First F1 speed demons now Excavators!

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Ricardo innovated the basic flywheel in a number of ways. The flywheel is hermetically sealed in a container, with a sealed-for-life vacuum, transmitting power through a magnetic gear drive. They use high-speed rolling elements with a composite flywheel unit that allows the system to spin up to 60,000 rpm. The vacuum environment means low losses due to air friction. The demonstration system stores 0.25 kW·h and delivers maximum torque of 28 N·m (20.6 lb·ft) as measured at the flywheel. The company noted that is working on three storage units rated at 0.055 kW·h, 0.25 kW·h, and 1.25 kW·h.

The Williams F1 team, however, developed a novel flywheel-electric system with a flywheel tied to a motor-generator. The flywheel is the energy storage system rather than electro-chemical battery. The race team has formed a subsidiary called Williams Hybrid Power to try and commercialize the system. Williams has now formed a consortium with Ricardo, Torotrac, Land Rover and several other companies for a demonstration project to evaluate its system as well as a flywheel magnetic system from Ricardo in commercial applications. The goal is to develop an on-the-road system for under £1000 ($2,000). The new KinerStor demonstration project is partially funded by the UK government through the technology strategy board.

More at: http://green.autoblog.com/2009/11/25/ricardo-and-williams-team-on-kinerstor-flywheel-hybrid-demonstra/Some background from a 2011 Economist article

England takes a bet on Space

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The Sabre air breathing rocket and the Skylon single stage to orbit craft grow more real with time. We should all remember that England was a hot bed of jet engine development in the early years and is still a leader (Rolls Royce.)

The announcement late last month that the Chancellor, George Osborne, is planning to put a chunk of the country’s meagre resources for capital expenditure behind a British project to develop a revolutionary jet engine for a reusable space plane, suggests the government has high hopes of the space engineering sector.
….
The Chancellor’s interest in Skylon centres on the hybrid air-breathing rocket engine, known as SABRE, which would power it into orbit in a single stage. The engine relies on an entirely new pre-cooling technology that allows it to function at extremely high speeds, at plus Mach 5. The project has no competitor. If successful it would offer a uniquely lightweight and therefore more affordable means of reaching space. It has already completed a series of tests and the next stage is to build a full-scale prototype.

Read more: The Engineer : Career opportunities in the UK space sector
Also the company developing the tech: Reaction Engines

Technology continues to advance on all fronts

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Servo technology turns press design upside down

A view inside the press showing two of the connecting rods that pull down the press slide

Read more: The Engineer: Servo technology turns press design upside down
Better, Cheaper, Faster, More Efficient, More Capable….

To the Moon Gracie!

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

AWST Staff: Source: Aerospace Daily & Defense Report : NASA Calls For Private Lunar Lander Partners

Piggybacking on the Google Lunar X Prize and various commercial endeavors, NASA has offered its expertise and test facilities to potential lunar-lander partners who might be able to help mount scientific missions to the Moon’s surface as early as 2018.

A request for information published July 2 seeks concepts for “an industry-developed robotic lander that can be integrated with a launch vehicle for the purposes of supporting commercial (and potentially future NASA) missions.”

The U.S. space agency is interested in landers that can put two classes of payload on the lunar surface — 30-100 kg. (70-220 lb.) and 250-450 kg. Potential missions “of interest to NASA” include prospecting for volatiles at the Moon’s poles, sample return and setting up geophysical networks.

“U.S. industry is flourishing with innovative ideas based on NASA’s pioneering work to explore space, including low-Earth orbit and the Moon,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations (HEO) in Washington. He suggested that, data from commercial lunar landers, like space station research, could aid the agency’s plans to explore an asteroid and Mars.

“New robotic commercial capabilities on the Moon could extend that research in important ways, just as NASA expertise could help advance commercial endeavors to reach the Moon.”

The HEO directorate is proposing no-exchange-of-funds partnerships under Space Act agreements or other mechanisms, offering its technical expertise, unique test facilities, and some hardware and software to private companies willing to put up funding for lander development.

“NASA envisions that an integrated team comprised of NASA civil servants and the industry partner personnel could work together to design, develop and test landers,” the RFI says.

Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 2. Interest in private lunar landers has soared over the past three years after Google offered $30 million in prizes through the X Prize Foundation to teams that can land a robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface, have it move at least 500 meters, and send back video, images and data. Presently 22 teams worldwide are in the running, working against a deadline of Dec. 31, 2015.

‘Nuff said, really cool stuff

Kick it Beyond the Moon

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

MIT TR: Kickstarter Campaign Wants to Send Tiny Satellites out of Earth Orbit
Space loaf: This artist’s rendering shows a three-unit CubeSat with a propulsion unit.

