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Category: transportation – Page 250

There are few environments as unforgiving as the ocean. Its unpredictable weather patterns and limitations in terms of communications have left large swaths of the ocean unexplored and shrouded in mystery.

“The ocean is a fascinating environment with a number of current challenges like microplastics, algae blooms, coral bleaching, and rising temperatures,” says Wim van Rees, the ABS Career Development Professor at MIT. “At the same time, the ocean holds countless opportunities — from aquaculture to energy harvesting and exploring the many ocean creatures we haven’t discovered yet.”

Ocean engineers and mechanical engineers, like van Rees, are using advances in scientific computing to address the ocean’s many challenges, and seize its opportunities. These researchers are developing technologies to better understand our oceans, and how both organisms and human-made vehicles can move within them, from the micro scale to the macro scale.

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Nairobi, Kenya - Opibus has just introduced the first all-electric bus in Kenya as well as the first African designed electric bus ever. This is the first major step in the company’s vision to provide a locally designed and developed electric bus that can be mass-produced for the pan-African market, by the end of 2023. This is a step towards realizing Opibus goal of electrifying Africa’s public transport system, deploying products tailored for the local use case. The bus is designed and developed in-house with local engineering talent, while at the same time utilizing local manufacturing partners.

The key to the technology is the Opibus proprietary electric vehicle platform, which is modular and can be the foundation for several types of vehicles. This enables the creation of a bus that is suitable for the African use case, in its reliability, durability and price point. This also means local and global contract manufactures can be used to create a globally competitive product, with a rapid scale-up.

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Coffman said he could not elaborate on many of the specifics related to advanced degrees of autonomy, but he did point out a few distinct and significant advantages newer applications of robotic autonomy will bring to the force. For example, perhaps an autonomous vehicle could benefit from force-wide, cross-domain networking and learn of upcoming barriers, obstacles or even enemy force locations? Perhaps artificial-intelligence-enabled forward robots can gather large volumes of sensor data, process and organize the critical information during operations and make adjustments and determinations as needed according to certain variables.

“What we learned is based on their mobility, their excellent mobility and their autonomous behaviors, we can actually have them move on a separate axis of advance and link up with the humans on the objective. So they can autonomously move without humans, link up with the humans, transfer back control, and then execute the mission. This gives the enemy multiple dilemmas,” Coffman said.

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Rolls-Royce today announced that its Spirit of Innovation aircraft has officially become the world’s fastest all-electric vehicle. The ambitious aircraft attempted the feat in November, giving the British company the confidence that it had set a new record. However, the firm had to wait until now to receive confirmation from aviation bodies.

The Spirit of Innovation program seeks to pioneer sustainable aviation by proving the capabilities of electric flight. Those behind the program are keen to enable a future of low-carbon air travel.

The plane first took off the Ministry of Defence’s Boscombe Down site in the English county of Wiltshire in September last year. A 400kW (500+hp) electric powertrain helped the aircraft on its way, a piece of equipment that is backed by what is dubbed the most power-dense battery pack ever put together for a plane.

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Volvo has pledged to manufacture only electric cars by 2030. In November of last year, it released a 50-page report that delves in exquisite detail into the total carbon footprint of its cars, the purpose being to allow an honest and transparent analysis of the progress it is making toward its corporate goal of reducing emissions from manufacturing its automobiles by 40% by 2025, compared to the reference year of 2018.

Volvo produces three versions of its 40 series cars — the XC40 powered by a gasoline engine, the XC40 Recharge powered by a battery pack, and the C40 Recharge, a more aerodynamically styled version of the XC40 Recharge. All three are built in the same factory by the same workers using similar parts. That allows Volvo to do a close analysis of the emissions characteristics of each. On page 24 of its study, there is one sentence that has been seized upon by anti-EV provocateurs to as proof that electric cars are not nearly as “green” as people think they are. Here is what it says:

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Startup Jetson is now accepting preorders for its recreational EVTOL, the Jetson One. The vehicle starts at $92,000 and deliveries are expected to begin in 2023.

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Over 70,000 jobs will be created through the rising battery manufacturing in Europe within the next years, new studies predict.

The energy supply in Germany and Europe has never been more in flux. As the success of renewable energies continues to mount, another technology is coming into focus. Energy storage technologies and battery storage systems in particular are becoming increasingly important with the advancement of the energy transition. This development also has significant implications for Germany as an economic center, since battery production is expected to create thousands of jobs here in the future.

Europe has not traditionally played a very significant role as a site for battery cell production, but technical advances, favorable political conditions and an especially promising sales market are making the continent increasingly attractive for battery production. A look at the key role that battery cell production plays in upstream value chains – throughout the renewable energy supply sector and especially in the manufacture of electric vehicles – makes its significance clear. Battery cells represent approximately 40 percent of the value added in the production of an electric vehicle. So it is no wonder that production capacities for lithium-ion batteries are growing faster in Europe than in any other region of the world. Current forecasts predict that the continent’s share in this global manufacturing business will increase from around 6 percent now to 16 to 25 percent by 2030.

Numerous battery cell manufacturing plants are currently being built in Europe. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, Europe is expected to host manufacturing facilities capable of producing more than 300 gigawatt hours (GWh) of battery capacity by 2029. The meta-study “Batteries for electric cars: Fact check and need for action,” commissioned by VDMA and carried out by Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, even suggests that production capacities of 300 to 400 GWh could be achieved by 2025. The website Battery-News.de anticipates that the German market alone will account for more than 170 GWh of production capacity. By way of comparison, Europe currently has around 30 GWh of production capacity.

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