60秒科学:Rice for Nice, Low-Price Ice
The fridge is one of your home’s biggest energy hogs 1. Better insulation 2 can make refrigerators much more efficient. And a panel encasing a vacuum is one of the best insulators 3 known. But vacuum-insulated panels are too pricy for widespread use.
Enter some University of Michigan students. They took something called rice husk ash: the leftover 4 husks from processing rice is burned for energy, and the ash remains 5. It’s high in silica and carbon. So they tinkered with the ash and developed a new core material for vacuum insulated panels. It’s about 50 percent cheaper than what’s currently available. And the resulting panels are such good insulators that swapping 6 them into refrigerators could lead to about a 50 percent energy savings 7. They’re space efficient too: a one-inch-thick ash panel equals today’s four-inch-thick polystyrene panels.
Then Michigan business students partnered with the scientists to create a company called Husk Insulation. They entered the invention in the M.I.T. Clean Energy Prize competition. And on May 13th, Husk Insulation won the competition’s first prize—a cool $200,000. Which will be invested in further research and development.
—Cynthia Graber
- 'sounds like -- like hogs grunting. “像——像是猪发出的声音。 来自英汉文学 - 汤姆历险
- I hate the way he hogs down his food. 我讨厌他那副狼吞虎咽的吃相。 来自辞典例句
- Please examine the insulation of the electric wires in my house.请检查一下我屋子里电线的绝缘情况。
- It is always difficult to assure good insulation between the electric leads.要保证两个电触头之间有良好的绝缘总是很困难的。
- There is no sharp line separating conductors from insulators. 实际上并没有一个明显的界限将半导体和绝缘体分开。
- To reduce heat losses the pipes are covered by thermal insulators. 为了减少热散失，管子外包保温层。
- These narrow roads are a leftover from the days of horse-drawn carriages.这些小道是从马车时代沿用下来的。
- Wonder if that bakery lets us take leftover home.不知道那家糕饼店会不会让我们把卖剩的带回家。
- He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
- The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。
- The slow swapping and buying of horses went on. 马匹的买卖和交换就是这样慢慢地进行着。
- He was quite keen on swapping books with friends. 他非常热衷于和朋友们交换书籍。