Home's Electrical Wiring Acts as Antenna to Receive Low-Power Sensor Data

The walls do have ears, thanks to a device that uses a home's electrical wiring as a giant antenna. Sensors developed by researchers at the University of Washington and the Georgia Institute of Technology use residential wiring to transmit information to and from almost anywhere in the home, allowing for wireless sensors that run for decades on a single watch battery. The technology, which could be used in home automation or medical monitoring, will be presented this month at the Ubiquitous Computing conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Low-cost sensors recording a building's temperature, humidity, light level or air quality are central to the concept of a smart, energy-efficient home that automatically adapts to its surroundings. But that concept has yet to become a reality.

"When you look at home sensing, and home automation in general, it hasn't really taken off," said principal investigator Shwetak Patel, a UW assistant professor of computer science and and of electrical engineering."Existing technology is still power hungry, and not as easy to deploy as you would want it to be."

That's largely because today's wireless devices either transmit a signal only several feet, Patel said, or consume so much energy they need frequent battery replacements.

"Here, we can imagine this having an out-of-the-box experience where the device already has a battery in it, and it's ready to go and run for many years," Patel said. Users could easily sprinkle dozens of sensors throughout the home, even behind walls or in hard-to-reach places like attics or crawl spaces.

Patel's team has devised a way to use copper electrical wiring as a giant antenna to receive wireless signals at a set frequency. A low-power sensor placed within 10 to 15 feet of electrical wiring can use the antenna to send data to a single base station plugged in anywhere in the home.

The device is called Sensor Nodes Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure, or SNUPI. It originated when Patel and co-author Erich Stuntebeck were doctoral students at Georgia Tech and worked with thesis adviser Gregory Abowd to develop a method using electrical wiring to receive wireless signals in a home. They discovered that home wiring is a remarkably efficient antenna at 27 megahertz. Since then, Patel's team at the UW has built the actual sensors and refined this method. Other co-authors are UW's Gabe Cohn, Jagdish Pandey and Brian Otis.

Cohn, a UW doctoral student in electrical engineering, was lead student researcher and tested the system. In a 3,000-square-foot house he tried five locations in each room and found that only 5 percent of the house was out of the system's range, compared to 23 percent when using over-the-air communication at the same power level. Cohn also discovered some surprising twists -- that the sensors can transmit near bathtubs because the electrical grounding wire is typically tied to the copper plumbing pipes, that a lamp cord plugged into an outlet acts as part of the antenna, and that outdoor wiring can extend the sensors' range outside the home.

While traditional wireless systems have trouble sending signals through walls, this system actually does better around walls that contain electrical wiring.

Most significantly, SNUPI uses less than 1 percent of the power for data transmission compared to the next most efficient model.

"Existing nodes consumed the vast majority of their power, more than 90 percent, in wireless communication," Cohn said."We've flipped that. Most of our power is consumed in the computation, because we made the power for wireless communication almost negligible."

The existing prototype uses UW-built custom electronics and consumes less than 1 milliwatt of power when transmitting, with less than 10 percent of that devoted to communication. Depending on the attached sensor, the device could run continuously for 50 years, much longer than the decade-long shelf life of its battery.

"Basically, the battery will start to decompose before it runs out of power," Patel said.

Longer-term applications might consider using more costly medical-grade batteries, which have a longer shelf life. The team is also looking to reduce the power consumption even further so no battery would be needed. They say they're already near the point where solar energy or body motion could provide enough energy. The researchers are commercializing the base technology, which they believe could be used as a platform for a variety of sensing systems.

Another potential application is in health care. Medical monitoring needs a compact device that can sense pulse, blood pressure or other properties and beam the information back to a central database, without requiring patients to replace the batteries.

The technology does not interfere with electricity flow or with other emerging systems that use electrical wiring to transmit Ethernet signals between devices plugged into two outlets.

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Planar Power: Flat Sodium-Nickel Chloride Battery Could Improve Performance, Cost of Energy Storage

Researchers say these sodium-beta batteries could eventually be used in electricity substations to balance the generation and delivery of wind and solar power on to the grid.

