Author: Chris Gammell

Chris Gammell is an engineer who talks more than most other engineers. He also writes, makes videos and a couple podcasts. While analog electronics happen to be his primary interests, he also dablles in FPGAs and system level design.

Categories
Analog Electronics Renewable Energy Supply Chain

LED supply chain

http://www.edn.com/article/CA6571020.html?nid=2437&rid=2069959399

As LED lighting and nearly all aspects of energy saving and/or renewable energy come into focus in the real world, we need to keep an eye on the economics of it all. You know the big players are. Big attention means big money and as you can see, lots of people want a slice of the action.

A quick synopsis of the above article could be: LEDs don’t work on their own…people need to buy other stuff. I have already written about one such component, the LED driver, in the past few weeks. Other than touching on drivers, the article also mentions other aspects of LED design including heat management, logic control and LED internals. Each of these parts of the whole design will need to ramp production in order to introduce economies of scale on each part level. The most striking number from the above article is that for every dollar spent on a LED (in this case a HB LED, used in commercial and residential lighting), the user must also spend $2-5 on auxillary components. This means that as the use of LEDs increase, so shall the semiconductor interest in driving those LEDs.

Another sign of this is chip makers entering traditionally non-lucrative markets. National Semiconductor has recently added a power management line of silicon aimed at taming the fickle nature of solar panels. When Nat’l enters the fray, you know they have projected some serious growth. So while my optimism for the entire subject of solar power is restrained, things like the new solar chips and the LED articles mentioned above make me happy. Hopefully we’ll see more news like this soon.

Categories
Analog Electronics Life

My volunteer idea

I’ve been thinking a lot about learning lately. I’d say the amount I’m still learning at work has a good amount to do with it. But I’ve been brainstorming a charity I would like to start.

I would like to start a charity that goes around to schools and promotes science and engineering to lower and middle income schools.

Not because I’ve been reading about how the country will be hurt by less engineers coming out of our schools. To be completely honest, that would work in my favor because I would be more rare and therefore more valuable. But really I want others to experience engineering. I want others to be curious about the world. I want to inspire some kid that’s going to create the space shuttle that makes it to Mars.

At first I was thinking that my idea was original. It wasn’t. A lot of companies have some great programs in place for this sort of thing. But what drives me here is that most programs I have found are more localized. Some programs are national, but they aren’t educational programs so much as they are activities (as they should be, hands on is crucial). I was also thinking possibly this excitement could be generated in kids from books. But there are already these out there too, some more subtle than others. I even read some of these when I was a kid and perhaps this is why I became an engineer in the first place.

What I envision is a national network of engineers who are “dealt” out to schools to present to children in their classrooms. These should be hands on or at least exciting presentations, similar to a “career day” where kids’ parents come in and tell what they do. It needs to be more exciting though. Most importantly, the kids MUST realize why they need to learn certain things in school and how they apply in real life. I think back to all the things I learned and subsequently forgot because I thought it wasn’t going to be necessary in “real life”. I’m sure this has happened to everyone. But you need to plant that seed so kids get excited about learning the math and the science that we always hear about faltering, so they know what they have to do to reach an eventual goal of inventing something or helping people with science.

When I was thinking that a book might be the correct route, I began to outline the ideas I had for topics. I think they would be relevant as a framework for a volunteer speaking in front of a classroom. Here are some of those initial ideas:

