Lifeboat Foundation

A revolutionary cryogenic tank design promises to radically boost the range of hydrogen-powered aircraft – to the point where clean, fuel-cell airliners could fly up to four times farther than comparable planes running on today’s dirty jet fuel.

Weight is the enemy of all things aerospace – indeed, hydrogen’s superior energy storage per weight is what makes it such an attractive alternative to lithium batteries in the aviation world. We’ve written before about HyPoint’s turbo air-cooled fuel cell technology, but its key differentiator in the aviation market is its enormous power density compared with traditional fuel cells. For its high power output, it’s extremely lightweight.

Now, it seems HyPoint has found a similarly-minded partner that’s making similar claims on the fuel storage side. Tennessee company Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories (GTL) has been working for many years now on developing ultra-lightweight cryogenic tanks made from graphite fiber composites, among other materials.

Over the last few decades, the high consumption of energy from fossil fuels has promoted a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. To address this, scientists have been searching for an alternative, renewable sources of energy.

One of the main candidates is hydrogen produced from organic waste, or biomass, of plants and animals. Biomass also absorbs, removes, and stores CO₂ from the atmosphere, while biomass decomposition can also bring us ways to negative emissions or greenhouse gases removal.

Now, EPFL researchers have developed a way to maximize hydrogen yields from biowaste within a few milliseconds. The method uses rapid photo-pyrolysis to convert dried biomass powders such as banana peel into valuable gases and solids, including hydrogen and biochar.

A billion-year-old ‘hydrogen economy’ in the frozen soil of Antarctica provides bacteria with energy, water, and the carbon that makes up their bodies.

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#engineering

French manufacturer used 100% recycled material, green energy.

When stars like our Sun run out of fuel, they contract to form white dwarfs. Such dead stars can sometimes flare back to life in a super-hot explosion and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation. A research team from several German institutes including Tübingen University and led by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has now observed such an explosion of X-ray light for the very first time.

“It was to some extent a fortunate coincidence, really,” explains Ole König from the Astronomical Institute at FAU in the Dr. Karl Remeis observatory in Bamberg, who has published an article about this observation in the reputable journal Nature, together with Prof. Dr. Jörn Wilms and a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the University of Tübingen, the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. “These X-ray flashes last only a few hours and are almost impossible to predict, but the observational instrument must be pointed directly at the explosion at exactly the right time,” explains the astrophysicist.

“These so-called novae do happen all the time but detecting them during the very first moments when most of the X-ray emission is produced is really hard.” —

In November 2018, NASA InSight landed in the Elysium Planitia region of Mars with the goal of studying the planet’s deep interior for the first time by using seismic signals to learn more about the properties of the planet’s crust, mantle, and core. Join us live at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET/1800 UTC) on May 17 as agency leadership and mission team members highlight the spacecraft’s science accomplishments, share details on its power situation, and discuss its future.

Speakers:
Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters.
Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Kathya Zamora Garcia, InSight deputy project manager, JPL

Continue reading “NASA InSight Still Hunting Marsquakes as Power Runs Down (News Audio + Visuals)” »

Called the Artemis lunar base, it will include a habitation unit (for up to four astronauts) and separate mining and fuel processing facilities. These facilities would be built far away from the base camp and would serve to produce rocket fuel, water, oxygen, and other materials needed for extended exploration of the lunar surface while decreasing supply needs from Earth.

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There will also be an electrical grid for the two units which will be connected during emergencies for resiliency and robustness. Sandia’s researchers note that the electrical system controller for the habitation unit will be very similar to the International Space Station (ISS)’s direct current electrical system with some notable differences.

The first demonstration of the laser in 1960 was rapidly followed by the birth of a new research field: nonlinear optics. The unique coherence properties of stimulated emission, the fundamental physical process of laser radiation, has enabled intensities that exceed those of incoherent sources by many orders of magnitude. The high intensities drive electrons so strongly that they oscillate with frequencies different from those of the driving light field. The subsequent dipole emission can be extremely colorful. Optical fiber or laser filaments have been used as waveguides for decades to maximize this effect and to generate extremely broadband light pulses.

However, if the laser pulses carry too much energy, fiber suffers from damage and light filaments break-up, such that the unique spatial properties of laser radiation are lost. Researchers from the German Electron-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, Germany, and the Helmholtz-Institute Jena, Germany have now reported a new method for guiding light in an energy-scalable manner. Guiding is accomplished by the use of two refocusing mirrors and the careful spacing of thin nonlinear glass windows.

The scientists have reported in a recent publication in Ultrafast Science that light pulses gain more than 30 times of their initial bandwidth in such a setup and can be consequently compressed by the same factor. This shortens their duration and considerably increases their peak power. Remarkably, these experiments were performed with laser pulses that exceed the peak power limit in glass fibers by a factor of 40. However, despite propagation through about 40 cm of glass in total, beam quality and pulse energy remained high. “We have elegantly combined two recent approaches to extend the bandwidth of ultrashort pulses. Nevertheless, the optical setup is really simple. All optics we used in our spectral broadening scheme were stock items. This and the excellent noise properties make our approach widely applicable,” says Dr. Marcus Seidel, lead author of the publication.