IBM Models Human Blood System To Build Solar Power Prototype 87
coondoggie writes "IBM today said its researchers are developing a solar power system that concentrates solar radiation 2,000 times by using a human-blood supply modeled way of cooling and converting 80% of Sun's heat into useful energy. IBM says the system can also desalinate water and cool air in sunny, remote locations where such systems are often in short supply."
Welcome to the Matrix! (Score:1)
\subject
Re:Welcome to the Matrix! (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, IBM is selling their new Blood Solar Division to Lenovo.
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Do not feed the trolls.
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You do realize that every time your dumb ass posts we can use the laws of physics to narrow down where you live/post from to within a 2km radius, right?
I suggest you stop shitting up the board before I show you other neat things physics can do. Like what high-velocity flying metal can do to soft tissue.
Both you and the MyCleanPC people are targets.
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Actually, it applies to the function of blood to transfer excess heat out of the body.
You're repeating what I'm saying.
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I'm not convinced of that. There's more to temperature regulation than merely cooling things off. There's also the portion of the system which generates the heat in the first place. Reducing the systems and functions which create the heat can also be used to regulate body temperature... think metabolic variations and the roles dietary content play in this. I have been all through hacking my metabilism to get the results I was after and it worked quite well.
In bother approaches, there are limits to the r
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Somehow I don't think that this has actually anything to do with solar power at all...if this stuff is actually "inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body", it's probably just something like street hierarchy [wikipedia.org], only applied to heat flow instead of car traffic.
It's a cooling system for a HCPV [wikipedia.org] solar cell. Instead of just releasing the heat into the air, they made use of it, similar to CSP [wikipedia.org] solutions. In doing so they've combined 2 products into one and they get more energy out of the same installation.
It doesn't matter where does the heat come from.
Try telling that to the guy who has to keep that HCPV cell running...
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It's a cooling system for a HCPV [wikipedia.org] solar cell. Instead of just releasing the heat into the air, they made use of it, similar to CSP [wikipedia.org] solutions. In doing so they've combined 2 products into one and they get more energy out of the same installation.
You may not have noticed, but I know all that. I was just reacting to the GP's insinuation that this has anything to do with exposing anything blood-related to solar radiation.
Try telling that to the guy who has to keep that HCPV cell running...
The heat conductor actually doesn't care where the heat came from, or whether or not it passed through a PV cell on its way. In the same vein, the PV cell doesn't care how the heat is dissipated, as long as it is done somehow. Engineers usually call this "mix-and-match approach".
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You may not have noticed, but I know all that. I was just reacting to the GP's insinuation that this has anything to do with exposing anything blood-related to solar radiation.
Your fault for responding to AC without quoting. He got down-modded below most of our filters.
Try telling that to the guy who has to keep that HCPV cell running...
The heat conductor actually doesn't care where the heat came from, or whether or not it passed through a PV cell on its way. In the same vein, the PV cell doesn't care how the heat is dissipated, as long as it is done somehow. Engineers usually call this "mix-and-match approach".
...and you miss at sarcasm too.
In other news (Score:1)
This development is soon to be delayed by politicians, warring factions in third world countries, corrupt governments, and corporate interests intent on developing the best method of monetizing the new prototype.
But they found out iron in the blood (Score:5, Funny)
causes rust accumulation on components, so they substituted with copper. And the green-blooded IBM became very cold and inhuman.
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It is only logical.
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Cray 2 (Score:2)
But can you power a Cray 2 with it?
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You need blood from horseshoe crabs to power a Cray. Human blood is only suitable for IBM solar power plants.
Re:Cray 2 (Score:4, Informative)
A Cray 2 requires 200KW. The panels claim 80% efficiency, so you'd need 200/0.8 = 250KW. Sun intensity, ignoring atmosphere and with optimal panel orientation, is around 1.3KW/M^2. So you'd need 192 M^2 of panels. In practice you'd need space for panel orientation gear, plus atmospheric attenuation would reduce power, so you'd need rather more than that, but it's entirely practical. However, no running the Cray at night.