  1. Why is great about engineering? What do engineers do?
    1. Example products are a great way to excite kids because it’s something tangible. If you show them the latest iPhone and tell them about all the different components inside and how they need to be made, kids will listen. If you tell them about how a bridge is made and how much weight they can support (preferably in units of #’s of elephants), they will listen. When you tell them that you can create an artificial limb for someone to walk again, they will listen. Stress all the different types of engineering and science and you will pique a lot of individual interests.
    2. Stress the fact that they can change the world.
    3. Sure, most engineers will tell you that there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t great about being an engineer or a scientist, but that’s not how you inspire people. You don’t tell a bunch of aspiring doctors how they’ll have to deal HMOs, do you? You don’t talk to aspiring lawyers about the boredom and monotony of reading legal cases for civil suits, do you? In this case, you tell them about designing and being creative and making things that will help the world. All the things that all of us aspire to do every day, even if we don’t get to. Extra points to the presenter who gives ideas to kids on how to inspire their creativity.
  2. What do you need to know to be an engineer?
    1. Math
      • This is probably one of the hardest subjects in school based solely on the fact that it is abstract. I remember the day that my calculus teacher started talking about a math theorem in terms of cars. Or the day I found out what a fourier transform really represented instead of the math you had to do in order to get a solution. Abstraction is something that is not learned until later in life and kids need reinforcement on why math is important. Hook them young and you’ll have a math fan for life (the other option is to force them to learn math at first and hope they appreciate it later…doesn’t work)
    2. Science
      • This is the obvious one and probably allows for the most demonstrations that will excite kids. It would also be a good opportunity to tie in the different types of engineering.
    3. Business
      • This is definitely something that engineers need but would really be a better way to work in other subjects that might not be thought of as necessary for aspiring scientists and engineers. Even English and history could be worked in as being necessary for writing and context. The idea would be to stress that all subjects are important in some way or another.
  3. Where can you learn more?
    1. Your parents/Your teachers/Your heroes
      • Stress good role models to kids. This is done in many avenues but cannot be done enough. Stop kids idolizing Pacman Jones, introduce them to Dean Kamen or Stephen Hawking. Make sure they know that they can learn a lot from their teachers and to utilize them any way possible.
    2. Wikipedia/Books/The internet
      • Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. It taught him something dangerous and then he was careless with it. Teaching kids to be curious is very important and stressing that they will need to teach themselves is even more important. Teaching oneself and doing useful research should be a class unto itself in college, let alone elementary/middle/high school.
    3. Each other
      • The most important thing that any aspiring scientist/engineer can do is to try something out themselves. Build a radio with a friend. Build a race car with a friend. Build a treehouse with a friend. Learn how to work well with others and don’t ever be afraid of failing. You will learn the most in your life from the things you don’t do right the first time.

Finally, in order to get this type of volunteer opportunity off the ground I think there would be some initial hurdles to get over:

  1. Finding volunteers
    • One of the problems with having engineers speak in front of kids is that…they’re engineers. Not so much the awkwardness factor (although I’m sure that could be a problem), but really the “having-a-day-job” factor. You’d have to ask engineers to take time out of their day to go speak at a school That could prove difficult.
    • Also, there would have to be a screening process, as bad as it sounds. A presentation that is boring in front of kids could have the opposite effect. Perhaps just a trial run for the volunteers to make sure they’re keeping kids engaged.
  2. Finding acceptance in schools
    • The target schools here would be middle to lower income. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how receptive they would be to this idea, but there would definitely need to be planning.
    • Another hurdle would be maintaining contact. Say a volunteer goes to speak to kids once a year, then all the schools in an area would be covered pretty quickly. There would need to be an on-going effort with schools to maintain a program.
  3. Finding funding
    • Everything costs money. And similar to the point made above, engineers have day jobs, so someone would have to coordinate everything. That means assistants/interns/whoever and office supplies cost money. There could be a nominal fee to bring these people into schools, but then that contradicts with the above idea of middle-low income schools that might not have the funding. Perhaps there could be a corporate pairing (“JFK middle school loves Analog Devices!” t-shirts?) or perhaps with other professional organizations.
  4. Finding time
    • This is more of a personal thing. Sure I’d love to start this charity/volunteer thing, but it’s going to take some time to hash out and start up. If you’d like to help, let me know.
Categories
Analog Electronics Renewable Energy

Creating (sorta) simple LED lighting for your home

An article about a new LED controller from Linear Technologies was the inspiration for this post. I decided upon seeing this article that it could be a good way to talk about a theoretical LED lighting scheme in your theoretical DC powered home.

One key I’ve learned to engineering is not trying to re-invent the wheel every time you start a project. In that spirit, I thought I would show case a new Linear Tech part that would fit well into an all DC powered home.

The basic idea of this circuit is to create a buck-boost converter, in order to pump more voltage into an array of power hungry (yet hopefully efficient) LEDs. Also there are other options on the chip to allow it to be even more versatile and act as a buck, boost, flyback or SEPIC, depending on setup and peripherals. Even though the listed applications are more for driving headlights and industrial applications (powering detection LEDs on an assembly line and then using a photo detector to determine changes), I believe this could work in a house wired with DC power in the walls. I believe a

Looking at the schematic on the EDN site, also directly linked here,  you can see that there are some external components that are required for this part, but are mostly in the realm of resistors for detecting shutdown currents or providing feedback to the circuit. A look at page 8 of the schematic shows just how complicated this circuit is and that you are probably saving yourself a good deal of trouble by using this instead of the individual components.

