10 bold green technology ideas

Climate change, traffic jams, poverty crisis: the problem posed in this century is probably how to secure human survival. The bigger the problem, the more visionary solutions must have. We introduce ten researchers to come up with outstanding technology ideas to change the world.

Elon Musk: Ultrasonic iron train

He has simplified Internet payments with PayPal, brought electric cars to life through Tesla Roadster and privatized flights to space with Space X. Here, the inventor, 43-year-old businessman It also wants to give the world a completely new type of transport that is twice as fast as a plane but is cheaper.

Mr. Musk is developing a fast ship named Hyperloop, which has the power of Concorde aircraft plus a cannon. On this cannon, the warhead accelerated thanks to the impact of the magnetic field. According to Musk, Hyperloop will only need about half an hour to travel 600km from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Moreover, the ship can fully utilize solar energy provided by photovoltaic cells along the route. The cost of construction of this road is about six billion dollars - only one-tenth of the cost of building a high-speed railway in California.

Heinrich Bülthoff: Arriving at the office by unmanned aircraft

Cars can run in three directions: straight, turn or reverse. When there is a congestion, the car dies a little. While there is another direction for them that is not used, it is the ascension. A group of international experts are studying this upward trend, this EU project called Mycopter.

Objective: to create an aerial route for flying cars controlled by computers that can direct passengers directly to the workplace - thereby reducing unnecessary energy consumption. This idea is not entirely unimaginable: in fact there were the first "hybrids" between aircraft and cars, for example, the Model Transition of Terrafugia, an American startup. The e-Volo business in Karlsruhe, Germany is even testing an easy-to-control electric helicopter.

Under the direction of Professor Heinrich Bülthoff, of the Max Planck Institute for the Control of Students in Tübingen, Mycopter researchers wanted to clarify, what to do to continue developing such flying devices into objects. how to fly drones to transport passengers, as well as how the government has to deal with these changes: in the future, those who fly by themselves need to have the same kind of license, managing personal air traffic will How it happens, what is the integration of this type of transport in cities. Researchers want answers to these questions so that traveling by flying object is as simple as traveling by car.

Eduard Heindl: Turn mountains into batteries

According to scientists, a rock pressed on a pillar of water could hold up to two terawatts / hour of energy - the same amount of electricity that Germany consumed in about 30 hours.

To completely convert to renewable energy, Germany must move mountains, just as the word literally means. This is the proposal of Furtwangen University of Applied Sciences scientist. The physicist intends to build a huge energy building of granite, and this will be a prominent work because of the similarity of Ayers Rock in Australia.

Heidl plans to use tunnel boring machines and stone saws to separate a cylindrical (or tubular) marble block, over 500 meters high and one kilometer in diameter. The gaps and the surface of this stone will be plastered flat to ensure tightness. Excess power from wind poles and from photovoltaic cells ensures the operation of this giant pump, the pillar of compressed rock masses below it to push the pillars to hundreds of meters. When the grid needs energy - for example when the wind is calm - water will flow beneath the marble pillar and make the turbine work.

The cost of building so-called energy storage can be up to billions of Euros and can store about 2,000 Gigawatt hours of electricity - 40 times more than the electricity stored by all the current pump stations. of Germany and by the amount of electricity that Germany consumes in a day.

Matt Watson: Cool the earth

When humans knew how to clone sheep, they could move young mountains - so why not create a volcanic activity? This is exactly what researcher Matt Watson wants to achieve with his Projekt SPICE project to end global warming.

Scientists at the University of Bristol in England want to do what the volcano Pinatubo (Philippines) once caused, this volcanic eruption in 1991 caused the earth's temperature to drop by half a degree C because of volcanic ash loading up to the stratosphere and cover the sun. Watson also wanted to blow up the ash to the stratosphere through a pipe attached to the end of a giant hellium sphere up to a height of 20km. A sea-going ship serves as the basis for the entire process.

The first small-scale installation test was scheduled to begin in 2012 but had to be stopped. Now Watson intends to develop his idea first in the laboratory.

Yasuyuki Fukumuro: Generating electricity on space

Where is the best location to make solar power plant? According to Yasuyuki Fukumuro, in charge of Space Solar Power Systems project of Jaxa Japan Space Research Agency, the most appropriate position to put solar power plants is on earth orbit. This is the place where the sunlight is always bright, never cloudy - those are the highlights of this position.

Fukumuro plans to transmit electricity through microwave rays to a ground station. An International Academy of Astronautics study said that in the next 10 to 20 years, the first orbit power plant could be built.