The Cray 2 had 1.3GF of floating-point processing power. A single i7 chip has 109GF, double-precision. The Cray 2 was without doubt one of the coolest looking computers ever built, but the technology is rather dated. You could comfortably emulate it on a modern desktop.
*European, not handegg.
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[citation needed]
But let me help you with that, since most solar power advocates can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that there is a physical limit to the amount of solar radiation that makes solar power a non-starter for baseload power generation:
Insolation [wikipedia.org] article on Wikipedia
The relevant excerpt, with the critical information in bold:
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You may want to give up. I dont think the average couch potato will ever get it, they all think solar is the way of the future. Most seems to believe we will someday put a simple put a 2m^2 panel on your roof and get all your power needs.
You know what, I take that back. Most could not tell you how big two square meters is. They are expecting one of them blue panel thingies will some day power the house.
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First, I did not say it was useless, I said "I dont think the average couch potato will ever get it"
Assuming you are an average couch potato, I would suggest that you did not break even. You simply did not understand the math. :P
Doing some rough math I come up with the following.
Checking my local electric I am paying $0.06 per kWh and if I feed electric back to the grid they pay $0.03 per kWh
Checking current prices and using the optimum output from the system a $28,000 system will produce 16,755 kWh a year.
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Ok, if solar power is useless then how the fuck did I get to brake even with my investment in microgeneration even without accounting for state support
Okay, let's figure this out. According to the EIA [eia.gov], the average USA home uses 940 KWH per month. Dividing that by 30, you've got an average of 31.333 KWH per day of needs. Now, assuming that you get 250 watts on average from each 1 square meter, than you would need 5.222 square meters of solar coverage per house to collect enough power to average out over the year. Since the average home has +80 m^2 of roof space, I'm sure the average person could find 5.222 m^2 of space facing the correct direction. No
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You're quite right: I didn't account for atmospheric attenuation. I mentioned that. I just gave very rough calculations. I also didn't account for cloud cover. But even if you need ten times my estimate, that's still only 1,920 M^2 of panels. It'd be far more expensive than grid power, but if for some reason you feel the need to run a cray 2 off of solar (I cannot imagine why you would) then it could be done. You won't need to pave over a continent, bankrupt a country or anything like that. Maybe as an art
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As is traditional, I converted the measurement into football fields. Once I saw how small a fraction of a field it would take, I took the conversion out. I neglected to remove the footnote specifying which 'football' field I'd used.
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You could comfortably emulate it on a modern desktop.
You could comfortably emulate it on a modern cellphone.
I like pointing this out to anyone who'll listen, today for a small monthly fee any cell company will GIVE you a device that 20 years ago would have cost millions of dollars.
"are often in short supply." (Score:2)
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So why is "scarce" so much better than "in short supply"? I grant you, it's shorter, and that's a valid reason to prefer it, but it doesn't seem a grave enough sin to be a pet peeve.
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So, you don't like idioms when other people use them?
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"are often.. scarce". Sorry, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
My pet peeve is when folks place contradictory words too close together. Thanks for the double dot, that was awfully... kind of you.
Coming soon... not (Score:2)
Link to actual illustration (Score:3)
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A Dyson sphere! (Score:3)
Let me say I'm excited that IBM is building a Dyson sphere powered by human blood, first, to get 80% of the Sun's output is tremendously effective and secundly who knew the blueprints were somehow sitting in our DNA?
It comes at a surprise that IBM is so technologically advanced, now it ain't gonna easy to launch all that stuff and assemble it in heliocentric orbit.
Not cost competitive (Score:2)
The cost of energy with this system is " ... less than 10 cents per KWh ... cost at coal power stations is 5 - 10 cents per KWh ... "
And it will be on-line at most eight hours per day.
Other than that, it's a good deal.
