Bach Seat

A couple of recent articles about greener alternative energy sources for tech caught my eye as I sat in my Bach Seat. First, TES NewEnergy, based in Osaka Japan has come up with a new way to charge your mobile phone by heating a pot of water over a campfire according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Hatsuden-Nabe thermo-electric cookpot turns heat from boiling water into electricity The pot features strips of ceramic thermoelectric material that generate electricity through temperature differentials between 550 degrees Celsius at the bottom of the pot and the water boiling inside at 100 degrees. The pot feeds the electricity via a USB port into digital devices such as Apple (AAPL) iPhones, iPods, and Garmin (GRMN) GPS‘s.

Chief executive Kazuhiro Fujita said the invention was inspired by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami, “When I saw the TV footage of the quake victims making a fire to keep themselves warm, I came up with the idea of helping them to charge their mobile phones at the same time,” Mr. Fujita said.

“Unlike a solar power generator, our pot can be used regardless of the time of day and weather while its small size allows people to easily carry it in a bag in case of evacuation,” said director and co-developer Ryoji Funahashi.

The company says the device takes three to five hours to charge an iPhone and can heat up your lunch at the same time.

rb- The thermo-electric cookpot sells for 24,150 yen ($305) which seems sort of expensive to charge an iPhone when the towers are also put of power and down. TES NewEnergy also plans to market it later in developing countries with unreliable power grids. Their best bet is probably REI for all the extreme suburbanites.

Aussie greener alternative energy idea

According to PCAuthority.com Aussie scientists have developed a way to power electronics by harnessing the energy of the keyboard. Using piezoelectrics, which converts pressure into an electric current, and a thin-film technology found in microchips, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne believe laptops could become self-powered just by their user’s typing.

The new energy source needs more work before it’s practical for low-cost laptop integration, but Dr. Mandu Bhaskaran, the co-author of the research, believes the development is a step in the right direction. “With the drive for alternative energy solutions, we need to find more efficient ways to power microchips,” said Bhaskaran.

TechEye correctly identifies the biggest challenge to this alternative energy source will be to get the power demands of computer chips down to be able to use the technology. Despite the best efforts of chipmakers like Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD), the power drain for chips is still too high for this sort of technology.

rb- Maybe the Aussies want to bring back WordPerfect and DOS so you have to type all the time otherwise your laptop will run out of power. Image the rush to buy these devices as the green police get credits for taking more computers off the grid.

TV as an alternative energy source

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a self-powered, wireless paper-based device that runs on scavenged ambient energy from the environment. The GATech alternative energy system collects electromagnetic energy transmitted by television transmitters, mobile phone networks, and satellite communications systems. Manos Tentzeris, a professor in the GATech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering told Gizmag the new technology can be used to power small electronic devices such as networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors, and communications chips.

The GATech team has been able to build the system by combining sensors, antennas, and energy scavenging capabilities on paper by using inkjet printing technology According to the article, the energy scavenging technology can take advantage of frequencies from FM radio to radar. So far the team has been able to generate hundreds of milliwatts by harnessing the energy from TV bands. Gizmag reports that multi-band systems would generate over one milliwatt, which is enough to run small electronic devices, including microprocessors. The Professor explains that multi-band systems can exploit a range of electromagnetic bands to capture more energy.

The Gizmag article says the system works. The researchers have successfully operated a temperature sensor using electromagnetic energy captured from a television station more than half a kilometer away. They are now preparing another demonstration where a microprocessor-based microcontroller would be activated by holding it in the air.

The researchers say the technology could be used with other electricity-generating technologies like solar. Scavenged energy could help a solar element charge a battery during the day while at night, scavenged energy would continue to charge the battery.

The Georgia Tech team believes that self-powered, wireless paper-based sensors will soon be widely available at a very low cost. Gizmag says the autonomous, inexpensive sensors would be attractive for a range of applications, such as chemical, biological, heat and stress sensing, RFID and monitoring for the military, manufacturing, shipping, communications, and smart grid applications.

rb-

I wrote about something similar here. It is important to realize that this new alternative energy source has so far been wasted.

Related articles

• Pan Charger boils your iPhone battery back to life (slashgear.com)
• Nanotechnology Eternal Battery (neatorama.com)

What do you think?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.