Because the battery's main components include abundant materials such as alumina, sodium chloride and nickel, they are less expensive to manufacture than lithium-ion batteries, and could still offer the performance necessary to compete for consumers' interest. In addition, compared to other battery systems, sodium-beta batteries are safer and can help incorporate renewable energy sources into the electrical system easier.

"This planar sodium battery technology shows potential as an option for integrating more solar and wind power into our electric grid," said Carl Imhoff, electricity infrastructure sector manager at PNNL.

Sodium-beta alumina batteries have been around since the 1960s but their tubular, cylindrical shape does not allow efficient discharge of stored electrochemical energy. This inefficiency causes technical issues associated with operating at high temperatures and raises concern about the cost-effectiveness of the tubular batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries surpassed sodium-beta batteries because they perform better. However, materials for lithium batteries are limited, making them more expensive to produce. Safety also has been a concern for rechargeable lithium batteries because they can be prone to thermal runaway, a condition where the battery continually heats up until it catches fire.

"The PNNL planar battery's flat and thin design has many advantages over traditional, tubular sodium nickel chloride batteries," said PNNL Scientist Xiaochuan Lu, co-author of the paper.

To take advantage of inexpensive materials, the PNNL researchers thought a redesign of the sodium-beta batteries might overcome the technical and cost issues: the cylindrical sodium beta batteries contain a thick, solid electrolyte and cathode that create considerable resistance when the sodium ion travels back and forth between the anode and the cathode while the battery is in use. This resistance reduces the amount of power produced. To lower the resistance, temperature must be elevated. But increasing operation temperature will shorten the battery's lifespan.

The researchers then tested the performance of their redesigned sodium-nickel chloride planar batteries, which look like wafers or large buttons.

The researchers found that a planar design allows for a thinner cathode and a larger surface area for a given cell volume. Because the ions can flow in a larger area and shorter pathway, they experience lower resistance. Next, the battery's design incorporates a thin layer of solid electrolytes, which also lowers the resistance. Because of the decrease of resistance, the battery can afford to be operated at a lower temperature while maintaining a power output 30% more than a similar-sized battery with a cylindrical design.

Finally, the battery's flat components can easily be stacked in a way that produces a much more compact battery, making it an attractive option for large-scale energy storage, such as on the electrical grid.

"Our goal is to get a safer, more affordable battery into the market for energy storage. This development in battery technology gets us one step closer," said Lu.

Researchers at PNNL and EaglePicher LLC received funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency -- Energy, or ARPA-E, earlier this year to conduct the research, and will work together to improve the battery's design, lifespan and power capacity.

The research was funded by PNNL and by ARPA-E.

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Silicon Strategy Shows Promise for Batteries: Lithium-Ion Technique for Electric Cars, Large-Capacity Storage

Sibani Lisa Biswal, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, revealed how she, colleague Michael Wong, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of chemistry, and Steven Sinsabaugh, a Lockheed Martin Fellow, are enhancing the inherent ability of silicon to absorb lithium ions.

Their work was introduced at Rice's Buckyball Discovery Conference, part of a yearlong celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the buckminsterfullerene, or carbon 60, molecule. It could become a key component for electric car batteries and large-capacity energy storage, they said.

"The anode, or negative, side of today's batteries is made of graphite, which works. It's everywhere," Wong said."But it's maxed out. You can't stuff any more lithium into graphite than we already have."

Silicon has the highest theoretical capacity of any material for storing lithium, but there's a serious drawback to its use."It can sop up a lot of lithium, about 10 times more than carbon, which seems fantastic," Wong said."But after a couple of cycles of swelling and shrinking, it's going to crack."

Other labs have tried to solve the problem with carpets of silicon nanowires that absorb lithium like a mop soaks up water, but the Rice team took a different tack.

With Mahduri Thakur, a post-doctoral researcher in Rice's Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department, and Mark Isaacson of Lockheed Martin, Biswal, Wong and Sinsabaugh found that putting micron-sized pores into the surface of a silicon wafer gives the material sufficient room to expand. While common lithium-ion batteries hold about 300 milliamp hours per gram of carbon-based anode material, they determined the treated silicon could theoretically store more than 10 times that amount.

