Collegiate Times

In a competition held over the weekend, a former Virginia Tech master's student won second place for a new gadget he designed for the event.

Clay Moulton, who received his master's degree in science and architecture with a concentration in industrial design last December, won the award in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition as part of the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City.

His invention, a light-emitting diode (LED) floor lamp called Gravia, works for four hours at a time once the user moves weights to the top of the lamp that then spin a rotor.

Gravia faced two rounds of pre-judging before the final decision on Feb. 1 at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center, where all entries were judged on innovation, clarity of design, originality, form and presentation.

Moulton's lamp competed against designs such as a remote control that charged on a TV, a device that would only spray air conditioning on a person in a room and an easy-to-build creation that measures how much power electric appliances draw. This last device, made by Matt Meschulam and Zach Dwiel, was the only one that beat out Gravia.

The lamp's name, which simply means via gravity, is a misnomer.

"The lamp isn't actually powered by gravity, but from a physics perspective, when the user picks up that weight and lifts it up and puts it up in the lamp to start it moving, they're imparting the potential energy for that whole thing," Moulton said.

The original concept for Moulton's design was based on a typical American workday, which is usually broken up into two four-hour blocks.

"It's this kind of give-and-take relationship, kind of like a grandfather clock," Moulton said. "It'll run for a certain amount of time, but you have to go back and do something with it."

The design, which Moulton developed in about six to eight weeks beginning last March, was one of the three objects he conceptualized for his unfunded graduate thesis project. The light has 600-800 lumens, about the same as a 400-watt incandescent bulb over four hours. Gravia would probably work for about 200 years if used every day for eight hours. But the design is only a concept as of now; it would not currently work because of the current state of the art technology for LEDs, Moulton said.

"It's not really possible right now," Moulton said, adding that one of the general guidelines for the competition requests conceptual work. "That came up while I was working on it. I decided to propose it as sort of a 'what if' situation. If we had LEDs that were as efficient as they could be in the future, how could we possibly use these things?"

Jackie Reed, licensing agent from Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, Inc. (VTIP), said it has received a lot of e-mails from people who are critical about Gravia being unable to presently work.

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