This post is a summary of an article I wrote for the latest AMTIL Australian Manufacturing Technology magazine which came out in print edition today and can also be read online.  Go to page 40.

And here is a picture taken of a Solar Systems concentrated Solar Power Dish. We were involved in software upgrades to the dish controller.  It produced 114KWhr of power on an August day at Fosterville, near Bendigo and this picture was taken on that day.

Solar Systems Dish on sun at Fosterville

Energy Storage

The biggest issue with electricity is that it is hard to store. The Electrical Grid delivers power on demand and manages the generators to maintain the frequency and voltage while delivering the required power to satisfy the demand. Quite a juggling act.  And while there are schemes like the Snowy Mountains Hydro where we can pump water uphill to consume power then let it flow downhills and run turbines to produce power, most power is managed at the generator directly.

Wind Power, Solar Photo Voltaic and Solar Concentrated are the primary renewable energy sources we will look at here, and they all provide a fluctuating supply.  You can’t easily crank them up or down with the demand. So we still need a base supply to do the balancing act.  Depending on our approach, it is estimated that the limit for these fluctuating supply types is between 8% and 30% of the total grid capacity.

Carbon Footprint

This represents how much carbon is releases into the atmosphere for a particular activity.  The top emitters of carbon are:

• livestock, principally sheep and cattle
• power generation
• transport (road, rail, air, sea)
• industrial processes
• land clearing, deforestation and agriculture

In Australia, 50% of our emissions come from power generation as we use a lot of brown coal which also happens to be one of the most polluting ways to generate power on mass. This is followed closely by transport.  So you can see why power generation and transport are primary focuses for improving our carbon footprint.

There are only a few ways to improve this. These are:

1. use less power – which creates the opportunity for more energy efficient devices to be created or alternative ways of doing things such as the use of smarter appliances that conserve energy use or even cooperate with the grid to use power at the best possible time
2. reuse existing energy – heat exchangers in air conditioning systems are an example of this
3. create energy in more efficient ways – new generator technologies or moving from dirtier sources to cleaner sources
4. create energy in ways that does not use carbon, or uses a lot less of it

Because in Australia the creation of electricity is our primary source of greenhouse emissions we will focus on this area for the rest of the article.

Australia is ranked 5th in overall greenhouse gas emissions per capita and we are the highest per capita emitter of the industrialised nations so it is in our interest to develop alternatives to our current high emitting energy infrastructure.  This is also where some major manufacturing opportunities arise for Australian industries.

Australian Manufacturing Opportunities

One of the leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions is sea freight. So the classic Australian model of digging it up, shipping it overseas and shipping value added goods or materials back is a poor strategy when you consider the greenhouse gases produced. There will be an increasing advantage of doing the value add locally when reducing the total carbon footprint becomes important.

Here are some examples of successful local manufacture of alternative energy products in Australia today.  This is a very cursory list:

• Australian Solar Manufacturing is importing silicon cells and manufacturing complete TUV approved panels in Hallam, Victoria.
• Solar Systems are world leaders in concentrated solar silicon photovoltaics and are putting together the world’s largest concentrated solar electric facility in Mildura.
• Latronics and Solar Energy Australia both locally manufacture grid tied central inverters

Here are some opportunities to consider in the near future.  This is just scratching the surface:

• BP Solar are working with the CSIRO on deep discharge lead acid batteries for use in energy storage for remote solar installations. This will lead to new battery technology and new manufacturing opportunities.
• CSIRO are world leaders in organic photovoltaics and organic semiconductors. VICOSC is established to commercial the organic photovoltaics and there will be many opportunities that come from this initiative.
• Existing mounting and installation hardware for photovoltaics is labour intensive to use. There are opportunities for smarter and more elegant systems to make installation more modular and straight forward. This can work with local or imported panels.
• Most grid connected inverters are imported but there are concerns about both build quality and whether they are all compliant with Australian Standards.  The world market for inverters is set to grow by a factor of 10 over the next 5 years so there are also export opportunities.
• Biofuels will become increasingly more important and there will be many opportunities related to this at both the production and consumption end of the process.

As you can see from the list, there are opportunities in both the core technology manufacture and also in the supporting systems and hardware.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Ross Brinsdon of Can-Tek

We are so pleased to announce that Ross Brinsdon of Can-Tek has won the latest episode of the ABC program The New Inventors with his water based aerosol touch up paint product which allows you to get exactly the custom colour you want in an aerosol can that is loaded in store and is water based so you can clean it off before it dries if you make a mistake. And it is environmentally friendly as well.

The secret is in the chemistry added to the can that reduces the surface tension of water so the paint sprays and coats evenly.  This is a major challenge for water based paints and to be able to do it in store with the colour of your choice is a major advance in this area of technology.

We have had a couple of electronics products we worked on win on The New Inventors so we really appreciate the work it takes and that you don’t get these awards without having a serious advance.  You can also check out our Electronics Awards.