An added bonus for this new part is the dimmer control, with analog ratios of up to 10:1. That means that in our theoretical DC powered home of tomorrow (eat your heart out, Disney World!), we could wire in a simple dimmer with minimal cost, using an oscillator, a PWM generator, and a potentiometer built into a wall switch (and peripherals).  The dimmer control would also allow us to bring down the output current (via PWM_OUT) of the chip in order to save power.

The efficiency of this part can reach 94% in an inductive boost mode. Assuming there are no restrictions on some EMI emmitance issues and size of the parts, this could be a very good option for an LED lighting fixture in a home (with even simpler implementations also possible). Maybe one day we’ll see some wall fixtures with similar parts in them.

Categories
Analog Electronics Work

Modesty comes in bulk doses

I am not an analog engineer yet. But I’m learning how to be.

One of the things I love about my company is that they really allow for professional development. I will have the opportunity to go back to school and we have conferences on new technologies. Last week I was introduced to the another great opportunity, a meeting with the senior engineers of the company to just talk shop and bounce around ideas. Today we had another of our weekly meetings with each other and this time we had an outside vendor come in and present new product offerings. Here’s some of the things I learned:

  1. Analog engineers find favorite parts and stick to them
    • Say you’re a salesman. Do you think you’d be in a meeting and someone there would start gushing about the product you sold 10 years ago? How great it was? OK, say you’re a doctor. Do you hear other doctors talking about the great medicines and techniques that were used 10 years ago? No? Well, we do in analog engineering. Either by habit or price or whatever drives a man or woman to talk affectionately about an often-used piece of silicon, it’s kind of weird to hear it. Doubly so when you’re in a presentation for all the NEW stuff that is coming out and you expect the focus to be on that. To be fair, sometimes chip makers get it right one time and then can’t replicate it for a while. But that’s another blog post.
  2. The same point goes for books
    • I guess this point doesn’t really hold up when comparing analog designers to other professions. I’m sure doctors still read Grey’s Anatomy, Salesmen read Dale Carnegie and Priests still read the Bible. But there are some bibles in analog design too. In fact, that was the first meeting I mentioned above. We sat around talking about our favorite books. As someone who has just about no clue about everything, I’ve been grabbing at any knowledge I can get my hands on. I love books!
  3. If you used to work at a company and then come back as a vendor, watch out!
    • Yikes. I’ve seen some pretty rough treatment of vendors before, much worse than today actually (Semiconductor vendors REALLY get the shaft, that’s all I’ll say). But today I witnessed a vendor get hit from all sides. To be fair, I feel that a good deal of the treatment was because he used to work here and then became a vendor. This meant he had personal relationships with a lot of the engineers he was fielding questions from, but he still got some doozies. Makes me think twice about jumping into a field app position anytime soon (besides my cluelessness about it).
  4. There is actually some symbiosis between customers and vendors.
    • As I mention in point 3, I’ve seen some struggle between vendors and users. But today I saw some genuine attempts at bringing the needs of the customer back to the vendor, which gives me a warm professional fuzzy feeling. Plus I’ve heard they even deliver on some of their promises, another reason I’m glad I’m in this new sector (basically you had to be THE biggest player in the semiconductor market to really influence any change).
    • Another great thing is that I found out that some vendors offer free training to new guys like me. That is great because my job requires a little knowledge about a lot of things and then the ability to quickly acquire the remainder of any knowledge. Example: I am told a product isn’t working and it MIGHT be this or that part. Go. (That’s the point I start to scramble).
  5. Converse to the above point, analog engineers love asking for the moon.
    • Well, nothing is perfect, right? And in my experience, analog designers will ask for exactly what they want, even if it might never be possible. But if you don’t ask, you’ll never know, right? It reminds me of the phrase I use when I don’t get my way:
      • “All I want is everything I want right when I want it. Is that too much to ask?”
  6. I’ve mentioned it before, but I have a ton to learn
    • I wrote down no less than 6 things from that meeting that I had no clue what they were. That’s pretty crazy. I had a very general feeling about what they might be about (I actually found out some of them have applications in renewable energy), but I still have at least a good week of reading ahead of me (on top of my usual workload) to figure out what some of these things meant. When I came into this job thinking I’d be learning, I sure had it right.