Sinsabaugh described the breakthrough as one of the first fruits of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center of Excellence at Rice (LANCER). He said the project began three years ago when he met Biswal at Rice and compared notes."She was working on porous silicon, and I knew silicon nanostructures were being looked at for battery anodes. We put two and two together," he said.

Nanopores are simpler to create than silicon nanowires, Biswal said. The pores, a micron wide and from 10 to 50 microns long, form when positive and negative charge is applied to the sides of a silicon wafer, which is then bathed in a hydrofluoric solvent."The hydrogen and fluoride atoms separate," she said."The fluorine attacks one side of the silicon, forming the pores. They form vertically because of the positive and negative bias."

The treated silicon, she said,"looks like Swiss cheese."

The straightforward process makes it highly adaptable for manufacturing, she said."We don't require some of the difficult processing steps they do -- the high vacuums and having to wash the nanotubes. Bulk etching is much simpler to process.

"The other advantage is that we've seen fairly long lifetimes. Our current batteries have 200-250 cycles, much longer than nanowire batteries," said Biswal.

They said putting pores in silicon requires a real balancing act, as the more space is dedicated to the holes, the less material is available to store lithium. And if the silicon expands to the point where the pore walls touch, the material could degrade.

The researchers are confident that cheap, plentiful silicon combined with ease of manufacture could help push their idea into the mainstream.

"We are very excited about the potential of this work," Sinsabaugh said."This material has the potential to significantly increase the performance of lithium-ion batteries, which are used in a wide range of commercial, military and aerospace applications

Biswal and Wong plan to study the mechanism by which silicon absorbs lithium and how and why it breaks down."Our goal is to develop a model of the strain that silicon undergoes in cycling lithium," Wong said."Once we understand that, we'll have a much better idea of how to maximize its potential."

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Stable Way to Store the Sun's Heat: Storing Thermal Energy in Chemical Could Lead to Advances in Storage and Portability

The molecule undergoes a structural transformation when it absorbs sunlight, putting it into a higher-energy state where it can remain stable indefinitely. Then, triggered by a small addition of heat or a catalyst, it snaps back to its original shape, releasing heat in the process. But the team found that the process is a bit more complicated than that.

"It turns out there's an intermediate step that plays a major role," said Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. In this intermediate step, the molecule forms a semi-stable configuration partway between the two previously known states."That was unexpected," he said. The two-step process helps explain why the molecule is so stable, why the process is easily reversible and also why substituting other elements for ruthenium has not worked so far.

In effect, explained Grossman, this process makes it possible to produce a"rechargeable heat battery" that can repeatedly store and release heat gathered from sunlight or other sources. In principle, Grossman said, a fuel made from fulvalene diruthenium, when its stored heat is released,"can get as hot as 200 degrees C, plenty hot enough to heat your home, or even to run an engine to produce electricity."

Compared to other approaches to solar energy, he said,"it takes many of the advantages of solar-thermal energy, but stores the heat in the form of a fuel. It's reversible, and it's stable over a long term. You can use it where you want, on demand. You could put the fuel in the sun, charge it up, then use the heat, and place the same fuel back in the sun to recharge."

In addition to Grossman, the work was carried out by Yosuke Kanai of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Varadharajan Srinivasan of MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Steven Meier and Peter Vollhardt of the University of California, Berkeley.

The problem of ruthenium's rarity and cost still remains as"a dealbreaker," Grossman said, but now that the fundamental mechanism of how the molecule works is understood, it should be easier to find other materials that exhibit the same behavior. This molecule"is the wrong material, but it shows it can be done," he said.

The next step, he said, is to use a combination of simulation, chemical intuition, and databases of tens of millions of known molecules to look for other candidates that have structural similarities and might exhibit the same behavior."It's my firm belief that as we understand what makes this material tick, we'll find that there will be other materials" that will work the same way, Grossman said.

Grossman plans to collaborate with Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor of Chemistry, to tackle such questions, applying the principles learned from this analysis in order to design new, inexpensive materials that exhibit this same reversible process. The tight coupling between computational materials design and experimental synthesis and validation, he said, should further accelerate the discovery of promising new candidate solar thermal fuels.

Funding: The National Science Foundation and an MIT Energy Initiative seed grant.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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