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Category: energy – Page 70

A system designed at MIT could allow sensors to operate in remote settings, without batteries.

MIT researchers have developed a battery-free, self-powered sensor that can harvest energy from its environment.

Because it requires no battery that must be recharged or replaced, and because it requires no special wiring, such a sensor could be embedded in a hard-to-reach place, like inside the inner workings of a ship’s engine. There, it could automatically gather data on the machine’s power consumption and operations for long periods of time.

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Tesla continues to make progress on its upcoming diner, drive-in theater and Supercharger in Los Angeles, with recent drone footage showing new water runoff infrastructure, preparations for stucco installation on the first-floor walls, and seemingly, materials for the start of some interior construction.

In a drone video update shared by YouTube channel 247Tesla on Sunday, you can see new stacks of sheetrock both inside and outside of entrances to the Tesla diner building, as construction prepares to begin focus on interiors. The video also shows a new rectangular area dug roughly five feet deep into the ground, which the video’s host says will likely be used to control water runoff.

In addition, you can see shots of the site’s power shed, though it doesn’t include transformers or batteries as of yet. The diner building’s walls surrounding the first-floor structure have also now been covered with a waterproofing sealer, the host notes, which is usually installed prior to stucco being applied.

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A new gravimeter is compact and stable and can detect the daily solar and lunar gravitational oscillations that are responsible for the tides.

Gravity measurements can help with searches for oil and gas or with predictions of impending volcanic activity. Unfortunately, today’s gravimeters are bulky, lack stability, or require extreme cooling. Now researchers have demonstrated a design for a small, highly sensitive gravimeter that operates stably at room temperature [1]. The device uses a small, levitated magnet whose equilibrium height is a sensitive probe of the local gravitational field. The researchers expect the design to be useful in field studies, such as the mapping of the distribution of underground materials.

Several obstacles have impeded the development of compact gravimeters, says Pu Huang of Nanjing University in China. Room-temperature devices generally use small mechanical oscillators, which offer excellent accuracy. However, they are made from materials that exhibit aging effects, so these gravimeters can lose accuracy over time. Much higher stability can be achieved with superconducting devices, but these require cryogenic conditions and so consume lots of power and are hard to use outdoors.

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Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you’ll likely learn that they are “dead stars” that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.

“We discovered the classical picture of all white dwarfs being dead stars is incomplete,” says Simon Blouin, co-principal investigator and Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics National Fellow at UVic.

“For these white dwarfs to stop cooling, they must have some way of generating extra energy. We weren’t sure how this was happening, but now we have an explanation for the phenomenon.”

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