Problem: Artisan women in Guatemala earn less than $2.00 per day weaving textiles. Solution: Women weave textiles and then form them into high efficiency wind turbine blades. High value turbine blades create good paying jobs and clean renewable energy. University of Michigan BLUELab Engineering students are working with a local Guatemalan womens weaving coop to pioneer this new empowering technology. Guatemala has the wind, the need and the capacity to support up to 8 wind co-ops.
What is the issue, problem, or challenge?
Thousands of women in Guatemala make their living by weaving textiles and selling them to “middle men” who then sell textiles in regional markets. Women often make less than $2.00 per day. This level of poverty leads to malnourished children and lack of opportunity for children, particularly girls, to get an education. By creating new technologies and new markets for women artisans we are breaking the circle of poverty and creating new clean technology jobs.
How will this project solve this problem?
Our collaborative design team of University of Michigan Engineering students and a local womens weaving cooperative in Nueva Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, Guatemala are working together, hand-in-hand to design a new high value technology based on traditional practices. We provide opportunity through new technology where none existed.
Potential Long Term Impact
Women bear the brunt of global poverty. Of the 1.2 billion abject poor (less than $1.00 / day) an astonishing 70% are women. We need to create new opportunities for women to take control over their financial destiny. To help thousands of women, we will publish the Woven Wind Turbine online along with instructional photos and video. From our previous projects we expect dozens of nonprofits (NGOs) around the world to use our designs to help create new income for poor women worldwide.
Project Message
We can generate income and electricity!
- Cleotilde Lopez, Woman Weaver
Tests done by the Environmental Working Group have reveled that 31 cities in the US have the carcinogenic chemical chromium (IV) in their tap water. Ann Arbor, MI, my home town is one of them. The EPA currently only regulates chromium (VI) exposure through existing regulation in total chromium. Unfortunately, total chromium does not take into account the differences in the toxicity between the different oxidation states of chromium. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Solar cells, the ones that make electricity from sunlight, are pretty inefficient. Really good ones currently on the market are about 15% efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. By comparison converting sunlight into heat is very efficient, 85 – 90% with just good quality spray paint. So we have a long way to go with the efficiency of photovoltaic cells.
To address this discrepancy, researchers from MIT took a new look at solar cells and the conversion of sunlight to energy and they discovered that by mimicking plants they could increase the efficiency of solar cells while at the same time creating self-healing photovoltaic structures.
Chemical engineering professor Michael Strano “I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism,” he told MITNews. To mimic this process, he and his team began work on self-repairing molecules called phospholipids. These molecules can turn sunlight into energy and reassemble themselves even after breakdown. The new phospholipids create a structural support that responds to light and can realign the system once electrons are “knocked loose” by the particles of light.
With a grant from the MIT Energy Initiative, Strano and his team built and tested a prototype of the synthetic molecules and discovered the system to be 40% efficient (!)
This is about double to triple the efficiency of cells currently on the market. In one trial the phospholipids cells were repeatedly assembled and disassembled and showed no efficiency lost.
Strano also said his new photovoltaic technology could one day near 100% efficiency, which frankly sounds too good to be true.
Strano recovers nicely by stating “We’re basically imitating tricks that nature has discovered over millions of years”
Nature is a great inspiration for efficient, self repairing, low cost and organic ways to design the future.
After discovering thousands of unwanted malware files corrupting our vast SDU servers we took the time to scrub our hard drives clean and start up with new bits and bytes.
SDU will now return to our regular and semi-regular publishing of all things sustainable, with particular emphasis on mass market appropriate technologies.
Biofuel startup ZeaChem has begun building a biofuel pilot plant that will turn cellulosic feedstocks such as switch grass and wood chips into ethanol via a novel biomimetic process that uses microbes found in the guts of termites. It makes perfect sense to use the termite model to turn hard to digest cellulosic materials into simple sugars. Termintes have been happily munching wood millions of years. They have a proven process.
The company says the ethanol yields from the sugars of its cellulosic feedstocks are significantly higher than the yields from other biofuel production processes. ZeaChem says its process also has the potential to produce a plastic feedstock.
From Technology Review:
Bugging out: A pilot scale cellulose to ethanol plant is under construction by ZeaChem and partner Hazen Research in Golden, CO. The plant will soon pump out 250,000 gallons of fuel per year.
ZeaChem employs a hybrid approach that uses a combination of thermochemical and biological processes. It first uses acid to break the cellulose into sugars. Then, instead of fermenting the sugars into ethanol with yeast, as is typically done, the company feeds the sugars to an acetogen bacteria found in the guts of termites and other insects. The bacteria converts the sugar into acetic acid, which is then combined with hydrogen to form ethanol.
“It’s a little more complicated than a conventional process. It’s not the obvious, direct route, but there is a high yield potential,” says Jim McMillan of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO.
In more conventional biofuel processes, much of the carbon content locked up in the sugars is lost to the formation of carbon dioxide when the sugars are fermented into ethanol. Converting the sugars into acetic acid and then ethanol, however, yields no carbon dioxide. As a result, this method has the potential to raise biofuel yields by as much as 50 percent, according to ZeaChem.
I’ve worked with Dr. Norbert Muller on a variety of projects. (Note: my role on these projects has always been modest). But what I have noticed about Norbert’s work over the years is the intellectual rigor that goes into his designs and his absolute dedication to creating a sustainable future. Norbert is one person you should watch. A variety of very cool, affordable and sustainable technologies are in the works in his labs.
Last Fall he showed me a sketch for an engine that uses shock waves instead of pistons to compress a fuel-air mixture. An engine that takes the best from “wave rotor” technology and turbine engines such that the engine has only one moving part, it doesn’t need water cooling and it uses fuel much more efficiently than anything on the market. Check it out:
Associate professor of mechanical engineering Norbert Mueller believes his wave disk engine could signal a breakthrough for hybrid electric vehicles. Mueller leads a team of Michigan State University engineers and scientists that recently received a $2.5 million federal stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build and develop their engine.
The engine uses turbo combustion “shock wave” technology to convert either liquid fuel or compressed natural gas or hydrogen into electrical power. Fuel efficiency for hybrid vehicles could increase five times compared to internal combustion engines while reducing costs by 30 percent.
“Well, it’s lighter than an (internal combustion) engine, it’s smaller and it’s cheaper to produce because it’s all you need to produce,” Mueller said.
“It has no valvetrains, it has no overheads, it has no radiator, and all these things, and no water cycle, it’s pretty easy and simple. You only need to connect a generator on the back, which we call a pot-sized generator and that would be, basically be the engine which drives your full utility vehicle.”
The goal of Mueller’s team is to produce an engine that would give hybrid vehicles a 500-mile driving range and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 95 percent.
“That’s what we want to do, and we are committed to do in the next two years,” Mueller said. “I want to see you in three years, driving this full or hybrid electric vehicle with this engine in there.”
