Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
Boulder facility goes ‘off the grid’ generating total power from non-fossil fuels for first time
Oct 29th
Less than two weeks after celebrating the implementation of solar photovoltaic panels just outside its gates, Boulder’s Wastewater Treatment Facility (WWTF) reached a new milestone, going “off the grid” completely for two and a half hours on Thursday, Oct. 28. Going “off the grid” means that all power necessary to operate the facility came from sources other than Xcel’s traditional fossil fuel supply.
In this case, Coordinator of Wastewater Treatment Chris Douville explained, the plant was able to draw all of the energy it needed, roughly 1,200 to 1,400 kilowatts at any given moment, from the solar array and from its two co-generation (co-gen) system engines. The co-gen engines capture and burn the gas that is coming off the anaerobic digester process tanks, using that gas to generate additional power instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. The solar system, when at its peak on Thursday, was generating close to 800 kilowatts.
Douville said the success was attributable to a combination of factors, including relatively low wastewater flows, less demand than usual, a clear solar day and cooler temperatures. Data captured at the plant shows the milestone was reached at 11:30 a.m. The plant did not start drawing power from the traditional source again until 2 p.m. Attached is a screen grab that shows the solar photovoltaic production for the day.
“This is a great example of what we can get to,” said David Driskell, executive director of Community Planning and Sustainability. “It shows it is possible to really change our energy mix, and that will have long-term economic and environmental benefits to us as a community.”
While going “off the grid” is impressive, the ultimate goal for the WWTF is for 50 percent or more of the facility’s power to come from alternative sources, over a monthly or annual basis, Douville said. The city hopes to meet this goal through a combination of energy efficiency efforts and maximizing its alternative supplies.
SOURCE: CITY OF BOULDER NEWS RELEASE
TWO CU-BOULDER FACULY MEMBERS WIN NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION CAREER AWARDS
Oct 20th
Oct. 20, 2010
Two University of Colorado faculty members have received prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Development, or CAREER awards.
Assistant Professor Nils Halverson, who holds faculty appointments in both the astrophysical and planetary sciences department and the physics department, was awarded $875,415 over five years from NSF to support detector development and data analysis for cosmic microwave background studies with the South Pole Telescope.
Cosmic microwave background is relic heat from the Big Bang that scientists can detect with microwave-wavelength telescopes. The light is slightly polarized, much in the way sunlight is polarized when it is reflected off the surface of a pond. The polarization signal is expected to contain tiny ripples from gravitational waves set in motion a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang, said Halverson.
By measuring the signal, astrophysicists can begin to understand the physics of the universe during its birth. As part of the NSF award, Halverson and astrophysical and planetary sciences instructor Seth Horenstein will provide a graduate class focused on observations, data analysis and statistics with conceptual assessment tools, peer-instruction exercises and course notes.
Assistant Professor Amy Palmer of the chemistry and biochemistry department received $831,720 from the NSF over five years to support her research to provide a powerful new approach to illuminate disease-causing bacteria like salmonella that invade host organisms and can produce harmful and sometimes lethal effects.
Many bacterial pathogens use a set of proteins called “effectors” to invade and infect host cells, cooperatively working to hijack cellular signaling and to reprogram the host cell to enable bacterial survival. Palmer and her team are developing a new method that will directly tag a broad spectrum of effector proteins with fluorescent molecules in order to visualize their movements during infection of a host cell.
Palmer’s project also will contribute to a campuswide effort to reform undergraduate science education by developing and validating interdisciplinary, hands-on tutorials that will promote student engagement and transform student learning. She has worked with the Science Education Initiative on campus, which is part of the university’s STEM efforts, to integrate learning assistants into upper division physical chemistry classes, develop pre/post concept tests to measure learning gains and to promote active engagement in the classroom. Palmer also is a faculty member in CU’s Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology, or CIMB.
SOURCE: CU MEDIA RELEASE
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CU scientists discover earlier warming period
Oct 7th
Oct. 7, 2010
If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent what might be called universal warming. The consequence of that early heating was that fierce blasts of radiation from voracious black holes stunted the growth of some small galaxies for a stretch of 500 million years.
That is the conclusion of a team of astronomers led by the University of Colorado at Boulder who used the new capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe the invisible, remote universe.
Using the newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, the team identified an era from 11.7 to 11.3 billion years ago when the universe stripped electrons off from primeval helium atoms — a process called ionization. This process heated intergalactic gas and inhibited it from gravitationally collapsing to form new generations of stars in some small galaxies. The lowest-mass galaxies were not even able to hold onto their gas, and it escaped back into intergalactic space.
CU-Boulder Professor Michael Shull of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department and his team were able to find the telltale helium spectral absorption lines in the ultraviolet light from a quasar — the brilliant core of an active galaxy. The quasar beacon shines light through intervening clouds of otherwise invisible gas, like a headlight shining through a fog. The beam allows for a core-sample probe of the clouds of gas interspersed between galaxies in the early universe.
The universe went through an initial heat wave over 13 billion years ago when energy from early massive stars ionized cold interstellar hydrogen from the Big Bang. This time period is called the Reionization Epoch because the hydrogen nuclei were originally in an ionized state shortly after the Big Bang, said Shull, also a faculty member at CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, or CASA.
A paper on the subject will be published in the Oct. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Co-authors included CASA Research Associate Kevin France, CASA Research Associate Charles Danforth, CASA postdoctoral researcher Britton Smith and Jason Tumlinson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
But the Hubble data indicated it would take another 2 billion years before the universe produced sources of ultraviolet radiation with enough energy to do the heavy lifting and reionize the primeval helium that also was cooked up in the Big Bang.
This radiation didn’t come from stars, but rather from quasars, said Shull. In fact, the epoch when the helium was being reionized corresponds to a transitory time in the universe’s history when quasars were most abundant.
The universe was a rambunctious place back then, Shull said. Galaxies frequently collided and this engorged supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies with gas falling in. The black holes furiously converted some of the gravitational energy of this mass to powerful far-ultraviolet radiation that would blaze out of galaxies. This heated the intergalactic helium from 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly 40,000 degrees.
After the helium was reionized in the universe, intergalactic gas again cooled down and dwarf galaxies could resume normal assembly. “I imagine quite a few more dwarf galaxies may have formed if helium reionization had not taken place,” said Shull.
So far Shull and his team only have one sightline from Hubble to measure the helium transition, but the COS science team plans to use Hubble to look in other directions to see if the helium reionization uniformly took place across the universe.
The $70 million COS instrument, inserted during the final Hubble servicing mission in May 2009 was designed by a team from CU-Boulder led by Professor James Green and was built primarily by Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. of Boulder.
SOURCE: CU-BOULDER MEDIA RELEASE
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