The Eclectic Technologist

Solar thermal is an attractive renewable energy source. Like other solar energy sources, it works, but is often not economically viable compared with established sources, such as coal. With rising energy costs and environmental concerns, there is increased interest in solar today.

The design above is a modern, reflective parabolic dish from Stirling Energy Systems. The dish produces about 25 kW, enough for about 10 homes in the US. This video on YouTube has more details. This video shows a small scale Stirling engine operating on solar power, similar to the full scale dish. Based on data from a large installation, it looks like 4 of these large dishes pictured above can fit in one acre, so that’s 100 kW/acre. The United States consumes about 440 GigaWatts. Roughly 18 million of these units spread over 6875 square miles would satisfy the entire US electric power requirements. That’s about 6% of the land area of Arizona, one of the two states with high solar insolation. It could be built using only 5.7% of the Sonoran desert.

The US congress is currently debating an economic stimulus package of $150 billion. If all of this money was used to build a solar array and each collector could be installed for under $50000, the power output would be equivalent to 44 Hoover dams, or about 20% of US electric power consumption. At current market prices, such an array could pay for itself in under 4 years. After that, the array could yield as much as $38 billion per year in gross revenue.

Of course, transmission of this power from the deserts of the Southwest to where it’s needed is a challenge, but it’s something to think about.

In 1990, I was an engineer working at the Space Sciences Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. We were building a payload containing several scientific instruments designed to measure airglow in the upper atmosphere. The payload was to be mounted and flown on the Earth side of polar orbiting NOAA TIROS satellite.

Spacecraft design and development is somewhat unique. There is little margin for error, so lots and lots of testing is conducted to make sure everything works. Of course, this still doesn’t uncover all problems, as many spectacular spacecraft disasters have illustrated. I got involved in the project at about the mid point in development. Many of the major components were in fabrication and the flight software was already complete. There was little in terms of ground testing software, much of this testing was done by hand. This was not a large complex instrument, but it still required as long as three hours to fully test everything.

During the winter of 1990, there was a little down time. I had this crazy idea of automating most, if not all of the testing of our instrument. Armed with a wire wrap gun, an ISA bus prototype board, and Turbo C 2.0, I started working on the ground support interface board and software. The interface board connected the ground support equipment to an IBM PC/AT with 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. For testing automation, I developed a testing script language and compiler/runtime environment to execute test scripts.

Due to complications beyond our control, the experiment lost its ride on the particular NOAA satellite for which it was scheduled. The instrument, ground support equipment, and the PC/AT with all the software was packed up and placed in storage. The hope was that someday, another ride would come along and the instrument might be resurrected.

Last week, after nearly 17 years, I received an email from one of the remaining scientists on the project. It appears there is an opportunity to mount the instrument onto the International Space Station. It will be flown on a Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle and deployed on the Experiment Module Exposed Facility.

From what I was told, the instrument, ground support equipment and that old IBM PC/AT were brought out of storage and unpacked. They fired up the PC and surprisingly it booted up. The next day, when the PC was powered on again, the hard drive spun briefly, and then ground to a halt. It failed completely. Apparently, there was no possibility of recovery.

Fortunately, there were some 5 1/4 floppy disks lying around with some backups of some of the software. Oddly enough, I also kept copies of some of it also, as it was one of the first, significant projects I worked on. The floppies were still readable after all those years.

Finding a PC that could accept an ISA board was a minor challenge, and the original DOS had to be replaced with FreeDOS. Turbo C 2.01 is now freely available, which is a big help. It sounds crazy, but it just might work…

I recently ran across an interesting website that lists alcohol yields of various crops per acre. The results are quite interesting. Apparantly, one acre of Jeruselam Artichokes yields about enough alcohol each year for one car. Considering that grass is the largest irrigated crop in the United States, maybe it’s time we replaced some of that turf with artichokes?