So to reuse my blog headline, modesty does come in bulk doses when you’re an analog engineer, especially when you hang out with veterans. It’s kind of refreshing though, knowing that I have so much I can potentiall learn. I know it won’t get boring and I know the industry doesn’t plan on slowing down any time soon either. Bring it on.

Categories
Politics Renewable Energy Supply Chain

McCain, Gas Prices & the Enron Loophole – Keith Olbermann

I am definitely a fan of Keith Olbermann. There is no denying that he is more than a little left of center, but I feel that he is a bare-knuckled reporter first and foremost and that he will take it to just about any politician, including Obama. Also, I know it’s corny, but I like that he has adopted the Edward Murrow sign off (“Good night and good luck”) and I think that some of his blunt and thorough investigative reports have earned him the right to do so. He definitely gets a little more riled up though…

Anyway, I think this report that Olbermann gives (see link below) is pertinent to this blog because of the effect of gas prices on renewable energy. Aside from the fact that there really are some crook speculators out there (Ben Graham is rolling over in his grave), I have to wonder if this blog would even exist if the gas prices weren’t so high? Would America really care about the environment if our pocket books weren’t shouting at us? Would anyone really care about solar power other than the environmentalists who were investigating it in the first place? I think the answer to that is no. Americans would have happily gone about their world if gas prices stayed the same. There would still be some fringe interest about the environment and about generating cheap, renewable energy (eventually). But otherwise, we’d still be loving our SUVs here in America.

As I’ve written about before, renewable energy will require economies of scale. There’s no other way to really bring down the prices enough for anyone other than Hollywood celebs and Internet startup gurus to afford the power methods available today. And so even though they mention the banks coming in and hurting the consumers in this clip (as I also mention here), it might be a necessary step in the overall evolution of renewable energy.

To make a big impact in renewable energy we have to accept that it will have to be big business.

read more | digg story

Categories
Life Work

2 years!

Today is the 2 year anniversary of when I officially entered the workforce. Or as I told my friend today, 2 down, 43 to go. Still, it’s a pretty crazy feeling. A couple things have been going through my head as I think about it.

1. I have a really long way to go

This is pretty obvious given my above comment. But I’m not really looking forward to retirement at all. I like being active and now that I’ve found something I enjoy doing I’m looking forward to what the future has in store for me.

2. I have already changed careers

In the end, my work at Samsung was valuable, but it was not a great situation. I decided to change careers in order to escape work I did not enjoy doing and to not have to deal with unnecessary stress.

3. I have a TON to learn

I’ll be posting more about this later, but it is really humbling when you try talking electronics with engineers who have been in the business for 20+ years. This was a major choice in moving and changing jobs so I knew it was coming. Plus, I really want to learn more.

4. I quit when the quitting was good

Another future post (what? I’m busy, people!) will be about knowing when to quit in bad situations. As much as I miss my friends in Austin, the feel of Austin and the lovely weather, I would do it all again in a heart beat. Sometimes things are just right.

5. Things I’ve accomplished

Short answer: Not much. I could blame this on a lot of things, but really the only one that matters is myself. I did not accomplish much at Samsung other than increasing my knowledge of Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint; I did keep the fab running smoothly and there’s something to be said about that. But I didn’t really change the world at all and I will be working on that more in the near future.

6. I’ve been out of school for 2 years now

This might be the most sobering thought of all. I really still think of myself as a student (not necessarily a bad thing), especially when going to the movies. But there are some different priorities that go along with no longer being a student. I try to network more now. I keep an eye on professional journals and towards any other career opportunities (I’m still happy at Keithley, don’t worry).  I drink less cheap college beer (ok, I still do once in a while). It’s just a different mindset now and I don’t think it’ll change if/when I go back for my master’s.

So that’s about it. 2 years down. Feels weird and I do miss the people I started with at Samsung. But I’d say I’m better off now.

Categories
Renewable Energy Supply Chain

Freedom Tower Goes Green, Gets Fuel Cells

So normally I would not write about buildings going green. However, I really like Ecogeek.com and Inhabitat.com and I think that this story is pertinent to the thesis of my blog (analog design and renewable energy). Be sure to read the story as linked below.

