Digital Camera Charged by Solar Energy and Take 3D Photos - Assignment Example

Heading: Digital camera charged by solar energy and take 3D photos Your name: Course name: Professors’ name: Date Transmittal Letter Dec 21, 2011 Dear Sir/Madam, Recommendation for Digital Camera Charged by solar Energy and take 3D photos As the company product development department, we would like to thank you for the support you have accorded us this far. Through evaluation of the market trends and the needs of our product consumers, we have come up with a new product, digital camera charged by solar energy. The product is working to utilize the freely available resource, solar energy, and make the product more useful to people from different localities since it has helped the consumer save cost on energy. The product which has been one of its kind in the market, has created awareness on how well solar energy can be utilized even in industrial products like digital cameras, hence creating an impact in the digital world where a consumer in the event that they need to camp in remote areas with limited or no supply of electricity and there is need to use digital cameras. As a department, we highly recommend this product to the former that has been dependent on electricity for energy. This product also comes with a lot of advantages to the user and the company marketability. Attached is the detailed report of the recommended digital camera. Thank you very much. (Insert the head of department name) (Insert the department name) Abstract In many households, digital cameras have been widely used to replace film-based cameras. Their portability and easy application has made it possible for every household to be able to have more than one digital camera. The rise in the use of the digital camera has come with cost implications more specifically in energy use since their batteries are rechargeable. Solar researchable digital cameras have come in handy in saving the energy cost that has been on the rise in many households. This recommendation report is intended to shed more light on how the digital camera has been made to be able to use solar energy as a source of power supply. It will also expose some of the advantages of this camera as compared to the former product that our company has been producing. Introduction With the different changes in technology and efforts by manufacturers to have a product that will be consumer friendly, our company through the production department has come up with product that is more marketable and makes use of the freely available resources. This has been out of considering the naturally available resources to the target customers, the solar energy. As a company we are contributing positively to environmental conservation that has been degrading hence the result of global warming. Solar energy which is free and unlimited gets radiated every day from the sun (Need, 2011). As Need (2011) documents “the sun makes energy in its inner core in a process called nuclear fusion”. This renewable energy depending on the surface it falls on can be trapped and put into better use. This report will describe how the digital camera charged by solar energy is serving better that the previous product. How the camera works Batteries are used to store electricity generated during the day by solar electric systems for future use. The battery sustainability varies depending on the materials used to make the batteries (Roberts, 2001). With digital camera taking 3D photos, the energy consumption is a bit higher and so sustainability is a key factor to consider. To be able to cater for this, the camera has been fitted with solar cells depending on the time of the day, the season of the year, and the cloudiness of the sky and how close the digital camera is from the equator, the heat gets trapped by these solar cells. The solar cells change the sunlight into usable heat energy (Need, 2011) since it can be used to supply energy to anything powered by batteries for electric power (Need, 2011). Technical specifications The conversion process from sunlight to electricity is a silent and instant process as compared with other energy production processes like hydroelectric process. The use of solar charged camera helps in avoiding wearing of the mechanical parts and so will save money on replacement or repair of the worn out parts during energy production. Since solar energy cannot overpower the Digital Camera energy needs, overheating during charging and during use has been avoided in this. For electricity charged batteries, overheating happens if the battery gets fully charged and it is still plugged in. This temperature and humidity alter the performance of the batteries (i3a, 2011). With solar chargeable camera, the camera has a rest period for the battery to get back to room temperature even if the camera is in use. This in turn has worked to increase the battery life and avoid battery replacement every so often. With increase in power supply, the digital camera user enjoys efficiency and the charging system having a longer life since the power supply is by far efficient. “The ideal charging system is able to charge a battery efficiently in active mode and then drop down to a low power level in idle mode after the battery is fully charged.”