No. 113: A more advanced energy-saving office building from Daiwa House (December 19, 2011)

Daiwa House will launch a more advanced energy-saving office building that utilizes as much outside light as possible. The company has already put the office building that conserves electricity by 50% from the level in 1990 by incorporating photovoltaic generation and heat insulation. The new office building can reduce electricity by more than 50%. It employs lighting blinds, light ducts, and double-sided light-emitting diodes based on the light guide plate of liquid crystal display. Light diffused by the lighting blind spreads to the four corners of a room, and light ducts to take in outside light are installed in the space that cannot get outside light. The light duct was developed by Sumitomo 3M.

The LED lighting was developed jointly by KoizumiLighting Technology and Sumitomo Chemical. It employs the edge light system that diffuses light using the light guide plate. It helps the light realize more natural feeling and make people feel brighter because it is double-sided illumination. It is automatically controlled by the illuminance sensor, and it can run without emitting light for four hours a day. Theoretically, it is possible to maintain the necessary level of luminance for 9.9 hours on average a day. On the rooftop, the new building has solar panels with a generation capacity of 10 kW to supply power enough to operate the lighting and air-conditioning.

No. 112: Applying TRON to the smart city in alliance with European research Institutes (December 10, 2011)

YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory sponsored by Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Sony will play the central role in the research to apply the Real-Time Operating System Nucleus (TRON) that Dr. Takeshi Sakamura proposed in 1984 to the smart city. The laboratory will establish an organization with government-affiliated research institutes and companies in Europe including Siemens of Germany and ST Microelectronics of Switzerland to put TRON-based technologies into practical use. It has already reached an agreement with a Chinese city on the technological cooperation on TRON. It will help the Chinese city establish a TRON-based security system that covers the entire city including the historical management of pharmaceuticals and foods. Likewise, it will provide the know-how on incorporating TRON in various kinds of sensors to European organizations.

The smart meter (next-generation power meter) is used in the smart city to network various devices to exchange data in search of the optimal power supply. A sophisticated operating system is vital to know the city environment in real time, and TRON is regarded as the best operating system. According to a Japanese public research company, the world smart meter market will grow more than three times over the level in 2009 to 1,300 billion yen in 2020. TRON will have increasingly intensifying competition with Android of Google and Windows of Microsoft. TRON plans to differentiate it from other two operating systems by focusing on devices that do not need a large processing ability. At present, no clear winner in the world’s standard of the operating system for sophisticated sensors vital to the smart city.