The filed trip to MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center was very enlightening. I haven’t heard the term “fusion” before, and couldn’t understand it even after I looked up on dictionary, so I guess it must have more scientific explanation behind. After the presentation we had during the field trip, I’m now having a clearer picture about “fusion” in my head. The presentation was hard to fully comprehend the material while the presenter is talking. Many of the terminology he used were entirely new for me and can only understand some of it. The presenter is trying to simplify the very scientific topic so that we could possibly understand more of it. From his presentation, I understand that fusion is a very efficient of land use and it has more advantages than most renewable energy resources. Fusion energy also have advantages over nuclear fission. It has no long-lived nuclear waste, which produces less waste than fission have.

After the presentation, there is another PHD student take us to visit the fusion center, including the engineers’ working place and workshop where the fusion device located.

It is a very cool experience to get know more about the renewable energies and the most “front-line” technology.

The fusion center PHD student, he was very informative and patiently explains to us how does fusion device work.

The field trip to the museum of science was very interesting, this food photography show was the first that catches my eyes. An unique way to portray our most familiar food.

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The energy exhibition was quite inspiring, they introduce many different kinds of eco-friendly energy source. Including cow waste, solar energy, and wind. The installation also discusses about how much more energy that human being are demand in next decades, it will increased a lot.

This panel is very helpful, it explains the difference and characteristics of each energy source. 

This graph is nicely explains that our dominant energy source is still coal, which is not efficient and sustainable enough. I’m very happy to see that other energy source are in the developing stage. I believe along with the improving of technology, the renewable energy will become the majority of this graph in the future.

The following panels are answering some very popular questions, and it helps me to understand some problems that has been bothers me for quite while. For example, why doesn’t the U.S. rely more on nuclear energy? We all know that nuclear energy is very efficient and has less waste produced and release in the atmosphere. However, U.S. government thinks the radioactive element is very harmful and it’s not worth to expand the nuclear energy industry, since it’s not worth to risk people’s health to improving technology. But I do understand Japan has to rely on their nuclear energy heavily, each country has different policy and strategy on energy resource because of their different background and geographical reasons.

Keystone XL Pipeline

Keystone XL Pipeline is an oil pipeline across Canada and the U.S. The pipeline is an extension to the old pipeline, with bigger capacity, and longer distance traveled, from Alberta, Canada, all the way to Texas, U.S.

Pros:

The existing pipeline can only transmit 590k barrels of oil per day. The new system can accommodate up to 830k barrels per day. That’s an increase of 140% capacity than before (more than double).

The project will inject 2 billion dollars of economic benefits into the U.S. (estimation)

Keep the oil prices competitive so OPEC would never able to raise the price per barrel over $100

The project will create about 42k job opportunity.

The U.S. will have better oil independence, which may directly boost the economy.

Cons:

The process of extracting tar sand, which is where these Canadian oil came from, produces 18% more carbon dioxide as its byproduct than the conventional way of extracting oil.

To extract oil out of tar sand, tar sand has to be boiled. The process creates chemical waste and pollution to the environment, which could pollute waterways.

The pipeline will run though sovereign lands of several indigenous tribes, and will displace thousands of people who live on the projected route.

The senate has already approved the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, but since the pipeline crosses an international border, TransCanada (the oil company) needs a presidential permit to actually begin the construction. So the final decision comes down to President Obama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU-Y_VEhbj8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-08Pyiwx3s&feature=iv&src_vid=RU-Y_VEhbj8&annotation_id=annotation_2135511873