Anyway, the thing I think is pertinent about adding “green” technology to a building the size and scope of the Freedom Tower is twofold. First, I think that the PR side of it all, by which I mean the publicity generated about renewable energy just by including it, is very relevant. As much as I read about this stuff every single day, I know that a good deal of people have NO clue about their own energy consumption or even that there are other options available. As mentioned in the article, their choice to include fuel cells instead of other readily available power sources such as solar and wind was an odd choice. However, the architects/builders of the new tower could have essentially glued a solar calculator to the top of the spire and said “Hey look, ‘Green’ technology”. As ridiculous as that sounds, I’m sure it still would have had a positive, if not minuscule, effect.

The other thing that is pertinent about adding some kind of renewable technology is my same argument about economies of scale. I have written before about the importance of increasing sales of end products in order to drive production and lower overall costs. I think this will be on of the largest hurdles to overall increases in renewable energy availability. Imagine that instead of buying the 12 400kW generators, they bought 500 solar cells. I would guess that the latter would have a more meaningful effect on the renewable energy market because it would require increases in production and would drive the supply chain. Higher quantities of input supplies to the process (in this case raw silicon and processing technology supplies such as process gases) would allow bulk buying and lower costs. It’s an iterative process and perhaps I’ll have my friend who is a supply chain manager write a guest post on here sometime. I think it’s also important to note here that renewable energy as a whole has an uphill battle because there are SO many technologies available out there that are continually vying for market share. I think over the long term the struggle will unfortunately continue, because there are a lot of good options but each has a hurdle in availability and plausibility in different regions.

For now, check out the links below and keep an eye on these technologies. I also saw a link through on Ecogeek about fuel cell technologies here. It is an interesting piece on the increases in technologies that will allow for fuel cells.

Kudos to the Freedom Tower. Looking forward to the day when NYC buildings start powering each other.

read more | digg story

Categories
Renewable Energy

Intel And IBM Get Solar Exposure

This is a very exciting time for renewable energy, as we all know. I wanted to re-post this story I saw on digg mostly because I’m always excited to see more people entering the market. And when the big name players enter the market, that’s even better. This is the economies of scale I mention in my article on powering a house with DC power.

Now let’s step back a minute here. $50 million dollars isn’t that much. I know that sounds absurd, but I used to work in a fab that cost $5B (maybe, could be more by the end). I am not familiar with the actual processing of solar cells, but I know that any kind of silicon is not cheap. But that’s why we need more and more big players to get in on it.

I think that in this case, Intel and Big Blue (IBM) are doing it somewhat selfishly and cautiously. Like I said, they’re really just dipping a toe in with the $50M, but maybe they will use the tech for some of their own power generation.

Overall though, I could not be happier to see some corporate conglomerates trying to take over and suck money from us consumers. The more people in the market and the more competition that exists, the lower the pricing. I say, in this case the more corporations, the better!!!

read more | digg story

Categories
Analog Electronics Renewable Energy

Can DC power an entire home?

AC power vs. DC power: Both are necessary in our everyday lives and switching between the two causes a great deal of strife in electronics. Why do we need both?

As some of you may or may not know, there was a long standing battle between the two types of power raging back in the 1880s between two giants. The proponents of this war knew that whoever won would determine the future of the power distribution in the United States and possibly the world. In the first corner was Thomas Edison and his company that would eventually become General Electric; Edison wanted the world to run on DC. In the other corner was Westinghouse Corporation, funded by George Westinghouse and led (intellectually) by Nikola Tesla. Westinghouse represented AC power and would be the eventual winner. You can read more about the battle HERE, but I thought it would be interesting to point out that this battle eventually became a political one. Edison even started fighting dirty, secretly funding the invention and use of the first electric chair powered by AC, in order to give some bad press.

AC of course won out over DC as the power distribution of choice, mainly because of the ability to have large generators in a central location and then transmit the power efficiently over power lines to homes and businesses. DC would have required local generators on every street or even every home, which was not possible nor economically viable at the time.

