NEWARK, N.J. -- As the clean energy revolution builds up steam, a group of five engineers and dreamers here is hoping to put this long-suffering, hardscrabble town back on the nation's technology map.
While the odds are long, the group's chances for success have recently improved as Americans face record gasoline prices and higher utility bills and vote for presidential candidates and legislators who seem eager to get a handle on the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.
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| Tony Chow. Photo by Nathanial Gronewold. |
Housed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the small team is busy enhancing and improving upon two patented technologies that could revolutionize how energy is produced and vehicles are powered in the United States. Although their facilities are sparse and the technology is still a work in progress, the group's members feel that with the right corporate partnership their ideas and designs could have a big impact in a relatively short period of time.
One of their more promising ideas is "a solid fuel drive turbine system," explained Tony Chow, inventor of the technology and chief executive of New Energy Technology & Development Inc., which is located at NJIT's Enterprise Development Center. "It is absolutely clean," Chow said.
The patented solid fuel power generation design proposes using waste coal dust to power turbines. The coal dust is fused into a fuel rod and injected into the turbine mechanism. The dust is highly flammable and has been the cause of many explosions and accidents at coal mines, but is mostly discarded as waste. But its explosive tendency -- Chow compared it to black gunpowder -- also makes it a potential power source, since a relatively small spark will produce a large bang.
While Chow and his team admit that this solid fuel turbine system will still release some fossil fuel pollution, the resulting emissions are a fraction of what is produced by simply burning coal. And the group has a plan for eliminating those emissions, too.
In an interview, Chow, an immigrant from Taiwan, explained how his emissions filtration idea originated from an ancient Chinese design for a tobacco pipe. In the same way the Chinese pipe uses water to cycle through and filter out smoke, Chow plans to use a water basin to cleanse greenhouse gases and other pollutants from the solid fuel turbine system.
"We get a very easy explosion, and the explosion pushes the turbine system and underneath is water," he said. "The water is like a swimming pool coming in and coming out, like a filter, automatic."
What does come out of the pipe is mostly water vapor, he said. "Almost entirely clean, zero. No carbon dioxide," Chow said.
His description evokes an image of something like a cross between the old theoretical designs for gunpowder engines and a water pipe, or hookah. The idea sounds strange, but the upstart company is already generating interest from the coal industry, which is eager to find an economic use for the mountains of coal dust its operations generate and a way to safely dispose of the dangerously explosive material that puts its miners at constant risk.
"That will eliminate danger in the coal mines because that's what causes explosions once in a while," said Howard Helfgott, Chow's business partner at New Energy Technology & Development. "We spoke with some consultants and they liked the idea, so we'll be meeting with some coal mines in Pennsylvania probably in June."
The company also aims to market the technology as a much cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear power, which, although it produces no carbon dioxide emissions, could likely rekindle long-dormant concerns over radiation leaks and waste storage, the partners believe.
"We have many coal mines in the United States, in Virginia and Pennsylvania. They throw the waste coal away. And we try to make it valuable," Chow said.
"So it's a win-win: We help out the coal mines and we create clean energy," Helfgott added.
The Newark entrepreneurs are also busy improving on technology that won Chow another patent from the U.S. government -- this time for a magnetic rotation drive system that could be incorporated into a host of different applications.
The idea behind the technology is simple: that two charged magnets will naturally repel each other, often with tremendous force.
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| Model of a magnetic rotation drive system. Photo by Nathanial Gronewold. |
Apply the concept to a rotary system and what you get is a means to significantly boost the amount of torque that could be generated with a relatively small amount of power. An initial power supply will start the motion, causing magnets to react with each other and push the rotation even further and with more power than it would normally have using the regular power source.
The result is a force multiplier that could significantly cut the amount of electricity or fuel needed to produce any rotation, from power plant turbines to the wheels on an electric car.
The action itself also independently generates additional electricity, as experiments by the company's team have shown. If harnessed, the electricity produced from the reacting magnets could be looped back into the cycle, creating even greater efficiency.
The company's leaders believe the concept, if properly engineered, could be applied in a variety of ways, and not only for clean energy generation. For instance, the added force of the magnetic system could make it easier for physically disabled people to power both battery-powered and manual wheelchairs. It could even be incorporated into bicycles, making pedaling easier.
But their ultimate aim is to win the hearts and minds of new energy developers, especially those right in their own backyard.
"We're going to be meeting with some solar power manufacturers in New Jersey and wind turbine companies," Helfgott said. Their magnetic rotation drive system has especially rich potential in wind power, he believes, because the extra boost the magnets give to the wind-driven turbines, and the extra electricity generated, means that much more energy could be generated with fewer windmills covering fewer acres of land.
New Energy Technology & Development also hopes to gain the attention of companies in the automotive industry, including Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., which have mostly ignored it up to now.
"I don't have money to build an electric car," Chow explained. "If they don't accept it, I have to go to other companies, other countries."
Helfgott said the team members plan to travel to Sweden and speak with executives at Volvo. They are also considering approaching other automakers that have recently announced plans to manufacture full electric or hybrid vehicles on a large scale.
The team even showed up for the launch of the Automotive X Prize at the New York International Auto Show earlier this year. The competition, modeled after the Ansari X Prize, which produced the world's first privately financed manned space shuttle, challenges teams to develop a commercially viable vehicle that gets the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon. New Energy Technology & Development is in talks with a few of the participants in that race.
While California's Silicon Valley appears to have the pole position in the "clean tech" race, these inventors believe that, as the country awakens to a world where gasoline costs $4 a gallon and consumers demand more energy-efficient technology, their ideas will sell. Crazier things have happened in Newark. In the 1870s, a young man with no formal education, recently fired from his job as a telegrapher, began tinkering here with ways to improve the telegraph.
His name was Thomas Edison.
Click here to go to New Energy Technology & Development's Web site.
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