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Category: transportation – Page 342

XTI Aircraft has teamed up with VerdeGo Aero to build the TriFan 200, an unmanned, autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.

Denver, Colorado-based XTI and Florida-headquartered VerdeGo say on 19 November that the TriFan 200, a small brother of the in-development passenger TriFan 600 aircraft, will be capable of transporting 227kg (500lb) of cargo on missions of more than 200nm (108km).

“The TriFan 200 aircraft will open up a significant new market for XTI to address the needs of cargo and logistics operators globally,” says XTI’s chief executive Robert LaBelle.

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In the near future, large vessels carrying vehicles or other cargo across the ocean could be powered by wind, thanks to innovative sail technology.

Oceanbird, designed by Swedish engineering company, Wallenius Marine, is a futuristic concept for a PCTC (Pure Car and Truck Carrier) with capacity to carry 7,000 cars on long-distance ocean journeys. The project aims to prove that the global shipping community can transport goods in a sustainable way, and that low or zero-emission shipping is possible by using wind as the main energy source.

“We are proud to present our third iteration of our design, which we have worked with for several years,” said Per Tunell, COO of Wallenius Marine. “Shipping is a central function in global trade and stands for 90% of all transported goods, but it also contributes to emissions. It is critical that shipping becomes sustainable. Our studies show that wind is the most interesting energy source for ocean transports and with the 80-metre-high wing sails on Oceanbird, we are developing the ocean-going freighters of the future.”

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The automotive industry is knee deep in the vast transition to electric, but one place where gas is still going strong is out on the water. Seattle startup Zin Boats wants to start what you might call a sea change by showing, as Tesla did with cars, that an electric boat can be not just better for the planet, but better in almost every other way as well.

With a minimalist design like a silver bullet, built almost entirely from carbon fiber, the 20-foot Z2R is less than half the weight of comparable craft, letting it take off like a shot and handle easily, while also traveling a hundred miles on a charge — and you can fill the “tank” for about five bucks in an hour or so.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well, it ain’t cheap. But then, few boats are.

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If there’s one major thing that’s holding back an electric revolution in the aviation world, it’s energy storage. But there are a ton of very clever people banging away at the problem of how to increase the energy density of batteries, and another growing faction working to make long-range, fast-fueling hydrogen-fuel-cell powertrains the standard for future flight.

Either way, it’s going to happen in the coming decades, and one new company out of Minneapolis is turning its attention to the other critical element of the propulsion system. H3X Technologies is bursting out of the gate with an integrated electric motor design it says can deliver the same sustained power as some of the best motors on the market at a third or less of the total weight.

Weight, of course, is a big deal in aviation – and that goes double for electric aircraft. Every pound carried skyward represents a pound less payload you can carry, a reduction in the range you’ll get from your battery or hydrogen tank, and ultimately a loss of money for the owner.

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From time to time, Fully Charged receives an offer that is too good to refuse, and when a long-term friend of the show offered us his electrified Ferrari 308, we didn’t hesitate.

This is part of an ongoing collaboration between Fully Charged and Electrek.

While the sheer scale of combustion engine cars that are converted to electric remains to be seen, conceivably, conversions could become an entirely new market. A number of companies are making inroads in this most intriguing of markets, including New Electric in Ireland and the Netherlands working on open source conversions, and Transition One in France that convert an array of smaller combustion engine cars. In North America, cool conversion shops like EV West in California, and Moment Motors in Texas, are popping up, and in England, Electric Classic Cars, who worked on the Ferrari in question, have featured a few times on Fully Charged.

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With lithium-containing batteries facing constraints on many of the metals they contain, Nina Notman looks at whether its group 1 neighbour sodium can supply the answer.

The lithium-ion battery powers much of our modern lives, a fact reflected in this year’s Nobel prize. It resides in devices ranging from very small wearable electronics, through mobile phones and laptops, to electric vehicles and ‘the world’s biggest battery’ – the huge 100MW/129MWh Tesla battery installed on an Australian wind farm in 2017.

‘Lithium-ion has a massive span of applications,’ explains Jonathan Knott, an energy storage researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia. ‘It is being used as a hammer to crack every nut and we need to start getting a little bit more sophisticated in the use of the best tool for the job.’

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Researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms have created tiny building blocks that exhibit a variety of unique mechanical properties, such as the ability to produce a twisting motion when squeezed. These subunits could potentially be assembled by tiny robots into a nearly limitless variety of objects with built-in functionality, including vehicles, large industrial parts, or specialized robots that can be repeatedly reassembled in different forms.

The researchers created four different types of these subunits, called voxels (a 3D variation on the pixels of a 2D image). Each voxel type exhibits special properties not found in typical natural materials, and in combination they can be used to make devices that respond to environmental stimuli in predictable ways. Examples might include airplane wings or turbine blades that respond to changes in air pressure or wind speed by changing their overall shape.

The findings, which detail the creation of a family of discrete “mechanical metamaterials,” are described in a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, authored by recent MIT doctoral graduate Benjamin Jenett PhD ’20, Professor Neil Gershenfeld, and four others.

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A recent research study conducted by City, University of London’s Professor Christoph Bruecker and his team has revealed how micro-structured finlets on owl feathers enable silent flight and may show the way forward in reducing aircraft noise in future.

Professor bruecker is city’s royal academy of engineering research chair in nature-inspired sensing and flow control for sustainable transport and sir richard olver BAE systems chair for aeronautical engineering.

His team have published their discoveries in the Institute of Physics journal, Bioinspiration and Biomimetics in a paper titled ‘Flow turning effect and laminar control by the 3D curvature of leading edge serrations from owl wing.’

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