Hang on a second though…a DC generator on every home…sounds familiar…where have I heard about something like this before? Oh right, solar power. However, even more interesting than the fact that solar power produces DC power output is that any kind of storage will have to be in DC. So THAT means if you have any kind of renewable energy resource on your premises (wind, geothermal, any kind of generator which will have an AC output) and it’s not continually supplying power to your home, you will likely need to store it somewhere (assuming you are not selling power back to the power company, which is the case in some areas still and a must in the remote areas). Further, barring any possibility of storing AC power (a huge inductor?), you will need to store that power in DC. So let’s look at a theoretical wind turbine on a theoretical property:

The wind blows –> wind turbine spins –> motor in turbine creates AC power –> AC converted to DC –> DC stored in a battery –> DC converted back to AC when needed –> AC powers devices in a home –> (possibly) AC converted back to DC for use in consumer devices

That’s a lot of steps! Not only are there a multitude of steps to convert wind into air conditioning (heh, the electrical way…the natural way is opening the window), there are lots of places that you will be losing energy to inefficiencies. These occur in the power generation (motors have friction), the storage in the batteries (heat and losses due to chemical impurities in the wet cells), the AC to DC conversion and the DC to AC conversion (both processes lose energy to heat in the electronics). All told, it’s not hard to see why this is not the preferred method of powering ones’ home.

So now the real question: Can we take out some of these steps?

Other articles on this site will deal with improving efficiencies of each of these steps, but the simplest method for improving overall efficiency would be to remove one or more of those steps. The way I see it, one of these ways would be to convert a power scheme in a house. Let’s look at all the ways a DC power system in a house could be beneficial or detrimental to ones’ living situation:

Concerns about DC wall power

  1. Many devices have different voltages
    • This would be a definite issue. Have you ever had to power a guitar pedal board? Random question perhaps, but if you saw what the power strip looks like, you’d catch my drift. Every one of those little electronic devices is too small for a transformer, so they all have AC-DC converters which can power the device with a different required voltage. Now take this idea and expand it to all the doo-dads in your house. I would be willing to guess that there are at LEAST 5 different required DC voltages for all of the normal devices in a home.
  2. Converting devices
    • Conversions would be required from DC->DC instead of AC->DC. A possible solution would be to set up the wall sockets to have selectable DC output (perhaps the home runs on 100V DC and each socket can convert this down to 24V, 12V, 5V, 3V).
  3. Selling power back to the power supply company
    • One of the most popular notions in renewable energy today is the idea of selling your excess power back to the power company, hopefully at a decent rate. Then when your device is not outputting power, you simply switch to grid power and start buying it from the power company. This is great because it does not require battery systems. And while this exercise excludes that option (for people living in the middle of nowhere or with unaccommodating power companies), it would be nice to sell any excess power back to make a small profit.
  4. Economies of Scale
    • This is possibly one of the biggest problems that an all DC power system would face: No one does it yet! All parts would have to be custom made and you couldn’t just call an electrician to come out and fix your stuff.
    • This also means that you would have a tough time buying consumer goods. Nearly every device has an AC plug, because that’s what everybody has! Not to mention all of the internal components for AC conversion and occasional power filtering (some devices need very clean DC power). Let’s just say you couldn’t go buy a TV and plug it in…
    • Government regulation would also limit any kind of large scale implementation of DC power sockets. It is almost guaranteed that it would require government certifications on many levels to allow manufacturing large enough quantities to bring the cost down for Mr. John Q Everyman.
  5. Conversion to AC for certain devices
    • Motors are the first kind that come to mind. This is basically how Nikola Tesla got started onto AC, proving that it is much more efficient when using AC than DC AND that these motors do not rely on voltage level (DC motors’ speed can be controlled by the voltage applied). This would mean you would either have to convert your DC back to AC to run the vacuum cleaner or you would have to make sure that your DC could supply constant DC and the whopping currents that those kinds of devices use.
  6. Step up/down transforming
    • You know those big garbage can looking things that are attached to power line poles? Those are changing the ridiculously high voltages in the power lines (done for transmission efficiency) down to something that we can use in our houses. Further, these are VERY high efficiency devices. For power in general, you really can’t beat AC-AC conversion; the system proposed here would have to use transistors (note: not transformers) which will have some amount of heat loss associated with them. So even though we wouldn’t be using the AC power from the power company, we would be losing a critical tool in the electrician/electrical engineers’ arsenal, the transformer.
  7. Leakage currents and phantom power consumption
    • No transistor is perfect, they all let just a little bit of current through. The more components in a system or the higher voltage you run at, the more leakage you will tend to have (Ever wonder why electronic devices run out of batteries eventually, even if you don’t use them for a long time?). This would apply to any DC system too and when you don’t have the lights on or anything running, there’s still a chance that the power devices are leaking. This will cut into overall efficiency.

