Lifeboat Foundation

Clean power for windless days and hydrogen vehicles.

British startup Faradair Aerospace has unveiled plans to build and sell an 18-seat bioelectric hybrid airplane for use as both a passenger and cargo air transport. The company is calling its plane the Bio Electric Hybrid Aircraft (BEHA). The current model is the M1H, and the plans include a triple box wing configuration to give it exceptional lift.

The M1H will have an electric motor for use during takeoff and landing, providing a much quieter experience than jets with a traditional engine. Engineers at Faradair claim the plane will produce just 60 dba when taking off, compared to the average of 140 dba for conventional jet aircraft. It will also have a 1,600hp turboprop engine in the rear of the plane for use during flight and for recharging the batteries that power the plane when landing and taking off.

Representatives for Faradiar also claim the plane will be able to land and take off from shorter runways than conventional jet aircraft, needing just 300 meters of space—this feat will be possible due to the “vectored thrust” provided by the two contra-rotating propfans, its triple box wing design and a light body made of carbon composites. Once in the air, the plane will be capable of flying at speeds of 230 mph.

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South Australia has recently put the world’s biggest lithium battery into operation – but perhaps it should’ve waited. A local startup says it’s built the world’s first working thermal battery, a device with a lifetime of at least 20 years that can store six times more energy than lithium-ion batteries per volume, for 60–80 percent of the price.

35,000 feet is standard cruising altitude for a commercial jet airplane, but at those lofty heights the air temperature plummets below −51 degrees Celsius and ice can easily form on wings. To prevent ice formation and subsequent drag on the aircraft, current systems utilize the heat generated by burning fuel. But these high-temperature, fuel-dependent systems cannot be used on the proposed all-electric, temperature-sensitive materials of next-generation aircraft.

According to the report, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has requested at least $10 million for its Reactor on a Rocket (ROAR) programme.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency intends to assemble a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system in orbit, Aviation Week reported, citing the Pentagon’s 2020 budget.

“The program will initially develop the use of additive manufacturing approaches to print NTP fuel elements… In addition, the program will investigate on-orbit assembly techniques (AM) to safely assemble the individual core element subassemblies into a full demonstration system configuration, and will perform a technology demonstration”, the budget document says.

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Aside from harvesting solar, wind, and hydrogen energy to produce electricity, many energy experts believe that developing compact fusion facilities can give humankind a stable and sustainable source of power that can last forever.

Jon Menard, a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has reportedly examined the possibility of expediting the development of compact fusion facilities to generate safe, clean, and limitless energy.

In his study, Menard looked into the concept of creating a compact tokamak powered by high-temperature superconducting magnets.

Continue reading “New Research Boosts Potential of Compact Fusion Power” »

NASA on Friday published satellite photos of a powerful meteor which appeared just above the Bering Sea on December 18 but went unnoticed until months later.

The explosion unleashed around 173 kilotons of energy, more than 10 times that of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima in World War II.

Can tokamak fusion facilities, the most widely used devices for harvesting on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars, be developed more quickly to produce safe, clean, and virtually limitless energy for generating electricity? Physicist Jon Menard of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has examined that question in a detailed look at the concept of a compact tokamak equipped with high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. Such magnets can produce higher magnetic fields—necessary to produce and sustain fusion reactions—than would otherwise be possible in a compact facility.

Menard first presented the paper, now published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, to a Royal Society workshop in London that explored accelerating the development of tokamak-produced fusion power with compact tokamaks. “This is the first paper that quantitatively documents how the new superconductors can interplay with the high pressure that compact tokamaks produce to influence how tokamaks are optimized in the future,” Menard said. “What we tried to develop were some simple models that capture important aspects of an integrated design.”

A startup with alumni from MIT and Yale says it’s made a breakthrough in creating a next-generation material that should make it possible to 3D print literally anything out of thin air.

New York-based Mattershift has managed to create large-scale carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes that are able to combine and separate individual molecules.

“This technology gives us a level of control over the material world that we’ve never had before,” said Mattershift Founder and CEO Dr. Rob McGinnis in a release. “For example, right now we’re working to remove CO₂ from the air and turn it into fuels. This has already been done using conventional technology, but it’s been too expensive to be practical. Using our tech, I think we’ll be able to produce carbon-zero gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels that are cheaper than fossil fuels.”

Continue reading “A Real World ‘Star Trek’ Replicator Is Now Possible Thanks To New Breakthrough” »