Fortescue has an all-new 6 MW DC fast charger that can charge a massive 230 ton haul truck’s 1,900 kWh battery in less than thirty minutes!
In a surprise revelation, Toyota has sent shockwaves throughout the automotive world with an all-new engine that melds combustion technology with the potential for zero emissions. This stealth development may transform our thinking about green energy and the future of transportation. For two decades, the world has been struggling over what the road to sustainable transport would look like, and to date, EVs have proven a front-runner. However, Toyota’s latest development puts a monkey wrench into that thinking by suggesting that a hydrogen-powered combustion engine may be what carries us into the future.
While Toyota is no stranger to innovation—it gave the world its first mass-produced hybrid, the Prius, back in 1997—it has traditionally taken a more cautious approach toward anything resembling an electric vehicle. Less conservatively speaking, the hydrogen-powered combustion engine signifies a quantum leap. This latest motor technology is based on a variant of the same 1.6-liter turbocharged three-cylinder used in its GR Corolla and GR Yaris. Instead, it relies on hydrogen, not traditional gasoline, to run the engine, making it cleaner than conventional combustion engines.
This innovative engine could also hold the key to one of the most significant challenges for the car-making industry: balancing high performance with sustainability. While electric cars take away that visceral experience from driving enthusiasts, Toyota’s hydrogen engine ensures a gasoline-powered car’s rumble, response, and mechanical integrity. The company tested it thoroughly through the grueling conditions of motorsports, including endurance events such as the Fuji 24 Hours.
When cars, planes, ships or computers are built from a material that functions as both a battery and a load-bearing structure, the weight and energy consumption are radically reduced. A research group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is now presenting a world-leading advance in so-called massless energy storage — a structural battery that could halve the weight of a laptop, make the mobile phone as thin as a credit card or increase the driving range of an electric car by up to 70% on a single charge.
“We have succeeded in creating a battery made of carbon fiber composite that is as stiff as aluminum and energy-dense enough to be used commercially. Just like a human skeleton, the battery has several functions at the same time,” says Chalmers researcher Richa Chaudhary, who is the first author of an article recently published in Advanced Materials.
Research on structural batteries has been going on for many years at Chalmers, and in some stages also together with researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. When Professor Leif Asp and colleagues published their first results in 2018 on how stiff, strong carbon fibers could store electrical energy chemically, the advance attracted massive attention.
A new model accounts for a wide range of ion-electrode interactions and predicts a device’s ability to store electric charge. The model’s theoretical predictions align with the experimental results. Data on the behavior of the electric double layer (EDL) can aid in the development of more efficient supercapacitors for portable electronics and electric vehicles. The study has been published in ChemPhysChem.
American start-up Boom Supersonic is planning to develop the very first supersonic aircraft powered by 100% sustainable fuel. The aircraft, named Overture, would succeed Concorde in providing ultrafast connections between Europe and the United States, more than 20 years after the latter ceased operation. The new aircraft also echoes its predecessor’s unique, long and slender design.
Boom Supersonic is currently flying a demonstrator, the XB-1, over the Mojave Desert in California. A first supersonic flight (at Mach 1) is now expected by the end of 2024, following the green light given from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). All these tests are designed to ensure the aircraft’s reliability and maneuverability. Above all, they lay the foundations for the firm’s future Overture plane.
Extinct volcanoes are hard to study – we never see them erupt. Using a unique experimental technique, we were able to recreate a certain type of extinct volcano in a lab, learning more about the magma these volcanoes produce.
We found that some rare magma types are surprisingly efficient at concentrating rare earth elements. This is a group of metals with crucial applications in several high-tech industries, such as magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Demand for rare earths is soaring as society moves away from fossil fuels and electrifies energy production and transport. Despite the name, rare earths aren’t particularly rare. The biggest challenge is finding rocks in which these metals are concentrated enough to be economically viable to extract.
While most of us are still struggling to find SSDs with greater capacities than 4TB, Samsung is working on creating the world’s first petabyte SSD. At least, that’s their plan. Last year, reports suggested that the company was about a decade away. Now, they seem much closer.
As the world’s largest manufacturer of 3D NAND storage, they’re certainly one of the most likely to do it. Samsung has revealed more information about its planes, and how it’s working to get to that 1,000-layer NAND required for such high capacities.
Samsung has long been a leader in large capacity solid state drives. And while they’re not readily available to the average consumer due to their (still) prohibitively expensive prices, Samsung announced a 16TB SSD way back in 2015.
For the most part, we treat electric aviation like it’s something that we’ll see in the future. I mean, batteries are expensive and heavy, and they don’t hold that much energy per unit of weight. So, compared to, say, kerosene (jet fuel), batteries take up a lot more space and weight capacity in a plane design. This means either really poor range or carrying around nothing but batteries (which isn’t very useful).
But that’s only true for the largest of planes. The smaller the plane, the easier it has been for companies to electrify or even go full electric with it it. Once you get down to unmanned planes and helicopters that carry something like a small sensor payload (cameras, etc.), you’re in a realm where all-electric aviation has been around for over a decade.
Continue reading “Electric Aviation With Unlimited Range Is Getting Cheaper & Smaller” »
52 billion solar panels could soon be covering the American highway network. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Geosciences, and Columbia University have proposed a historic initiative which could see major global highways covered with solar panels.
The researchers publication “Roofing Highways With Solar Panels Substantially Reduces Carbon Emissions and Traffic Losses” in Earth’s Future advocate for the deployment of solar technology across the global highway network which spans up to 3.2 million kilometers.
In doing so, the researchers estimate that up to 17,578 TWh of electricity could be generated annually. This figure is equivalent to more than a staggering 60% of 2023’s energy consumption. This could offset up to 28% of global carbon emissions and reduce road accident incidences up to 11%.
