By Susan Kuchinskas
In September a driverless Audi TTS will speed to the top of Colorado's Pikes Peak at just under 100 kilometers per hour—that's right, no driver. It is an early step toward a robo-car that can drive itself, perhaps better than you can.
The World Health Organization projects traffic fatalities to be the third leading cause of mortality worldwide by 2020. And drivers themselves are responsible for 73 percent of these deaths. So automakers are looking at ways they could make cars safer by taking driving out of human hands. Self-driving cars could offer other benefits: TNO, an international research firm based in the Netherlands, says that they could reduce the time lost to traffic jams by up to 50 percent, and reduce CO2 emissions and fuel consumption by 5 percent.
The Pikes Peak run is a joint project of the Stanford University Dynamic Design Laboratory, the Electronics Research Lab (ERL) for the Volkswagen Group (which owns Audi), and software-maker Oracle Corp. The rough, part-gravel road to the top of Pikes Peak is the route of the annual International Hill Climb rally, an annual auto and motorcycle race. The TTS run will demonstrate whether the car can take curves as fast as a human driver—without driving off a cliff.
Showing posts with label Innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Innovation. Show all posts
Friday, August 13, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
Solar-powered plane lands safely after 26-hour flight. BBC News
8 July 2010
The solar-powered plane lands near Bern
An experimental solar-powered aircraft launched on Wednesday has landed safely in Switzerland after successfully flying through the night.
The feat is a step toward the makers' aim of circling the globe using the power of the Sun to fuel the plane.
The aircraft used super-efficient solar cells and batteries to stay in the air after the Sun's rays had faded.
The plane touched down at an airfield about 30 miles (50 km) from the Swiss capital Bern at 0900 (0700 GMT).
The plane landed at Payerne airport after a total flight time of 26 hours.
During the flight it reached a height of 8,700 m (28,543 ft).
Assistants rushed to stabilise the experimental aircraft as it touched down, ensuring that its huge 63m (207ft) wingspan did not scrape the ground and topple the plane.
It is the longest and highest flight recorded by a solar-powered plane.
The four-engine aircraft was steered by Andre Borschberg, a former fighter jet pilot from Switzerland.
The plane has 12,000 solar cells arranged on its wingspan which collected enough energy to power the plane for the flight.
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The solar-powered plane lands near Bern
An experimental solar-powered aircraft launched on Wednesday has landed safely in Switzerland after successfully flying through the night.
The feat is a step toward the makers' aim of circling the globe using the power of the Sun to fuel the plane.
The aircraft used super-efficient solar cells and batteries to stay in the air after the Sun's rays had faded.
The plane touched down at an airfield about 30 miles (50 km) from the Swiss capital Bern at 0900 (0700 GMT).
The plane landed at Payerne airport after a total flight time of 26 hours.
During the flight it reached a height of 8,700 m (28,543 ft).
Assistants rushed to stabilise the experimental aircraft as it touched down, ensuring that its huge 63m (207ft) wingspan did not scrape the ground and topple the plane.
It is the longest and highest flight recorded by a solar-powered plane.
The four-engine aircraft was steered by Andre Borschberg, a former fighter jet pilot from Switzerland.
The plane has 12,000 solar cells arranged on its wingspan which collected enough energy to power the plane for the flight.
Read Full Story:
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Battery-less radios developed. ScienceDaily.com
ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — At the International Solid State Circuit Conference, imec and Holst Centre report a 2.4GHz/915MHz wake-up receiver which consumes only 51µW power. This record low power achievement opens the door to battery-less or energy-harvesting based radios for a wide range of applications including long-range RFID and wireless sensor nodes for logistics, smart buildings, healthcare etc.
Today's battery-operated wireless communication systems consume a lot of power at times when the radio does not have to transmit or receive data. This means that most of their time Bluetooth or WLAN radios on mobile phones are taking energy from the battery without adding functionality. Imec and Holst Centre's wake-up receiver with ultra-low power consumption and fast response time can be put in parallel with the conventional radio to switch it on when data needs to received or transmitted.
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Today's battery-operated wireless communication systems consume a lot of power at times when the radio does not have to transmit or receive data. This means that most of their time Bluetooth or WLAN radios on mobile phones are taking energy from the battery without adding functionality. Imec and Holst Centre's wake-up receiver with ultra-low power consumption and fast response time can be put in parallel with the conventional radio to switch it on when data needs to received or transmitted.
Read Full Story:
Friday, January 22, 2010
Turning Plastic Wastes to Fuel. Biofuelshub.com
FeatureWritten by Sabrina Deparine
Monday, 18 January 2010 10:11
Based on statistics, the United States alone produces 50 million tons of plastic wastes annually. The figure is too much considering that plastics are low-value wastes, meaning, people may not bother that much to have them recycled because they could not give back favorable returns aside from the usual “saving the earth” sentiment. Wouldn’t it be nice if we can find a way to convert these low value wastes to something high-value that we can use again?
