Leonard "Lynn" L. Northrup Jr. (March 18, 1918 - March 24, 2016) is an American engineer who pioneers the commercialization of solar thermal energy. Influenced by the work of John Yellott, Maria Telkes, and Harry Tabor, the company Northrup designed, patented, developed and manufactured some of the first commercial solar water heaters, solar concentrators, solar powered air-conditioning systems, solar power towers and thermal photovoltaic systems in the United States. The company he founded became part of ARCO Solar, which in turn became BP Solar, which became the largest solar energy company in the world. Northrup is a prolific inventor with 14 US patents.
Video Leonard L. Northrup Jr.
Kehidupan awal, pendidikan, akademisi, dan dinas militer
Lynn Northrup Jr., the fourth generation from Texas, is the son of L. L. Northrup Sr, an inventor in himself, and Dolly McKaskle Northrup, a retail businessman, both members of the pioneer family of Texas. He was educated at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, and received a BA from Southern Methodist University, MS from the University of Denver, and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. Northrup served as captain of the United States Armed Forces Engineering Corps during and immediately after World War II.
Maps Leonard L. Northrup Jr.
Initial work on automotive air conditioning and housing
After the War, Northrup worked for Storm Vulcan, a Dallas company, where he found a machine to clean aircraft engines. He also started an effort to customize the car with the air conditioning equipment, put the machine in the trunk and pipe the cooled air through the tube in the headliner. This attracted the interest of engineers from General Motors, who mimicked the Cadillac system in the late 1940s. "After market" automotive air conditioning unit was produced in Texas until the 1980s. He also sold some of the first air conditioning units, built by Curtis Mathes Corporation, the early leader in window unit manufacturing. Northrup married Jane Keliher and started a family in Dallas, where he designed and built one of the first single family homes in the United States with central air conditioning. He founded the company to install air-conditioning in residential and commercial buildings. With the Marketing Plan of G F Sweetman (CEO of American Awards Co.), he became one of the largest Curtis Mathes fan and compressor suppliers in the country. He also developed the company to manage, install, update, and clean air filtration systems.
Commercialization of solar thermal technology in the US
In the late 1960s, Northrup purchased a controlling stake in Donmark Corporation, a manufacturer of residential air conditioning and heating equipment from Curtis Mathes, a lifelong friend. Northrup promotes the use of central heating and "all electric" cooling equipment, building a manufacturing facility in Dallas and then in Hutchins, Texas and selling primarily to apartment developers. In designing this system, Northrup focuses on the total cost of installed units, including framing and plumbing costs.
During the mid-1970s, Northrup became interested in improving the efficiency of air conditioning systems, and began looking for new approaches, including geothermal geothermal heat pumps, and the use of innovative scroll compressors in central split AC system systems to achieve higher efficiency ratings, when it became a standard compressor for high efficiency air conditioning equipment.
In the early 1970s, before the Arab oil embargo and the surge in oil prices, Northrup became interested in the commercialization of solar thermal systems, especially for heating drinking water and swimming pools. Such systems are already commercialized in other countries where favorable climatic conditions, high energy costs, and there is a tradition of scientific innovation especially solar power in Israel. Working in the United States is limited to academics and some companies in Arizona, Texas, and California. Northrup began experimenting with solar collectors to heat the air, using a whistling heat exchanger, and involved solar pioneer Professor John Yellott as a consultant on absorptivity and emissivity or various surfaces and configurations, and on the transparency of glass and glass material showing "greenhouse effect" transparent to incoming solar radiation, but opaque to infrared radiation from the heated surface - hence thermal traps or collectors showing "greenhouse effect".
In addition, he employs Maria Telkes, a phase change material specialist, particularly molten salt, as a way to store heat energy, and consults with Israeli solar pioneer Harry Tabor on surface coatings, including "black chrome" for solar panels. This work leads to the commercialization of flat panel solar water heaters, and solar pool heaters, marketed as a direct Northrup Energy product and through dealers, with particular success in Hawaii, where solar thermosiphon systems can be used with antifreeze. With low-temperature products in production and distribution, Northrup turned its attention to reaching higher temperatures - which would require different methods of insolation entry concentration and solar tracking - with varying degrees of success.
