TECHNOLOGY SUPPLY

Smart Renewable Energy Microgrid A small team of enthusiastic and adventurous engineers at FluxGen Engineering technologies has come up with a solution to electrify houses in remote rural areas  that are not directly connected to the electricity board power grid. Read on to know more. Microgrid is basically a small-scale power supply network that is designed to provide power for a small community. It can-not be used for high-power consuming devices but can be used as an alternative approach to integrate small-scale distributed energy resources into low-voltage electricity systems. Enabling local power generation, it comprises various small power generating sources that make it highly fexible and efficient. Basically, the solution aims to electrify houses that are not directly connected to the electricity board power grid due to their remoteness. To be precise, “We have integrated existing hardware components in the market with a powerful embedded system. The setup forms an electric...

World's thinnest substance graphene 'will power the next generation of computers'   Today, most information is transmitted by light – for example in optical fibrers. Computer chips, however, work electronically. Somewhere between the optical data highway and the electronic chips, photons have to be converted into electrons using light-detectors. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have now managed to combine a graphene photodetector with a standard silicon chip. It can transform light of all important frequencies used in telecommunications into electrical signals. The scientific results have now been published in the journal “Nature Photonics.” Computing power made of carbon? Both academia and the industry have high hopes for graphene. The material, which consists of a single layer of hexagonally arranged carbon atoms, has extraordinary properties. Two years ago, the team around Thomas Müller (Institute of Photonics, Vienna University of Technol...

Industrial Processes Call for Customized Approaches to Wastewater. Water is a mission-critical resource for industrial firms, and wastewater treatment makes up an important component of many company’s water-management strategy. Increasing water scarcity and stress, along with ever-stricter government regulation, compel industrial firms to seek out ever-more-efficient systems for treating their wastewater. How do manufacturing and industrial firms treat their wastewater? Although we’re discussing industrial wastewater treatment here, the best place to start is describing conventional treatment processes. Nearly any industrial plant will need to process sewage — graywater and human waste — either through an in-house plant or by feeding it to a municipal facility. For any enterprise large enough to need its own wastewater facilities, the default system would be more or less based on the three stages of primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment. However, a manufacturing or industrial ...

Modular Battery Concept for Short-Distance Traffic. Electric mobility may be economically efficient today. Battery-based electric drives can be applied efficiently in urban buses, for instance. Frequent acceleration and slow-down processes as well as a high utilization rate in short-distance traffic make their use profitable even when considering current battery costs. At the IAA International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) will present an e-city bus demonstrator to illustrate the concept. The key modules of the demonstrator are a drive train with a high-torque electric motor, a high-voltage network, a battery management system, and a novel modular battery system with lithium-ion cells made in Germany. At the IAA, the demonstrator developed for drive tests will present options for the design of the electric drive train of buses. Using the demonstrator, the innovation potential of KIT's research results can be validated and interaction of the compon...

THE RISING SUN   GREEN JOBS ARRIVE With renewable energy being all the rage right now, solar literally produces the power to change the world. If you want a career in an industry that’s only going to get bigger, solar may be for you.. B lessed with one of the best quality and quantity of sun, India offers a huge potential to develop solar photovoltaic (PV) power both for domestic consumption and export. With several new companies from India and abroad starting their solar operations in India, and existing companies committing to expanding their capacity, solar PV power is bang in the middle of a take-off in India right now. The government too has been very supportive to boost the growth of solar industry. In January last year, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and Ministry of Power launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) with an aim to set up an enabling environment for solar energy penetration in the country. The ambitious project aims to establi...

T ech-Focus - Nanotechnology: The lord of     Small things!   While many hail nanotechnology as ‘the’ phenomenon of the new age, and one of the most potent emerging forces in the field of technology, there are others who dismiss it as a subject fit only for research labs. this article aims to explore the truth behind these claims, and track the direction in which nanotechnology is moving “Everything can be made in some way better—stronger, lighter, cheaper, easier to recycle—if it’s engineered and manufactured at the nanometre scale.”     —Stan Williams director-Quantum Science Research  HP Labs    The 21st century can easily be called the era of portable devices that are lighter, smaller and a whole lot powerful in configuration than their predecessors. All this has largely been rendered possible with the size of the processor shrinking to the nanometre scale. These small-sized processors, also called microprocessors, have enabled the ...

Barcode systems in use........... Barcode systems result in faster and accurate data-capturing, lower costs, minimal mistakes and easier inventory-management Bar code first came in use commercially in 1966, but it was soon realised that there would have to be some sort of set industry standard. By 1970, the universal grocery products identification code  (UGPIC) was written by a company called Logicon Inc. The first company to produce bar code equipment for retail trade (using UGPIC) was the American company Monarch Marking, and for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications, in 1970. UGPIC evolved into universal product code or the UPC symbol set, which is still used in the US. In June 1974, the first UPC scanner was installed at a Marsh’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The first product to have a bar code included was a packet of Wrigley’s Gum.  Barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows certain data about certain products. Ori...