One of the primary constraints in improving power use, is knowing the current power you are using in each device. In the 1990s, a microwave oven mostly consumed power to keep the clock going. For some owners, 95% or more of the power consumed by a microwave oven was the clock. Not a great use of energy.A similar issue arises with electric motors. In an industrial processing line, the electric power consumed by a mote can be more than 10 times the cost of the motor. So installing a more efficient motor makes good economic sense, if you know this. Of course capital and operating budgets are often owned by different departments and so this conversation might never happen. The cheapest motor is purchased and the higher power bills are paid more often than not.In housing or building construction the same thing happens. Germany has double glazed or even triple glazed windows because it makes good economic sense to save the energy from leaking through the windows. If we did the same in Australia, heating and cooling power requirements would go down. This would help with the peak capacity requirements on our electricity grid now that reverse cycle air conditioning is so popular.I drive my car with the dash display on L/100Km so that I can see the implications of my driving habits as I drive. Real time feedback is very valuable for choosing our behaviour. I very much appreciate this information being available to me, so I can make informed choices.Imagine if your home could tell you the electricity, water and gas use in each product as it was being used? That would certainly allow us to make better informed choices. In the design of products, similar choices can be made. These can include:
- Reducing the power consumed by the product
- Getting the power from a greener source
- Reducing the power required to make the product
- Improving recycling
- Giving the user information on the energy usage as it is being used
In the following 3 blog posts there are some ideas for addressing the first 3 of these points:-
http://www.successful.com.au/blog/2009/12/07/electronics-design-for-green-manufacture/-
http://www.successful.com.au/blog/2009/11/30/green-electronics-strategies-reduce-power-while-awake/-
http://www.successful.com.au/blog/2009/11/23/green-electronics-strategies-sleep-saves-energy/ For both reducing energy use and also getting it from a greener source, Energy Harvesting is a very interesting idea. Although there are devices on the market, a broad range of options are not yet available and as usual for an emerging technology the price point is still too high. This is one of those developing spaces where widespread adoption is required to get the price point into the right zone. There are a number of recent technical breakthroughs such as step up voltage switching from piezoelectric sources. An example of this is the LTC3588 http://www.linear.com/product/LTC3588-1 and enocean http://www.enocean.com/ have dedicated their future to making energy harvesting work commercially.Many industrial processes also look for ways to reuse the energy already in the system and I was recently speaking with a pump manufacturer that plan to use the cooling effect on the expansion side of the pump to cool the pump and so allow them to reduce the physical size of the pump and also the energy losses at the same time. So I might not be able to personally make coal fired power stations greener, but in the interim I can design more efficient products and think about the long term energy use that goes with the products. Others are working on making coal greener and you can read about one approach in http://www.electronicsnews.com.au/news/a-balanced-perspective--power-costs-should-come-do As the debate on the environment heats up, it is worth thinking about what we can each do to make it a little better in the areas we can directly influence.
Engineer's Perspective is a column written by Ray Keefe, who has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedInprofile. This post was written for Electronics News but is copyright Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.Engineer's Perspective: More efficient power use Electronics News
No comments:
Post a Comment