However, whether it is effective to shoot photovoltaic cells on space by missiles is far away. One thing must be solved is how to significantly reduce the weight of photovoltaic cells, or produce them through printers right on the universe.

Claudio Lenoardi: Mounting aircraft

The installation of aircraft compartments will make passengers and luggage and cargo on the sewing machine faster. One day one could fit hydrogen gas containers or battery tanks into electric powered aircraft.

Claudio Leonardi, a researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne is promoting a project called Clip-Air, whereby passengers travel in the future when departing from a train station that can board Multi-function to go straight to the airport by rail, from here up straight to the plane without completing the procedures to board the plane.

Up to three cabins can be fitted, each 30 meters long at the airport into a dedicated aircraft. Each cabin can accommodate up to 150 passengers, equivalent to an Airbus-A320. It is also possible to fit cargo and luggage compartments according to demand on this aircraft.

This idea continues to be developed by Glasgow University. Their Horizon system consisted of an electric-powered roller coaster, always near a dedicated airport runway and landed only when the train cabin arrived and fitted it, then took off again. Besides passengers in these cabs, there are new batteries that can be charged so that the aircraft can continue to fly. When landing, these cabins separate from the aircraft and continue to other cities via magnetic drive.

Michael Sterner: Ships become generators

There have been some ideas about harnessing energy from the sea. However, there is no way to go as far as the plan of Michael Sterner, professor of energy and energy systems at Regensburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He plans to use ships of about 100 meters in length to control computers operating in the North Atlantic to create hydrogen gas.

As soon as the wind pushes the ship, the water will cause the turbine to integrate in the ship to generate electricity through electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas. Sterner said that in favorable wind conditions, the ship could generate stable energy in the form of hydrogen gas and accumulate in large barrels. After that, hydrogen gas will be pumped into large tanks on the shore and this energy source can be used, for example, with cars powered by hydrogen gas.

The sail is the Flettnerrotor, these are vertical wind turbines. A ship can generate two megawatts of electricity. The components are now available - now someone needs to stand up to build this first energy ship.

Edmund Kelly: The solar power plant floats

Normally solar power plants are more productive when the sun shines more. So scientists have long planned to build solar power plants in the desert and even in space. Researcher Edmund Kelly in California and his entrepreneur Stratosolar are considering a new approach: building solar power plants and floating on the stratosphere.

Giant bubbles contain thousands of tons of fuel gas carrying thin photovoltaic cells that stick to the sky at a height of 20km.

This is where the sun shines continuously throughout the day, with no wind and very cold air so the efficiency of solar power here is much higher than on the ground. The electricity from the giant aerial photoelectric ball is transmitted through the cable to the earth, which is also the anchor of the bubble. According to Kelly's calculations, although the construction cost is extremely large, the cost of solar power on the stratosphere is three times cheaper than the cost of solar power on earth today.

Neil Palmer: Recreating electricity from lightning

The earth's atmosphere has a huge charge. Every day in the world there are three million lightning bolts in the sky. A team at the University of Southampton (UK) headed by physicist Neil Palmer and researchers from Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia have considered the possibility of using this energy to run devices. suffer from electricity in our lives.

Scientists created 200,000-strong lightning bolts in the lab, using a dedicated receiver to receive this energy source and load the current into a Lumia-925-Smartphone, without hurting. harm the mobile phone. In the same way, other researchers also used giant towers to capture lightning bolts and thereby reap electricity from the air. The problem is: how this works and whether it is effective, these are still open questions.

Louis Michaud: Take electricity from tornadoes

Louis Michaud is working on an experimental facility on a tornado power plant.

Tornadoes are horrors for many people. Particularly engineer Louis Michaud of Canada found the tornado extremely attractive that he sought to create them. The engineer wants to work with his startup Avetec to build tornado power plants to generate electricity. He uses hot exhaust from steel mills or thermal power plants to run through high chimneys and air that spiral up high.

The outside air was colder, so the top of the chimney formed a vortex suction force, which created a high cyclone of about 40 meters. Researcher Michaud hopes the energy generated here is enough to operate a turbine at the base of the tower and thereby generate electricity.

In this way, hot exhaust gas from a 500 Megawatt coal-fired power plant can be used to create tornadoes in the tower to add up to 200 Megawatts of electricity.

Michaud received a great deal of support from PayPal CEO Peter Thiel and the number one investor at Facebook - he contributed $ 300,000 to build a prototype.