http://www.transcanada.com/oil-pipelines-projects.html

1. Deploying Clean Energy

President Obama has several improvements he wishes that could speed up the process of utilizing clean energy in Americans’ everyday life, which mainly consist of budget boost and setting up standards on the federal level to encourage state-level cooperation. I think deploying clean energy is a long-term commitment and cannot be achieved in a rush. Clean energy, like any other new technology, needs time and research effort to cut its cost to acceptable level that is suitable for massive production and to eventually replace our traditional way of generating electricity. Speaking from a practical point of view, no one is willing to spend more than what we are already paying for the electricity bill each month just to benefit the Earth and our next generation. Clean and renewable energy will only fully replace traditional environment unfriendly power plant when its prices are right, and its performance is reliable. Therefore I believe the key to next generation power plant is affordable and reliable technology that will allow us to harvest renewable energy. For instance, solar panel has received much attention in the recent years, but it also has many flaws. Panels can only operate at day time, and its efficiency is very bad. To generate enough electricity, each household would have to install numerous panels just so they can power basic electronics need such as lighting. Disadvantage like this has been interrupting our transitions to clean energy, because people still value the thickness of their wallet more than the future of the Earth. At this stage the budget boost to clear energy related research projects and institutes are the correct and perhaps only answer to generate the right push for the transition. I believe U.S. will have the potential to lead the clean energy industry in the following decade.

2. Building 21^st century transportation sector

In this section President Obama focuses on raising the fuel economy standard and modernizing the public transportation system in the states. These two are perhaps the two systems that the United States is definitely falling behind the global trend. EU has been raising the standards years ago and that’s why most European car-makers stopped making large displacement engines and replaced them with turbo-charged small displacement engines in an attempt to reduce green house gas emission from their cars. The U.S. is also falling behind on public transportation technology. Most countries in Europe in Asia have extensive high speed rail system cover across regions and metropolitan areas, with extensive underground metro system in most major cities. The U.S. is still a place that relies too much on cars. Some people might argue that car culture is a U.S. thing, but that is just an excuse for not actually caring the environment.

3. Leading at the Federal Level

In this part President Obama raises his concern over current building standards and citizens’ awareness towards global climate change. These are more like mending the fold after losing number of sheep. The Americans was once given a chance to put some effort into protecting the environment when the Kyoto Protocol was presented to them in 1997. But the senate would never pass any sort of international agreement that could “hurt the U.S. economy”. They also claimed, at that time, that there wasn’t enough scientific proof to justify that global warming was primarily caused by green house gas emission. Now that more than a decade has passed, and even normal people with normal eyes can see that climate change is a real thing, the U.S. has finally realized its role in “reducing CO2 emission”. Perhaps its never too late to fix what we’ve done wrong.

http://www.harbortaxgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/REN21_GSR_2010_full_revised-Sept2010.pdf

http://www.ren21.net/Portals/0/documents/Resources/GSR/2014/GSR2014_full%20report_low%20res.pdf

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ETP2012SUM.pdf

http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/status_of_ratification/items/2613.php

http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership

In March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck at the eastern ocean region of Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Causing a huge tsunami to hit many prefectures’ bay area and damaging many near shore facilities. One of the severely damaged facility is the Fukushima Daiichi Genshiryoku Hatsudensho, a nuclear power plant located in Fukushima.

There are six boiling water reactors in the Fukushima Power Plant. During the incident reactor 4, 5, and 6 were down for planned maintenance. The automatic earthquake detector system sensed the earthquake and issued an immediate shutdown of the reactors 1, 2, and 3. Due to the shutdown of all reactors and damages caused by the earthquake, the Fukushima Power Plant lost most of its power generating ability and could only rely on its backup diesel power generator to drive the reactor cooling system. Due to the nature of nuclear reaction, the reactors could still be generating heat after shutting down, and it could require a few more days of cooling after its shutdown sequence to prevent its fuel rods from reaching their melting points.

The tsunami hit the Fukushima Power Plant 50 minutes after the earthquake. It was 46 feet high and it ran over the 33 feet seawall like it was nothing. The tsunami soon devoured the power plant and damaged the backup diesel power generator, leaving the power plant with only the backup batteries to drive the cooling system and other vital control components. The battery soon ran out on the following day, and causing the core of the reactors to heat up – leading to catastrophic core meltdown.

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) sent in many workers to try to supply power to the failed cooling system, but a few hydrogen-air chemical explosions caused by the extreme heat in all reactor units severely interrupted the rescue mission. The explosion blew a massive hole in the reactor, causing contamination of radioactive materials in the plant’s surrounding. The Japanese government declared emergency and evacuated all residents that are within 20km range of the plant. The Genshiryoku Anzen Hoanin (Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency) categorize the incident as level 7 in the International Nuclear Event Scale, the same level the Chernobyl disaster was rated at.

