Digital Lumens Closes $10 Million To Bring Smart, LED-Lighting To The Industrial Market

Digital Lumens, leading developer of LED-based Intelligent Lighting Systems, today announced that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding and a new working capital line of credit.  The round has full participation from the Company’s current investors — Black Coral Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Stata Venture Partners — bringing total funds raised to $25 million since the Company’s inception.  Silicon Valley Bank is providing the working capital line of credit.
“We are delighted to support Digital Lumens as it enters this next stage of growth,” said Jon Karlen, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners.  “The Company has rapidly taken a leadership position in the intelligent lighting market with an innovative, systems-based approach and superior products that are meeting customers’ needs, while revolutionizing the economics of industrial lighting.  We see such compelling opportunities for Digital Lumens that, while outside interest was strong, the existing investors opted to expand our commitment instead.”
Digital Lumens will use this latest round of capital to expand sales and distribution internationally, further product development, and strengthen its position as the leader in LED-based intelligent lighting for industrial customers.
“The rapid adoption of the Digital Lumens Intelligent Lighting System by large industrial customers is the best evidence of our products’ value,” said Tom Pincince, President and CEO of Digital Lumens.  “Customers are locking in major energy savings and reducing load on their utility partners — all because of the Digital Lumens approach to energy-efficient lighting.  We look forward to bringing intelligent lighting into new markets, and are very pleased that our investors are actively supporting our expansion.”
Proven to reduce industrial facilities’ lighting energy use by up to 90% and improve light levels, the Digital Lumens Intelligent Lighting System is redefining the industrial lighting market with LEDs and an intelligent, systems-based approach to lighting.  Customers to-date, which include Americold, United States Cold Storage, Maines Paper and Food Service and others, are lighting millions of square feet of new and upgraded space with the Digital Lumens system

The Intelligent Lighting System
Designed for large warehouses, manufacturing and other industrial facilities, the Digital Lumens Intelligent Lighting System integrates LEDs, controls, networking and reporting into a single solution that leverages system-wide intelligence to reduce customers’ energy costs.  The system includes:
•Intelligent Light Engines (ILEs), high-performance, LED-based fixtures for highbay and midbay applications that feature a broad range of control and dimming capabilities, and form a wireless mesh network to communicate with LightRules.
•LightRules lighting management software is an intuitive, web-based interface for managing the lighting system.  It collects detailed energy consumption and occupancy details from the ILEs, which it presents in standard and customizable charts so that facilities managers and engineers can understand a facility’s lighting patterns and optimize lighting delivery.
The ILEs have been named ‘recognized winners’ in the 2010 and 2011 Department of Energy’s Next Generation Luminaire competition, and are listed on the DesignLights Consortium’s Qualified Products List (QPL).
Source: digitallumens

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Concrete source: MIT scientists turn the concrete jungle green

The word "concrete" is not much fun to say out loud. It actually sounds like a cold, hard, grey word.
The substance itself is even dull. Not even its assured place in the history books of the Roman Empire make it a less than sexy subject from the bystander's point of view.
Let's face it - concrete is boring. Most of us recognise it instantly, when we see hideous flats and offices from the 1960s and 1970s, that for a brief moment were the cutting edge of architecture.
So, with our expectations completely lowered, it's time to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known better as MIT.
"Concrete is a relatively inexpensive. It's a forgiving material - it can be mixed by ordinary labourers, and used in climates ranging from the South Pole to the tropical mid part of the Earth. It can also get hard under water."

Environmental impactBut all that comes at a price to the environment. Thirty billion tons of concrete are manufactured globally each year.
The way that concrete is mixed is very simple says Professor Ulm.
"It's made out of cement. Cement is basically limestone and clay. Cement is then mixed with water to form this ubiquitous material which shapes our landscapes and cities."
This process of combining of water, cement paste, sand and rock creates an awful lot of ozone-depleting CO2 gases - about five to 10% of the world's total emissions.
MIT wanted to see whether this could be lowered. After all, it has a habit of making giant steps from the tiniest of changes - so tiny in this case, it was invisible to the human eye.
Despite its availability all over the world and its ease of use, the molecular structure of concrete had remained elusive for decades. In particular one part of it - calcium silicate hydrate - refused all attempts to be analysed under an electron microscope or by nano-indentation.
"Calcium silicate hydrate does not reveal its secrets easily." says Professor Hamlin Jennings.
"It's partly amorphous; it contains a lot of water, which evaporates, and the structure changes. So what you see in an electron microscope, which requires a vacuum, is substantially different from what is naturally there."
So the scientists turned to their laptops, and using cutting-edge computational mathematics, modelled the concrete on the screen at a molecular level.
In 2009, after three years of almost constant hard-drive rotation, all the atoms fell into place in a nice colourful stable pattern on the monitor.

