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.
"There is no way to make this work right now, but technology is evolving, and frequently we handle things that are ahead of their time," Reed said. "I'm actually talking with someone who has a factory in China who says he has engineers he's going to put on it, and they'll solve the problems that people are complaining to us about, so we'll see."
Robert Dunay, a professor of Architecture and Director of Industrial Design Architecture, said that the attention across the nation about Gravia is important to the project's mission.
"It's getting a lot of reaction now I think across the country," Dunay said. "Actually, in that regard, it's been a successful project, because what it's really designed to do is activate a lot of interest and dialogue about energy and how we use it in our daily lives."
Moulton stated that he has always been interested in aiding the environment.
"I came to the realization that the method of design can solve some of these harder questions," Moulton said. "What do we do when we find out that we're a little bit at a time ruining the environment? I think design can certainly make a huge difference, and once I realized that, now I can feel really good about trying to contribute to that."
Moulton is currently doing freelance work for a small start-up company that develops 100 percent organic dolls for kids. A patent is pending on Gravia.
"I showed the idea to Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, and they thought it was a pretty novel mechanism," Moulton said. "They kind of took it from there, and they said, 'Let's go for it. It's novel and interesting, and it could be a neat way to power small-scale electronic devices.'"
Reed said the patent her office applied for is for more than just Gravia, but "a method for generating small amounts of electricity for low-wattage usage." She said she has been "inundated" with letters from people worldwide who wanted to get their hands on the lamp, including two different people who are developing "green" hotels. Some people think the design is beautiful, while she has also received e-mails from third world country residents who are trying to "develop means of generating light in areas where there is no electricity and there won't be for a long time".
"I could have sold thousands out of my office here in the last few days," Reed said. "There's a huge pent-up need for ways to generate light that don't require plugging a cord into the wall."