Throughout the world there are about 8,000 Rubber Tired Gantry cranes which do a lot of damage to the environment due to huge fuel consumption, and gas emissions. In order to reduce the harmful emissions, an ECE researcher called Mark Flynn has developed a device that can be integrated in ports around the world. Dr. Flynn designed a high-speed flywheel motor controller which reduces the fuel consumption of the RTG cranes which are powered by a diesel motor.

The RTG cranes can move a shipping container in three minutes, and this requires a lot of power especially in the lift as these containers weigh 50 metric tons depending on their load. Also, considering the fact that the descent requires a special attention, then you can only imagine how much power the cranes consume. The high-speed flywheel motor controller can be integrated in RTG’s energy storage systems, and it will capture the so-called “braking energy”, and it will use it for the next crane.

VYCON Inc. is the company that produces Flynn’s device, and sea ports are among the best places to test new greener technologies. RTG cranes lose a lot of power when maneuvering containers, and instead of using it for the upcoming containers, the energy is dissipated as wasted heat. Like aforementioned, Flynn’s device captures the energy and uses it for the next load.

According to some field tests in China, the flywheel energy storage system can also lower power requirements which will save a lot of energy. The tests also showed that the fuel consumption was lowered by 38%, while NOx and PM emissions were dramatically cut down. Driven by the success of the VYCON flywheel, now data centers and hospitals are replacing industrial batteries with the high-speed flywheel motor controller.

“Industrial batteries are less expensive initially than a flywheel, but when you factor in maintenance and having to pay for more charge than you need to avoid frequent battery replacement a flywheel-based solution can be considerable less expensive. A VYCON flywheel will last 20 years and eliminates the problem of what to do with 200 large-scale toxic lead-acid batteries,” said Flynn.

You don’t have to be a genius to tell that data centers and hospitals can’t afford blackouts as many lives and businesses depend on them. Although hospitals and data back-up centers have back-up diesel generators, their energy will not be entirely utilized which means that the energy is lost forever. VYCON’s flywheel can handle most power outages, and if an outage persists then the device will absorb “energy abnormalities” and transfer power to generators.

“I am very pleased with the fuel and emissions savings results we are seeing and with additional improvements currently under research that aim to improve the savings further. Future work will investigate the feasibility of using flywheels in subway rail stations to accelerate one train with the braking energy recovered from another. Doing so will not only save energy but can be used to defer or eliminate the costs of adding utility substations as rail service grows,” explained Flynn.

The VYCON flywheel has a promising future ahead of it, we expect even more from the device. It’s not hard to tell that in the 8,000 sea ports around the world, a lot of energy is wasted while harmful emissions are released in the atmosphere damaging the entire eco-system. Maybe this flywheel energy storage system will help us save the planet, and the tests clearly show that. Expert environmentalists just have to “convince” the authorities to integrate the device in sea ports, and later in other applications.

If I learned one thing about concepts and prototypes, I learned that most of them never make it to the production line and with time they are forgotten. However, this is not the case of a prototype device created by researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. This device is a supercapacitor who usually performs electronic operations thanks to silicon chips, but the USC researchers managed to develop a transparent and flexible supercapacitor using carbon nanotubes.

The team of researchers led by Chongwu Zhou claims that the supercapacitor which uses CNT films and indium-oxide nanowires can be manufactured at prices competitive with conventional techniques which use silicon. Also, this energy storage and conversion device is completely transparent, and is so flexible that it can be “bent and twisted like a poker card.”

According to Zhou, this new capacitor features an energy density of 1.29 watt-hour per kilogram, and a storage capacitance of 64 Farad per gram, while conventional capacitors store an energy density of at most .1 watt-hour per kilogram with a specific capacitance in the range of tens of millifarads. The team consisting of aforementioned Zhou, USC post-doctorate Guozhen Shen, and USC graduate students Sawalok Sukcharoenchoke and Po-Chiang Chen, believes that their supercapacitor will have enormous implications in e-paper displays, many electronic devices, and other applications.

Zhou and his team attached indium-oxide and CNTs films on a transparent flexible substrate, then they optimized its thickness in order to preserve its flexibility and its transparency. The researchers managed to combine metal nanowires with carbon nanotubes (after many attempts) and they said that this represents the key for flexible and transparent supercapacitors as conventional storage devices are not flexible, neither transparent.

“We demonstrated enhanced specific capacitance, power density, energy density, and long operation cycles, compared to those supercapacitors made only by CNTs,” said Zhou. “We successfully produced a prototype of flexible and transparent supercapacitors built on two important nanostructured materials [including metal oxide nanowires and CNTs].”

“CNT films were fabricated by vacuum filtration method. An adhesive and flat poly (dimethysiloxane) (PDMS) stamp was adapted to peel the CNT film off of the filtration membrane and then released it onto a polyethylene terephtalate (PET) substrate. In2O3 nanowires with a diameter of ~ 20 nm and a length of ~ 5 ?m were synthesized by a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method. The as-grown nanowires were sonicated into IPA solutions and then dispersed upon transferred CNT films to form In2O3 nanowire /CNT heterogeneous film for transparent and flexible supercapacitor study,” explained Zhou.

Well, as the researchers have demonstrated the potential of flexible and transparent supercapacitors, now we are waiting for the devices to be commercialized. Zhou said that the new supercapacitors can be manufactured at costs competitive with conventional supercapacitors and we can’t understand why the researcher didn’t mention when the devices will be available. We will have to wait for further details.