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Category: energy – Page 270

This 45-ton dump truck ascends a 13-percent grade and can take on 65 tons while doing so.

As the heavy transport descends with more than double the weight, the trucks regenerative braking system recaptures all the energy it will need to refill the charge that it will need to use on the way back up again. Regenerative braking allows the eDumper to produce more energy downhill than it consumes uphill.”

The eDumper is the world’s largest electric vehicle but it generates more energy than it uses so it never needs charging.

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Today, IBM Research is building on a long history of materials science innovation to unveil a new battery discovery. This new research could help eliminate the need for heavy metals in battery production and transform the long-term sustainability of many elements of our energy infrastructure.

As battery-powered alternatives for everything from vehicles to smart energy grids are explored, there remain significant concerns around the sustainability of available battery technologies.

Many battery materials, including heavy metals such as nickel and cobalt, pose tremendous environmental and humanitarian risks. Cobalt in particular, which is largely available in central Africa, has come under fire for careless and exploitative extraction practices.1

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The NREL scientists, along with colleagues at Yale University, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are part of the Department of Energy’s Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines (Co-Optima) initiative. Co-Optima’s research focuses on improving fuel economy and vehicle performance while also reducing emissions.

“If you look at biomass, 30% of it is oxygen,” said Derek Vardon, a senior research engineer at NREL and corresponding author of a new paper detailing the Co-Optima research project. “If we can figure out clever ways to keep it around and tailor how it’s incorporated in the , you can get a lot more out of biomass and improve the performance of diesel fuel.” The molecule, 4-butoxyheptane, contains oxygen while conventional petroleum-derived diesel fuel is comprised of hydrocarbons. The presence of oxygen significantly reduces the intrinsic sooting tendency of the fuel upon burning.

The paper, “Performance-advantaged ether diesel bioblendstock production by a priori design,” appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vardon’s co-authors from NREL are Nabila Huq as the first author, with co-authors Xiangchen Huo, Glenn Hafenstine, Stephen Tifft, Jim Stunkel, Earl Christensen, Gina Fioroni, Lisa Fouts, Robert McCormick, Matthew Wiatrowski, Mary Biddy, Teresa Alleman, Peter St. John, and Seonah Kim.

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Quadratic equations are polynomials, meaning strings of math terms. An expression like “x + 4” is a polynomial. They can have one or many variables in any combination, and the magnitude of them is decided by what power the variables are taken to. So x + 4 is an expression describing a straight line, but (x + 4)² is a curve. Since a line crosses just once through any particular latitude or longitude, its solution is just one value. If you have x², that means two root values, in a shape like a circle or arc that makes two crossings.

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Researchers fabricated a cavity device with a large number of “exceptional points,” which are modes that exhibit exotic phenomena, such as extreme sensitivity to external parameters.

One of the fundamental laws of physics is that energy is conserved, but many local physical systems—seen in isolation—gain or lose energy. For example, a light bulb converts electrical power into radiation, which from the perspective of the electrical circuit is a loss of energy. By contrast, a light beam gains energy as it passes through an amplifying medium. Although one can model the inputs and outputs, it’s often mathematically simpler to just treat energy as a locally nonconserved quantity. Nonconservative systems, referred to as non-Hermitian, have attracted a great deal of interest because they can exhibit potentially useful phenomena, such as enhanced sensing [1] and robust single-mode lasing [2]. These phenomena are intimately related to the ability of non-Hermitian systems to support exceptional points, a type of degeneracy in which two or more modes suddenly coalesce into one (Fig. 1).

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