Following the incident many countries criticized Japanese government’s role and its action of trying to cover-up the incident as a small accident. They condemned the Japanese government’s failure to react when TEPCO clearly didn’t have the situation in control. Contamination around Fukushima was very high, leading to international ban on all products that were imported from the region. The incident also posed dangerous health risk to all workers who were involved in the rescue operation. Approximately 300 workers who entered the plant to save the cooling system absorbed high level of radiation, the exposure level could lead to high probability of cancer related disease’s development in the future of all worker’s lives.

The Japanese government showed high interest towards the clean energy after the incident. Many anti-nuclear organizations emerged as a result, and many public figures also opposed the use of nuclear energy as Japan’s main source of power generation. Japan showed a much higher statistics in installation of solar panel in household. The funding of related renewable energy such as air and ocean also increased dramatically as a result. Although the island still relies most of its power source on nuclear power, the Japanese government showed determination to gradually phase out those power plant in the following centuries.

Resources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/japan-severity-idUSTKE00635720110412

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/fukushima-accident-upgraded-to-severity-level-7/

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/fukushima-nuclear-accident-update-log-51

The video demonstrated people’s view on opposing the use of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy has caused not only once, but many devastating results in the human history. Nuclear energy can be safe 95% of the time, but when it does go wrong, the result is not only lethal to our human species, but also the planet earth. But, there’s a big but here: Although people all know about how devastating and catastrophic the nuclear power is, it is still widely adapted in many countries and served as the major power source. Why?

This all comes down to the technology available to us. So far any energy generation technology we have are as bad in efficiency as they could be. For instance we had been relying on coal and natural gas power plant throughout the industrial era. Power was generated by a source that emits heat, which can be redirected to heat up water, which generates steam, which flows through a tube and then eventually to drive a turbine that would generate electricity. The process is long and as wasteful as it can get in any possible way. But this is the most reliable method of generating electricity we have been having. Therefore we can’t really change the process of generating steam, because heat alone doesn’t drive the generator. As a result, people had been seeking a low cost, reliable, and a massive heat generating source that can be used on a large production scale. Coal and gas were the answer, but we soon realized the massive CO2 byproduct pollutes the environment badly, we desperately needs something that will generate as much heat as the traditional material, but with lot less pollution. Nuclear energy was the answer. It is low cost(in the long run), cleaner than coal, generates massive heat, and enable cheap electricity to the backbone of any developing countries — economy.

It is definitely a trend to eliminate nuclear power in the near future to prevent disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but at what cost? It is a cost that anti-nuclear organizations neglect to discuss or face. Ditching nuclear power may be a feasible option in well developed country, but in developing countries where budgets are tight and consumers are high; nuclear power is vital to the growth of the country. Clean and renewable energy is definitely the superior energy to harvest, but to push the movement globally it will require a lot of effort and patience. At the end, will normal people accept triple or even quadruple electricity bill per month so that everyone is benefitting from clean energy? That is yet a question to be proven.

Since our group had technical issues during the experiment so that we couldn’t finish the lab successfully.  However, we recorded one 30 second perfectly, but only got the power for the first five seconds, and the power was approximately equals to 0.074. If we can to do this experiment again I would compare the bigger amount of data that we recorded from multiple times. Once we had enough data we could graph it and explain more in depth about why less shakes generates less power and more movement would caused more voltages. The graph of this experiment would be really interesting since the shape of the graph is under controlled by our own frequency of shaking.

Solar power in China is a growing industry with over 400 photovoltaic companies. China was the world’s leading installer of solar photovoltaics in 2013, adding a record of 11.3 gigawatts of capacity.

China has been the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels since 2008. Industry estimates that by the end of 2017, China will have enough manufacturing capacity to produce 51 gigawatts of photovoltaics per year, an amount over twice as large as 2010’s global production rate.

Japan has been expanding its solar power since the late 1990s, where as China is a big manufacturer, Japan has been a large consumer. Japan was the world’s 2^nd largest market for solar power in 2013.

Check the following image of Komekurayama solar power plant:

Space-based solar power:

Not only can we harvest the power on the Earth, we can also harvest solar power in the space. This greatly increases the area of power we can collect. The project has been in research since the early 1970s.