A mini-satellite, no bigger than a loaf of bread, could push itself out of Earth’s orbit as soon as next year if a crowdfunding campaign to support development of a diminutive propulsion system succeeds. If such small spacecraft can be made to operate far from Earth, they could one day make inexpensive expeditions to asteroids, Mars, and beyond.

Now that’s neat, the ion thruster is pretty crude and tech leaders doubt it will work, but things ‘scale’ oddly, a honeybee can only fly because at it’s scale air is much more viscous…sticky…than we experience it. So it’s possible this simple small relatively short lived little exploring skiff will sail. And just think, if we can flip out these tiny surveyors to asteroids and comets for this sort of investment the haul of new knowledge will be huge.

Flex and Bend, Unbreakable cell phones on the horizon + more

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

@ TechRadar:IN DEPTH Will pliable displays ever take off? :Want to know when your phone will become your flexible friend?

Good survey of the oncoming tech…

It proves I’m a geek to say I want one even if I’m not quite sure what I’d do with it

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

…FPGAs are intimidating beasts to most makers, including myself. Thankfully, Justin Rajewski’s insanely popular Kickstarter project caught our eye. The entire goal of the Mojo is to make getting started with FPGA and digital design as easy as possible. An FPGA allows you to design digital circuits (basically a bunch of logic gates connected together to perform a specific task). The designs that you create can range from something as simple as a counter to blink an LED to something as complex as a multi-core processor (or an Audio Visualizer).
With a microcontroller (like an Arduino), you write software that gives you control of the the built-in peripherals but is limiting in that you can often only complete one action at a time. With FPGAs you are not creating software; you’re designing the hardware. Instead of writing code to run on a fixed processor with fixed peripherals, you get to design your own circuit.
Justin’s done a fantastic job of releasing new tutorials for getting started with Electronics, Logic and the Mojo on the Embedded Micro website. He’s also began work on an IDE specifically for the board, to make it even easier to develop for. Read more about this flexible, powerful board and pick one up from the product page. …

…and the other stuff they highlight is cool to!

Slash/Gear NASA 3D printed rocket injector test firing

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

…NASA didn’t use ABS plastic that most 3D-printers use. Instead, the agency used custom 3D printers to spray layers of metallic powder using lasers. The lasers spray the powder in a specific pattern in order to come up with the desired shape for an object. In this case: a rocket engine injector.

WIRED, way, way weird, and oh so cool!

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Wired: ‘Holographic Duality’ Hints at Hidden Subatomic World

The holographic duality, discovered in 1997 by Juan Maldacena, says that events inside a region of space that involve gravity and are described by string theory are mathematically equivalent to events on the surface of that region that involve particles and are gravity-free. Illustration: Annenberg Lerner 2013

In the mathematical parlance of the holographic duality, certain strongly correlated matter in 2-D [such as in cuprate hi temp superconductors shown above; editors note] corresponds, in 3-D, to a black hole — an infinitely dense object with an inescapable gravitational pull, which is mathematically simple. “These very complicated quantum mechanical collective effects are beautifully captured by black hole physics,” said Hong Liu, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For strongly correlated systems, if you put an electron into the system, it will immediately ‘disappear’ — you can no longer track it.” It’s like an object falling into a black hole.

An Electric Air about them

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Flying hybrid: This two-seater electric-gas airplane may be the first of many to take to the skies

UVa’s Sustinere design for a 50-seat jet eschews batteries in favor of a turboelectric distributed propulsion (TeDP) concept – two 2,500shp turboshaft engines under the wing generating electrical power to drive six 3,300lb-thrust fans arrayed in a duct that wraps around the upper fuselage.

The EADS IW concept uses a single large turbine engine to generate electricity to power six ducted fans that provide thrust. This allows propulsive and thermal efficiency to be optimized separately. The turbine engine can be optimized for thermal efficiency (turning fuel into shaft power) while the ducted fans increase effective bypass ratio and therefore propulsion efficient (turning shaft power into thrust).

Read more at AWST : eConcept – EADS’s Hybrid-Electric Airliner

Two years after Honeywell and Safran announced plans to develop an electric-drive system, the team is preparing to demonstrate a proof-of-concept system on an Airbus A320 at this year’s Paris air show.

The result of close collaborations with Finmeccanica companies – Selex ES, Ansaldo Breda, and Ansaldo Energia – and partner companies from Italy, UK, U.S. and Japan, the aircraft embeds some unuque features: aesthetically pleasing styling and aerodynamically unique tiltrotor configuration; carbon graphite exterior surfaces; High-Integrity Flight Control Computer and Actuator Control Unit; custom produced electric motor inverter and motor control algorithm; axial flux permanent magnet electric motors.