Perhaps this was the same question that Envion thought of. The company has opened a USD 5-million plant in Washington D.C. which can convert 6,000 tons of plastic wastes to nearly a million barrels of new material resembling oil. According to Michael Han, Chairman and Chief Executive of the company, their output product can be blended with other materials or components to produce gasoline or diesel.
Although the exact procedure in the plant is not disclosed, the plant can convert plastic wastes to fuel material for about USD 10 per barrel. Bales of plastics like beverage cups from coffee shops and fast food chains, margarine containers, planters and others are stored temporarily in a part of the plant premise, waiting to be shredded and fed into the machinery. They can also digest the blue bins and PET bottle caps. However, Han hastily added that they do not accept PET (particularly PET bottles with the “1” embossed at the bottom) in their plant because these have higher values in the recycling market.
Envion’s plant is equipped with two-story-high chemical reactor, internal agitator, and heating equipment that can give off infrared energy. The process is driven by electricity, not with open flame, so operators can control the temperature when converting plastic materials to liquid fuel. About 82% of the plastic wastes fed to the machine are converted.
The output is something similar to murky lemonade. It does smell like gasoline or diesel though. One oil company has already agreed to buy this material to blend them with motor fuel. Mr. Han is also currently in talks with other oil and petroleum companies and working out to secure a license for this Envion technology so it can be used around the world.
The process also produces a sludge-like by-product which can be burned for energy. Based on pilot tests, each ton of waste can produce as much as 3 to 5 barrels of oil-like product. Each barrel takes about 59 to 98 kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly two or three days’ worth of electricity for a typical household. This means that the price of electricity per gallon is roughly around 7 to 12 cents.
Read at-source
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Bacteria engineered to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. ScienceDaily.com
ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.
In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.
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In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.
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Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Converting Water and CO2 into Fuel. Alternative Energy
December 2nd, 2009
Researchers are trying to duplicate the natural process of photosynthesis. If successful, we can use the “evil” carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and industrial units to good use. This way, industrial units don’t have to establish new subsidiary units for the treatment of carbon dioxide. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a prototype machine that utilizes the sun’s energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into the molecular building blocks that can be utilized as transportation fuels. If researchers can make this device produce twice the energy generated by the natural process of photosynthesis, it will do great service to environment. It will pave the way to recycle CO2.
Read Full Story
Researchers are trying to duplicate the natural process of photosynthesis. If successful, we can use the “evil” carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and industrial units to good use. This way, industrial units don’t have to establish new subsidiary units for the treatment of carbon dioxide. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a prototype machine that utilizes the sun’s energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into the molecular building blocks that can be utilized as transportation fuels. If researchers can make this device produce twice the energy generated by the natural process of photosynthesis, it will do great service to environment. It will pave the way to recycle CO2.
Read Full Story
Turning Heat to Electricity. RenewableEnergyWorld.com
MIT research points to a much more efficient way of harvesting electrical power from what would otherwise be wasted heat.
by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
November 25, 2009
Boston, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source of inefficiency. But new research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable electricity.
That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in, or power plants that put out more electricity for a given amount of fuel, says Peter Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new concept appearing this month in the Journal of Applied Physics.
Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion.
Theory says that such energy conversion can never exceed a specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula for determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in converting heat into work. But current commercial thermoelectric devices only achieve about one-tenth of that limit, Hagelstein says. In experiments involving a different new technology, thermal diodes, Hagelstein worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the Naval Research Laboratory, and coworkers to demonstrate efficiency as high as 40 percent of the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show that this new kind of system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of that ceiling.
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by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
November 25, 2009
Boston, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source of inefficiency. But new research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable electricity.
That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in, or power plants that put out more electricity for a given amount of fuel, says Peter Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new concept appearing this month in the Journal of Applied Physics.
Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion.
Theory says that such energy conversion can never exceed a specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula for determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in converting heat into work. But current commercial thermoelectric devices only achieve about one-tenth of that limit, Hagelstein says. In experiments involving a different new technology, thermal diodes, Hagelstein worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the Naval Research Laboratory, and coworkers to demonstrate efficiency as high as 40 percent of the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show that this new kind of system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of that ceiling.
Read Full Story:
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
First test for record solar plane. BBC News
The prototype of a solar-powered plane destined for a record round-the-world journey has made its first trip across a runway.
On Thursday, the plane covered at least 2km at speeds of up to five knots on the landing strip in Switzerland.
This week saw the Solar Impulse plane outside its hangar for the first time, with tests of its motors and computer.
As wide as a jumbo jet but weighing just 1,500 kg, it will be piloted by Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard.
The plane's maiden flight is scheduled for February, and a final version will attempt to cross the Atlantic in 2012.
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