ew Green Smart Glass is intended to make getting the perfect cup of coffee both easier and more eco-friendly.
We all do it - ask for our coffees "extra hot" or "at the temperature in the molten core of the sun". Then, we whine and moan about how our beverage is "too hot to drink", and impatiently wait for it to cool down.
Fortunately, designer Ruan Chengzhu has chosen to use his design-oriented mind for the purpose of good, rather than mocking us all as we purse our lips and hope for the best as we tip our steaming cups to mouths.
In a flurry of eco-friendly fanaticism, Chengzhu has created the Green Smart Glass, a tumbler glass that takes and stores all of that wasted heat energy that is coming off of our extra-mocha-double-frappo-whatever as it cools. It does this through simple ingenuity - the inside of the glass is coated with a thermoelectric semiconductor that absorbs the releasing heat energy and stores it in the cup as electricity.
A meter on the side of the cup tells the user the current temperature, so they can watch as their "it's burning my lungs! My luuunggs!!" coffee drops to a level of human biological tolerance. Once it does, the cup can be switched from energy collection mode to energy spend mode, and be used either to cool or heat the beverage.
So, a few uses of the cup will get a good storage build of energy going, allowing drinkers to either keep their cold drinks cool without the need for ice, or keep their hot drinks, well, warm rather than scalding, using the electricity stored in the cup.
This is one of those clever inventions that most of us will sit around saying "I totally could have invented that. It's so easy!" Well, you didn't, so keep enjoying the lovely view from your parents' basement windows as you sip your Chengzhu-cooled beverage.
Sure, there could be a few issues here such as long-term energy storage and insular decay, as well as the whole "how the hell do you wash this thing" question, but overall we're quite impressed by Chengzhu's brainstorm.
It's a real glass act.
