As the holidays fade and the New Year unfolds, it’s back to business for most of us. For NASA Tech Briefs, that includes a bunch of trade shows and conferences our editors will attend over the next few months.

One show I plan to attend is the Pacific Design & Manufacturing Show, taking place at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif., from February 9 through 11. The show will feature the latest design and manufacturing solutions from hundreds of companies. The diverse array of products and services include adhesives, CAD/CAM/CAE software and services, electrical and electronic components, fluid handling media and controls, instruments and controls, materials, mechanical components, motors and motion controls, testing and inspection products and services, and valves, switches, and controls.

No less than seven other shows are co-located with the Pacific Design & Manufacturing Show. Three of the more significant shows are the Medical Design & Manufacturing Show West, Electronics West, and Green Manufacturing Expo. The Medical Design & Manufacturing Show West and Green Manufacturing Expo represent the burgeoning fields of medical technology and “green” technology – sectors that held their own during the economic downturn and are increasingly important to design engineers.

In coming weeks, I hope to get more details on some of the products and technologies being shown. If your company plans to exhibit, drop me a line and let me know what you’ll be showing. Hopefully, we can meet during the show to discuss what’s new and exciting.

I spent part of the recent Fourth of July weekend in central Pennsylvania, with one of the stops being Lancaster, home of one of the largest concentrations of Amish people in the U.S. The Amish are well known for eschewing modern technology as they shun the use of electricity, private automobiles, and many of the conveniences we take for granted. But what on the surface appears to be a backward way of life has an upside: the Amish champion “green” living.

During a guided tour of a restored Amish home, it became clearly evident that the Amish have us beat as far as environmentally-friendly lifestyles. As electricity use remains virtually non-existent, there’s no concern over electric grid outages. In Amish homes, propane gas runs home stoves and hot water heaters, and gas tanks run wringer-type clothes washers. Air compressors run the power tools needed on Amish farms.

Although the Amish do now use cell phones, they don’t own iPods or other portable electrical devices; thus they don’t consume massive quantities of disposable batteries that clog and pollute our landfills. And, as PC usage is almost non-existent, they’re not throwing away hundreds of lead-containing CRT monitors and don’t need banks of power-gobbling servers.

Because the Amish don’t own automobiles, they’re not concerned about automotive company financial problems or gas prices. And you can keep your hybrid-electric or diesel gas vehicle, thank you. The Amish continue to rely on the time-honored horse and buggy for transportation.

Mind you, the Amish partake in these practices not out of a stated desire to be “green”, but because they believe modern technology is not compatible with their simple, Bible-centered way of life. It somehow works. The Amish have existed in this country for over 300 years and remain a healthy, thriving population.

I’m not advocating driving horses and buggies and shutting off the electricity in my house anytime soon. But we can draw inspiration from the Amish by applying their conservation-oriented mindset and clever use of existing – albeit dated – technology to solve everyday challenges.

When the time comes to kick back and relax, my wife and I enjoy vacationing in Aruba. Located in the southern Caribbean about 15 miles off the coast of Venezuela, this tiny (75 square miles) desert island has a lot going for it, starting with the climate. Being situated outside of the Caribbean’s notorious hurricane belt, the weather is monotonously the same every day – sunny, with an average temperature of 80 – 85 degrees Fahrenheit and a nice, cooling breeze provided by the constant trade winds that blow across the island. In the last 50 years Aruba has grown from being a sleepy little island whose main source of income was oil refining to a world-class resort destination whose main source of income is tourism.

As one might expect on a desert island, fresh water is scarce. Rainfall averages less than 20 inches per year, which may be ideal for sun worshippers but it’s not real conducive to human survival. Or tourism. For one thing, it’s kind of hard to make those fruity, umbrella-topped rum drinks tourists like so much without fresh water. So Aruba solved the problem by building one of the largest water desalination plants in the world. Water-en Energiebedrijf Aruba N.V., as the plant is officially known – or WEB for short – currently sucks up sea water and converts it into roughly 9.8 million gallons of fresh water per day using a multi-stage flash (MSF) distillation system. From what I’ve read, the plant produces some of the purest, highest quality drinking water in the world, and my taste buds would not disagree. The plant also doubles as the island’s source of electricity, cranking out somewhere in the area of 60 MW a day.

Considering the escalating need for, and diminishing supply of, clean drinking water in many parts of the world, the obvious question is, if a tiny island like Aruba can successfully convert enough seawater into fresh water to sustain its 100,000 inhabitants and more than 700,000 tourists who visit each year, why can’t other countries? God knows there’s enough seawater in the world, and we obviously have the technology.

Unfortunately, the solution isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Water desalination, it seems, is a very energy-intensive, expensive process. Most estimates put the average cost to produce 1 acre-foot (approx. 325,851 gallons) of desalinated water at anywhere from $800 to $1400. And that’s not counting the cost to build and maintain the plant and infrastructure. Some of the countries who need fresh water the most also happen to be some of the poorest countries on Earth.

Then there are the environmental impact considerations. Depending on the type of energy used to run the plant, greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear waste could be a problem. And what do you do with all that salt you remove from the water? Dumping it back into the ocean could raise local salt concentration levels, adversely affecting marine life.

None of these problems is insurmountable and, as they say, “necessity is the mother of invention.” What’s important is that we have the technology now to convert seawater into drinking water if we have to. The economics of doing so will work themselves out as the need increases. Just ask anyone serving fruity, umbrella-topped rum drinks to tourists in Aruba.

There’s no shortage of solutions proposed to solve the problem of global warming, some devised after long, painstaking, and expensive hours of research. But President Obama’s key energy expert has come up with what appears to be a low-cost no-brainer – paint the roofs of all buildings white.

According to U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, painting roofs and paved surfaces in white or other light colors would reduce global warming by conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. He goes as far as to say that making all building roofs white would be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

Chu’s premise is that when sunlight reflects off a white or light-colored surface, much of the light will pass through the atmosphere and back into space. On the other hand, infrared radiation emitted from warm surfaces is trapped by greenhouse gases, causing the atmosphere to further heat up and contribute to global warming.

Chu believes demands on air conditioning systems would be reduced if buildings have white or light-colored surfaces. Moreover, he added that painting vehicles in lighter colors would make them more energy-efficient in the summer, reducing demands on vehicle air conditioners.

While Chu’s idea is plausible, implementation on any massive scale would be challenging. I’m no expert on building construction, but how would you modify building surfaces in large cities like New York, where I live, with their diverse styles and constructions? Can one picture the Empire State Building painted white? What happens to all the landmark buildings where any exterior modification would require local legislative action and likely throw building historians into a tizzy?

I have a request for President Obama: Can you get Congress to pass legislation to give us tax credits to help us pay to paint our house roofs and dark-colored cars white?

Bricks Made of Power Plant Waste Enable “Green” Construction

Researchers from Freight Pipeline Company (FPC) taking part in a National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored project have found that bricks made from fly ash — fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants — may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as earlier predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Each year, 25 million tons of fly ash are recycled, generally as additives in building materials such as concrete, but 45 million tons go to waste. Fly ash bricks find a use for some of that waste and counter the environmental impact from the high-temperature kiln manufacture of standard bricks.

Once colored and shaped, the bricks are similar to their clay counterparts in both appearance and in meeting or exceeding construction-material standards. Supported by NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, FPC made fly ash bricks more durable by engineering them to resist freezing and thawing due to weather. A second-phase SBIR award will test the brick material’s safety and prepare it for market.

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