Super-durable tights, 11kg blanket and other crazy stuff

How to use sand to store energy for several months? How to solve the problem of homelessness with a 3D printer? What are women’s tights made of that cannot be torn? How can smart overalls help when choosing clothes in a store without trying them on? What do you need to hide to relieve stress and sleep well? Kommersant continues to talk about new and old inventions with great potential.

Warmth buried in the sand

Ordinary sand, which looks very organic on the beach or in the sandbox, can also perform serious tasks in the energy sector. A year ago, Finnish scientists from Polar Night Energy established in southwestern Finland, the world’s first sand-based energy storage facility, a large battery that can, for example, efficiently heat residential buildings in winter.

Sand has a high heat capacity, and if it is heated to a temperature of 500 ° C, it will keep it for a long time. Moreover, unlike chemical batteries, a sand battery can be recharged an infinite number of times, and the sand itself is inexpensive and does not lose its properties over time.

The accumulator sand battery is a steel tower 7 m high and 4 m in diameter. The tower is filled with low-grade sand – it can hold 100 tons of this material.

The location for the battery was not chosen by chance: there is a thermal power plant nearby. The power plant receives heat from renewable energy sources and from server cooling systems, and the electricity generated by it heats the sand in the accumulator to 400–500°C. Sand keeps the temperature, and you can use this heat during a period when, for example, electricity production drops, or use this inexpensive energy in winter, when the cost of electric heating is higher.

Pipes extend from the battery, through which air heated by sand is sent to the district heating system, heating houses, offices and even heating water for the local pool. Now the developers of the sand cell, young engineers Markku Ülönen and Tommi Eronen, are working on scaling up the technology.

Under the roof of your house from a 3D printer

In order for each person or family to have at least a small, but his own house, you need to build quickly and a lot, but this requires at least a significant amount of building materials, construction equipment, engineers and builders. At the same time, construction is a noisy, dirty and often protracted business. So the problem of providing housing for those who do not have a roof over their heads, it seems, will have to be solved not by traditional, but by innovative construction. The prospects are good though.

For example, the Vulcan 3D printer created by the Texas startup ICON is capable of “build» a small house with an area of ​​32 sq. m in 48 hours.

And without noise, dirt and builders. And the improved Vulcan model can already build a house of 185 square meters. m in 24 hours. As a building material, special cement is fed into the printer, which is laid neatly layer by layer, forming walls, roof details and other elements. The design of the house can be anything, it does not have to be a gray concrete box.

At the same time, the structures of printed houses are very durable and withstand loads that are 350% higher than the normative ones. Such houses are resistant to extreme weather conditions, do not let water through, mold will not start in them, and they are not afraid of fire.

In addition to its regular commercial projects, ICON is building homeless housing in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean in partnership with several charities helping those in need.

Hole-proof tights

The Canadian company Sheerly Genius has solved a very important problem that most often worries women. Tights, which greatly adorn the female figure, are usually made of silk, nylon, spandex and similar materials. Some of them are less durable, some more, but they all break quite easily.

Sheerly Genius founder Katherine Homut says that at some point the company’s development team thought, “It’s even ridiculous that today there are so many crazy technologies that have not been invented, but this very ordinary problem has not yet been solved.” And they her decided.

Sheerly Genius has created a technology that turns a material commonly used in bulletproof vests and climbing gear into soft, thin, elegant tights.

According to the developers, these tights are not afraid of sharp objects or nails, and you can go out beautifully in them not once or twice, but fifty.

The main thing is that the suit sits

Surely, many have come across the fact that, having picked up some clothes for themselves in an online store and placed an order, they then try on these clothes at home and find out that they do not fit well. Either the size is wrong, or the style does not fit, or something else. And Japanese retailer ZOZO inventedhow to make sure that the chosen clothes fit perfectly both in size and style. And not only clothes.

ZOZO has developed and patented its own technology for 3D measurement of all, even the most insignificant parameters of the human body. For this, a tight-fitting overall with numerous fiducial marks applied to it was created.

A person puts on overalls and scans his figure using an application on a smartphone. The fiducial marks located in a special way allow the scanner to take into account all the nuances.

Then, through the same application, you can order clothes that you definitely don’t have to take to the store. Comparison of ZOZO scanner performance with that of a 3D laser scanner showed that ZOZO is only 3.7 mm off on average. In ZOZO, overalls are made with different density of coordinate points, and different models of overalls allow you to choose clothes, for example, for athletes with relief muscles or elegant underwear for graceful women.

After the success of the overalls, the specialists at ZOZO came up with a special mat that works on the same technology, but already scans the parameters of the legs for an accurate selection of shoes. But ZOZO did not stop there either. They have special glasses that scan the face of the buyer, taking into account all the unique color characteristics of the skin, and offer the perfect makeup.

Hug and don’t cry

Nowadays, another way to ease anxiety and get a good night’s sleep cannot be superfluous. And it was invented by the American startup Gravity, which created a cozy weighted blanket. Not even one blanket, but several different ones, differing in weight of 6, 9 and 11 kg, so that everyone can choose exactly one of them for themselves.

The Gravity blanket works simply: a person takes cover with it, and due to the additional weight of the blanket, he gets a feeling of warm and reliable hugs.

This favors the production of serotonin, which contributes to calmness and a sense of happiness, and the sleep hormone melatonin is produced from serotonin. A person falls asleep calmly, his heart beats evenly, which also contributes to health.

The effectiveness of the Gravity Stress Relief Blanket was tested in the first year it was released, which was 2017. “People still had very fresh memories of the 2016 election,” says Gravity startup co-founder Mike Grillo.

In just a few months, the startup raised almost $5 million on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. And in 2018, Time magazine named the Gravity blanket one of the best inventions of the year.

Alena Miklashevskaya