2024 Contest Now Accepting Entries!

Submit your best new product ideas for a chance at $25,000, other great prizes, and global recognition. If you already are registered, log in to access the entry form. Otherwise, click here to get started.

Help build a better tomorrow

Since Tech Briefs magazine launched the Create the Future Design contest in 2002 to recognize and reward engineering innovation, over 15,000 design ideas have been submitted by engineers, students, and entrepreneurs across six continents. You can also join the innovators who dared to dream big and build a better tomorrow by entering this year’s contest.

Read About Past Winners’ Success Stories

Over the past 20 years, many innovators have used the recognition afforded by the contest to advance the development and marketing of their technologies. We highlight some success stories of past winners who have brought their inventions to the marketplace.

Click here to read more

A ‘Create the Future’ Winner Featured on ‘Here’s an Idea’

Spinal cord injury affects 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. A research team at NeuroPair, Inc. won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Create the Future Design Contest for a revolutionary approach to spinal cord repair. In this Here’s an Idea podcast episode, Dr. Johannes Dapprich, NeuroPair’s CEO and founder, discusses their groundbreaking approach that addresses a critical need in the medical field, offering a fast and minimally invasive solution to a long-standing problem.

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Thank you from our Sponsors

“At COMSOL, we are very excited to recognize innovators and their important work this year. We are grateful for the opportunity to support the Create the Future Design Contest, which is an excellent platform for designers to showcase their ideas and products in front of a worldwide audience. Best of luck to all participants!”

— Bernt Nilsson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, COMSOL, Inc.

“From our beginnings, Mouser has supported engineers, innovators and students. We are proud of our longstanding support for the Create the Future Design Contest and the many innovations it has inspired.”

— Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Mouser Electronics

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Elpipes: Critical Enabling Technology for a Supergrid

Votes: 29
Views: 8524

Elpipes are polymer-insulated underground HVDC conductors based on low cost extruded metal conductors. Elpipes are designed for higher efficiency than is practical for overhead power lines. For a 325-800kV DC elpipe, we have selected a design basis of 1% loss per 1000 km, about three times better than an overhead 800kVDC line, similar to “high temperature” superconducting (HTS) lines after accounting for the energy HTS lines consume for cryogenic cooling. Elpipes use 3-18 times as much metal/ampere as a conventional transmission line, yet conductor cost never goes above 20% of total project cost in our modelling. The lower power density in an elpipe gives them exceptional overload capacity for an underground line.

Elpipes are not wrapped on a reel for transport, and so can use far more conductor than cables. Elpipes are composed of pipe shaped rigid segments mounted on powered, controllable wheeled carriages that run inside a pipeline. The pipe-like segments are linked through flexible splice modules, and the segments snap together. Elpipes can be fully underground, installed at the surface, subsea, or above ground (basically anywhere that gas pipelines are practical). There are many options for elpipes; Figure 1 illustrates a particular elpipe design with aluminum pipe conductor, insulated by a multi-layer crosslinked polyethylene (XLPE) pipe within a steel conduit. Figure 2 shows the major features of elpipes that make them in effect, part train, part power line.

By combining features of a train with a major power line, elpipes solve three critical problems that have previously prevented any underground power line from carrying the power levels that will be needed for building a supergrid (5-30 GW). First, the segmented nature of elpipes allows far more conductor to be used than is feasible for any wire or cable. Second, the mass-manufactured standard modules that snap together in a clean room environment at one end of the line, and then crawl into the pipe under power and control (like a train) can achieve the extremely high reliability required to enable elpipes (with thousands of splices) to be reliable. Third, the train-like feature of elpipes combined with regularly spaced maintenance vaults and side tracks (Figure 3) allows for rapid repairs and also for routine maintenance (which is completely impossible for conventional buried cables).

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  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Roger Faulkner
  • Type of entry:
    individual
  • Profession:
    Scientist
  • Number of times previously entering contest:
    never
  • Roger's favorite design and analysis tools:
    COMSOL, Solidworks
  • Roger's hobbies and activities:
    Inventing, hiking, swimming, dancing
  • Roger is inspired by:
    Getting off a fossil energy based economy.
  • Software used for this entry:
    Word, SolidWorks
  • Patent status:
    pending