|
How PARC sees printers boosting clean tech
Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, April 2, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
The Palo Alto Research Center--the heralded research labs that Xerox spun out as a separate company in 2002--is examining ways of taking technology and ideas originally devised for copiers and printers into the clean-tech market. The idea, from a conceptual level, is fairly intriguing. A lot of the components and ideas at work inside printers exist to control physical forces and objects in a constantly changing environment. Thus, they should be useful in channeling sunlight or other phenomena on a larger scale.
PARC scientists, for instance, are tinkering with a water purification system in which particles--and even microorganisms--are eliminated through rotational force...
In another project, PARC has come up with a way to print grid lines--the thin black strips in solar cells that transfer electricity from the silicon to a wire--with inkjet nozzles. Grid lines on existing solar cells are somewhat wide and cast shadows onto the surface of a solar cell. The shadows in turn reduce the efficiency of the cell...
Energy efficiency started relatively informally at the lab...People got interested, and management decided to pursue it.
PARC is one of the older--and more productive--industrial incubators. Xerox founded it in 1970, and 30 companies have been spun out of it. Inventions from the lab include the mouse, Ethernet, the Alto (the archetype of the PC), the laser printer, and, ignominiously, the computer worm. It was also one of the first industrial organizations to employ anthropologists and ethnographers. Xerox wanted to know how people actually interacted with copiers (besides hitting them and swearing at them).
Xerox didn't always profit from its inventions. Although some of the major concepts and scientists of the IT revolution came out of its labs, Xerox played a minor role in the market.
As a separate company, PARC is trying to avoid repeating history by focusing on research projects with a potential to pay off. Last year, for instance, it spun out the search company Powerset. It also aggressively courts long-term relationships to assist large, established companies with their research agendas. The company pulls in around $55 million a year and gets about 100 patents per year.
In one ongoing project, PARC is trying to take the adaptive control systems that effectively manage the inside operations of printers and apply it to controlling data centers...
The company will also team with start-ups. Solar concentrator maker SolFocus, for instance, is working with PARC on a second generation of products...
But the lab is also looking long-term, too. One of the more novel ideas is...
|
