Case study: Data Center located in Colombia. Equipment that is responsible for expelling air into the environment: Chiller Liebert HPC-M and EC-FAN fans- ECblue—model C116. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-74141-w
A pair of electrical engineers at Distance University of Madrid, working with a colleague from Mision Critica-Data Center, ZFB Technology Services, in Columbia, has developed a methodology for generating electricity from man-made wind sources using small turbines.
In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, Isabel Gil-García, Ana Fernández-Guillamón, and Álvaro Montes-Torres describe their methodology and outline how they used it to generate electricity from wasted wind generated by chilling machines at a data center in Columbia.
Prior research has suggested that there are many ways to capture some of the wind energy that is wasted by many technologies. Air moving across a ship or train, for example, or wind created by fans used on HVAC cooling systems. In this new study, the research team has developed a general methodology for capturing some of the energy typically lost by such technologies.
The new methodology starts with identifying a possible man-made resource, such as a ship, truck, train, or fan used for general cooling. The second step involves investigating how much of the resource is being wasted. In the case of wind applications, an anemometer can be used to test wind speeds, which can be used to determine the amount of wind being generated, and how much of it is available for use.
The next step is to estimate the amount of electrical energy that can likely be harvested from such a resource to ensure that it is worth the effort. The final step is selecting the technology that can be used to capture the wasted wind—typically a turbine. Once a plan is in place, an initial test can be conducted.
To demonstrate their methodology, the research team identified a possible source as wind emanating from cooling devices used to keep computers used in a data center in Columbia from overheating. The site featured three chillers, each with eight fans. The fans operated at 480 V and ran at 900 rpm.
The researchers chose to use Tesup V7 wind turbines to capture the wasted wind because of their small and lightweight features. They mounted six of them above the fans and were able to produce 513.82 MWh annually. After deducting the energy consumed by the fans, the researchers found that adding the turbines reduced net electricity by 467.6 MWh annually.
More information:
Isabel C. Gil-García et al, Innovation in clean energy from man-made wind and small-wind generation, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-74141-w
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Small turbines can capture wasted energy and generate electricity from man-made wind sources (2024, October 9)
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Bends of the Koyukuk River, photographed by airplane in March of 2024. The Koyukuk River is frozen from October to May of each year. Credit: Emily Geyman
Permafrost, the thick layer of perennially frozen ground that covers much of the Arctic, slows down the migration of Arctic rivers, according to a new Caltech study. River migration is a common process in which a river’s path meanders over time due to erosion of the riverbanks. This rerouting, which can also occur in sudden floods, poses a threat for many communities that live along and depend on rivers. The findings also have implications for how the Arctic region will be impacted by a warming climate as permafrost thaws over time.
The research was conducted in the Caltech laboratory of Michael Lamb, professor of geology, and is described in a paper appearing in the journal Nature.
Led by graduate student Emily Geyman, the study focused on the Koyukuk River, a large tributary of the Yukon River that winds for hundreds of miles through interior Alaska. There was debate within the scientific community about whether the frozen soil along the riverbanks serves to fortify the banks against erosion or to promote it.
“Large rivers like the Yukon or the Amazon can move tens to hundreds of feet per year,” Geyman says. “Arctic rivers in particular differ from temperate rivers because they need to thaw the material of their banks before they can pick that material up and move it.”
Due to climate change, permafrost is slowly thawing over decades. But a river can experience drastic natural changes within a single year, with flow conditions changing from very cold and fast in early spring to warm and slow a few months later. Geyman and her collaborators leveraged these major changes that take place within a single season to gain a glimpse into how the rivers will behave in response to climate change decades or centuries into the future.
In spring, the Koyukuk River swells in volume from snowmelt, flowing with fast, cold water. For more temperate rivers, a fast flow means more erosion. But in the Arctic, the temperature of the water matters—cold water is unable to thaw the frozen banks in order to migrate.
Representative field photos of the Koyukuk River near Huslia (65.689° N, 156.381° W). a, Scroll bars are arcuate traces of the river’s former position recorded in the floodplain landscape. b, The inner bend of a channel (point bar) is accretionary, whereas its outer bend (cut bank) is erosional. c, A zoom-in on an erosional permafrost cut bank. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07978-w
In the new study, Geyman and her collaborators used satellite imagery of the Koyukuk over the past several years and developed a technique to decode high-resolution changes from the images. The team hypothesized that if permafrost was slowing the river’s migration, they should only see migration later in the summer when the river water has warmed up. Their hypothesis matched with the satellite data, suggesting that permafrost does, in fact, slow down river migration.