TeslaMotors is developing an impressive electric car. It plays to the strengths of electric drive: high performance and low operating cost. It uses 1000 lbs of Lithium-Ion rechargable batteries to drive a single, 248 horsepower polyphase induction motor. If you read my article on power trains, it’s easy to see how the Tesla Roadster can accelerate from 0 to 60 MPH in 4 seconds. It uses a two speed transmission for higher speeds, but one gear is all you really need for everyday driving. The range is about 250 miles, which is perfectly adequate for local driving.

Of course, it’s not cheap. I’ve heard rumors of prices above $70,000. Hopefully, economies of scale will reduce prices in the near future. With a little luck, larger auto maker might be inspired to develop thier own electric vehicle designs at a lower cost. It’s just a matter of time.

An article in the August 2006 issue of Scientific American titled The Expert Mind offers some interesting data on how to become an expert in any field. In summary, it takes about 10 years of concerted effort. Experts are not born, they are made, or so the research suggests. There are plenty of examples, mostly from study of chess grandmasters. Apparently, grandmasters are not necessarily geniuses in any particular respect. Rather, they just put in their time and become good at it.

Of course, there are no guarantees, but at least it suggests that if you apply yourself, there is a strong possibility of becoming an expert. In my opinion, it’s a lot easier if you enjoy those 10 years. If not, it’s more like work and more likely you will give up too soon. An interesting corollary is that it’s theoretically possible to be an expert in more than one field. I like that.

Have you noticed that modern cars and trucks have complicated transmissions, but 100 year old steam locomotives don’t? Why do we need transmissions anyway? Isn’t there a better way to drive wheels? A short introduction to drive trains addresses these questions and suggests ideas for more efficient vehicles of the future.

In 1989, Pons and Fleischmann announced controversial research results called Cold fusion. During that time, I was finishing my physics degree at the University of Maryland. I was also working part time at the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, formerly the Laboratory for Plasma and Fusion Energy Studies. Needless to say, the faculty and staff at LPFE and the physics department were very interested. What followed next was one of the most provocative experiences I have had the fortune to witness.

Anyone familiar with Smalltalk or the work of Xerox PARC between 1970 and 1980 has heard of Alan Kay. Kay has to be one of the greatest minds and greatest contributors to modern technology in our time.

My recent interest in Smalltalk lead me to a video presentation by Alan Kay in 1987. That time seems like the plasticine era, just as Kay remarked about the 1960s. The video, “Doing with Images Makes Symbols”, highlights the developments of early CAD systems, origins of object oriented programming, human interface devices, and culminates with absolutely fantastic developments at Xerox PARC. Kays quips about the state of technology in 1987 underscores the monumental gap between research and commercialization, something that is just as true today.

I strongly encourage anyone with any interest in technology to watch this video. The streaming version is of low quality, so I would suggest downloading the entire 256 kb MPEG4 file and viewing offline. It’s about 120 MB and runs 40 minutes or so.

There is a second part to this video, which is slightly longer, and includes several examples of interdisciplinary learning applied to computer interface design. If you have every wanted to learn to play tennis, this is a quick introduction! Further, interviews with Alan Kay expose key ideas, such as the importance of the aesthetic in almost any field, particularly science and engineering.

After watching this video, I can’t help but wonder if Steve Jobs was heavily influenced by Alan Kay and his ideas. Clearly the aesthetic has been central to the Macintosh and more recently the wildly succesful iPod.

In second grade we had a model of the solar system, of course, it wasn’t to scale. One student asked which planet representent the Earth, I quickly pointed and said it was the third one from the Sun. Another student didn’t agree and confidently claimed it must be the biggest one because the Earth is so big.

It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to win this argument, so I suggested we ask the teacher. We explained each of our positions and asked for authoritative confirmation. The teacher looked bewildered, almost sad and said “I really don’t know”. I knew I was right because my brother and my father followed the space program closely in those days.

What was worse: no other student could identify the Earth, the teacher herself didn’t know, or that no one was willing to look it up in an established reference?