First Commercial Tracking Concentrate on Solar Collectors
Northrup's breakthrough technology is a collector that uses curved long acrylic fresnel lenses to focus or focus sunlight on a 12 to 1 theoretical ratio to flat flat copper tubes, coated with a variant of "black chrome" absorbent. Tabor surfaces. The array, about 10 'long, tracks the movement of the sun during the day (east to west), automatically, with generally fixed elevation (roughly at the same angle from horizontal as the latitude of the installation). The tracking device was ingenious - consisting of two photoelectric cells at the base of the tube with a baffle between them. The current from the cells goes to the control board that controls the tracking motor. When cell output is equalized, baffles and tubes will point to the sun. This is sufficient to allow arrays to track solar azimuth and generate considerable heat, as reported in tests published in the ASHRAE Journal, which noted that "... Array collectors... Following the sun from just after sunrise to just before the sun sinks and often produces twice as much energy as BTUs that can be used at higher temperatures than those provided by high-quality flat plate collectors. "
The array is proving popular - and is used to drive absorption refrigeration equipment at large commercial installations at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, at the Reef Hotel France in St. Thomas, USVI, residence, and is sold to prominent individuals, including movie actors and businessman Steve McQueen, actor Stuart Whitman and environmental activist Robert Redford.
The early success of these concentrated collectors was partly due to grants from the Department of Energy and its predecessor, the Energy Research and Development Agency. They created a lot of publicity for Northrup, Inc., including the cover of Popular Science Magazine and an article in Fortune Magazine that notes, "With optically filtered sun (sic), the new solar collector on the roof of the Lynn Northrup building produces a higher temperature than is available of most solar heating systems are now on the market ". Technically, this concentrated collector is one of the first commercially successful "east-west" traction solar collectors. The basics of their systems are still used in daily azimuth and parabolic collector elevation tracking. Most collectors concentrate linearly, as of this writing in 2010, from less expensive and less complicated seasonal tracking in the form of parabolic troughs.
First Commercial Heliostats and Electric Towers
Enriched with its success in centralizing collectors, Northrup turned its attention to reaching higher temperatures, with azimuth and elevation tracking mirrors "heliostats" focusing on central boilers - that is. solar thermal power tower. The most sophisticated electric tower of the time was the experimental tower in France, the THEMIS solar furnace in Odeillo, in the Pyrenees Orientales, which like other power towers, had been used solely for scientific purposes. Northrup attended the conference there in 1973 along with Professors Yellott and Floyd Blake, a former senior aerospace engineer Martin Marietta who became interested in solar thermal research.
This interest led to the employment of Blake and 16 other ex-aerospace engineers, who set up a research center in Littleton, Colorado, near Denver. The Northrup, Inc.'s first azimuth/elevation mirror array was built with Northrup, Inc. funds and grants from the State of Texas. Designed by the Blake team, the mirror array, dubbed "Northrup I", is assembled at the Northrup Energy manufacturing plant near Hutchins, Texas. It used several flat mirrors, with weather-proof support being the industry standard. Each mirror is tilted to the anticipated focal length to the central tower. Every moment of every year, every mirror must be in a position to divide the vector between the mirror and the sun as well as the mirror and target. This requires a large number of calculations, special computers, and mounting mechanisms designed by Northrup. The team leader Floyd Blake remembers, "Lynn climbs the stairs in front of the heliostats to take a picture of the reflected sun in it, then climbs by helicopter to make sure the heliostats are pointing correctly."
Northrup, Inc. soon became an industry leader in pre-commercial and commercial power towers and heliostat installations, getting grants from NASA Huntsville, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, United States Department of Energy, and Energy Research and Development Agency. Most heliostats, including Northrup II, a commercial model, were developed under a contract to the United States Department of Energy. Radiation centers the heliostats of the sun to produce temperatures up to 2,000 degrees on target. Northrup, Inc. jointly ventured with Bechtel Corp., who was responsible for designing the target of heliostat, a boiler.