By putting the solar power plant in the space the plant can double its production easily, because there’s no night time in the space, the orbiting plant can always face the sun. The problems with this project are mainly the cost and the ways of transmitting the power generated back to the Earth. Radiation and micrometeoroid could also damage the orbiting plant.

The solar cell phone charger use solar panels to charge cell phone batteries. These can be a mobile power plant since they are small and easy to transport. They provide a great alternative when electric outlets are not around but sun is right above you. These solar chargers have been integrated into cell phone cases that can charge the phone directly whenever there’s light, hence the phone will never need to be charged from wall outlets.

http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/energytrends/currentusage/renewable/solar/japan/summary.shtml

http://www.earth-policy.org/datacenter/xls/indicator12_2014_2.xlsx

http://www.iea-pvps.org/fileadmin/dam/public/report/statistics/PVPS_report_-_A_Snapshot_of_Global_PV_-_1992-2013_-_final_3.pdf

http://www.iea-pvps.org/index.php?id=1&eID=dam_frontend_push&docID=1236

http://www.12voltsolarpanels.net/charge-your-cell-phone

http://www.go-green-solar-energy.com/portable-solar-power.html

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/162/3856/857.pdf

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=3,781,647.PN.&OS=PN/3,781,647&RS=PN/3,781,647

Tesla was a Serbian American who moved to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison in New York City. He is most famous for his break through in the production, transmission and application of electric power.

Tesla performed the first experiments in wireless power transmission in 20^th century. The experiment involved spark-excited radio frequency resonant transformers (which is later called Tesla coil), and it generated high AC voltages on elevated capacitive terminals, which marked the successful wireless power transmission for the first time. Later he found that he could increase the transmission distance by using a receiving LC circuit (an electric circuit consisting of an inductor, and a capacitor) tuned to resonance with the transmitter’s LC circuit. The experiment gave a good range of wireless power transmission, about 30 meters, and the resonant inductive coupling which Tesla used is now further developed and utilized in mobile devices’ wireless charging system that we see today. This near-field wireless power transmission did not satisfy Tesla, he was more obsessed with long range wireless power transmission and thought that transmitting wireless power on a global scale was feasible. He believed that he could conduct the Earth and the atmosphere to transfer the energy. Tesla stated he could use balloon to suspend transmitting and receiving terminals in air at about 9,100 meters altitude, due to its low pressure. He claimed at this altitude an ionized layer would allow electricity to be sent at high voltages over long distances.

Tesla had more than 100 patents registered, and these patents support him well financially, so he was able to fund his other science projects.

In today’s world we have wireless charging ability in many mobile devices. It uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy between 2 objects. This technology is called inductive charging, and it works by powering a primary coil (usually in the charging station) to charge a secondary coil (usually in the device that’s being charged). The two induction coils combined is called an electrical transformer. When resonant inductive coupling is used the transfer distance can be increased. Wireless charging has many advantages over traditional charging, it provides protected connection so no wires would get corroded over long periods of time. It also provides better safety for medical implants. Although wireless charging has lower efficiency and takes more charging time, the technology itself will get better and better in the future.

Tesla has made important changes in the technology these days, and many wireless technology is based on his previous work and experiments. The famous motor company is named after him to celebrate his success in electric power innovation.

References:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=PW06qF-dj2IC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5167054.stm

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/nikola-tesla

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=soSsLATmZnkC

In this experiment, we tested our robot at three different power levels. We started with 75 power then 50 and final 25 power and did three times for each level. The 75 power we gave the robot 1 second of power. The 50 and 25 power runs we gave the robot 2 seconds of power. With the data we recorded, then we calculated the velocity and the error percentage for each run. We used a ruler to measure the distance the robot has been travelled.

Even though we tried to reduce the error percentage, we still can not do as perfect as the computer does. The data we got for the error percentage is between 0%  to 7%. Error percentages come from the relationship between the Labview measurement and the physical measurement. We recorded when the program is recording. The closer these two measurements are, the lower the error percentage. These errors could have happened because of the ruler can be moved by the robot when its moved or the robot not traveling in a straight line,  which would shorten its distance on the ruler. The lego robot activity showed that little adjustments to variables can change the data entirely, which can increase the error percentage.