Next, the team compared sections of the river that flow through permafrost with those that do not. The Koyukuk is special because it traverses a patchwork of both permafrost and unfrozen ground. The team traveled to the Arctic to map the erosion on various bends of the river and found that sections without permafrost migrated twice as fast as analogous riverbends through permafrost terrain.
The research is part of a larger effort to understand the dynamics of rivers and how they transport carbon, nutrients, and other materials trapped in the soil.
“River migration has implications for local communities and infrastructure, and also for the Arctic environment,” Lamb says. “About 1,500 gigatons of carbon are stored in the frozen permafrost—about twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere, for comparison. There is also mercury frozen in the soil that could be liberated into rivers as permafrost thaws. We are, ultimately, trying to understand what happens to these elements in the context of river erosion.”
The work was a collaboration with local Alaska Native communities, in particular from the town of Huslia.
“It’s been an honor working with Caltech and that they selected our little community to measure permafrost thaw,” says Carl Burgett, Chief of Huslia. “With the thawing and northern geotechnical timelines, we are facing a great threat of losing at least a third of our community within a short time period. With the new data we collected, hopefully a relocation plan can be funded for our community, along with much needed infrastructure.”
More information:
Emily C. Geyman et al, Permafrost slows Arctic riverbank erosion, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07978-w
Citation:
Arctic river erosion linked to permafrost thaw (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-arctic-river-erosion-linked-permafrost.html
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The flight paths of individual moths were tracked using radar. On the left a large yellow underwing (Noctua pronuba) with a transponder. Credit: Jacqueline Degen/University of Würzburg
Light pollution is more serious than expected: Moths not only lose their orientation directly under street lamps. Their flight behavior is also disturbed outside the cone of light.
The increasing use of artificial light at night is one of the most dramatic man-made changes on earth. Streetlights and illuminated buildings are significantly changing the environment for nocturnal animals.
Scientists have identified light pollution as one of the causes of the sharp decline in insects in recent years: many nocturnal insects fly to artificial light sources and circle around them incessantly. There they become easy prey for bats and other predators or eventually fall to the ground exhausted and die.
Moths are one group of nocturnal insects that are in significant decline. Their disappearance is also problematic because they play a key role in food webs and in the pollination of plants.
A new study now shows that the behavior of moths changes not only in the cone of light from street lamps, but also outside the illuminated area. The experiments were carried out by a group from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, in cooperation with researchers from Berlin and Providence (U.S.). The results have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Using radar tracking, we found that the orientation of moths is also disturbed outside the cone of light: the flight paths of the three species of hawkmoths and one species of lappet moths, for which we were even able to demonstrate a barrier effect from streetlights, were significantly more curvy than normal,” says Dr. Jacqueline Degen, head of a junior research group at the JMU Biocentre.
“Surprisingly, we had to reject our basic assumption that most individuals would fly to one of the streetlights,” explains the Würzburg researcher. This only applied to 4% of the individuals studied: “This suggests that the effects of light pollution are not limited to direct attraction to light sources, but are much more far-reaching and complex than previously assumed.”
Flight tracking using a radar system near Marburg
The experiments took place at a radar system in Großseelheim near Marburg in Germany. The harmonic radar is currently the only radar system that can track small insects over several hundred meters. The research group observed the flight behavior of a total of 95 moths up to 1 kilometer away from the release point, which was surrounded by a total of six street lamps at a distance of 85 meters.
In order to record the insects by radar, a transponder had to be attached to each individual moth. This small antenna is 10.5 milligrams light and 12 millimeters long. It does not change the flight behavior of the moths in any way—the researchers had previously clarified this in elaborate control experiments.
Interaction with the moon
What also emerged from the experiments is there is an interaction between the disorientation of the moths caused by artificial light and the moon. This depends on whether the moon is above or below the horizon.
“We don’t yet have a precise understanding of this interaction,” says Degen. But this is likely to change in the course of further research.
More information:
Jacqueline Degen et al, Shedding light with harmonic radar: Unveiling the hidden impacts of streetlights on moth flight behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401215121
Citation:
Light pollution disturbs moths—even in the dark, study shows (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-pollution-disturbs-moths-dark.html
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Maps of average household energy burden between 2015 and 2020 and change over the period in every census tract in the contiguous United States. (A) Estimates of average energy burden using 2015 and 2020 US Census Bureau’s ACS data in the machine learning model developed. Shades of green represent energy burdens between 0 and 6%. Shades of yellow to yellow-orange represent energy burdens between 6 and 10%. Shades of red represent energy burdens from 10 to 15% or greater. Darker shades indicate higher estimated average energy burdens. Gray areas indicate census tracts with not applicable (N/A) values. Credit: Batlle et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eadp8183 (2024)
A growing portion of Americans who are struggling to pay for their household energy live in the South and Southwest, reflecting a climate-driven shift away from heating needs and toward air conditioning use, an MIT study finds.
