2011 was another busy year for engineers all over the world. From inventing a device that turns air into water to exploring the oceans in a tiny submarine, scientists and engineers are exploring uncharted territory.

Like last year, we at eGFI have chronicled the most awe-inspiring innovations and stories, so in case you missed one, we present:

The Most Popular, Interesting, Weird, or Just Plain Cool eGFI Blog Posts of 2011

	Turning Air into Water
	Jetman: Flying Soon to a Landmark Near You
	Vertical Forest Coming Soon to Milan
	And Now: Flavor-Shifting Ice Cream
	Solar Decathalon 2011 Powers Up
	The World’s Sweetest Printer
	Water Bottles to Illuminate a Million Homes
	Airbus Presents a Futuristic Vision of Air Travel
	Students Create an App to Diagnose Malaria
	Berkeley Engineers Help Student Walk
	Underwater Scooters are the New SCUBA
	Virgin Oceanic Goes Many Leagues Under the Sea
	Cynthia Breazeal Wants You to Make Friends with Robots
	New Shirt Measures Athletes’ Performances
	Watson vs. The World

Now, Rio de Janeiro is aiming to create the first games with a zero-carbon footprint when it hosts the Summer Olympics in 2016.

To help the city achieve this goal, Swiss-based RAFAA Architecture and Design has proposed a Solar City Tower, which features a visually stunning energy-generating waterfall.

Solar City Tower is RAFAA’s entry in the International Architecture Competition for the Olympic Games in 2016. Solar panels on the tower produce energy for the Olympic village by day, while seawater that is pumped into the tower drives turbines that generate electricity at night.

On special occasions the water can also be pumped over the edges of the building to create a dazzling waterfall, and an instantly recognizable landmark for visitors arriving in Rio by air or sea.

RAFAA proposed locating the Solar City Tower on the Cotunduba Island, and equipping the tower with an observation deck as well as a balcony at the top of the tower that would provide visitors with a 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape. A glass skywalk platform would let visitors walk over the waterfall. There would also be a retractable platform for bungee jumping.

Does this make you want to travel to Rio for the Summer Olympics even more?

Images: RAFAA

Every hour, the sun beams down more energy than the whole planet consumes in a year. Although solar cell technology has advanced considerably in recent years, many challenges related to reliably capturing and storing the sun’s energy still remain.

Sossina Haile, a professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at CalTech, is developing a new approach to solar power. Using cerium oxide (or ceria), a metal most commonly found in self-cleaning ovens, Haile and her research team have created a prototype reactor that has the power to transform sunbeams into clean fuel.

Professor Sossina Haile and grad student William Chueh next to a thermochemical reactor used to screen materials for their new solar reactor

The reactor has a window made of quartz that focuses the sun’s rays like a magnifying glass into its core. There the ceria works to catalyze a solar chemical reaction, producing hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The hydrogen can be used in hydrogen fuel cells, which help power hybrid cars, buses, and airplanes. Carbon monoxide is useful in the creation of liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

Here’s the catch: for all of these reactions to work, temperatures in the reactor need to be extraordinarily high – around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Haile’s team was able to achieve these conditions by testing their prototype at the Solar Technology Laboratory at Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.  The lab’s High Flux Solar Simulator can produce the equivalent heat of over 1,000 suns.

PSI’s High-Flux Solar Simulator can mimic the power of 1,500 suns

The new solar reactor performed remarkably well in tests, harnessing close to 1% of the solar energy it received (a high number by today’s standards). In the near future, Haile says she would like to bring the efficiency up to 15%. Long term goals include incorporating this new technology into large-scale energy plants, where the power of the sun as well as CO2 emissions could be recycled and converted into fuel.

Images:
Caltech/ETH Zurich
California Institute of Technology
Paul Scherrer Institute

Americans of Hispanic descent have made notable contributions to science, engineering and technology. They include a 1968 Physics Nobel laureate, the current head of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the first Latina astronaut, now Number 2 at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 – Oct. 15), here are the stories of a scientist and two engineers of Hispanic descent who have made a significant impact in their fields.

Luis Walter Alvarez (1911 – 1988)

This San Francisco-born experimental physicist and inventor won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 “for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics.” That distinction was just one of the high points of a life of scientific adventure. In 1938, two years after joining the University of California at Berkeley faculty, he found that some radioactive elements decay when an orbital electron merges with the atom’s nucleus, producing an element with an atomic number smaller by one, a form of beta decay.

