Enable Green Engineering

With National Instruments products, engineers and scientists can inherently apply green engineering techniques using the graphical system design platform to help meet some of the world’s Grand Challenges for Engineering such as making solar power an economical source of renewable energy, capturing and recycling waste to help better manage the nitrogen cycle, and providing energy from fusion.

To further empower customers to develop life-changing applications, NI continues to invest heavily in R&D. Even in the midst of the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010, NI invested more than 16 percent of its total revenue in R&D. As a result, the company released 438 new products in 2010. New NI products released in 2010 that further enable green engineering include NI C Series modules for electrical power analysis applications and an NI LabVIEW driver for distributed network protocol 3.0 (DNP3) communication for electrical substation equipment.

NI Green Engineering Grant Program
Since its inception in 2009, the NI Green Engineering Grant Program has provided start-up assistance for companies planning to use NI hardware as an embedded component of their renewable energy, energy efficiency, smart grid, or clean-tech products or technologies. NI sponsored one company in 2009 and committed to sponsoring 25 additional companies in 2010. NI surpassed that goal by sponsoring 40 additional companies and awarding grants valued at more than $900,000 USD in software and training services to help companies develop innovative green engineering devices.

Developing Smart Grid Technology
Energy is the foundation of economic and social development. Meeting increasing demand and reducing environmental impact are two of the largest issues society faces today. Rapid growth in the developing world, which will significantly increase global energy consumption, and the significant impact of fossil fuels on climate change are two issues that will require large advancements in both renewable energy and energy efficiency technology.

In both cases, vast improvements are needed to lower the cost and increase production of cleaner energy-producing technologies. Smart grid technologies are an important area of investment because they will provide the infrastructure improvements necessary to support energy efficiency and renewable energy.

In 2010, NI kicked off R&D projects to develop products specifically aligned with smart grid technologies, including a LabVIEW toolkit for smart grid power quality, flicker, and synchrophasor applications. The company continues to help advance innovations in this area and remains committed to creating new products to aid customers in meeting the challenging demands of the evolving smart grid in 2011.

Solutions for Big Physics
Engineers, physicists, and other scientists around the world are working to solve various challenges in areas such as particle physics, fusion, and astronomy. From programming embedded real-time systems based on multicore processors and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to working with high-speed data acquisition systems requiring advanced timing and synchronization, engineers, scientists, and physicists use NI commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software and hardware to meet their control and instrumentation needs.

In 2010, NI announced a collaboration with Vitrociset, a leading European technical services provider for complex systems, to offer a complete solution for big physics applications such as particle accelerators and fusion devices. Engineers and physicists working on large control applications can combine NI COTS hardware and software for advanced physics with technical services from Vitrociset to streamline their sophisticated physics projects.