by Cynthia Booth

New Jersey school of architecture professor presents us how to construct an environmental-friendly home with limited funds

Did you know 2 New York based architects designed an asymmetrical home with a fixed cost of $250,000?

Architects and Jersey City residents Richard Garber (assistant tutor at the Newjersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design in Newark) and Nicole Robertson of GRO Architects in New York City rose to the challenge of designing and managing the construction of a single-family house that’s an authentic evidence of both revolutionary design and environmental-friendly technologies.

Denis Carpenter not too long ago bought one small vacant lot and, to accomplish his concern for the planet, wanted a house that was cost-efficient and easy to maintain.

What’s so exceptional about this home?

- In the home, on the floor level, radiant heating below the exposed cement floor gets warm the full bathing room and a couple of bedrooms.

- In the loft-like second level, sleek aluminum and stainless steel railings accent the bamboo stairway to the mezzanine, living room and an artfully designed kitchen made with salvaged home appliances and cabinetry.

- Passive air conditioning strategies like ceiling fans and clerestory windows make it easy for home owners to remain cool during summer months and warm during winter months.

- The roof consists of 260 sq ft of solar panels that provide nearly 2,000 kilowatts of energy annually to a battery stored in the basement.

This single family 1,600-square-foot home was constructed in six months and won a 2009 American Institute of Architects merit award and the 2010 Green Building of the Year Award from the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency.

Now what? How could you convert your home into an environmentally-friendly home without investing too much money?

If you’re remodeling a home, perform an energy audit first to help you identify what energy efficiency improvements should and can be made to your home. In this way you’ll evaluate how much energy your home needs.

My personal favorite eco-friendly methodology is the passive solar cooling/heating design.

Passive solar usually means that your home’s windows, walls, and floors can be designed to collect, store, and distribute solar power in the form of heat in the winter season and reject solar heat in the summer time.

Existing houses can be adapted or “retrofitted” to passively collect and store solar heat too.

The next five aspects constitute a comprehensive passive solar home design:

The Collector – The area through which sunlight enters the building (usually windows).

The Absorber – The hard, darkened surface of the storage element. Sunlight hits the surface and is absorbed as heat.

The Thermal Mass – The components that retain or store the heat produced by sunlight below or behind the absorber surface.

The Distributor – The system by which solar heat circulates from the collection and storage points to different areas of the house.

The Controller – Roof overhangs may be used to shade the aperture area during warm weather or Thermostats that signal a fan to turn on.

The author – Cynthia Booth contributes articles for the <a href=”http://www.architecturecareers.org/”>architecture careers advice</a> blog. It’s a nonprofit web-site dedicated to provide help for beginning architects who need resources for their careers. With this she would like to raise the awareness on eco-friendly home design and change the general public conception of energy efficiency.

Innovation Puts Next-Generation

Solar Cells on the Horizon.

Could dye from berries be the answer??

ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2009) — In a world first, a Monash University-led international research team has developed an innovative way to boost the output of the next generation of solar cells.

Scientists at Monash University, in collaboration with colleagues from the universities of Wollongong and Ulm in Germany, have produced tandem dye-sensitised solar cells with a three-fold increase in energy conversion efficiency compared with previously reported tandem dye-sensitised solar cells.

Lead researcher Dr Udo Bach, from Monash University, said the breakthrough had the potential to increase the energy generation performance of the cells and make them a viable and competitive alternative to traditional silicon solar cells.

Dr Bach said the key was the discovery of a new, more efficient type of dye that made the operation of inverse dye-sensitised solar cells much more efficient.

When the research team combined two types of dye-sensitised solar cell — one inverse and the other classic — into a simple stack, they were able to produce for the first time a tandem solar cell that exceeded the efficiency of its individual components.

“The tandem approach — stacking many solar cells together — has been successfully used in conventional photovoltaic devices to maximise energy generation, but there have been obstacles in doing this with dye-sensitised cells because there has not been a method for creating an inverse system that would allow dye molecules to efficiently pass on positive charges to a semiconductor when illuminated with light,” Dr Bach said.

“Inverse dye-sensitised solar cells are the key to producing dye-sensitised tandem solar cells, but the challenge has been to find a way to make them perform more effectively. By creating a way of making inverse dye-sensitised solar cells operate very efficiently we have opened the way for dye-sensitised tandem solar cells to become a commercial reality.”

Although dye-sensitised solar cells have been the focus of research for a number of years because they can be fabricated with relative simplicity and cost-efficiency, their effectiveness has not been on par with high-performance silicon solar cells.

Dr Bach said the breakthrough, which is detailed in a paper published in Nature Materials, was an important milestone in the ongoing development of viable and efficient solar cell technology.

“While this new tandem technology is still in its early infancy, it represents an important first step towards the development of the next generation of solar cells that can be produced at low cost and with energy efficient production methods,” he said.

