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In order to save energy, consumers need to be able to obtain up-to-date information at any time about the energy consumption of their appliances, and be able to control them while away from home. In Hall 9, Booth B36 at CeBIT, Fraunhofer scientists unveil two applications that help consumers manage their power use.

“Smart meters” – intelligent devices to measure consumption – make it possible to read and control power consumption, even of private households, while away from the property. This is because the increasing use of solar and wind resources will be changing the electricity supply matrix in the very near future. Today’s battery technology is unable to sufficiently buffer the fluctuations in the energy supply. This is why customers should be able to consume power as precisely as possible, once it becomes available. Price incentives represent one possibility for creating this precise alignment of supply and demand: When supply is up, the price drops, and vice versa. An intelligent control system will soon be assisting end-consumers with this by keeping a steady eye on electricity prices.

Professor Frank Bomarius, deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern, and his team are currently developing software that shadows the electricity meter and that ensures energy consumption is adjusted accordingly. “Data on the anticipated price trend over the next few minutes or hours come from the outside – which means from the power supplier – or utility company,” says the computer scientist. These must be adapted to the needs and preferences of the consumer. “Our system makes sure that there is optimal control over household appliances based on these conditions.” This entails more than simply shutting off the air conditioner or laundry machine for the interim, should electricity prices go up. Instead, a much more intelligent approach would be, for instance, using the refrigerator or freezer for energy storage. “If the utility company reports that electricity is getting scarce and will become more expensive in the next two hours, then these appliances can begin to pre-cool their contents right away, so that afterwards, they won’t need any power for an extended period of time.” The same principle applies correspondingly to water and heating systems.

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The system can be controlled via PC, where the consumer simply enters his preferences: setting the temperature for cooling or heating, setting a maximum price that he’s willing to pay per kilowatt hour, and setting a limit on maximum consumption. The software uses this input to assess when and which devices in the household are switched on and off. The computer is directly connected to the laundry machine or heater through electrical conduits or wirelessly. And in actual use, the intelligent energy management system will run on the same computer that also controls other household functions: lighting and heating; window shades; locking systems; and arranging help for residents at home who require assistance.

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The system is slated for real-life testing in a few residences in Kaiserslautern in 2010.  Of course, it is also suited for use in large residential complexes, public buildings or commercial premises. Typically at such properties, a centralized building system is already installed, and energy management rests on its shoulders. Researchers for the Kaiserslautern project and the local utility company are still negotiating exactly how the system will communicate with the supplier. “We want to keep the interface within a narrow margin,” says Bomarius. “There is no reason why my power supplier should know or influence when I use my heating or cooling, watch television or do the cooking.”

Mobile phone as control center
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin are offering an alternative helpful support: They have created an application that displays the energy consumption of individual appliances within the home. This means that consumers can figure out what device guzzles energy, and get a feeling for which appliances consume how much energy – and that will clearly help them save money. The application is based on the “Hydra” middleware developed by the institute, which was upgraded with a specialized energy protocol. “Using his mobile phone as a display and control mechanism, the resident can control the energy consumption of his appliances,” says Dr. Markus Eisenhauer, who developed the system. “For instance, he can display consumption per room, turn appliances on or off, or dim the lights.” And that’s not all: The cell phone’s camera image can be used as a “magic lens.” Just point the camera to a certain appliance, and, as if waving a magic wand, the appliance’s exact wattage is displayed in real-time.

The end result is a diamond-like carbon material mass-produced at the nanoscale that doesn’t wear. The new nano-sized tip, researchers say, wears away at the rate of one atom per micrometer of sliding on a substrate of silicon dioxide, much lower than that for a silicon oxide tip which represents the current state-of-the-art. Consisting of carbon, hydrogen, silicon and oxygen molded into the shape of a nano-sized tip and integrated on the end of a silicon microcantilever for use in atomic force microscopy, the material has technological implications for atomic imaging, probe-based data storage and as emerging applications such as nanolithography, nanometrology and nanomanufacturing.

The importance of the discovery lies not just in its size and resistance to wear but also in the hard substrate against which it was shown to perform well when in sliding contact: silicon dioxide. Because silicon –- used in almost all integrated circuit devices –- oxidizes in atmosphere forming a thin layer of its oxide, this system is the most relevant for nanolithography, nanometrology and nanomanufacturing applications.

Probe-based technologies are expected to play a dominant role in many such technologies; however, poor wear performance of many materials when slid against silicon oxide, including silicon oxide itself, has severely limited usefulness to the laboratory.

Researchers built the material from the ground up, rather than coating a nanoscale tip with wear-resistant materials. The collaboration used a molding technique to fabricate monolithic tips on standard silicon microcantilevers. A bulk processing technique that has the potential to scale up for commercial manufacturing is available.

Robert Carpick, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn, and his research group had previously shown that carbon-based thin films, including diamond-like carbon, had low friction and wear at the nanoscale; however, it has been difficult to fabricate nanoscale structures made out of diamond-like carbon until now.

Understanding friction and wear at the nanoscale is important for many applications that involve nanoscale components sliding on a surface.

“It is not clear that materials that are wear-resistant at the macroscale exhibit the same property at the nanoscale,” lead author Harish Bhaskaran, who was a postdoctoral research at IBM during the study, said.

Defects, cracks and other phenomena that influence material strength and wear at macroscopic scales are less important at the nanoscale, which is why nanowires can, for example, show higher strengths than bulk samples.

The study, published in the current edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, was conducted collaboratively by Carpick and postdoctoral researcher Papot Jaroenapibal of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science; Bhaskaran, Bernd Gotsmann, Abu Sebastian, Ute Drechsler, Mark A. Lantz and Michel Despont of IBM Research-Zürich; and Yun Chen and Kumar Sridharan of the University of Wisconsin. Jaroenapibal currently works at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, and Bhaskaran currently works at Yale University.

Research was funded by a European Commission grant and the Nano/Bio Interface Center of the University of Pennsylvania through the National Science Foundation.

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