The Home Energy Saver
The Home Energy Saver

The Home Energy Saver is designed to help consumers identify the best ways to save energy in their homes, and find the resources to make the savings happen. The Home Energy Saver was the first Internet-based tool for calculating energy use in residential buildings. The project is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of the national ENERGY STAR Program for improving energy efficiency in homes.
- posted by Chuck Eesley @ 8:10 PM (0) comments

 
Drive your vegetables
Drivin' veggies.

- posted by Chuck Eesley @ 9:08 PM

 
Macadamia-fuled Power Plant
No, it's not as bad as it sounds- they're not using the nuts themselves, but rather their discarded shells. Phew.

"The Macadamia Cogeneration Facility will use the discarded shells of the nuts to power up to 1200 Queensland homes in its first year."

"The $3 million "green power" facility is a joint venture between the Queensland government-owned Ergon Energy and the Gympie-based Suncoast Gold Macadamias company, the world's third-largest producer of the nuts."

- posted by Eric @ 3:38 PM

 
Green tea is good for hard drives
Green Tea Good for Hard Drives

For years, green tea has been believed by some to lower cholesterol,
prevent rheumatoid arthritis and even stave off cancer. Now scientists
think the warm green stuff has yet another benefit: the potential to
save hard-drive manufacturers millions of dollars.


A team of researchers based in Tucson, Arizona, announced Monday that a
study of the use of green tea extracts for polishing the magnetic heads
in hard-disk drives has yielded a compound that works three to four
times faster than conventional compounds. If the findings can be
reproduced in an industrial setting, the compound could reduce the cost
and environmental impact of hard-drive manufacturing, the researchers
said.

The study was funded by a $100,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation, awarded under its Small Business Innovation Research
program.


"It's an exciting new area of chemistry," said John Lombardi, lead
researcher on the project and president of Ventana Research. "Our
original drive was to develop a (polishing) fluid that was
biodegradable. But as we got deeper into developing the compound, one
thing we discovered is that it could increase the efficiency of the
magnetic read-write manufacturing process."


The hard-drive manufacturing industry relies on special polishing
compounds, or slurries, to ensure that the magnetic heads responsible
for reading and writing data on a hard drive have virtually no
imperfections on their surfaces. A bump or particle that is just 1
nanometer in height could cause the head to scratch the disc-like
platter that it sits above, destroying the data on the hard drive.


Manufacturers add the slurries to the hard-drive heads while they are
being polished. Although the specific ingredients in the slurries are
closely guarded secrets, they typically work by attracting and
containing the tiny ceramic particles that are created during the
polishing process. After a certain amount of time, the slurry is washed
away and disposed of according to various regulations on the chemicals
that it contains.


With the compound created by the Arizona team, the particles would be
attracted by tannins in the green tea extract. The ability of tannin to
bind readily with ceramics is the same principle that causes green tea
to leave stains on mugs and teapots. The researchers hope the high
availability and biodegradability of green tea will make it a
less-expensive option for drive manufacturers.


The researchers also said they believe their discovery could be applied
to all sorts of electronics-polishing applications, known as chemical
mechanical planarization. "Although John's (Lombardi) work is in the
magnetic media industry, I think the compounds themselves have
far-reaching implications for the semiconductor industry," said Srini
Raghavan, a professor of materials science and engineering at the
University of Arizona.


Raghavan and a third team member, Pace Technologies CTO Don Zipperian,
assisted Lombardi with the study. Pace Technologies sells chemicals and
other products for microsurface finishing.


It's too soon to tell how much of an effect the team's research will
have on the $406 million slurry industry. But Lombardi said the study
has already received a good deal of interest from one company that he
declined to name.


A spokesman for Cabot Microelectronics, the leading manufacturer of
slurry compounds, said the company had not yet had a chance to look at
the study and therefore could not comment on its impact.


The next step for the researchers is to quantify the environmental
impact of the green tea compound in relation to other slurries and to
develop it for commercial use, said Raghavan. Part of that development
might be funded by a phase II grant from the National Science
Foundation, he said. If the group's application is accepted, the phase
II grant would provide the team with $500,000 over two years to develop
the compound into a commercially viable product.


Approximately 40 percent of businesses that complete the phase II
process go on to produce successful products, according to a National
Science Foundation estimate.

- posted by Chuck Eesley @ 2:54 PM

 
Human Kindness Foundation
Bio-Kindness

Bo Lozoff has reached into more than 700 prisons, teaching yoga and meditation to convicts. Now he wants to raise $1 million and put ex-cons to work at a biodiesel refinery in Orange County. If past history is any guide, he may just pull it off.

B Y   M E L I N D A   R U L E Y

In the end, the decision to open North Carolina's first biodiesel refinery came neither as cosmic bolt nor avatar nor mystical epiphany; it came, rather, in an "oh shit" moment.

- posted by Chuck Eesley @ 9:46 PM