Joe Nicholson-Alaska Airlines.
The retrofitted aircraft will expand the reach and applicability of zero emissions flight technology, further advancing the aviation industry’s quest towards achieving net-zero carbon emissions.
Category: transportation – Page 144
A solar-powered motorhome, shaped like a huge elongated teardrop, silently rolled into Madrid on Friday as part of a month-long journey from the Netherlands to southern Spain to highlight more sustainable modes of transport.
Engineering students at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands created the blue and white vehicle, named Stella Vita – Latin for “star” and “life” – to inspire car makers and politicians to accelerate the transition toward green energy.
Expansive solar panels on the roof and on lateral wings that unfold when the vehicle stops allow the self-sustaining house on wheels, or SHOW, to travel up to 740 km (460 miles) on a sunny day, while the battery can also power a fridge, coffee maker and laptop in the two-person cabin.
Aviation punches above its weight when it comes to greenhouse emissions — it is by far the highest emission form of transportation. Our modern mega planes may be the most efficient they’ve ever been, but in 2019, they still churned out over 915 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
To make matters worse, one of our best zero-emission alternatives — hydrogen — is far too heavy and bulky to build a usable airplane. Or at least that is what we thought.
The California startup HyPoint recently announced their plan to make a hydrogen-powered aircraft with nearly three times the range of a turboprop commuter jet.
In a recent presentation, Tesla said that it was working to eliminate rare Earth magnets from its EVs over supply and toxicity concerns.
In a major move, Tesla is looking to rid its electric vehicles of rare Earth minerals, potentially eliminating the biggest environmental concern over the increasing number of EVs on the road.
The surprise announcement came during Tesla’s Master Plan 3 Investor event where the company outlined its business strategy for the next few years.
Tesla.
More than one in three new vehicles sold in 2030 will be electric thanks to “explosive” growth in the market, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The influential Paris-based group says electric cars are already on track to make up 18% of sales in 2023. With new policies driving growth in the US and the EU, the share of electric models in 2030 is now set to be more than double what it expected just two years ago.
The expansion means that the demand for oil-based fuels such as petrol and diesel in the road transport sector will start to decline within just two years. Around 5% of current oil demand will have been wiped out by 2030, it adds.
The California Air Resources Board has issued an Executive Order for Toyota’s new hydrogen fuel cell swap kit for Class 8 heavy vehicles like semi trucks and busses. The kit turns diesel trucks into zero emission vehicles.
ChatGPT may get an incredible boost with applications like Auto-GPT, which aims to give autonomy to the chatbot.
The Google employee who claimed last June his company’s A.I. model could already be sentient, and was later fired by the company, is still worried about the dangers of new A.I.-powered chatbots, even if he hasn’t tested them himself yet.
Blake Lemoine was let go from Google last summer for violating the company’s confidentiality policy after he published transcripts of several conversations he had with LaMDA, the company’s large language model he helped create that forms the artificial intelligence backbone of Google’s upcoming search engine assistant, the chatbot Bard.
Lemoine told the Washington Post at the time that LaMDA resembled “a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics” and said he believed the technology was sentient, while urging Google to take care of it as it would a “sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us.”
Stretching without Buckling
Posted in mathematics, transportation
Liquid-crystal elastomers (LCEs) are shape-shifting materials that stretch or squeeze when stimulated by an external input such as heat, light, or a voltage. Designing these materials to produce desired shapes is a challenging math problem, but Daniel Castro and Hillel Aharoni from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, have now provided an analytical solution for flat materials that shape-shift within a single plane—like font-changing letters on a page [1]. Such “planar” designs could help in producing rods that change their cross section (from, say, round to square) without buckling.
LCEs consist of networks of polymer fibers containing liquid-crystal molecules. When exposed to a stimulus, the molecules align in a way that causes the material to shrink or extend in a predefined direction—called the director. Researchers can design an LCE by choosing the director orientation at each point in the material. However, calculating the “director field” for an arbitrary shape change is difficult, so approximate methods are typically used.
Castro and Aharoni focused on a specific design problem: how to create an LCE that stretches only in two dimensions. These planar LCEs often suffer from residual stress that causes the material to wrinkle or buckle out of the plane. The researchers showed that finding a buckle-free design is similar to a well-known mathematical problem that has been studied in other contexts, such as minimizing the mass of load-carrying structures. Taking inspiration from these previous studies, Castro and Aharoni provided a method for exactly deriving the director field for any desired planar LCE. “Our results could be readily implemented by a wide range of experimentalists, as well as by engineers and designers,” Aharoni says.
SAN FRANCISCO –New Hampshire startup Light Steering Technologies won a $1.25 million U.S. Air Force contract for angular pointing technology with small satellite applications.
Through the contract with AFWERX, the Air Force organization focused on innovation, LST aims to advance the Technology Readiness Level, or technological maturity, of its Multi-Axis Scanner. LST’s Multi-Axis Scanner is a patented magnetic joint for gimbal-like capability.
“What’s compelling about the technology is we are minimizing the moving mass,” Aaron Castillo, LST senior vice president of business development and program management, told SpaceNews. “This is achieved by actuating a mirror instead of the entire satellite bus or using a traditional gimbal mechanism.”