The newly published research also reveals that a major U.S. federal program that provides energy subsidies to households, by assigning block grants to states, does not yet fully match these recent trends.
The work evaluates the “energy burden” on households, which reflects the percentage of income needed to pay for energy necessities, from 2015 to 2020. Households with an energy burden greater than 6% of income are considered to be in “energy poverty.”
With climate change, rising temperatures are expected to add financial stress in the South, where air conditioning is increasingly needed. Meanwhile, milder winters are expected to reduce heating costs in some colder regions.
“From 2015 to 2020, there is an increase in burden generally, and you do also see this southern shift,” says Christopher Knittel, an MIT energy economist and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. About federal aid, he adds, “When you compare the distribution of the energy burden to where the money is going, it’s not aligned too well.”
The paper, “U.S. federal resource allocations are inconsistent with concentrations of energy poverty,” was published in Science Advances.
The authors are Carlos Batlle, a professor at Comillas University in Spain and a senior lecturer with the MIT Energy Initiative; Peter Heller SM, a recent graduate of the MIT Technology and Policy Program; Knittel, the George P. Shultz, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT; and Tim Schittekatte, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan.
A scorching decade
The study, which grew out of graduate research that Heller conducted at MIT, deploys a machine-learning estimation technique that the scholars applied to U.S. energy use data.
Specifically, the researchers took a sample of about 20,000 households from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey, which includes a wide variety of demographic characteristics about residents, along with building-type and geographic information.
Then, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data for 2015 and 2020, the research team estimated the average household energy burden for every census tract in the lower 48 states—73,057 in 2015, and 84,414 in 2020.
That allowed the researchers to chart the changes in energy burden in recent years, including the shift toward a greater energy burden in southern states. In 2015, Maine, Mississippi, Arkansas, Vermont, and Alabama were the five states (ranked in descending order) with the highest energy burden across census bureau tracts.
In 2020, that had shifted somewhat, with Maine and Vermont dropping on the list and southern states increasingly having a larger energy burden. That year, the top five states in descending order were Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia, and Maine.
The data also reflect an urban-rural shift. In 2015, 23% of the census tracts where the average household is living in energy poverty were urban. That figure shrank to 14% by 2020.
All told, the data are consistent with the picture of a warming world, in which milder winters in the North, Northwest, and Mountain West require less heating fuel, while more extreme summer temperatures in the South require more air conditioning.
“Who’s going to be harmed most from climate change?” asks Knittel. “In the U.S., not surprisingly, it’s going to be the southern part of the U.S. And our study is confirming that, but also suggesting it’s the southern part of the U.S that’s least able to respond. If you’re already burdened, the burden’s growing.”
An evolution for LIHEAP?
In addition to identifying the shift in energy needs during the last decade, the study also illuminates a longer-term change in U.S. household energy needs, dating back to the 1980s. The researchers compared the present-day geography of the U.S. energy burden to the help currently provided by the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which dates to 1981.
Federal aid for energy needs actually predates LIHEAP, but the current program was introduced in 1981, then updated in 1984 to include cooling needs such as air conditioning. When the formula was updated in 1984, two “hold harmless” clauses were also adopted, guaranteeing states a minimum amount of funding.
Still, LIHEAP’s parameters also predate the rise of temperatures over the last 40 years, and the current study shows that, compared to the current landscape of energy poverty, LIHEAP distributes relatively less of its funding to southern and southwestern states.
“The way Congress uses formulas set in the 1980s keeps funding distributions nearly the same as it was in the 1980s,” Heller observes. “Our paper illustrates the shift in need that has occurred over the decades since then.”
Currently, it would take a fourfold increase in LIHEAP to ensure that no U.S. household experiences energy poverty. But the researchers tested out a new funding design, which would help the worst-off households first, nationally, ensuring that no household would have an energy burden of greater than 20.3%.
“We think that’s probably the most equitable way to allocate the money, and by doing that, you now have a different amount of money that should go to each state, so that no one state is worse off than the others,” Knittel says.
And while the new distribution concept would require a certain amount of subsidy reallocation among states, it would be with the goal of helping all households avoid a certain level of energy poverty, across the country, at a time of changing climate, warming weather, and shifting energy needs in the U.S.
“We can optimize where we spend the money, and that optimization approach is an important thing to think about,” Knittel says.
This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.
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The changing geography of ‘energy poverty’: Study shows homes in the South and Southwest could use more aid (2024, October 9)
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Attach-and-release octopus schematic and underwater manipulation demonstration of the octopus-inspired switchable adhesive on irregular surfaces. Credit: Chanhong Lee and Michael Bartlett for Virginia Tech.
