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Not too keen
on the damp hand towels in your restroom? If so, Mitsubishi
Electric has the solution, a high-speed hand dryer
that blow-dries your hands in 3–5 seconds. The
device is far more sanitary than punch-button air
dryers, as there is no need to actually touch it—just
insert your hands and let the sensor-activated, high-power
air jets, blowing air at 90 meters per second, take
care of the rest. In October 2005, Mitsubishi
Electric will release the first full redesign of their
popular slim-type Jet-Dry high-speed hand dryer in
three years. A newly designed "hyper-slit"
rectangular air nozzle ensures that none of the water
blows back onto the user as it dries hands in under
five seconds. As in previous models, the unit also
collects the water from the hands into a small tank,
leaving the floors clean and dry.
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be launched. |
In addition, since all paper waste is
eliminated, it makes for cleaner bathrooms and fewer
environmental resources to consume. It is also far
more cost-effective and easier to maintain, as there
are no towel dispensers requiring filling or replacement.
The new unit incorporates numerous ergonomic
advances and saves energy by reducing the drying time
while consuming only 630 W, the lowest power usage
in the industry.
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| In
1947, Thor Heyerdahl sailed nearly 7,000
km from Peru to Polynesia aboard Kon-Tiki,
a balsa raft built with aboriginal techniques. |
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Regular readers of the Mitsubishi
Monitor may have noticed that reports on NYK
Line's environmental protection activities have
become a nearly regular feature. This report notes
that those environmental activities have now earned
NYK the prestigious Thor Heyerdahl International
Maritime Environmental Award. The Norwegian Minister
of Trade and Industry, Mr. Borge Brende, presented
the award on May 19, 2005, at the Hotel New Otani
in Tokyo. NYK is the first shipping company, as
well as the only Japanese company, ever to be honored
with this award.
NYK's environmental activities include
the establishment of a Safety and Environmental
Management Committee and the creation of NAV9000,
a comprehensive set of operational standards designed
to increase safety and reduce the environmental
impact of the company's activities. Through NAV9000,
NYK works closely with shipowners and ship-management
companies to ensure that all vessels shipping goods
for them follow the standards. To date, about 12,000
pertinent improvements have been made to these ships.
The biennial Heyerdahl Award was set
up in June 1999 by the Norwegian maritime explorer
Dr. Thor Heyerdahl and the Norwegian Shipowners'
Association to promote shipping as an environmentally
sound mode of transport and to inspire new methods
of environmental protection.
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A high degree of dissolved oxygen
in the water is critical for the self-purification
of rivers, and vital to the fish and other aquatic
organisms that live in them. The higher a river's
contamination, the lower the level of dissolved
oxygen. If the level drops to zero, decomposition
begins and the river starts to smell. The level
of dissolved oxygen is one of the main indicators
of water quality, and increasing the oxygen is thought
to be an effective way to improve quality.
Mitsubishi Kakoki, a chemical plant
and machinery manufacturer and a leader in environmental
control technology, developed and delivered a river
purification system to the city of Nagoya, Japan.
The system, which introduces high-density oxygen
into river water, takes in water with low oxygen
content and dissolves pure, compressed oxygen into
it until it becomes oversaturated. The oxygenated
water, filled with micro-sized air bubbles, is then
reinjected into the river.
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| Minute
oxygen bubbles are restoring life to this
river. |
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Nagoya City is carrying
out a program to improve the water quality of the
city's main river, which flows from north to south.
The city appreciated the performance of Mitsubishi
Kakoki's new system in test operations and decided
to install it for the program. The system can be
also applied to cleaning up lakes, marshes and inner
bays, and the company is now actively promoting
wider use of the system.
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Mitsubishi Corporation, under an organizational
agreement with the Tokyo Institute of Technology
(Tokyo Tech), has launched an alternative energy
project called the Entropia Laser Initiative.
The concept is expected to be a realistic,
CO2-free alternative
to fossil and nuclear fuels. Until now, the efficiency
and practicality of solar-power technology has been
a matter of debate, while fuel cell technology has
faced the bottlenecks in hydrogen generation capacity,
storage and delivery.
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| Minute
oxygen bubbles are restoring life to this
river. |
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Tokyo Tech has invented
a set of core technologies to make the new energy
system a reality: new, more efficient technology
for converting solar power to laser energy; technology
for converting laser energy to electricity; laser-powered
engines that utilize water to generate power; and
laser-hydrogen cycle technology in which a magnesium
and water reaction continuously generates hydrogen
for fuel cells or hydrogen-burning engines. Factories
and households would store the magnesium for use
in on-site mini-power plants. Once used, the reaction's
by-product, magnesium oxide, would be recycled back
into magnesium via a solar-powered laser at a central
power plant. A prototype of the new energy system
will be developed in 2005–2006.
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