Technology Trending: Friendly IoT platform, MD microgrid, solar harvesting for sensors, new solar cell records
Friendly Technologies IoT platform for smart meter management, a Maryland microgrid for powering an electric bus fleet, solar harvesting to power IoT sensors and new Perovskite solar cell advances are on the week’s technology radar.
The ‘Friendly’ platform for smart meters and IoT devices
Israeli IoT and device management company Friendly Technologies has set its eye on managing tens of millions of IoT-enabled utility smart meters for electricity, water, gas and heating.
The company reports entering the realm of smart utilities with multiple new IoT projects spanning the globe, alongside its recent platform upgrade to enable the introduction of “new projects and verticals with ease”.
Friendly Technologies counts over 250 active customers worldwide, primarily in the telecom vertical but also including smart home providers and device manufacturers.
Its platform is designed to enable organisations to manage devices, collect and analyse data, implement automated workflows, integrations, multi-tenancies, access control, create unique dashboards and more in one user interface.
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Microgrid for powering EV bus fleet
The first clean energy microgrid in the Washington DC region, at the Brookville Smart Energy Bus Depot in Montgomery County, Maryland, has been energised and is now in operation for the EV bus fleet.
The initiative by The Mobility House, in collaboration with partners including Schneider Electric, comprises an integrated 6.5MW microgrid using onsite solar canopies, natural gas generators, battery storage and microgrid controls and electric bus charging infrastructure to support 70 electric buses – a solution that can run ‘islanded’ independent of the local utility.
The Mobility House’s smart charging and energy management system, ChargePilot, coordinates charging with the microgrid by optimising the buses’ charging schedules based on route blocks and energy demands to ensure vehicle readiness.
Mobility House US MD Gregor Hintler describes the management of EV charging within a microgrid as a technological achievement.
“The Brookville Smart Energy Bus Depot is a momentous achievement not only for resilient public transportation but also in demonstrating the power of integrated technologies to provide sustainable community resources.”
Solar harvesting for IoT sensors
Powering sensors for Internet of Things applications and geolocation use cases such as asset tracking in supply chains in particular can prove challenging but Swedish solar company Exeger and the semiconductor supplier Semtech report having come up with a solution.
In a demonstration, Exeger’s Powerfoyle solar harvesting cell technology was combined with Semtech’s LoRa Edge platform to reveal a significant extension of battery life in such sensors.
The Powerfoyle material is flexible and durable, enabling it to be integrated seamlessly into any electronics device.
Semtech’s LoRa Edge scans GNSS satellites as well as Wi-Fi SSIDs and partitions the processing between IoT devices and the LoRa Cloud to determine the location. The cloud-based solver significantly reduces the power consumption and thereby increases the battery life.
“Coupling the benefits of Powerfoyle with the ultra-low power capabilities of Semtech’s LoRa® devices will provide IoT applications with an extended or even unlimited battery life,” said Dr Oscar Hemberg, chief product integration officer at Exeger.
New solar cell breaks efficiency records
Perovskite is emerging as the material for the next generation of solar cells and new research at Northwestern University in Illinois is continuing to drive the technology forward.
In the work published in the journal Nature, the researchers demonstrate the production of a tandem solar cell using two different layers of perovskites, each tuned to a different part of the solar spectrum, providing both an extremely high efficiency of 27.4% and a record-setting voltage of 2.19 electron volts.
The prototype solar cell measures 1cm2 in area and the top perovskite layer absorbs well in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum as well as some visible light, while the bottom layer is tuned more toward the infrared.
“Between the two, we cover more of the spectrum than would be possible with silicon,” says postdoctoral researcher Chongwen Li.
But the bigger breakthrough the researchers report is the coating of the surface of the perovskite layer where light is absorbed and transformed into excited electrons with a substance known as 1,3-propanediammonium, which evens out the electric field across the surface and leads to the big improvement in the overall efficiency.
Next, the team hopes to scale their production for commercial use, further enhancing the tandem cell’s efficiency and improving its stability.