In 1939 he and Felix Bloch made the first measurement of the magnetic moment of the neutron. During World War II he developed a radar guidance system for landing aircraft, worked in the Manhattan Project, and flew in a backup plane when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He later helped construct the first proton linear accelerator and constructed the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber. With his geologist son Walter, he helped develop the theory that links the dinosaurs’ extinction with a giant asteroid or comet impact. The Nobel Foundation, in awarding Alvarez the prize, cited “the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis.”

Ellen Ochoa

The first Hispanic woman astronaut, Los-Angeles-born Ochoa has made four space flights. During the most recent, in 2002, she operated a robotic arm to maneuver space walkers around the International Space Station. With a bachelor’s degree physics from San Diego State University and master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford, she is also an inventor, with three patents related to optical systems. At NASA, she has been chief of intelligent systems technology at the Ames Research Center, supervising 35 engineers and scientists; Director of Flight Crew Operation at the Johnson Space Center and now, deputy director of the center, which has the lead at NASA in working on the International Space Station.

Dan Arvizu

Dan Arvizu is taking on some of the country’s biggest energy challenges as head of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colo. That’s the Energy Department’s main lab for research and development in energy efficiency and renewable fuels. A leading expert on renewable energy and sustainable energy, he began his career at Bell Laboratories. He went on to become an executive at Sandia National Laboratories, and later was chief technology officer with CH2M HILL Companies, Ltd. A mechanical engineer with degrees from New Mexico State University and Stanford, Arvizu has helped shape national research policy as a member of the National Science Board and in testimony before Congress.

The Army is currently developing tanks that run on hydrogen fuel cells

The U.S. military often struggles – unsuccessfully – to supply enough batteries for troops’ equipment.  GPS units and radios demand a lot of energy, so a sustainable source would be really beneficial.

That’s why the U.S. Army has created the Rucksack Enhanced Portable Power System (REPPS), which collects solar energy for the troops in Afghanistan, where there are high levels of sunlight.

The REPPS features a 62-watt, anti-glint solar panel blanket tucked into a backpack.  Not only can the system recharge batteries in a matter of hours, it can also be hooked up to electronic devices, providing them with more power.

More importantly, however, the technology will help save lives. Currently, troops must run back to their vehicles or nearest tactical operation centers in order to get new batteries. With the REPPS, troops can stay in place longer, making it more difficult for enemies to detect them.

This new system also won’t be too inconvenient for the troops to carry around, as it only weighs ten pounds.

The military is involved in developing other green initiatives as well:

One project is a hydrogen fuel cell-powered tank, which would gather hydrogen from JP-8 diesel fuel, and then convert it into raw electricity.

Even though that technology is a long way from being commercialized, the Army hopes the fuel cells will be able to power a tank’s computer, sensors, and battle command centers.

Images:
cell105/Flickr
Ken Zemach/US Army

Installing solar panels on the roof of buildings has become very en vogue recently.  But in a few years charging up your home might be cheaper and easier than ever.

The Norwegian company EnSol AS has developed a thin, transparent solar film that can be sprayed onto windows and other surfaces, rendering them able to absorb the sun’s energy just as efficiently as solar panels.

The special coating consists of metal nanoparticles suspended in a clear chemical compound, and could potentially be added to new building materials during their manufacturing process, or even to the roofs of electric cars. The company hopes to have this miraculous spray commercially available by 2016.

For more information about how spray-on solar cell technology was developed and how it works, see these articles.

Image: Joyseph/Flickr

Your apartment is heated by the warmth of  human bodies in a nearby Metro station – creepy or cool?

We’re not sure, but French engineers are moving ahead with plans to install the experimental heating system in a public housing project in Paris.

The caloric heat collected from Metro passengers, as well as the heat collected from the train itself, will funnel through an underground corridor to heat exchangers that will push warm air through the building’s pipes.

The system will be able to heat 17 apartments. And, despite being supplemented by district heating, carbon emissions should be cut by a third compared with using a standard boiler heating system.

At this point, the system will not be replicated in other areas of the country’s capital because of expense. Heating this particular building is only possible only because there’s a stairwell connecting the apartments to the Metro, which can be used as a pathway for the heat.

Alternative heating methods are nothing new for Paris, and if the city has its way, 12,000 other apartments will be geothermally heated soon. A planned energy project would soon tap into a mile-deep water reservoir with a natural temperature of 135 degrees Fahrenheit. While the project will cost the city $40 million, it will prevent 14,000 tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.

Image: pedrosimoes7/Flickr