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Category: transportation – Page 207

Researchers at Ulm University in Germany have recently developed a new framework that could help to make self-driving cars safer in urban and highly dynamic environments. This framework, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is designed to identify potential threats around the vehicle in real-time.

The team’s paper builds on one of their previous studies, featured in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles earlier this year. This previous work was aimed at providing autonomous vehicles with situation-aware environment perception capabilities, thus making them more responsive in complex and dynamic unknown environments.

“The core idea behind our work is to allocate perception resources only to areas around an automated that are relevant in its current situation (e.g., its current driving task) instead of the naive 360° perception field,” Matti Henning, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In this way, computational resources can be saved to increase the efficiency of automated vehicles.”

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The biggest benchmarking data set to date for a machine learning technique designed with data privacy in mind has been released open source by researchers at the University of Michigan.

Called federated learning, the approach trains learning models on end-user devices, like smartphones and laptops, rather than requiring the transfer of private data to central servers.

“By training in-situ on data where it is generated, we can train on larger real-world data,” explained Fan Lai, U-M doctoral student in computer science and engineering, who presents the FedScale training environment at the International Conference on Machine Learning this week.

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China’s dependence on foreign suppliers of computer chips could undermine the country’s transition to electric vehicles, tech traders and researchers say.

The shortage of chips, or semiconductors, is more acute in China than elsewhere and could hit the nation’s EV momentum, according to CATARC, the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, because its fledgling domestic chipmaking industry is unlikely to be in a position to cope with demand within the next two to three years, it says.

With delivery delays of up to a year, that means carmakers in China are occasionally being forced to pay expensive premiums to chip brokers in cities like Shenzhen, where there is a “grey market” trade in semiconductors.

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Now, an international team of researchers has developed a tower that uses solar energy to produce a synthetic alternative to fossil-derived fuels like kerosene and diesel. The fuel production system uses water, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sunlight to produce aviation fuel. The team has implemented the system in the field, and the design could help the aviation industry become carbon neutral.

The solar-made kerosene is fully compatible with the existing aviation infrastructure for fuel storage, distribution, and end use in jet engines. It can also be blended with fossil-derived kerosene, says Aldo Steinfeld, a professor from ETH Zurich and the corresponding author of the paper.

The solar fuel production plant consists of 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that redirect and concentrate solar radiation into a solar reactor mounted on top of a tower. The concentrated solar energy then drives oxidation-reduction (redox) reaction cycles in the solar reactor, which contains a reticulated porous ceramic structure made of ceria. The ceria – which is not consumed but can be used over and over – convert water and CO2 injected into the reactor into syngas, a tailored mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Subsequently, syngas is sent into a gas-to-liquid converter, where it is finally processed into liquid hydrocarbon fuels that include kerosene and diesel.

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Wireless charging roads equipped with energy storage systems are promising electric vehicle solutions by virtue of their strong advantages in time saving and reduced pressure on the existing power infrastructure, according to a paper by Cornell researchers published this month in Applied Energy.

The electric vehicle (EV) industry has experienced remarkable expansion and technical development during the last decade. It is estimated that EVs will comprise 48%, 42% and 27% of light-duty vehicle sales in China, Europe and the United States, respectively, by 2030, according to co-authors H. Oliver Gao, the Howard Simpson Professor of Engineering, and Jie Shi, a former Cornell systems postdoctoral researcher.

Integration of charging into the existing electricity market and efficient management of the corresponding energy storage system are crucial for successful implementation of the wireless charging road systems.

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A scientific article just published by four Brazilian and two American scientists reports gains in electric and thermal energy obtained when brewer’s spent grain (barley bagasse), an abundant waste produced by the beer industry, is treated with ultrasound before undergoing anaerobic digestion, a microbiological process involving consumption of organic matter and production of methane.

Pre-treatment generated biogas with 56% methane, 27% more than the proportion obtained without use of ultrasound. After purification in methane, the biogas can be used as vehicle fuel with a very low carbon footprint compared to conventional fossil fuels. Moreover, in cogenerators, the methane can be burned off by the brewery to produce electricity and heat. The final waste can be used as biofertilizer instead of mineral fertilizer. The methodology is described in detail in the article, which is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

The innovative process was developed at the Laboratory of Bioengineering and Treatment of Water and Waste (Biotar) in the State University of Campinas’s School of Food Engineering (FEA-UNICAMP). The research group lead, T nia Forster-Carneiro, is principal investigator for a project supported by FAPESP.

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