Benefits of using DC instead of AC:

  1. Higher efficiencies off of battery power
    • This point was discussed above, but is THE main point of the article and for going to all this trouble. The less you need to convert between AC and DC, the less energy will go to waste. And if you do need an AC power source, the inverter could be much smaller, in order to handle smaller loads or in order to sell power back to the power company (once the battery is fully charged)
  2. LED Lighting
    • Currently any LED fixture installed in homes requires an AC-DC converter. Using a DC wiring system throughout a home would allow easy installation of LED fixtures and elements (the LEDs themselves)
  3. No 60 Hz hum
    • I’m sure most of you know what this sounds like from a faulty light switch, an older device with poor power supplies or even by sticking a fork in the wall. The native frequency of power coming out of the wall is 60Hz in the US, but varies by region. Either way, this is something that I’ve had to deal with at my job and that all electronics designs have to deal with. With an all DC system there would be other issues such as power filtering and voltage stability… no hum though!
  4. Shrinking power supplies
    • As devices continue to get smaller, the power supplies are reaching a lower limit. 1.8V is currently the lower end of DC supplies for microchips. This allows for less power consumption, as is governed by the formula P = V² * f * C (where P = power, V = voltage, F = frequency and C = capacitance). Have you ever noticed how they stopped increasing the frequency of microchips past a certain point (~3.5 GHz)? Yeah, it was because they started getting so hot you could fry eggs on the processors. Plus mobile processors became much more prevalent. As more and more devices go towards these lower voltages, there will be less need for conversion (or alternately, more need for AC-DC converters if wall power remains as AC).

So the final question comes back to that posed by the giants of the 19th century: AC or DC power? Well, really the answer will be both, as history has shown. Perhaps over time we’ll see a shift back towards DC power as devices continue to shrink and manufacturers don’t want to include bulky transformers or as people hopefully begin producing their own power at home; but one thing that is for certain is this battle will continue raging for a long time and hopefully we’ll help renewable energy find it’s place.

I welcome any and all comments on this idea and if you know of something being developed similarly, please let me know!

“If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” ~Sir Isaac Newton

Categories
Life Work

Another new goal: My career

Disclaimer: I am not a hippie

You may say that I have been on the verge of it a few times, but no, I’m not. Hell, you even look at my music choices and some of my political choices, but no, I’m not. Not saying hippies are bad people, I just think they lack some action on their admittedly good ideas, and that’s what I’m going for with all this. I want to define actions I want to take for my career.

I think I’d really like to work on renewable energy longterm.

So why did this come about? First, as anyone who reads these days, renewable energy is a definite need in the future and there will be great interest in it in the future (even after gas prices go back down, as they’re bound to). This in and of itself is not a great reason to change career goals, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that others talking about it got me thinking about it.

Another reason was because of a recent experience I had. My friend Dave took a few people out on his boat on Lake Erie (not the most carbon-neutral experience, but a fun one for sure). As we were sitting on the water, fishing with the setting sun to our back, I had a great view of Cleveland and the Lake Erie shoreline staring back out at me. I scanned the skyline and what do I see? Probably the most disgusting yellow cloud I’ve ever seen, just hanging over the coal fired power plant on the shore. And as we rode around, spewing some of our own fumes into the air (sorry ’bout that, we’ll take the sailboat next time), I could see that these clouds were not contained to around the power plant. They were everywhere. It was a pretty disgusting site (the reason you can’t see them usually is because of the angle of the sunlight and/or proximity to the lake).

