Eideard

The privilege of working under the open sky is reserved for just a few lucky professions. For the less fortunate majority, spending their working hours surrounded by gloomy office landscapes, the soothing sight of clouds drifting through the sky is unattainable. Setting up office cubicles in the open would do the trick but it’s hardly a practical option, especially in places where the weather cannot be trusted. Fortunately, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO), based in Stuttgart, Germany, know what else can be done to bring a little outdoor comfort to the office-bound. They built a dynamic luminous ceiling which allows office dwellers to gaze at clouds without ever leaving their desks.

As clouds shift shapes and move through the sky, the intensity of sunlight we experience on the ground is in constant flux. When replicated indoors, such lighting conditions could help entice the feeling of freedom and spaciousness that we associate with being outdoors. However, it takes more than attaching a set of your regular LCD TVs to a ceiling and playing footage of a cloudy sky to pull this off. The IAO researchers teamed up with LEiDs GmbH, an LED technology company, to make sure their ceiling simulates natural light conditions on a partially-cloudy day as accurately as possible.

…A combination of red, blue, green and white diodes is used to produce the full light spectrum, which translates into over 16 million possible hues. This means the set-up is able to simulate dynamic changes in lighting conditions that are not immediately obvious to the naked eye. They may, however, influence your effectiveness at work…

For now, the prototype sky takes up 34 square meters of ceiling real estate and uses 32,560 LEDs to provide light with the intensity of over 3,000 lux (500 to 1000 lux is already enough to create comfortable lighting conditions). A small section of this virtual sky is going to be exhibited at the beginning of March in Hanover, Germany, during the CeBIT tradeshow, so you still have some time to talk your bosses into buying one of these. At the moment, the sky comes at 1000 euros per square meter, but the price is likely to come down with the solution growing in popularity.

I showed this to friends who work in a pretty typical American cube-farm and they thought the idea was terrific. Pay attention, boss!

What do you need to generate a lot of electricity from photoelectric solar cells? A lot of surface area. What is a lot of the surface of the United States covered in? Roads. Put those two ideas together, and the idea of turning the nation’s highways into solar farms doesn’t sound too odd, does it? Well, maybe it doesn’t until you consider that you’re talking about taking electronics – electronics that are typically somewhat delicate and rather expensive – and purposely putting them on the ground where heavy vehicles will zoom over them at high speed…

Replacing crushed stone and tar with LEDs and capacitors seems so unlikely that when Solar Roadways was awarded $100,000 to construct a small, 12′ by 12′ prototype system in 2009, infrastructure blog The Infrastructionist gave the effort its “Dubious Green Scheme” award and labeled Solar Roadways not just “harebrained” but “totally batshit crazy.”

As it turns out, that initial panel impressed the Department of Transportation enough that Solar Roadways has now been given $750,000 to take it to the next step: a solar parking lot. Constructed out of multiple 12′ x 12′ panels, the smart parking lot will do more than the asphalt alternative. It will warm itself in cold weather to melt away snow and ice. A layer of embedded LEDs can be used create traffic warnings or crosswalks. Electricity leftover from those tasks could be used to charge electric vehicles or routed into the power grid. The electrical components will be embedded between layers of hardened, textured glass – this may sound fragile, but is already tough enough that some areas use the material for sidewalks.

Parking lots, driveways, and eventually highways are all targets for the panels. If the nation’s system of interstate highways was surfaced with Solar Roadways panels, the results would be more than three times the amount of electricity currently consumed. Of course, at $100,000 per 12′, costs would need to come down significant bit before that could happen.

Obviously, the editors never compared the cost of building solar roadways to typical American highway boondoggles. The record is held by a project near and dear to my heart – Boston’s Big Dig. A three-and-a-half mile tunnel that ended up costing over $14 billion.

Plus he’s extrapolating from the first 12′ x 12′ panel. The parking lot project will reduce square foot cost as will further ramping up towards capacity production. All of which he doubtless knows.

Of all the energy-saving tips out there, probably the one we hear most often is to not leave lights on when we leave a room. It’s good advice, yet cities around the world are not following it in one key way – their streetlights stay on all night long, even when no one is on the street.

The Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology is experimenting with a new streetlight system on its campus, however, in which motion sensor-equipped streetlights dim to 20 percent power when no people or moving vehicles are near them. The system is said to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions by up to 80 percent, plus it lowers maintenance costs and reduces light pollution.

Delft Management of Technology alumnus Chintan Shah designed the system, which can be added to any dimmable streetlight. The illumination comes from LED bulbs, which are triggered by motion sensors. As a person or car approaches, their movement is detected by the closest streetlight, and its output goes up to 100 percent. Because the lights are all wirelessly linked to one another, the surrounding lights also come on, and only go back down to 20 percent once the commuter has passed through. This essentially creates a “pool of light” that precedes and follows people wherever they go, so any thugs lurking in the area should be clearly visible well in advance…

Some fine-tuning is still ongoing, in order to keep the lights from being activated by things like swaying branches or wandering cats. In the meantime, Shah has formed a spin-off company named Tvilight to market the Delft technology. He claims that municipalities utilizing the system should see it paying for itself within three to four years of use.

Anything that saves on electricity use pays for itself sooner than most people realize.

Yes – I can still hear my father instructing me to – “turn off the light when you leave a room”!

A judge in Pennsylvania Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit brought on behalf of a girl claiming she was hurt by a bar-code scanner at a convenience store…

Dominica Juliano and her guardian, Ginnisue Juliano, claimed a clerk at a Country Fair store in Erie waved the hand-held scanner over the girl’s face during a June 2004 visit to try to get her to smile. The lawsuit claimed Dominica, who was 12 at the time, suffered facial burns that led to serious psychological problems, the newspaper said.

The scanner could not have caused the injuries because it is an LED light and not a laser.

Who was more of a crook? The lawyer who told these folks they could win this suit? But, then, they went looking for a lawyer, right?

More than a century into its existence, Philips is once again betting heavily on semiconductors. This time the consumer electronics firm is looking to harness their potential as a source of light.

The producer of one in four of the world’s lights, which sold its semiconductor business in 2006 after it was undercut by Asian rivals, has invested more than 4 billion euros to ride the clean-tech wave and defend its world-leading position. But this time, Philips is better prepared for competition.

The company is betting on a shift in the lighting market, away from inefficient incandescent light bulbs and toward light-emitting diodes or LEDs — perhaps best known for their use in the flashing indicators found on most consumer devices.

“In terms of value around 2015, LED will be bigger than conventional light sources,” said Philips executive Niels Haverkorn. In the fourth quarter of 2009, LED-based products made up more than 10 percent of Philips’ lighting sales for the first time…

To help draw attention to LEDs’ potential to scale up, come down in price and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Philips at the turn of the year converted the famous numerals on the Times Square Ball — which is raised and lowered to signify the coming of a new year — to LED technology…

Analysts also warn competition in the market will be brutal. Philips’ main rivals in the sector are Siemens’ Osram, General Electric, Sharp, Samsung, and Cree of the United States.

Anticipating this — and building on lessons it learnt from sliding semiconductor prices — the 119-year old company is scaling up its LED output. Where before it used to sell just light bulbs, in LEDs the offer is a packaged “solution,” such as a luminaire, or the lamp and fitting combined…

But even if the company has a savvier strategy in approaching the modern LED market, the challenges it faces include current high prices which are deterring some retailers from stocking the products…

It expects the cost of producing LEDs to fall below that of compact fluorescent lamps in about 2013, but still be more expensive than an incandescent bulb.

Get near the price of a CFL and I’m already sold. Reducing the cost of electricity for my home is an important part of our future.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Alarmed by an increase in the number of people jumping to their deaths in front of trains, some Japanese railway operators are installing special blue lights above station platforms that they hope will have a soothing effect and reduce suicides.

The East Japan Railway Company has put blue light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in all 29 stations on Tokyo’s central train loop, the Yamanote line, which is used by eight million passengers daily.

There is no scientific proof that the lights actually help to reduce the number of suicides, and some experts are skeptical that they will have any effect. But other experts say that the color blue does have a calming effect on people.

