Tag Archives: appropriate technology

Home Engineering: Windmill for Electricity

photo of windmill

I built my first windmill when I was 15. Over the next few years I kept refining the design. I made many modifications to the plans i found in the book. For example, I increased the blades from three to four to provide more power output. The windmill now powers lights for 3 rooms and a light over our porch outside. I also use it to power my family’s two radios. I also can charge mobile phones that the neighbors have.
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Two weeks ago I used a computer for the first time. I learned about Google and searched for “windmill” and “solar energy.” I was amazed to learn how many entries there were for both subjects. My friends showed me how to create an email address and now I am on Gmail. Now I am practicing sending and receiving emails when I have access to a computer.
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On Sunday, my friends from National Solar and I completed the next phase of work on my electrical system. You can see a compete set of (my first) digital photos at my new site on Flickr. I had the following goals:

1. Upgrade the power generation in the windmill
2. Upgrade the battery technology and capacity, to provide more even power for more hours at a time
3. Increase the brightness of the lighting (lumens) to make it easier for my family to accomplish tasks at night, especially to read…

Photo: Back in November, the windmill was only 5 meters (15 feet) tall compared to 12 meters (36 feet) today. I raised the height because I discovered that the best wind was just over the top of the shorter windmill.

Design for the Unwealthiest 90 Percent

Design for the unwealthiest 90 percent by Alice Rawsthorn:

Many humanitarian designers focus on helping the needy to enhance their earning potential by setting up new businesses, or running existing ones more efficiently. The Bamboo Treadle Pump enables poor farmers in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and India to pump up groundwater during the dry season. The Big Boda Load-Carrying Bicycle provides cheap transport in Kenya and Uganda to carry hundreds of pounds of cargo or two passengers using pedal-power. And thanks to the KickStart MoneyMaker Block Press, eight workers can produce up to 800 building blocks a day from soil and a small quantity of cement.

Strawjet: Invention of the Year, 2006

Invent Now 2006 Modern Marvel of the Year (links all broken by History Channel, so links were removed, – when will we finally have people in charge of websites that understand basic usability fundamentals?):

The Strawjet is a farm implement that processes straw (wheat, flax, sunflower, tobacco, hemp, etc.) in the field (after the plant has been harvested) into a mat, similar to a large bamboo window blind. This is used to construct composite building panels in much the same way as fiberglass or carbon fiber; however, the Strawjet uses a binder made from paper pulp, clay and cement rather than plastic resin.

Update, 2013: strawjet.com. Also I added this webcast from 2009

Read (except they broke all the links so you can’t) about more finalists in the History Channel and Invent Now Inventor contest:

Dr. David L. Cull, Hemoaccess Valve System
Kristin A. Hrabar, Illuminated Nutdriver
Dr. Sundaresan Jayaraman, Wearable Motherboard (Smart Shirt)
Robert C. Kelly, Resc-hue Lite Line

Related: Pay as You Go Solar in India – Appropriate Technology: Solar Water in Poor Cairo Neighborhoods – Lemelson-MIT 2010 Award for Sustainability – Play pumps had the idea of putting a merry-go-round on the site and letting children playing on it provide the energy… The solution does not appear to have been executed well.

Cheap Drinking Water From Seawater

Image of process to get cheap drinking water from seawater

New membrane technology offers cheap drinking water from seawater

The consumption of drinking water is still increasing, while the availability of drinking water decreases. About 1 billion people in the world have no access to enough clean drinking water, while 70% of the Earth is covered with water.
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Other techniques to convert seawater into drinking water, like RO, MSF, or MED, use a lot of energy to vaporize the water or push the water through a membrane under high pressure. Memstill uses cheap waste-energy, which cuts down the energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The cost of desalination of one cubic meter water with Memstill could be under $0.50, where other distillation techniques cost about 1 dollar for the same amount of water.

State-of-the-art desalination technology – more information on the memstill web site.

Smokeless Stove Uses 80% Less Fuel

Philips Smokeless Stove Uses 80% Less Fuel, Saves Lives

300 million families in the world’s poorest regions burn wood for cooking, and smoke and toxic emissions kill 1.6 million people per year.

That claim in the article is disputed by a comment on the web site. The difficulty of drawing direct causation for many medical problems makes such claims difficult to prove. A scientific paper explores the issue:

Chronic pulmonary disease in rural women exposed to biomass fumes

There is little question finding engineering solutions that serve to reduce health risks are often much better than trying to deal with the health consequences after people are sick. So providing safe drinking water, for example, will do more for health than increase spending on medical care to treat those who get sick.

Additionally the opportunities to save lives and improve health in the world often do not require cutting edge science. It is often a matter of engineering effective solutions for hundreds of millions and billions of people living without what those in the wealthy take for granted (Water and Electricity for All – Solar Powered Hearing Aid – Appropriate Technology).

Water and Electricity for All

Segway Creator Unveils His Next Act

Water and Electricity may not seem like something to wish for if you are reading this post. However for over 1 billion people that do without both it is.

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

To solve the problem, he’s invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

“Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,” says Kamen. “The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don’t care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.”
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Kamen’s goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That’s a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.

Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.

More products from his company, Deka Research & Development Corp, including: Hydroflexâ„¢ Irrigation Pump, IBOTâ„¢ Mobility System and Intravascular Stent.

Dean Kamen understands what engineering can do. “Today, almost 200 engineers, technicians, and machinists work in our electronics and software engineering labs, machine shop, and on CAD stations.”

DEKA’s mission, first and foremost, is to foster innovation. It is a company where the questioning of conventional thinking is encouraged and practiced by everyone—engineers and non-engineers alike—because open minds are more likely to arrive at workable solutions. This has been our formula for success since we began, and it will continue to drive our success in the future.

Dean Kamen founded For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST)

Appropriate Technology

Technology is not only about new breakthroughs. In some cases the technology used is nothing special, the impact is made in applying the technology well. Many opportunities exist for breakthroughs using technology that has been around for a long time.

I was reminded of my father‘s work by the article: From Stanford Engineering to Social Innovation (broken link):

In 1991, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon founded ApproTEC, a non-profit organization that develops technologies for alleviating poverty. More than 36,000 farmers in Kenya have now used their low-cost water pumps to create their own small businesses. They hope to take 400,000 people out of poverty in the next few years.

From the ApproTEC web site (broken link – it sure gets annoying how many people fail to follow basic web usability guidelines such as keeping links alive – organization now called KickStart):

ApproTEC’s Impacts To Date
Over:

35,000 new businesses started * 800 new businesses per month
$35 million a year in new profits and wages generated by the new businesses
New incomes account for over 0.5% of Kenya’s GDP and 0.2% of Tanzania’s GDP

On a related note, TrickleUp is my favorite charity. Their mission: to help the lowest income people worldwide take the first steps up out of poverty, by providing conditional seed capital, business training and relevant support services essential to the launch or expansion of a microenterprise.

John Hunter