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Hot water engine James Randerson explores turning waste hot water into electricity WASTE not, want not… An engine and cut emissions. that generates electricity from The Exergyn Drive exploits the waste hot water could reduce quirky properties of nitinol, an energy consumption and carbon alloy of nickel and titanium. You emissions for thousands of can bend nitinol out of shape, different businesses, from but when heated it undergoes a cargo shipping to data centres. phase transition and reverts to its So says Exergyn, a firm based original crystal lattice structure. in Dublin, Ireland, which plans This “shape memory” property to run the first industrial trials of makes nitinol desirable in a wide its technology next year. “The Exergyn Drive Globally, Exergyn estimates can produce electricity that the heat lost in waste hot more cheaply than gas water from industrial processes or coal” amounts to around twice the energy in Saudi Arabia’s annual oil and gas output. range of applications, including “There’s just so much waste hot medical devices and sunglasses. water in the world,” says Exergyn And unlike most materials, CEO Alan Healy. In most cases nitinol expands when cooled, companies are actually spending like water when it turns to ice. energy to cool it. These two properties drive the Cargo ships, for example, Exergyn engine. Inside the device, typically pump waste hot water a bundle of metre-long nitinol from the engine around the wires are attached to a piston. vessel to cool it down. And in data Cold and hot water are alternately centres, electricity-hungry fans flushed over the wires, making are used to dissipate the heat them rapidly expand and contract generated by rows of servers. by 4 centimetres, driving the Finding an efficient way to piston up and down. A hydraulic capture and use this wasted system converts that linear motion energy would both reduce costs into rotary motion, which in turn
drives a generator. The engine produces 10 kilowatts of electricity from around 200 kW of thermal energy in the hot water. That might not be hugely efficient, but this “free” energy would otherwise be wasted. And often, money and energy would be spent cooling the waste water. The company is now planning tests in 2017 at Dublin Airport and two landfill sites. The Exergyn technology will produce electricity on-site using water at 90 °C or less from a gas engine at the airport and from biogas generators at the landfills. John Blowes, a past president of the Institution of Diesel and Gas Turbine Engineers, agrees there is a massive range of applications, but only if the technology is cheap.“It comes down at the end of the day to commercial viability,” he says. Mike Langan, Exergyn’s head of product management, says the combination of no fuel costs and mechanical simplicity keeps costs down. He says it can generate electricity at £40 per MWh – cheaper than gas and coal. n
Body talk A new electronic tattoo listens to the sounds of the human body, including the heart and muscles. The sensor-laden skin patch could be used in medical monitoring, to detect irregular heartbeats, for example. Placed on the throat, it could also act as a humanmachine interface by picking up the vibrations of your voice, even in noisy conditions. In one demonstration, people used it to play Pac-Man by voice control (Science Advances, doi.org/bs62).
“The most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy” Whistleblower Edward Snowden on the UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill, which has now been passed by both Houses of Parliament and is expected to become law within weeks.
Raffi Maghdessian/getty
AI has learned to lip-read. A deep learning system designed by researchers at Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford was trained on some 5000 hours of BBC news videos, totalling 118,116 sentences and 807,375 words. It performed more than twice as well as a human lipreading professional on a previously unseen set of clips (arXiv: 1611.05358v1).
–Free energy: going spare– 26 | NewScientist | 26 November 2016
Jeong Lab, University of Colorado Boulder
Read my lips
ONE PER CENT
Hot water engine James Randerson explores turning waste hot water into electricity WASTE not, want not… An engine and cut emissions. that generates electricity from The Exergyn Drive exploits the waste hot water could reduce quirky properties of nitinol, an energy consumption and carbon alloy of nickel and titanium. You emissions for thousands of can bend nitinol out of shape, different businesses, from but when heated it undergoes a cargo shipping to data centres. phase transition and reverts to its So says Exergyn, a firm based original crystal lattice structure. in Dublin, Ireland, which plans This “shape memory” property to run the first industrial trials of makes nitinol desirable in a wide its technology next year. “The Exergyn Drive Globally, Exergyn estimates can produce electricity that the heat lost in waste hot more cheaply than gas water from industrial processes or coal” amounts to around twice the energy in Saudi Arabia’s annual oil and gas output. range of applications, including “There’s just so much waste hot medical devices and sunglasses. water in the world,” says Exergyn And unlike most materials, CEO Alan Healy. In most cases nitinol expands when cooled, companies are actually spending like water when it turns to ice. energy to cool it. These two properties drive the Cargo ships, for example, Exergyn engine. Inside the device, typically pump waste hot water a bundle of metre-long nitinol from the engine around the wires are attached to a piston. vessel to cool it down. And in data Cold and hot water are alternately centres, electricity-hungry fans flushed over the wires, making are used to dissipate the heat them rapidly expand and contract generated by rows of servers. by 4 centimetres, driving the Finding an efficient way to piston up and down. A hydraulic capture and use this wasted system converts that linear motion energy would both reduce costs into rotary motion, which in turn
drives a generator. The engine produces 10 kilowatts of electricity from around 200 kW of thermal energy in the hot water. That might not be hugely efficient, but this “free” energy would otherwise be wasted. And often, money and energy would be spent cooling the waste water. The company is now planning tests in 2017 at Dublin Airport and two landfill sites. The Exergyn technology will produce electricity on-site using water at 90 °C or less from a gas engine at the airport and from biogas generators at the landfills. John Blowes, a past president of the Institution of Diesel and Gas Turbine Engineers, agrees there is a massive range of applications, but only if the technology is cheap.“It comes down at the end of the day to commercial viability,” he says. Mike Langan, Exergyn’s head of product management, says the combination of no fuel costs and mechanical simplicity keeps costs down. He says it can generate electricity at £40 per MWh – cheaper than gas and coal. n
Body talk A new electronic tattoo listens to the sounds of the human body, including the heart and muscles. The sensor-laden skin patch could be used in medical monitoring, to detect irregular heartbeats, for example. Placed on the throat, it could also act as a humanmachine interface by picking up the vibrations of your voice, even in noisy conditions. In one demonstration, people used it to play Pac-Man by voice control (Science Advances, doi.org/bs62).
“The most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy” Whistleblower Edward Snowden on the UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill, which has now been passed by both Houses of Parliament and is expected to become law within weeks.
Raffi Maghdessian/getty
AI has learned to lip-read. A deep learning system designed by researchers at Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford was trained on some 5000 hours of BBC news videos, totalling 118,116 sentences and 807,375 words. It performed more than twice as well as a human lipreading professional on a previously unseen set of clips (arXiv: 1611.05358v1).
–Free energy: going spare– 26 | NewScientist | 26 November 2016
Jeong Lab, University of Colorado Boulder
Read my lips