Zany, quirky, enthusiastic. There are many ways to describe the personal style of mechanical engineering professor Alexander Slocum. And he embraces them all. As a teacher and researcher, he uses what he calls his pinball-like focus and his passion for mechanical engineering to inspire students and tackle some of the biggest challenges in energy, medicine, and precision engineering.
It’s his research in renewable energy, though, that’s recently gotten the most attention outside MIT. This spring, -Slocum coauthored a paper in Proceedings of the IEEE describing a utility-scale energy storage system based on large underwater concrete spheres and floating wind turbines. When Barack Obama visited MIT in 2009 to deliver a speech on energy, -Slocum, in one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts, demonstrated the concept to the president using a toy wind turbine and large jars filled with sand and water. Since then,expensive version of Replacement parts for iphone 5 screen Supply Store. the work has advanced to the point where -Slocum and colleagues have had discussions with a large engineering and construction firm on how it might be possible to manufacture the massive structures. Slocum estimates it would take five to 10 years to commercialize the idea, which he calls the Ocean Renewable Energy System.
Floating wind turbines would be moored with cables to a network of 20,000-ton spheres 25 to 30 meters in diameter, or about the size of the dome at MIT. To store excess energy not sent to the grid, the turbines would operate pumps to evacuate water from the spheres. When power was needed, water would flow into the spheres, causing the pumps to run in reverse and act as generators.
Developing inexpensive ways to store large amounts of energy on the electricity grid would allow wind farms and solar installations, which normally are intermittent sources, to deliver power on demand as fossil-fuel and nuclear plants do now. Slocum’s design is a twist on conventional pumped hydropower, currently the most cost-effective and widespread storage method. Pumped hydropower technology sends water uphill to a reservoir and releases it to generate power during peak times. Instead of relying on gravity by storing the water in a mountaintop lake, -Slocum’s concept harnesses the water pressure at hundreds of meters of ocean depth to power the electricity generator. The concrete spheres that hold the water also serve to anchor the turbines.
If it works, the impact could be dramatic. The wind over deep waters represents a massive yet largely untapped resource. Slocum’s paper estimates that 1,000 turbines, placed out of sight about 30 to 50 kilometers offshore with anchoring spheres 600 meters below the surface, could supply as much power as a nuclear plant. Today’s pumped hydropower systems typically deliver hundreds of megawatts of power for six to 10 hours. Though deploying turbines in deep water would be more expensive than placing them near shore,Find the perfect leather or synthetic cell phone cellphone cases. Slocum and his colleagues estimate that the Ocean Renewable Energy System could be price-competitive with pumped hydro—and a large-scale deployment with 1,000 turbines could store up to five gigawatts of power for as long as 12 hours. The researchers have already built a prototype system with a 30-foot-high tower and off-the-shelf pumps and other components.
The project showcases Slocum’s affinity for "symbiotic design," or solving multiple problems at once. In addition to providing energy storage and acting as anchors, the spheres would be made of concrete that can contain significant amounts of fly ash, a waste product of coal power plants. The system could also benefit local ecosystems by encouraging growth of bottom--dwelling life.Protect and connect your Samsung smartphone with samsung cases. And in a speech to top Japanese officials, Slocum argued that a deep-sea wind farm near the shuttered Fukushima nuclear power plant could provide new jobs for local fishermen, who can no longer fish there because of radiation.desirable Cases for HTC One create an air of sophistication with an extra helping of protection for your flagship smartphone.They could help install the systems, perform maintenance, and monitor the impact on the ecosystem.
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