ARCO Solar
In the late 1970s, just five years after testing the first low-temperature solar heat collectors, Northrup Energy has been a leading developer of solar thermal technology. It attracted the attention of investors, and applicants, including the Atlantic Richfield Company, "ARCO". Chairman of ARCO, Robert O Anderson is personally interested in solar technology and visiting the Northrup Energy facility. Northrup, Inc. joined Atlantic Richfield, and ARCO Ventures changed its name to ARCO Solar. The Northrup Energy team under Floyd Blake and Jerry Anderson went on to design and build some of the first commercial solar tower installations, notably "Solar One" near Barstow, California. Heat from other projects is used to produce steam for tertiary oil recovery in Kern County, California and for power generation. Some heliostats are built to directly track the sun with photovoltaic cell arrays to generate electricity for utility grids, near Hesperia, California. The installation of seven million watts near Barstow was later dismantled and shipped to the first commercial solar power plant in Europe. This unit is the largest solar power plant in the world. Northrup and Blake were later featured in a documentary about solar energy, Using the Sun, narrated by actress Joan Hackett.
ARCO Solar is increasingly concentrated on the development of solar photovoltaic systems and then sold first to Seimens, then to British Petroleum (now "BP"), where BP Solar becomes the largest solar photovoltaic company in the world.
Northrup's designs and works in flat plate solar thermal collectors, east-west tracking collectors and heliostats are still in use today and serve as the basis of solar thermal technology. To acknowledge Prof.'s contribution John Yellott for the advancement of the solar thermal system, Northrup blessed the seat at Arizona State in honor of Yellott. Northrup has, in turn, been honored for his contribution to the commercialization of solar technology by the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Heating, Cooling, and Air Cooling Engineers.
Working in Real Estate and System Architecture
After the incorporation of Northrup, Inc. to ARCO, Northrup became involved in real estate development, including the assembly of one of the largest plots of land in downtown Dallas, where he entered a joint venture with James Rouse Company Development Company to build the festival market. The project was sold to a Belgian investment group that failed to pursue the project with Rouse. Northrup helped fund the establishment of the Rouse's Enterprise Foundation residential project in Dallas. He also arranged tracts along the 1 mile coastline at Lake Lewisville, the part that later became the city of The Colony. Northrup acquired 5,000 acres outside San Antonio, Texas, made trustworthy to his family, and assembles the land now occupied by regional Rolex headquarters, among others.
Northrup then started American Limestone, an innovator in using Texas lime excavation surfaces on building facades, using a patented method that uses thin panels of limestone as veneers, attached to a metal box without mortar. It popularized the use of crude limestone as a thin layer in residential and commercial applications, including the front of the store, such as Brooks Brothers, churches, bank buildings and city buildings. At other extreme measures, Northrup has used massive limestone blocks for passive heating/cooling characteristics, and free-standing structural qualities, mainly donating stones and designing construction techniques for the Cistercian Chapel in Irving, Texas, reflecting both the aesthetics of classical design and masonry construction techniques without mortar - a modern building built in a rigorous Cistercian architectural style. The architect, Gary Cunningham, said, "We want to build a church that will literally last for the next 900 years."
Awards
Penghargaan Prestasi Teknik, American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, dan Air Conditioning Engineers
Quotes of Honor Award, American Institute of Architects to pioneer the development of solar energy as a viable industry
Honorary Member of Beta Beta Beta, the biological honorary society in recognition of its significant contribution and outstanding service to the community and biology
Complete US Patent
The Northrup Patent May 2006 describes a method with the potential to use water as a general refrigerant, as well as an economical method for filtering water.
Movie Shows
Utilizing the Sun (1980)
See also
- Hot sun
- John Yellott
- Maria Telkes
- Curtis Mathes (Curtis Mathes, Sr.)
- Harry Tabor
- BP Solar
- Energy Research and Development Administration
- The solar tower
References
External links
- Leonard L. Northrup Jr. on IMDb
- Cistercian Chapel Project Page in Cunningham Architects
- The Cistercian Chapel
- Colonies
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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