http://marketclues.blogspot.com/2013/04 ... t.html?m=1
Monday, April 01, 2013
Robert A. Heinlein Got Energy Right
In an uncanny way, speculative fiction author Robert A. Heinlein really nailed the energy picture when he wrote the following in his novel Friday. The main character (named Friday) was tasked with studying the Shipstone Corporation, which had become an all-powerful energy corporation by creating a product which could store vast amounts of electrical energy. That corporation wiped out all of the traditional energy companies and achieved not only global dominance, but also dominance across the solar system.
In this excerpt, Heinlein explains what so many people miss about energy:
Prometheus, a Brief Biography and Short Account of the Unparalleled Discoveries of Daniel Thomas Shipstone, BS., MA., Ph.D., LL.D., L.H.D., and of the Benevolent System He Founded.
—thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.
Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.
With the encouragement of his devoted wife Muriel (nee Greentree), who went back to work to keep food on the table, young Shipstone resigned from General Atomics and became the most American of myth-heroes, the basement inventor. Seven frustrating and weary years later he had fabricated the first Shipstone by hand. He had found—
What he had found was a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker." What he had achieved was the utter destruction of the biggest industry (aside from organized religion) of the western world.
A man far ahead of his time.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired. ... light/amp/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
DEVIN POWELL, SCIENCE NEWS SCIENCE 04.20.11 11:00 AM
NEW MATERIALS MAY ALLOW ONE-WAY LIGHT
Normally, a glass window doesn’t care where a ray of light came from. But special kinds of glass or plastic could be a bit pickier.
Nonlinear materials could distinguish between two rays of light coming from opposite directions, say two Italian physicists. Blocking a ray from one direction and allowing in a ray from the other could be useful for making a one-way street for light.
Textbook optics prohibits this kind of directional discrimination. Everyday linear materials are governed by the reciprocity theorem, which says that a beam of light coming from the left will pass through and reflect off a material in the same way as a beam of light coming from the right.
But nonlinear materials, which can change as light passes through them, play by different rules.
“Without nonlinearity this asymmetry would not be possible,” says Giulio Casati, a physicist at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy.
A textbook pendulum, for instance, swings with a steady frequency that can be calculated from equations. But a nonlinear pendulum’s frequency changes over time in a way that can be worked out only with a computer.
Casati mathematically modeled the behavior of light passing through two layers of nonlinear material. The light changes the properties of the materials as it passes through, which in turn changes the behavior of light in complex ways.
Thanks to this back-and-forth dance, the frequency of light that can pass through these materials depends on the direction of the light, he reports in the April 22 Physical Review Letters.
“Other people have used nonlinearity, but they use it in a different way,” says Panayotis Kevrekidis, a mathematical physicist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who wasn’t involved in the research.
Previous attempts to break down the reversibility of light used photonic crystals. Those materials can only block a portion of the light that has been boosted to twice its original frequency.
Casati’s initial simulations describe a way to transmit about 80 percent of the light traveling in one direction while blocking about 70 percent of the light coming from the opposite direction.
This selectivity could be useful for making wave diodes. Just as a traditional diode allows electrical current to flow only one direction in a piece of electronics, a wave diode could guide the flow of light in quantum or optical computing.
“This simple model may also apply to more general situations, like acoustics or different kinds of waves,” says Stefano Lepri, a physicist at the Italian National Research Council Institute for Complex Systems in Florence and a coauthor of the study. Materials that respond to sound waves nonlinearly could, he suggests, be useful for one-directional soundproofing.
Parabolic trough Edit
Main article: Parabolic trough
Parabolic trough solar systems have been determined to be the most cost effective large systems[citation needed], and in July 2008 New Mexico's utilities combined to release an RFP for a parabolic trough solar system to generate from 211,000 and 375,000 megawatt-hours (MW·h) per year by 2012.[4][5] New Mexico generated 514 MW·h from solar power in 2006, and 1,760 in 2007.[6]
A parabolic trough is a type of solar thermal collector that is straight in one dimension and curved as a parabola in the other two, lined with a polished metal mirror. The energy of sunlight which enters the mirror parallel to its plane of symmetry is focused along the focal line, where objects are positioned that are intended to be heated. For example, food may be placed at the focal line of a trough, which causes the food to be cooked when the trough is aimed so the Sun is in its plane of symmetry. Further information on the use of parabolic troughs for cooking can be found in the article about solar cookers.
For other purposes, there is often a tube, frequently a Dewar tube, which runs the length of the trough at its focal line. The mirror is oriented so that sunlight which it reflects is concentrated on the tube, which contains a fluid which is heated to a high temperature by the energy of the sunlight. The hot fluid can be used for many purposes. Often, it is piped to a heat engine, which uses the heat energy to drive machinery or to generate electricity. This solar energy collector is the most common and best known type of parabolic trough. The paragraphs below therefore concentrate on this type.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/arts/reub ... da-photos/
Photographer captures eerie beauty of Nevada solar power plant
By Matthew Knight, CNN
Updated 5:59 AM ET, Fri November 11, 2016
...
Located a few miles northwest of Tonopah, The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project covers 1,600 acres of Nevada desert.
With concentric circles of heliostats surrounding a central concrete tower, the concentrated solar power plant can generate an estimated 500,000 MWh per year.
...
i did not see til today.