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Showing posts with label solar technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solar technology. Show all posts
TreeHugger has already told us about how infrastructure designers in the Netherlands have decided that the country's highways need a major high-tech makeover and now those ideas are becoming reality. The Netherlands will start experimenting with photoluminescent paint on roads that charges in sunlight and then glows at night to denote lanes, traffic markers and even cold weather conditions.
The Smart Highway concept was designed by Studio Roosegaarde and infrastructure management group Heijmans. It won Best Future Concept at the Dutch Design Awards, but where concepts like these usually end there, this one is actually getting implemented this year.
The glow-in-the-dark paint at the center of the new roadway design is made with photo-luminising powder that will replace road markings. After being exposed to sunlight throughout the day, it then provides 10 hours of glow at night.
“It’s like the glow in the dark paint you and I had when we were children,” the designer behind the concept, Daan Roosegaarde, explained to Wired UK, “but we teamed up with a paint manufacturer and pushed the development. Now, it’s almost radioactive”.
The typical traffic markings will be painted on the roads, but the idea also includes plans for special painted snowflakes that will glow when temperatures drop and conditions could be icy. As a test of concept, a stretch of highway in the province of Branbant will be coated with the special weather-indicating paint in mid-2013.
The paint is just one part of the Smart Highway concept though. It also calls for some other smart road features, a couple we've covered before, like induction priority lanes that would charge electric vehicles as they drive over the road, interactive lights that switch on as cars pass and wind-powered lights that are planned to implemented in the next five years.
If you want to feel jealous of the Netherlands, you can watch a video of the concept below.
University of Pennsylvania Engineering Professor Shu Yang and her team have mimicked the reflective and water-resistant properties of butterfly wings to create a material that could coat solar panels and increase their output by keeping them clean and dry. The efficiency of solar panels takes a major drive when moisture and debris collect on their surface, so this inventive nature-inspired solution could keep them working at their maximum efficiency, not to mention the iridescence would be beautiful to look at.
New Scientist explains how Yang made the holographic wafer material:
"Yang used holographic lithography to recreate the wings' reflective properties, using a laser to make a 3D cross-linked pattern in a kind of material called photoresist. A solvent then washes away all the photoresist untouched by the laser, creating the 3D structure that affects light to create the colour effects. Then a poorer solvent roughens the surface, creating the texture that makes butterfly wings water-resistant."
The holographic material could also be used to coat buildings. While this wouldn't have any clean energy applications, Yang does see them as a way to make buildings more beautiful. The coated buildings could be connected to a chip that lets the owners change the color and transparency.
Yang is working under a grant to produce the hydrophobic coating for solar panels. A prototype of the material should be ready by June 2013.
I'm fortunate to have several passions in my life. I am absolutely an eco-nut. I am always trying to find new ways to reduce, reuse, recycle. We, as a species, have done more harm to this planet in the short time we have been here, than any other catastrophe or happening ever has. It's up to us to fix it.
I care about the environment whether it is as small as a single cell or as large as the universe.
I adore creativity and think we can all do more with much less. This earth has enough resources for us all to live comfortably if we all learn to share. Wasn't that a lesson we were supposed to learn in kindergarten?
I also love the bizarre, unusual, the weird and the strange. Be prepared for the odd "different" blog.
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