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.

When a new and revolutionary technology appears, everybody is concerned about its  cycle time, and of course, pricing. However, so far nobody was interested in how much energy new manufacturing processes use, and if we believe a MIT analysis then we will notice that cutting-edge techniques require too much energy and materials.

According to the study led by MIT researchers, modern manufacturing techniques are one thousand to one millions times bigger “consumers of energy per pound of output” than conventional industries. Timothy Gutowski, Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, says that we use a whole lot more energy to make microchips than to make a manhole housing. Although these are very different domains of activity, Professor Gutowski says that somebody has to ring the alarm bell in order to optimize modern manufacturing methods in terms of energy and materials use.

“The seemingly extravagant use of materials and energy resources by many newer manufacturing processes is alarming and needs to be addressed alongside claims of improved sustainability from products manufactured by these means,” said Gutowski in the study published in the ES&T (Environmental Science and Technology) journal.

MIT researchers are hoping that the energy use will become a priority for manufacturers which are more concerned about profit, but this will probably change when energy prices will rise and when a carbon tax will be adopted. Gutowski used solar panels as an example because the manufacturing process is similar with the manufacturing process of microchips but on a larger scale. State-of-the-art solar panels manufacturing techniques require very much energy and it’s a very inefficient process. According to the study, in their lifecycle solar panels do not generate as much power as the energy consumed during their manufacturing process.

“Our study represents just the first step in doing something about it,” said Gutowski. ” We covered everything from soup to nuts, from heavy-duty old fashioned industries like a cast-iron foundry, all the way up to semiconductors and nanomaterials.”

I have to say that I have a doubt about the above words as the researchers did not consider pharmaceuticals and petroleum. The excuse of  Professor Gutowski was that they only analyzed manufacturing processes that use electricity as the main energy source, however, it was a wrong thing to claim that you “covered everything from soup to nuts” and MIT’s study might lose some of its credibility.

Gutowski also added that their study doesn’t include “some significant energy costs” like the energy used to manufacture materials themselves as “all these things would make the energy costs worse.”

“New processes are huge users of materials and energy, but because some are so new, they will be optimized and improved over time,” concluded Gutowski. “[The study] claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There’s a significant energy cost involved here.”