The last reason (that I could think of) was when I almost had an anxiety attack the other day in a WalMart. I was there for a fishing license so I could go on the aforementioned boat and fish; as I stood in a line waiting to talk to a customer representative, I looked out over the immense store that they had just constructed. The shelves upon shelves and rows upon rows seem to go on forever. I don’t know if this was a particularly large WalMart in comparison to their other stores, but this one struck me as being gigantic. And I didn’t quite care about the size of the store (though I did think of the HVAC required for it) so much as all the crap on the shelves they were selling. The unspeakable numbers of trinkets and refined sugars that lay in wait, after their long journey from China where they may have been constructed by tiny hands or old hands or no hands at all. And before that, they may have been just oil in the ground, or sugar growing in the field. The effect it had on me is hard to describe, but it hit me pretty hard; I definitely teared up a little (not in the good way) and had a hard time breathing. I’m not one to stand on a soap box about large corporations, and that’s not what I’ll be doing here, but it made me think about a lot of world issues of sustainability and for that I’m grateful.

So why renewable energy?

As selfish as it may seem, I think it would fulfill a lot of my career goals.

  1. The opportunity for patents (a must-have personal career goal)
  2. Ability to positively affect the world (A long term personal goal too–who doesn’t want to be in the history books?)
  3. High likelihood of having my own company (even though this has no hope of me having reasonable hour)
  4. Working with intricate electronics

So despite my hope to work on this kind of work some day, there’s a long way to go. I know there are already a great deal of solutions out there, but really I would want to work with these people, hopefully from wherever I choose (another life goal). So, why do I think this could work for me?

  1. Background in test and measurement, a sure need for any electronics involving power storage and monitoring
  2. Possible association and/or development around Great Lakes Institute for Energy Innovation. This is an affiliate with my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University (Go Spartans!) and I think they will get funding and will be looking for entrepreneurs and possible grad students to work on this type of thing (I’m looking to go back to school eventually).
  3. Background in DSP, a possible way to improve monitoring capabilities and storage efficiencies
  4. Engineering and business mindset, as opposed to a scientist. Nothing wrong with scientists, just that sometimes the ability to get a product to market requires a different skillset. Profit is not the all important factor here (though it helps maintain a business model); instead, reaching the maximum amount of people at a reasonable cost is the most important factor (to create economies of scale)

The way I see it, there are a few options available to me in ways of working on renewable energy, some more plausible than others.

  1. Solar – There’s not a lot in NE Ohio, but there’s enough, apparently
  2. Wind – Anyone who has walked around Cleveland in the winter can tell you about the wind. The lake seems like a really great source of wind too, possibly the greatest energy resource in the NE.
  3. Biomass – This I would not be able to work on directly, seeing as my chemistry isn’t that great, but I think I could work out some devices to help monitor and improve efficiencies.
  4. Cyanobacteria – Again, biology is a weakness of mine, but I have a good friend considering doing a post doc in something in this field. Again, I’d be more of a measurements/instruments kind of designer, but whatever I can do, I will. And yes, that’d be a long way off, but he’s one of the few I’d consider starting a business with.

And now the most difficult thing, the first steps. Babies always start bolting around the living room when they figure out those first couple wobbly steps, and my development as an engineer interested in renewable energy will be similar I hope. I’d like to start with a small scale solar project. I think there are enough resources online and in print media to get this going, not to mention it won’t hit my wallet as hard as some of these projects can. I think a good first project would involve:

a.) Single solar panel
b.) Deep cycle battery
c.) Create a charging monitor device and/or an inverter
d.) Power small devices such as cell phone charger, etc.

This way I can find some of the beginner issues that would affect any new designs. After that I think I would like to move into more intricate re-designs of some of the components and begin constructing larger systems. I would also be interested in constructing a turbine made from commercial parts, as I have seen similar projects online similar to this idea.

My long term goals for sustainable, renewable energy would be a little bit selfish and hopefully a lot of bit helpful for others. I believe that you need to find issues by trying out products on yourself before you try and send them out to the market place. The first thing I think I would need to do is to create a sustainable living situation in NE Ohio. This would include solar panels on my house (still need to get one of those), efficient insulation and HVAC system throughout the house, a turbine in the yard with a self made battery storage system on my property AND have my electricity tied into the grid. Also, I would have a compost pit (hey, you gotta start somewhere). And the real long term goal would be to possibly break off and start a company, either part time or full time, and create products that would help the entire world become a better place to live.

Hey, I know that my goals are lofty…but I do not think they are unattainable. More importantly, I know that a lot of my conservation goals can start a lot sooner with improving efficiencies in my life and using solutions that are already in place. I hope that I will eventually be able to work on these life-altering energy methods and if you’re interested, I hope you’ll ask to help.

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler” ~Einstein