Electrodynamic Tethers

                          Electrodynamic (ED) tether is a long conducting wire extended from spacecraft. It has a strong potential for providing propellant less propulsion to spacecraft in low earth orbit. An electrodynamic Tether uses the same principle as electric motor in toys, appliances and computer disk drives. It works as a thruster, because a magnetic field exerts a force on a current carrying wire. The magnetic field is supplied by the earth. By properly controlled the forces generated by this “electrodynamic” tether can be used to pull or push a spacecraft to act as brake or a booster. NASA plans to lasso energy from Earth’s atmosphere with a tether act as part of first demonstration of a propellant-free space propulsion system, potentially leading to a revolutionary space transportation system. Working with Earth’s magnetic field would benefit a number of spacecraft including the International Space Station. Tether propulsion requires no fuel. Is completely reusable and environmentally clean and provides all these features at low cost.

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Powerline Communication

                           Connecting to the Internet is a fact of life for business, government, and most households. The lure of e-commerce, video on demand, and e-mail has brought 60 million people to the Internet. Once they get to the Internet, they find out what it’s really like. That includes long waits for popular sites, substantial waits for secure sites, and horrible video quality over the web.

Telephone companies have offered high bandwidth lines for many years. For the most part, the cost of these lines and the equipment needed to access them has limited their usefulness to large businesses. The lone exception has been ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) which has won over some residential customers. ISDN offers fast Internet access (128k) at a relatively low cost.

Here the solution is Powerline communications (or PLC). Powerline communications is a rapidly evolving market that utilizes electricity power lines for the high-speed transmission of data and voice services.

None of the available Internet access services offer the right balance of cost, convenience, and speed. Digital Powerline technology could change all that. It gives customers high speed Internet access through electrical networks. Lower costs are achieved because the service is implemented on standard electrical lines. The service is also convenient because it’s already in your home. Internet access through Digital Powerline would be at (at least) 1Mbps, 20 times faster than a standard phone/modem connection.

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Flying Windmills or Flying Electric Generator (FEG) technology

High Altitude Wind Power uses flying electric generator (FEG) technology in the form of what have been more popularly called flying windmills, is a proposed renewable energy project over rural or low-populated areas, to produce around 12,000 MW of electricity with only 600 well clustered rotorcraft kites that use only simple autogyro physics to generate far more kinetic energy than a nuclear plant can.According to Sky WindPower; the overuse of fossil fuels and the overabundance of radioactive waste from nuclear energy plants is taking our planet once again down a path of destruction, for something that is more expensive and far more dangerous in the long run. FEG technology is just cheaper, cleaner and can provide more energy than those environmentally unhealthy methods of the past, making it a desirable substitute/alternative.
The secret to functioning High Altitude Wind Power is efficient tether technology that reaches 15,000 feet in the air, far higher than birds will fly, but creating restricted airspace for planes and other aircraft.

The same materials used in the tethers that hold these balloons in place can also hold flying windmills in place; and with energy cable technology getting ever lighter and stronger .Flying windmills appear to be 90 percent more energy efficient in wind tunnel tests than their land-based counterparts; that is three times more efficiency due to simple yet constantly abundant and effective high altitude wind power, available only 15,000 feet in the air by way of clustered rotor craft kites tethered with existing anti-terrorist technologies like those used on the Mexican/American border radar balloons.
High Altitude Wind Power offers itself as a clean and more powerful source of power generation than anything available on-the-grid at present and if Sky WindPower Corp. has their way, FEG technology and flying windmills will take the lead of a more sustainable future within the decade.

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Stream Processor: Programmability with efficiency

                           For many signal processing applications programmability and efficiency is desired. With current technology either programmability or efficiency is achievable, not both.
Conventionally ASIC's are being used where highly efficient systems are desired. The problem with ASIC is that once programmed it cannot be enhanced or changed, we have to get a
new ASIC for each modification. Other option is microprocessor based or dsp based applications. These can provide either programmability or efficiency. Now with stream processors we can achieve both simultaneously. A comparison of efficiency and programmability of Stream processors and other techniques are done. We will look into how efficiency and programmability is achieved in a stream processor. Also we will examine the
challenges faced by stream processor architecture.

The complex modern signal and image processing applications requires hundreds of GOPS (giga, or billions, of operations per second) with a power budget of a few watts, an efficiency of
about 100 GOPS/W (GOPS per watt), or 10 pJ/op (Pico Joules per operation). To meet this requirement current media processing applications use ASICs that are tailor made for a
particular application. Such processors require significant design efforts and are difficult to change when a new media processing application or algorithm evolve. The other alternative to meet the changing needs is to go for a dsp or microprocessor, which are highly flexible. But these do not provide the high efficiency needed by the application. Stream processors provide a solution to this problem by giving efficiency and programmability simultaneously. They achieve this by expressing the signal processing problems as signal flow graphs with streams flowing
between computational kernels. Stream processors have efficiency comparable to ASICs (200 GOPS/W), while being programmable in a high-level language. We will discuss how stream processor is achieves programmability and efficiency at the same time. Also we will look at the tools available for design of stream processing applications and challenges faced in this
approach to media processing.

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