This article on ITER might be of interest.
Conceived in 1985, being built now, to be commissioned in 2019 and then after that comes a demonstration reactor. Power to the grid "as early as" 2040!
Personal Blogs
Sustainable Energy, Chocolate, Lego and Engineering
Friday, 22 Feb 2013, 15:03
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”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””Invitation
As part of Engineers Week 2013, the Open University in Ireland presents Sustainable Energy, Chocolate, Lego and Engineering - talks by Open University academics.
Places are limited so please book through the Engineers Week website: http://www.engineersweek.ie/events/?event_id=1416
Date: 2nd March 2013
Venue: Engineers Ireland, 22 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4
Time: 10.00-13.00
There will be two talks:
10.45am -11.45am Sustainable Energy Development - from James Bond 007 to reality a talk by Dr Satheesh Krishnamurthy about materials and engineering for energy conservation and storage.
11.45am -12.45pm Odd Materials, Oddly Used! - a talk by Dr Ian Johnston about scale in engineering involving flexible chocolate extrusion and the compression testing of Lego bricks.
Staff from the Open University in Ireland will be available from 10.00am to talk about Engineering qualifications at the Open University.
For further information about Ian Johnston and Satheesh Krishnamurthy visit:www.ianjohnston.co.uk and http://materials.open.ac.uk/staff/satheesh.htm
For more information about Open University courses and qualifications in Engineering visit: http://www.open.ac.uk and http://www3.open.ac.uk/near-you/ireland/.
As part of Engineers Week 2013, the Open University in Ireland presents Sustainable Energy, Chocolate, Lego and Engineering - talks by Open University academics.
Places are limited so please book through the Engineers Week website: http://www.engineersweek.ie/events/?event_id=1416
Date: 2nd March 2013
Venue: Engineers Ireland, 22 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4
Time: 10.00-13.00
There will be two talks:
10.45am -11.45am Sustainable Energy Development - from James Bond 007 to reality a talk by Dr Satheesh Krishnamurthy about materials and engineering for energy conservation and storage.
11.45am -12.45pm Odd Materials, Oddly Used! - a talk by Dr Ian Johnston about scale in engineering involving flexible chocolate extrusion and the compression testing of Lego bricks.
Staff from the Open University in Ireland will be available from 10.00am to talk about Engineering qualifications at the Open University.
For further information about Ian Johnston and Satheesh Krishnamurthy visit:www.ianjohnston.co.uk and http://materials.open.ac.uk/staff/satheesh.htm
For more information about Open University courses and qualifications in Engineering visit: http://www.open.ac.uk and http://www3.open.ac.uk/near-you/ireland/.
Electric cars and charging networks ...
Thursday, 21 Feb 2013, 15:17
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Estonia is in the news, with what is claimed to be the world's first nationwide car charging network. The chargers are "fast chargers", designed to charge the battery in 30 minutes rather than a more typical 8 hours (c.f. Britain's car charging network - which looks pretty nationwide for England anyway to me). To be fair, 55 of Britain's points are also rapid.
Students on Energy and Sustainability will notice a ironic connection here: in TMA02 not only did battery electric vehicle technology come up but so did Estonia in another respect, it is a major producer and consumer of shale oil. So the power to run these electric cars comes from one of the dirtiest fuel sources we have. Still, it illustrates the fact that electric vehicles are an enabling technology: make the elecrtricity source cleaner and the cars automatically become cleaner, no waiting years until they are replaced.
T213: activity 3.3d
Wednesday, 21 Nov 2012, 09:54
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Edited by Sebastian Tyrrell, Wednesday, 21 Nov 2012, 13:01
A couple of people have emailed me on this one, so here is an expansion on the calculation in the SG.
d. A 20 W compact fluorescent lamp uses electricity produced by a coal-fired power station. Use information from Sections 3.2 and 3.3 of the textbook to show that this lamp produces about 160 times more lumen-hours per kilogram of fuel than the candle you considered in parts (a) to (c).
As the SG says, there are several routes but we are looking at light produced per kilogramme of fuel, so let's start from 1kg of coal.
From the information in Box 3.1 of the book, we know that a typical coal contains
- 28 GJ of energy per tonne mass.
- Since 1 GJ is 1000 MJ, and 1 tonne is 1000 kg, we can see then that this means coal contains
- This is 28 MJ energy per kg mass
The overall energy efficiency is (again from Box 3.1) 3.17%. So each kg of coal will produce
- 3.17% x 28 MJ = 0.0317 x 28MJ = 0.888MJ = 888 kJ useful light energy
The SG then converts this to "kWh". This can be confusing because we are used to thinking of kW as a unit of power (which it is - work per unit time). But multiplying it by the number of hours of operations turns it back into a unit of energy, like the joule, but 3600 times larger (because that is the number of seconds in an hour).
So 888 kJ is the same as 0.247 kWh, which the study guide then shows can produce useful light at a rate of 2W for 124 hours - 2W being the rate at which a compact fluorescent lamp whose power consumption overall is 20W produces useful light.
(I've followed the SG approach here, but in fact I personally would have first calculated the electrical energy from the coal and how long that could run the 20W bulb for)
The SG then tells us that this emits about 1400 lumens, meaning that the total light emitted by the lamp from the power from 1 kg of coal is:
- 1400 lumens x 124 hours - 174000 lumen hours.
The kg of candle wax, on the other hand, produced about 1070 lumen hours on burning.
So the ratio of light produced from the electricity from 1 kg coal to the light from directly burning 1 kg candle wax is 174000/1070 = 160.
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