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So, environmental responsibility doesn't matter at all? It's not just dollars, you know.
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So, environmental responsibility doesn't matter at all? It's not just dollars, you know.
But those dollars are an important part of environmental responsibility. I think one of the great tragedies of the modern era is the considerable economic ignorance of people in the environmental movement.
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The idea is that the large power requirement is centralized, so that higher-efficiency higher-efficient processes could be used to provide said industry.
Not everyone can have a hydroelectric generator in their back yard, but it makes sense that a panel plant might.
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Perhaps they can find a way to store the heat energy for use during darkness.
(I guess the blood system analogy reads better than just saying they made a radiator.)
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a)
End customers often pay more than those 10ct due to transportation losses and other overhead. So if you are connected ton the grid and have a minimum power requirement higher than the peak output of this system, the system is profitable.
b)
Coal has seen very little cost improvement over the last decades while solar is co stantly improving at 30% per year since the sixties. It is intermediate steps like this system that are likely to make solar one of the least expensive technologies around.
(BTW: A recent s
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My fault, wrong wording. If you go backwards you see a 30% price increase per year which is a 23% cost reduction when you go forward (1/1.3 = ca. 0,77) which equates to a factor of about 10000 over 44 years.
Photovoltaics system costs in 1969 where about 3000$/kwp compared to about 1.4$/kwp in 2013. This is a factor of 2150 (19% improvement per year). Together with shorter module liveteam and higher maintainance cost and much higher installation area you get the 23% improvement.
I currently can't find 1969 da
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I get that evolution yields excellent results (Score:2, Interesting)
Evolution is a very powerful force. I recall an evolutionary software design system that was used to create the most efficient antenna discussed here on Slashdot some years ago. It was a pretty cool concept and it worked pretty well as I recall. But to straight up model a system after the human circulatory system? Really? I would think there were far better systems than the human system. Humans have stopped evolving physically and one could say we are devolving as our survival is no longer so dependen
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Also, even if humans *had* stopped evolving as GP mistakenly asserts, that doesn't really mean jack. If we "stopped evolving" tomorrow, to yesterday, or even a thousand years ago, we are sitting on top of several billion years of accumulated evolved features. More than enough to serve as a model for some nifty engineering.
The GP falls into the trap of thinking that "evolution trends towards better", which is another way of saying "evolution is going somewhere", aka "evolution has a goal", and of course from
Complexity be gone! (Score:1)
Suitable to generate liquid fuels? (Score:2)
One pet idea of mine is we should generate ammonia (NH3) from water, air, electricity and heat. You would need nuclear power or efficient renewables for that ; it's wasteful as you need electrolysis of water, then use the Haber process to combine hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia but the end result is a non carbonated liquid fuel you can easily enough handle, with about a third the energy density of diesel fuel by volume - that's way better energy storage than H2 and batteries!
Ammonia can be burnt in conve
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Ammonia is terribly useful in its own right. The amount of energy used making ammonia for fertilizer is huge, and is growing. You can stop right there, and have a very useful process -- even if it only runs on sunny days.
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Ammonia is terribly useful in its own right. The amount of energy used making ammonia for fertilizer is huge, and is growing. You can stop right there, and have a very useful process -- even if it only runs on sunny days.
That word is obsolete. We now use "terrorist WMDs" instead.
Nothing converts from heat with 80% efficiency (Score:2)
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It's obvious they refer to using the heat itself, whether that is "usable energy" depend on your needs but heat can be pretty useful, if only for cooking, making tea and taking a shower.
I think the 80% figure is the sum of electricity and useful heat, leaving 20% as heat wasted away.
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Water World (Score:1)
Extended hours of operation ... (Score:1)
Hey look another solar power break through! (Score:2)
That leads to nothing as it is too expensive or unrealistic to work. With silly claims of efficiency etc... How many of these do we get on slashdot per year, for how many years. You would think by now we would all be running 100% solar power by now.
So put me down for skeptical.