based lighting and display components in the form of large flexible sheets. This kind of illumination or display can be rolled up or can be applied as wallpaper or on ceilings.”

The graphene used in the production process consists of a single layer of carbon atoms and has many attractive properties as an electronic material. It has high conductivity, is virtually transparent, and can be produced as a solution in the form of graphene oxide.

For over 15 years researchers worldwide have been trying to replace the indium tin oxide component.  Indium is in short supply, and the alloy has a complicated life cycle. The raw material for the fully organic and metal-free LEC, on the other hand, is essentially inexhaustible and can be fully recycled, back into a fuel, for example.  A non rare earth metallic mixed device is going to be much less expensive and less of a problem when recycled.

A study paper has been published in the journal ACS Nano and is titled “Graphene and Mobile Ions: The Key to All-Plastic, Solution-Processed Light-Emitting Devices.” The authors are Piotr Matyba, Hisato Yamaguchi, Goki Eda, Manish Chhowalla, Ludvig Edman, and Nathaniel D. Robinson.

Well . . . If this scales up commercially those coming generations of TVs might be sandwich built way under an inch thick and much less expensive.  Video could get more pervasive than it already is  – as if that’s possible.  Imagining walls and ceilings that glow sounds interesting, but the sensation is yet to be experienced.

But power consumption should be very low.  To brighten areas where the amibiance isn’t a critical part of the design this invention should get rapid adoption.

On the other hand, the light might be just wonderful.  LED and one hopes this new LEC will be free of the oscillations many of us find annoying in fluorescent lit areas. The lumens per installed area are still to come out, the color temperature and other bits of interest will be topics for development.

Wait . . . Wallpaper?  If the love of my life who has a penchant for wallpaper and changing it finds out . . . Lets hope that the pink spectrum is impossible.  Well, I can hope.

The original post is created by: New Energy and Fuel

I like central vacuum cleaners. Having the power head in the garage and a series of inlets throughout the house all connected by tubing hidden in the walls is the equivalent of having structured wiring for your telephone, data, and CATV needs.  What I want to bring to your attention, whether you are planning a new install, adding a new inlet, or just replacing the hose, is that you need to make sure that the hose matches the inlet.

All inlets have two, spring-loaded metallic nubs that make contact with a ring on all hoses when the hose is inserted in to the inlet.  This low-voltage contact triggers the power head motor to turn on when the hose is inserted and off when the hose is removed.  The Nutone NU360 is a standard, low-voltage inlet. 

In additon to the low-voltage contacts, there is another type of inlet that has a trapezoidal shaped connector above the circular inlet that allows 120 VAC, household electrical current to safely flow through the hose and drive power brushes and other AC-powered cleaning accessories attached to the hose. The NUCI390 is an example of an electrified, direct-connect inlet.

So which hose do you use? If you have the standard, low-voltage inlet, then the NUCH230 is the hose for you. If however, you needed more cleaning oomph in the form of an electric power brush, you would need to get a different hose such as the NUCH520. The ‘520, pictured above,  can be inserted in a standard inlet, and comes with a six-foot, pigtail AC power cord attached to the inlet side of the hose.  The pigtail allows connection to a nearby electrical outlet thus allowing the use of the power brush.

The third and final hose is the NUCH620.  This is an electrified, direct-connect hose. No pigtail. Just plug it in and you’ve got both suction and AC power at your control.

Original post created by: Home Controls