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Category: transportation – Page 197

A strain-sensing smart skin developed at Rice University that uses very small structures, carbon nanotubes, to monitor and detect damage in large structures is ready for prime time.

The ‘strain paint’ first revealed by Rice in 2012 uses the fluorescent properties of nanotubes to show when a surface has been deformed by stress.

Now developed as part of a non-contact optical monitoring system known as S4, the multilayered coating can be applied to large surfaces — bridges, buildings, ships and airplanes, for starters — where high strain poses an invisible threat.

Read more | >

A strain-sensing smart skin developed at Rice University that uses very small structures, carbon nanotubes, to monitor and detect damage in large structures is ready for prime time.

The “strain paint” first revealed by Rice in 2012 uses the fluorescent properties of nanotubes to show when a surface has been deformed by stress.

Now developed as part of a non-contact optical monitoring system known as S4, the multilayered coating can be applied to large surfaces—bridges, buildings, ships and airplanes, for starters—where high strain poses an invisible threat.

Read more | >

Berkeley Lab scientists assess the technology landscape for developing a domestic source of lithium.

If you had a jar of marbles of many different colors but wanted only the green ones, how could you efficiently pick them out? What if it wasn’t marbles but a jar of glitter, and there was sand, glue, and mud mixed in? That begins to describe the complexity of the brine pumped out from beneath California’s Salton Sea as part of geothermal energy production.

For geothermal fields around the world, produced geothermal brine has been simply injected back underground, but now it’s become clear that the brines produced at the Salton Sea geothermal field contain an immense amount of lithium, a critical resource need for low-carbon transportation and energy storage. Demand for lithium is skyrocketing, as it is an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. Currently there is very little lithium production in the U.S. and most lithium is imported; however, that may change in the near future.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have recently published a comprehensive review of past and current technologies for extracting minerals from geothermal brine. The review, published in the journal Energies, discusses and evaluates a broad array of technologies used for extraction of lithium from brines. The review finds that geothermal brines in the Salton Sea region of California are expected to be a major domestic source of lithium in the future but that significant technical challenges need to be overcome.

Continue reading “Sizing Up the Challenges in Extracting Lithium from Geothermal Brine” | >

Motors are everywhere in our day-to-day lives—from cars to washing machines. A futuristic scientific field is working on tiny motors that could power a network of nanomachines and replace some of the power sources we use in devices today.

In new research published recently in ACS Nano, researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin created the first ever optical . All previous versions of these light-driven motors reside in a solution of some sort, which held back their potential for most real-world applications.

“Life started in the water and eventually moved on land,” said Yuebing Zheng, an associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. “We’ve made these micro nanomotors that have always lived in solution work on land, in a solid state.”

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Urban air mobility (UAM) company HT Aero continues to make progress toward the “flying car” it has promised to deliver by 2024. XPeng Huitian (aka HT Aero) recently posted a video to Weibo demonstrating an eVTOL prototype taking off, flying around, and being maneuvered like a car. It has the XPeng Motors steering wheel and everything – check it out.

HT Aero is the rebranded name of XPeng Huitian, a majority-owned entity of XPeng Inc. and founder He Xiaopeng. Since its foundation in 2013, HT Aero has conducted over 15,000 safely manned flights with the goal of combining automotive and aerospace technologies to develop safe, domestic electric flying vehicles at scale.

This began with the T1 eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) vehicle in 2019, followed by the X1 in 2020, which appears to be the model demonstrated in the video below, given that it doesn’t have a roof like the X2.

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A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.

The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.

The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations.

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