In previous posts, I mentioned wind power, wave power, and the balance between the needs of the environment and civilization’s demand for energy. While researching my wind and wave pieces, I noticed a substantial overlap in Earth’s wind resources and wave resources. This confluence is not surprising: high-velocity wind shears the ocean surface kicking up larger, more powerful waves.
If waves and wind come pairs, why is there no ongoing effort to develop hybrid wind/wave generation plants? This concept has already been suggested elsewhere, but I cannot find any evidence of action taken to implement it.
Once the commitment is made to drive a wind turbine boom into the ocean floor, the tower should be exploited to the maximum economically-feasible extent. Augmenting ocean wind power structures to extract wave energy would maximize both environmental and monetary returns. At the very least, wind towers could be used to moor Pelamis-style wave farms, sharing lines to deliver electrons to shore. Better design could identify techniques to integrate wave energy generators directly into wind towers.
By piggybacking on mature wind technology, there is an opportunity here for the US to climb back on top of the wave-power market. Hybrid wind/wave farms could leapfrog the wave-only installations being pioneered in Europe and Australia, speeding commercialization and maturity of promising wave energy technologies.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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