“We associate the color with the sky and the sea,” said Mizuki Takahashi, a therapist at the Japan Institute of Color Psychology, a private research center that was not involved in the lighting project. “It has a calming effect on agitated people, or people obsessed with one particular thing, which in this case is committing suicide…”

Last year, nearly 2,000 people committed suicide in Japan by jumping in front of a train. They accounted for about 6 percent of suicides nationwide…

The suicides are causing additional train delays, with conductors describing them over public address systems as “human accidents.”

“Human accidents” – sounds like something the Pentagon or Karl Rove would come up with.

The technology behind giant video billboards can now be made into flexible and even transparent displays. These could be used to create brakelights that fit the curves of a car or medical diagnostics that envelop a patient like a blanket.

It has been made possible by a new technique, outlined in Science, for manufacturing so-called inorganic LEDs.

The new method allows these tiny light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to be attached to materials such as glass or rubber…

The approach is able to make thin inorganic LEDs in high quantities in such a way that they can be cut up by bathing them in a strong acid. The separated elements can then be picked up with a “stamp”, with holes cut precisely to size for the elements, and then placed on a wide array of surfaces, from glass to plastic to rubber.

The devices can be placed sparsely enough that a bright layer of them is practically transparent.

“Because you can get away with very low coverage by area, it opens up the possibility of making something that’s see-through,” Professor John Rogers explained…

“Displays remain the ultimate goal – we don’t need a new law of physics to enable it, it’s just more of an engineering question,” he said.

It is a trip! No question about it.

Should be able to make some beautiful displays – and consume less electricity in the process.

When it comes to green products, people are interested but skeptical.

Buyers these days may not be as swayed by the green attributes of a product as they are by price. But at CES, green was everywhere. It was part of the stock press conference script to start off with comments on the dismal economy, plow on to product announcements and end with a message about environmental initiatives.

Some companies found a natural way to integrate green messages with economic ones: Introduce products that consume less energy. Samsung, which practices what it preaches by …

… automatically turning off the lights in its Korean offices during the lunch hour, introduced at CES a line of LED televisions that consume 40% less power than LCD TVs. Panasonic showed a Blu-ray player that uses 50% less power than its previous model. And Hewlett-Packard is introducing printers that switch on only when a print job is sent. The average printer is actively printing for just 15 minutes a day but is usually not turned off, gobbling up energy. HP’s next-generation printers will turn themselves off after sitting idle for a few minutes…

With consumers being more budget conscious, however, the better pitch for now may be the fringe benefits. Samsung’s LED TV, for example, sucks up less power, but the LED lighting creates a brighter screen than LCD TVs for a better contrast ratio that makes images appear more vivid. Said John Godfrey, Samsung’s vice president of government affairs, “We call it the TV that lets you have your cake and eat it too.”

It’s just a matter of coming full circle for me. Growing up in a factory town through World War 2, being frugal was a necessity and a social positive. Now, it’s a useful trait – a progressive attitude unless you’re proud, somehow, of wasting money.

To the know-nothings who lost the recent election and more – in their narrow minds, being Green makes you the new Black, as well.

Consumers love the large, bright color displays on smartphones, but not the power-hungry way the screens drain the batteries.

Now Pixtronix, Qualcomm and other companies are developing technologies intended to conserve battery life on handhelds as people spend ever more time not just talking and texting on them, but also browsing the Web and watching TV.

A new color display in a prototype from Pixtronix uses energy-efficient LED bulbs, creating the image with thousands of tiny shutters that slide open and closed like digital pocket doors.

New technology by Qualcomm takes advantage of natural light, reflecting the short, blue waves of daylight, for instance, and combining them in the same process that lets bluebirds glow with iridescent color in the sun.

Energy efficiency is widely sought by manufacturers of mobile devices, said Paul Semenza, a senior vice president at DisplaySearch, a market research company in Austin, Tex. “Everybody is shooting for low-power color,” Mr. Semenza said.

RTFA. Interesting stuff – especially since some of this will actually be in our hands, this year. Or next.