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Category: transportation – Page 532

In 2015 UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer and materials scientist Jonathan Berger developed an idea that could change the way people think about high-performance structural materials. Two years later, his concept is paying research dividends.

In a letter published in the journal Nature, Berger, with UCSB materials and mechanical engineering professor Robert McMeeking and materials scientist Haydn N. G. Wadley from the University of Virginia, prove that the three-dimensional pyramid-and-cross cell geometry Berger conceived is the first of its kind to achieve the performance predicted by theoretical bounds. Its lightness, strength and versatility, according to Berger, lends itself well to a variety of applications, from buildings to vehicles to packaging and transport.

Called Isomax, the beauty of this solid foam—in this case loosely defined as a combination of a stiff substance and air pockets—lay in the geometry within. Instead of the typical assemblage of bubbles or a honeycomb arrangement, the ordered cells were set apart by walls forming the shapes of pyramids with three sides and a base, and octahedra, reinforced inside with a “cross” of intersecting diagonal walls.

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Lompico is the rough jewel of Santa Cruz, California—high in the mountains and deep in the redwood forest, population 1,140. Weather providing, it takes less than an hour to get here from Silicon Valley, where technologists are hard at work designing our brave new world.

But heavy rains have made the valley barely accessible to Lompico residents like me this winter. Road closures are common in Lompico, caused by mudslides, fallen trees, and rising waters. California governor Jerry Brown requested federal disaster relief funds on Feb. 11 for this and other nearby counties, estimating damage at $162 million.

Now, just getting out of my neighborhood takes an hour. I navigate perilous one-lane trails with caravans of cars waiting their turn in either direction. Drivers back up onto cliff edges in the dark and fog to let each other by, hoping for the best. Out here, a comfortable, technologically advanced future hardly seems assured. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that our lives are still subject to the whims of nature. All it takes is a few hours of steady rain to down a dead tree and wreak havoc on an otherwise peaceful week.

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The falcon-wing doors sealed shut and the boy studied the moonroof above his seat. His eyes trailed forward to the panoramic front windshield. The 17-inch touch screen in the center stack arrested his attention, like headlights to a deer, causing the boy to mutter, as if in a trance, “This is how I imagine cars of the future.”

Then I floored it and the kid erupted in a fit of giggles as the all-electric performance SUV rocketed to 60 mph in 2.9 seconds.

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OMG? Are we going to have super cheap electric vehicles in a few years that charge in a few seconds/minutes?

I hope so! This is very exciting.

Australia has supercapacitors made from graphene oxide. They can can store as much energy per kilogram as a lithium battery, but charges in minutes, or even seconds, and uses carbon instead of expensive lithium.

Large-scale production of the graphene that would be needed to produce these high-performance supercapacitors was once unachievable.

By using low-cost solution-based film synthesis techniques and a laser 3D printer, the researchers are able to produce graphene on a large scale at low cost.

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Nice.

Lawrence Livermore scientists have collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of researchers including colleagues from Sandia National Laboratories to develop an efficient hydrogen storage system that could be a boon for hydrogen powered vehicles.

Hydrogen is an excellent energy carrier, but the development of lightweight solid-state materials for compact, low-pressure storage is a huge challenge.

Complex metal hydrides are a promising class of materials, but their viability is usually limited by slow hydrogen uptake and release. Nanoconfinement—infiltrating the metal hydride within a matrix of another material such as carbon—can, in certain instances, help make this process faster by shortening diffusion pathways for hydrogen or by changing the thermodynamic stability of the material.

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Almost two months to the day after Uber loaded its fleet of self-driving SUVs into the trailer of a self-driving truck and stormed off to Arizona in a self-driving huff, the company is preparing to launch its second experiment (if you don’t count the aborted San Francisco pilot) in autonomous ride-hailing.

What’s different is that this time, Uber has the blessing from Arizona’s top politician, Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, who is expected to be “Rider Zero” on an autonomous trip along with Anthony Levandowski, VP of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group. The Arizona pilot comes after California’s Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the registration of Uber’s 16 self-driving cars because the company refused to apply for the appropriate permits for testing autonomous cars.

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Going straight to Level 5 may hurt Ford in the short-term, as competitors will be able to offer some self-driving functionality to customers that want it. However, the decision let’s Ford power on ahead with its driverless dream, which it aims to have on the road by 2021.

Ford plans to skip ‘Level 3’ autonomy and shoot right for Level 5, the highest level of car automation. The automaker decided to skip the midway point after it noticed a few of its engineers dozing while testing semi-autonomous vehicles.

Even with “bells, buzzers, warning lights, vibrating seats and steering wheels, and another engineer in the passenger seat” the engineers struggled to maintain situational awareness, according to Raj Nair, Ford’s chief product development officer.

See Also: Ford rolls out gas- and driver-less fleet of tomorrow

Nair said the more the engineers became comfortable with the self-driving tech, the less attention they paid to the road. This could be a major issue for automakers deploying Level 3 cars, which cede some control to the human driver.

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