“With this innovation we are one step closer to the creation of a cost-efficient and carbon-neutral energy source.”

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 8th June 2010

A view inside the National Ignition Facility’s target chamber, a space easily big enough for technicians to stand inside. It is hoped the NIF will eventually be a major source of carbon-free energy.

(Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Lab)

LIVERMORE, Calif.–Think clean energy is a fantasy? What if the power of a star was applied to the problem?

That’s the approach being explored at the National Ignition Facility, a huge-scale experiment in laser fusion based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory here. Scientists are looking at NIF as a potential key to producing large amounts of carbon-free power.

It’s not known if the system will ever bear the kind of fruit the scientists and administrators who run NIF would like. Still, the facility is a scientific wonder that can transform a single laser beam no wider than a human hair into 192 beams–each of which is 18 inches wide. Together, the beams are designed to produce 4 million joules, the amount of power that would produce 4 million watts of power in a single second.

The NIF was completed in early 2009 and eventually will be used by the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as technicians from national laboratories, fusion energy researchers, academics, and others. It is “the world’s largest and highest-energy laser, [and] has the goal of achieving nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for the first time,” according to the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, “in essence, creating a miniature star on Earth.”

This is serious high technology. The NIF employs a series of amplifiers and mirrors known as switchyards to route and split the original hair’s-width laser beam over a total distance of 1,500 meters. After being separated by pre-amplifiers into 48 beams, each beam is then split into four beams, and then all are injected into the 192 main laser amplifier beamlines, according to the NIF.

The hope is that NIF will be online as a power plant within 15 to 20 years. For now, the facility is a proof-of-concept system, albeit one comprising two 10-story buildings and more than $3 billion of investment. Eventually, the 192 laser beams reunite to focus on a target fuel pellet that is just millimeters in size, yet placed inside a target chamber that towers over the technicians who sometimes work inside.

And 192 laser beams of this magnitude create some serious heat. The theoretical maximum, according to LLNL retiree and docent Nick Williams, is 100 million degrees Celsius.

For now, because of the amount of power necessary to produce the beams, and the heat created, scientists are only able to fire the laser system once every two or three hours. Eventually, the idea would be to fire it many times a second.

And by 2030, it is hoped, the NIF will be helping produce commercial power and helping scientists and researchers better understand the nature of the universe. That, it would seem, would be a main benefit of producing what amounts to a small star, right here in the middle of Northern California.

On June 24, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2010. After driving more than 18,000 miles in the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last four years, I’ll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more throughout the American northeast. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. In the meantime, you can follow my preparations for the project on Twitter @GreeterDan and @RoadTrip.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 7th June 2010

Hold Secret

to Affordable Solar Power Worldwide

Science(Apr. 30, 2010) — Pokeberries — the weeds that children smash to stain their cheeks purple-red and that Civil War soldiers used to write letters home — could be the key to spreading solar power across the globe, according to researchers at Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.

Nanotech Center scientists have used the red dye made from pokeberries to coat their efficient and inexpensive fiber-based solar cells. The dye acts as an absorber, helping the cell’s tiny fibers trap more sunlight to convert into power.

Pokeberries proliferate even during drought and in rocky, infertile soil. That means residents of rural Africa, for instance, could raise the plants for pennies. Then they could make the dye absorber for the extremely efficient fiber cells and provide energy where power lines don’t run, said David Carroll, Ph.D., the center’s director.

“They’re weeds,” Carroll said. “They grow on every continent but Antarctica.”

Wake Forest University holds the first patent for fiber-based photovoltaic, or solar, cells, granted by the European Patent Office in November. A spinoff company called FiberCell Inc. has received the license to develop manufacturing methods for the new solar cell.

The fiber cells can produce as much as twice the power that current flat-cell technology can produce. That’s because they are composed of millions of tiny, plastic “cans” that trap light until most of it is absorbed. Since the fibers create much more surface area, the fiber solar cells can collect light at any angle — from the time the sun rises until it sets.

To make the cells, the plastic fibers are stamped onto plastic sheets, with the same technology used to attach the tops of soft-drink cans. The absorber — either a polymer or a less-expensive dye — is sprayed on. The plastic makes the cells lightweight and flexible, so a manufacturer could roll them up and ship them cheaply to developing countries — to power a medical clinic, for instance.

Once the primary manufacturer ships the cells, workers at local plants would spray them with the dye and prepare them for installation. Carroll estimates it would cost about $5 million to set up a finishing plant — about $15 million less than it could cost to set up a similar plant for flat cells.

“We could provide the substrate,” he said. “If Africa grows the pokeberries, they could take it home.

“It’s a low-cost solar cell that can be made to work with local, low-cost agricultural crops like pokeberries and with a means of production that emerging economies can afford.”

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 3rd May 2010

Solar Cells Possible