Test subject But don't look for green concrete at the local hardware shop quite yet.
Optimistically, the first structures to use the new technology are five years away from construction. MIT's job is done, but that job is only to provide a "proof of concept".
It's up to the worldwide building industry to take the new concrete and pour it through its paces.
The compound will be pulled, pushed, squeezed, frozen, flattened and smashed until it begs for mercy from government regulators and industry panels.
Only when it can prove itself in the real world will it be allowed to claim the title of "most used material anywhere in the world" from its very close cousin.
How our world could change is also not something that MIT really ponders too much.
Their inventive phase will undoubtedly lead to a compelling innovative phase far from the Cambridge-based campus. But it's not hard to imagine all the possibilities, good and bad.
Fewer potholes on the roads? Fewer road works and traffic jams? Huge real-estate savings by companies and governments? And what will happen to the number of construction workers?
Longer-lasting buildings mean fewer workers, but higher buildings and longer bridges made with the new tougher cement paste might mean more jobs.
Nothing, as they say, is written in stone - or concrete.

Source: BBC

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Google Invests in World’s Largest Solar Power Tower Plant

Google has just sealed a deal to invest $168 million in a Mojave Desert solar energy plant.
The investment is going to BrightSource Energy, a company that developes and operates large-scale solar power plants, specifically to fund its Ivanpah project.
Ivanpah is a solar electric generating system that uses solar thermal technology and “an environmentally responsible design,” according to the project’s website, to deliver reliable, clean and low-cost power to Californians.
The plant will generate energy with a technology called power towers. Mirrors, called heliostats, are arranged in an array and aim the sun’s rays at a receiver atop a tower. The receiver generates steam; the steam causes a turbine to rotate; the rotation causes a generator to generate electricity. Because such large quantities of solar energy are being directed to such a small area, the power towers are very efficient.
The power tower at Ivanpah will be around 450 feet tall. The plant will use 173,000 heliostats, and each heliostat will have two mirrors, making Ivanpah the largest project of its kind.
Construction at Ivanpah should be completed in 2013. Here’s a video from the plant’s groundbreaking ceremony:


Google’s been on something of a clean energy investment kick over the past year or so. The company was granted the ability to buy and sell energy as a public utility last February, ostensibly to find better ways to power its own massive data centers.
A short time later, Google began making significant investments in green energy technologies. The company sealed a $38 million wind farm investment in May, bought 20 years’ worth of wind farm energy in July, and provided a substantial investment for a huge offshore wind farm in October.
Rick Needham is Google’s Director of Green Business Operations. On the company blog, writes, “We hope that investing in Ivanpah spurs continued development and deployment of this promising technology while encouraging other companies to make similar investments in renewable energy.”

Source: Mashables

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New Car Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry

Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer's green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.
However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.
The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy.

The Wave Disk Generator uses 60 percent of its fuel for propulsion; standard car engines use just 15 percent. As a result, the generator is 3.5 times more fuel efficient than typical combustion engines.
Researchers estimate the new model could shave almost 1,000 pounds off a car's weight currently taken up by conventional engine systems.
Last week, the prototype was presented to the energy division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is backing the Michigan State University Engine Research Laboratory with $2.5 million in funding.
Michigan State's team of engineers hope to have a car-sized 25-kilowatt version of the prototype ready by the end of the year.
Source: Discovert Tech

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Batteries that Recharge in Seconds

A new way of making battery electrodes based on nanostructured metal foams has been used to make a lithium-ion battery that can be 90 percent charged in two minutes. If the method can be commercialized, it could lead to laptops that charge in a few minutes or cell phones that charge in 30 seconds.
The methods used to make the ultrafast-charging electrodes are compatible with a range of battery chemistries; the researchers have also used them to make nickel-metal-hydride batteries, the kind commonly used in hybrid and electric vehicles.

How fast a battery can charge up and then release that power is primarily limited by the movement of electrons and ions into and out of the cathode, the electrode that is negative during recharging. Researchers have been trying to use nanostructured materials to improve the process, but there's usually a trade-off between total energy storage capacity (which determines how long a battery can run before needing a recharge) and charge rates. "People solved half the problem," says Paul Braun, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Braun's group has made highly porous metal foams coated with a large amount of active battery materials. The metal provides high electrical conductivity, and even though it's porous, the structure holds enough active material to store a sufficient amount of energy. The pores allow for ions to move about unimpeded.
The first step in making the cathodes is to create a slurry of polymer spheres on the surface of a conductive substrate. Because of their shape and surface charge, the spheres self-assemble into a regular pattern. The Illinois researchers then use a common technique called electroplating to fill the space between the spheres with nickel. Next, they dissolve the polymer spheres, and most of the metal, to leave a nickel sponge that's about 90 percent open space. Finally, they grow the active material on top of the sponge.
"It's some distance to a product, but we have pretty good lab demos" with nickel-metal-hydride and lithium-ion batteries, says Braun. The Illinois group has made lithium-ion batteries that charge almost entirely in about two minutes. The method should be applicable to the cell sizes needed for laptops and electric cars, though the researchers have not made them yet.
Braun acknowledges: "There are lots of people coming up with elegant [electrode] structures, but manufacturing them is tricky." He says, however, that his fabrication process combines existing methods that are currently widely used to make other products, if not to make batteries, and that it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt them. The process would add extra steps to making a battery, but these steps aren't particularly expensive or complex, Braun says.
Braun's group will next test the electrode structure with a wider range of battery chemistries and work on improving batteries' other half, the anode—a trickier project.
Source: TechnologyReview

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