Using mechanisms inspired by nature to create new technological innovations is a signature of one Virginia Tech research team. The group led by Associate Professor Michael Bartlett has created an octopus-inspired adhesive, inspired by the shape of octopus suckers, that can quickly grab and controllably release challenging underwater objects.
Having the ability to grab and release these underwater objects like heavy rocks, small shells, and soft beads, and other debris could be a powerful tool for underwater salvage and even rescue operations. Their findings have been published in Advanced Science.
This work was performed with undergraduate researchers Austin Via, Aldo Heredia, and Daniel Adjei from Virginia Tech. Graduate Research Assistant Chanhong Lee was first author on the paper.
“I am fascinated with how an octopus in one moment can hold something strongly, then release it instantly. It does this underwater, on objects that are rough, curved, and irregular—that is quite a feat,” Bartlett said.
Credit: Chanhong Lee and Michael Bartlett for Virginia Tech
Getting a grip underwater
To overcome this longstanding challenge, Bartlett and his team looked to the shape of the octopus. Specifically, they looked at the outer structure of the octopus’s sucker, called the infundibulum. This inspired the researchers to create an adhesive that utilizes an elastic, curved stalk with an active, deformable membrane that changes shape for multi-surface adhesion.
Gradute student Chanhong Lee tests the octopus-inspired sucker in the lab. Credit: Alex Parrish for Virginia Tech.
The curved stalk attaches to large-scale curvatures while increasing adaptability to small-scale roughness. These mechanisms work in synergy to improve adhesion across multiple length scales.
This resulted in octopus-inspired adhesives that are 1,000 times stronger when activated compared to the easy release state. Importantly, this switch occurs within a fraction of a second, about 30 milliseconds. The octopus-inspired adhesives now achieve high attachment strength on diverse surfaces, including rough, curved, and irregular objects as well as in different fluids. With this new tool, a diver could hold a slippery object without applying excessive squeezing, also being able to snatch it quickly with rapid switching.
Grip and release of challenging underwater objects
Because octopus suckers are made of living tissue, they warp, expand and contract to match the job they are approaching. This gives the animal not only a stronger grip, but also a versatility to adapt its hold as it finds objects that are smooth or rough, angular or flat.
With the new octopus-inspired adhesive, research team members can pick up, hold, and release a wide range of challenging underwater objects, including soft and rigid materials that are flat, rough, and even curved.
This capability was demonstrated by constructing an underwater cairn, a carefully constructed pile of underwater rocks. Here, the rocks have various sizes, shapes, and surface roughness and must be picked up but also precisely released to keep the structure balanced. At the same time, they can also grab and release soft, jelly-like beads with ease.
The octopus-inspired switchable adhesive can attach to and hold irregular-shaped objects over an extended duration. This is demonstrated with a rock (452 g) that was held for over 7 days underwater and then released on-demand when desired. Credit: Chanhong Lee and Michael Bartlett for Virginia Tech.
“These types of manipulations are performed by an octopus as they arrange objects around their den,” said Lee. “This demonstration highlights the ability of the octopus-inspired adhesive to precisely manipulate difficult underwater objects.”
The materials also show reliable attachment over multiple cycles and over an extended period of time. In one experiment, the attachment force stayed constant over 100 cycles. In another test, the team held a rough, curved rock for more than seven days underwater, then released it on demand. Particularly in salvage applications where holding an object over an extended period of time, this could be critical.
Gripping like an octopus
Bartlett previously created Octa-Glove, published in Science Advances. Octa-Glove has octopus-inspired adhesives equipped with LIDAR sensors that detected objects nearby, attaching to the object with a strong but gentle bond without applying excessive force. After capture, the suckers can be disengaged on demand, releasing the captured object.
The glove could be a valuable tool for rescue divers, underwater archaeologists, user-assisted technologies, and in health care or other similar work that involves the need to have a firm grip on wet or underwater objects. This recently published research could increase the capacity of the glove, making the grip even stronger.
“We hope to utilize our new adhesive design to further improve Octa-Glove,” Bartlett said. “Underwater environments present a long list of challenges, and this advance gets us over another hurdle. We’re now closer than ever to replicating the incredible ability of an octopus to grip and manipulate objects with precision, opening up new possibilities for exploration and manipulation of wet or underwater environments.”
More information:
Chanhong Lee et al, Octopus‐Inspired Adhesives with Switchable Attachment to Challenging Underwater Surfaces, Advanced Science (2024). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202407588
Citation:
Octopus-inspired adhesive shows promise for underwater salvage operations (2024, October 9)
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