So well done Ross Brinsdon.  Keep up the good work.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Electronics Design for Green Manufacture

This is not as straight forward a topic as it might at first seem to be.  And this is because there isn’t yet a unified agreement on exactly what Green Manufacture means.  And like most Design Issues, you cannot do Electronics Design without clear requirements.  So what are the requirements?

Here are some Green Manufacture requirements or targets:

• reduce product Power Consumption
• reduce manufacturing Power Consumption
• add Renewable Energy options to the product
• add Renewable Energy options to the manufacture process
• reduce pollution or waste in the manufacture process
• reduce energy involved in upstream or downstream processes
• reduce pollution or waste in the upstream or downstream processes
• increase product life
• increase product utility
• increase manufacturing plant utilisation

I guess you can see the dilemma.  It can be hard to know which target to aim for.  Am I doing the Electronics Design with the product, process, life cycle or ecosystem issues as the primary concern?  And how do I balance these concerns?

Here is one excellent article that also discusses this topic Green Supply Line.

Electronics Design can be Green

One major thing we can do is reduce the product Power Consumption.  We are coming out of a phase where a mains plug pack power supply was considered an ideal way to avoid compliance costs when designing new products.  This has led to a proliferation of low efficiency always on powered devices.  A recent look under my desk reveals the problem we have as Product Developers where every device I use is either USB Powered or mains plug pack powered.

So a first step is to review this whole approach to supplying power to devices.  We have made steady gains in the area of Power Consumption reduction for the devices themselves.  Now it is time to do a similar thing on the Power Supply side.

Energy Harvesting

This is a new area that hasn’t yet reached mainstream development.  The idea is that you can utilise the ambient environment to get power for free.  Or at least you aren’t directly requiring extra Power Generation.  Hence the name, Energy Harvesting.

How you do it and the Electronics Design and Electronics Technology required to make it work are still being defined but there has been some interesting new progress.  Some key players are:

Linear Technology – new Energy Harvesting Integrated Circuit

Enocean – are front runners in bringing Self Powered Wireless devices to the market

What is Energy Harvesting?

This is where we use Electronics Design and Electronics Devices to generate power from the Ambient Environment.  The result is a product that doesn’t need to be plugged in and recharges itself automatically. Some of the Energy Sources that are used are:

• Light
• Thermal differentials
• Vibration
• Chemistry
• Pressure differentials
• Air Flow

One example of a product that does this is the Enocean Light Switch where you can just put it where you want it.  And if you change your mind, just move it. Now wiring required.

Right now the technology is still more expensive and so take up is slow.  But as it develops and the price comes down that will change.

We are in for some interesting times.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

How Does Sleep Save Energy?

For this post, we will look specifically at Embedded Software techniques to save power and energy.  This is a well known Power Saving Strategy which doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.  It is also something you have to design into the Power Management Plan from the beggining.

For this example, we will use the MSP430 from TI which has some of the best Power Saving and Power Consumption figures in the industry.  We have used them to create devices that run from a pair of AAA batteries for 2 years and which have time based control algorithms so that they can’tbe used in a purely event driven mode.  Here is how it works:

Low Power Sleep Mode

This shows the power consumption versus time.  In Low Power Sleep Mode the consumption is close to zero.  Almost no power consumed.  Then depending on what is happening it wakes up to varying degrees.

Get the best Electronic Sleep

So this is how you take advantage of this:

• make the time between wake ups as long as possible
• make the time awake as short as possible
• only turn on the peripherals needs for a particular wake period

Now if you system only has to wake once every minute then you can get low power operation from a lot of different processors.  If it wakes many times a second then you need a processor that gives you lots of ways to reduce power during wake, reduce the time awake, and increase the interval between wakes.

MSP430 Sleep

So back to the MSP430. It has Power Conservation features that allow it to do all three better than most.  Here is the list:

• Digitally Controlled Oscillator DCO allows it to wake and run quickly
• Can run a Timer from a 32KHz crystal making interval timing very low power
• Can use the DCO to set the run speed and so shorten the wake time
• Lot’s of Power Down Modes so you can always find one that suits your application
• Peripherals can be Shut Down when not in use
• Can run down to 1.8V – more on that later but it can also help here

Low Power System Architecture

To take advantage of all this, you have to develop the System Architecture so that  takes advantage of this.  An example from a very long life application we did runs like this:

• 32Hz Oscillator runs a timer that generates a 1 second wake
• User input keys set up to wake on change of state from high to low
• Use DCO at 1MHz to quickly wake, execute & sleep again
• Use State Machines to allow modules to execute predictably with eratic timing
• Have early exit tests to prevent unnecessary Code Execution

The result is an application that runs a process with User Interaction, LED Indicators, and a 2 week cycle where the average Power Consumption is 20uA at 2.7V or 54uW.  Of this, less than half is the processor executing the software and the single biggest energy use is the intermittently flashed LED Indicators.

To learn more, check out this more comprehensive article on “Low power MCU selection criteria and sleep mode implementation” from embedded.com which provides more examples.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.