(Foster, Calwell, &Reeder, 2011). The digital camera has been fitted with charging circuitry that is designed to recharge the “battery quickly while monitoring the charge levels and temperature of the battery, hence adjusting its rate as the battery is charged” (Foster, Calwell, &Reeder, 2011). This as compared to what we have had before of chargers with no monitoring capability has come to reduce the continuous degradation of the battery as it overcharges. With a charge monitor that has made the camera more sophisticated, voltage across the battery terminals is being monitored while applying charge. “When the voltage gets to some maximum, the charger switches to the next period in the charge function or terminate the charge. This charge function is more complex than a constant current function (Foster, Calwell, &Reeder, 2011). The ideal model for this has been what Foster gives as a typical example of “Li-Ion and NIMH charge function that utilizes a period of constant current, a period of constant voltage, and then terminates” (Foster, Calwell, &Reeder, 2011) to prevent overcharging and allow low idle mode. The camera has auto bracketing features where it can take several photographs of the same scene at slightly different exposure and with OLED display; the LED display only glows when they are required hence saving power The solar receiving surface has been designed to be in solid nature since solid has high resistance to pressure as compared to gases and liquid. This surface has a bigger surface area, to allow maximum absorption of energy and also maximize energy storage. This is because; the rate of temperature drop from a solar storage is proportional to the surface area and is inversely proportional to the volume of the energy storage device (Chen, 2011). If the surface was made too thin or too flat, the loss of heat energy could be so high. The digital camera being a portable device, though it has a bigger surface area, a high energy to weight ratio has been considered (Nalwa, 2001). Materials with less weight but fitted with components that store much energy for longer hours has been used. An all-polymers battery that is thin, bendable, light weight and very small has been used for this camera (Nalwa, 2001). In this case, organic conducting polymers for battery electrodes due to their light weight have been used to achieve this volumetric capacity. Conventional batteries are so corrosive and toxic to the environment when thrown away. With this camera, manufacturing cost related to the 3D lens has been reduced through the metal layer and the heterogeneous process technology stacking. This has enhanced memory separation from logic layer which in turn has reduced cost (Xie, Cong, & Sapatneker, 2010). By partitioning the units into two equal, the critical path has remained unchanged. In this case, the company has been spending less in the lenses to maximize on the materials that are needed for the solar batteries. The camera has also been fitted with the on and off device that separates by magnitude of the camera use. By use of electric pulse measurements, on and off switch times ensures prolonged retention time of the charged batteries. This has been achieved by use of the active polymer layer (Eftekhari, 2010). Advantages Digital camera charged by solar has been highly preferred since the LED display and the flash system of the digital cameras require a relatively high amount of power consumption (Rechargeable digital camera, 2011). Solar chargeable camera has been proved to give a user many more years of service for no additional cost with solar charging (Schaeffer, 2005). Through use of solar to charge the camera, pollution has been minimized since it does not damage the environment. This has been one way of minimizing CO2 emitted from the power plants during energy generation. The camera has been considered as cost effective to both the government and the user since on the normal electricity production and consumption; so much money is spent on a national scale through energy. In all this efforts, the consumer saves money. In most mobile portable products, digital cameras included, majority of their energy is consumed in low power mode when the battery is not being charged (Foster, Calwell, &Reeder, 2003). By reducing low power losses, there is reduced electricity use on a national scale and saves on electricity bills. Conclusion As a department, we highly recommend this digital camera because of its many advantages in place of the former product that we have been producing. The camera serves the consumers who prefer this solar chargeable camera to electricity charged one since it saves on cost of energy. It has increase in efficiency since the user does not have to stop working because the battery has run out of power. As long as there is the freely available resource, solar energy, the camera still works. By the introduction of this camera to the market, it has contributed greatly to the science and technology by use of natural resources which helps in reducing pollution that has lead to global warming. As a company we have been contributing positively towards environmental conservation which has been degrading out of industrial productions by giving the world a more effective way of using solar energy as well as do business regardless of the failures in electricity that are unpredictable. The company also has benefited through reduced production cost and having a unique product in the market. The company will continue enjoying great profits as long as we still remain the only company producing digital cameras charged by solar energy. References Chen, J. C. (2011). Physics of solar energy. New Jersey, NJ: John Wiley & sons, inc. Eftekhari, A.(2010). Nonostructured Conductive Polymers. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & sons inc. Foster, S., Calwell, C., Reeder, T., & Neugebauer, R. (2003). Battery Chargers and Energy Efficiency: Summary of Findings and Recommendations. Natural Resources Defense Council August 2003. Retrieved from: http://www.efficientproducts.org/reports/bchargers/NRDC_Battery_Charger_Final.pdf I3a. (2011). Digital Camera Battery Standards Powering Portability. Retrieved from: http://www.i3a.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/digitalcamerabatterystandards.pdf Nalwa, S. H. (2001). Handbook of Advanced Electronic and PhotonicMaterials and Devices. San Diego, USA :Academic Press. Need. (2011). Solar Energy. Intermediate Energy Info book. Retrieved from: http://www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/SolarI.pd Rechargeable digital camera. (2011). Rechargeable digital camera. Retrieved from: http://www.rechargeabledigitalcamera.net/ Roberts, S. (2001). Solar electricity: a practical guide to designing and installing small photovoltaic systems, (Ed.). New Jersey, NJ: Prentice Hall. Schaeffer, J. (2005). Real goods solar living source book, (Ed.). Barkeley, US: Consolidated printers. Xie, Y., Cong, J., & Sapatnekar, S. (2010). Three Dimensional Integrated Circuit Design and Microarchitectures. New York, NY: Springer Science + business media. Read More