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Sprint Will Require Green Phones

Philip Proefrock

Cell phones are a big source of e-waste, accounting for millions of phones that are discarded annually. Some steps have been taken to try to make some cell phones greener, but it's been small measures so far. However, wireless network provider Sprint is now planning to require all of the cell phones for the network to have green certification.

The standard for mobile phones, developed by UL Environment along with cell phone manufacturers and other industry members, is known as UL ISR 110 (PDF). It is a third-party testing standard that evaluates phones in the categories of Materials Use, Energy Use, Health and Environment, End of Life Management, Packaging, Manufacturing and Operations, and Innovation.

The Samsung Replenish is the first handset to achieve certification under this standard. The Replenish is largely recyclable, as well as having recycled content for many of its components. Sprint hopes to have 70 percent of its handsets meet the certification by the ned of next year.

via: GreenBiz

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Self-Healing Circuits Could Lead to Longer-Lasting Electronics

Megan Treacy

A team of engineers at the University of Illinois have figured out how to create self-healing circuits in electronics and batteries, a discovery that could lead to longer equipment life and make a nice dent in the piles of e-waste plaguing the planet.

As electronics have become more complex, one small circuit failure can render a device useless, especially since it is hard or often impossible to diagnose where that failure occurred to fix it. Nancy Sottos, an engineer working on the project said:

"In general there's not much avenue for manual repair. Sometimes you just can't get to the inside. In a multilayer integrated circuit, there's no opening it up. Normally you just replace the whole chip. It's true for a battery too. You can't pull a battery apart and try to find the source of the failure."

The solution her team came up with was an army of microcapsules about 10 microns in diameter dispersed along a circuit. When a crack occurs in the circuit, the microcapsules break open and release a liquid metal that fills in the crack and restores the electrical flow. The time between a failure and the microcapsules filling the crack is only a few microseconds.

In tests, 90 percent of the samples were healed to 99 percent of their original conductivity. It also require zero human intervention. Only the microcapsules intercepted by a crack opened while the others remained intact.

The engineers see this breakthrough as especially useful for air and spacecraft where miles of conductive wire would have to be gone through to diagnose a failure. The team, which originally used microcapsules to create self-healing polymers, want to see what other applications they may have.

via Physorg

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Using LCDs to Collect Energy

Philip Proefrock

Keeping electronic devices powered is an ongoing concern, particularly as the number of electronic devices proliferates. Researchers at UCLA have developed a liquid crystal display (LCD) that incorporates photovoltaic polarizers that can convert sunlight, ambient light, and even its own backlight into electricity to power the device.

Polarizers are what makes the display in an LCD function, by controlling the amount of light that passes through from the backlight to make the display. The new material, called a polarizing organic photovoltaic film increases the efficiency of display and allows for charging of the device in bright light.

Obviously, the backlight isn't going to provide enough light to power the device infinitely long. But the researchers say that much of the energy lost from backlights can be saved with the new polarizer. "From the point of view of energy use, current LCD polarizers are inefficient, the researchers said. A device's backlight can consume 80 to 90 percent of the device's power. But as much as 75 percent of the light generated is lost through the polarizers. A polarizing organic photovoltaic LCD could recover much of that unused energy."

via: UCLA Newsroom

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Improved Cooling for Computers

Philip Proefrock

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratory have developed a new method for cooling microprocessors that is more effective and requires less energy than present air cooling methods. The Air Bearing Heat Exchanger technology, which has been dubbed the "Sandia Cooler," offers a solution to the "thermal brick wall" which has been limiting microprocessor speed.

Cooling is usually limited by the heat exchange taking place through the stationary air film that is found on all materials. The Sandia Cooler improves works by rotating the cooling fins to achieve a ten-fold reduction in the boundary layer of motionless air on the surface of the heat sink which increases heat transfer. Instead of having stationary heat sink fans with air being blown across them with a fan, the heat sink itself spins, which leads to increased heat transfer efficiency.

While the Sandia Cooler is initially being investigated for computer cooling, if it is possible to effectively scale the technology, it could also have applications for building cooling and air conditioning. "If Air Bearing Heat Exchanger technology proves amenable to size scaling, it has the potential to decrease overall electrical power consumption in the U.S. by more than seven percent," according to the inventor, Jeff Koplow.

link: A Fundamentally New Approach to Air-cooled Heat Exchangers (pdf)

via: EERE News and Solar Thermal Magazine

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Set-Top Boxes Are the #1 Household Energy Drain

Philip Proefrock

A recent study by the National Resources Defense Council finds that cable and digital recording devices are now "the single largest electricity drain in many American homes." The study found that "In 2010, set-top boxes in the United States consumed approximately 27 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is equivalent to the annual output of nine average (500 MW) coal-fired power plants."

This power consumption translates to roughly $3 billion in annual electricity costs paid by consumers, as well as being responsible for the release of 16 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. Furthermore, according to the NRDC report, an average HD set-top cable box and HD-DVR uses more energy (446 kWh/year) than an average 21 cubic foot Energy Star refrigerator (415 kWh/year).

Even worse than the "standby drain" of electricity used by equipment in a supposedly "off" position, many of these television set-top boxes - which include cable and satellite equipment, digital video recorders (DVR), and the like - are on 24 hours a day. Power strips can be useful for turning off these vampire loads, but consumers are reluctant to use those when they want their DVRs to be able to record programs.

NRDC points out that these devices could be designed to be more energy efficient, but that the service companies who provide these to consumers feel little incentive to do so, since it is the end users who pay for that power use.

image: CC-BY 2.0 by Scott Thomson

via: New York Times

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