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Category: engineering – Page 112

Countries, especially potential exporters, should improve hydrogen statistics to justify and promote investments in hydrogen. The measures should result from broad cooperation, also intended to standardize and homogenize measurements, said Columbia University‘s Anne-Sophie Corbeau. “Countries could start working together to determine how best to collect hydrogen data, both on the demand and production sides, and include existing consumption as well as potential future consumption in new sectors. Statistics on the demand side need to anticipate new uses in buildings, industry, transport, and power, as well as account for hydrogen’s potential use to produce other energy products such as ammonia and methanol,” the French scholar wrote on Monday.

Vancouver-based First Hydrogen has identified four industrial sites in the United Kingdom and is advancing discussions with landowners to secure land rights to develop green hydrogen production projects. It said it would be working with engineering consultants Ove Arup & Partners Limited (ARUP) for engineering studies and designs. “The sites are all in prime industrial areas spread strategically across the North and South of the United Kingdom and will each accommodate both a large refueling station — for light, medium and heavy commercial vehicles with on-site hydrogen production, to serve the urban areas of Greater Liverpool, Greater Manchester, the London area, and the Thames Estuary — and a larger hydrogen production site of between 20 and 40 MW, for a total for the four sites of between 80 MW and 160 MW,” First Hydrogen wrote on Monday. The Canadian company wants to use the production facilities to serve customers of its automotive division. “First Hydrogen’s green hydrogen van is to begin demonstrator testing in June with final delivery for road use in September 2022.”

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Boston-based solar company ClearPath Energy and Maitland, Florida-based Castillo Engineering, a solar engineering firm, are building six community bifacial solar farms in New York State.

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Ranging from 4.5 megawatts (MW) to 7.5 MW in size, the six solar farms are currently in late stages of construction in central New York State, and some are already mechanically completed. All six projects are scheduled to be operational in the second quarter of 2022.

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Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year. Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle rice husks to create the first silicon quantum dot (QD) LED light. Their new method transforms agricultural waste into state-of-the-art light-emitting diodes in a low-cost, environmentally friendly way.

The research team from the Natural Science Center for Basic Research and Development, Hiroshima University, published their findings on January 28, 2022, in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

“Since typical QDs often involve toxic material, such as cadmium, lead, or other , have been frequently deliberated when using nanomaterials. Our proposed process and for QDs minimizes these concerns,” said Ken-ichi Saitow, lead study author and a professor of chemistry at Hiroshima University.

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“Re-Architecting” Low Energy Wireless & IoT — Dr. David Su, Ph.D. 0, CEO & Co-Founder, Atmosic

Dr. David Su, Ph.D. (https://atmosic.com/company/leadership/) is CEO and Co-Founder of Atmosic, a fascinating company that is “re-architecting” wireless connectivity solutions from the ground up to radically reduce Internet of Things (IoT) device dependence on batteries, aiming to make batteries last forever and the Internet of Things battery free – thus breaking the power barrier to widespread IoT adoption.

Dr. Su brings to Atmosic over 30 years of engineering expertise with an extensive wireless background, as his past teams’ radio designs have brought billions of successful devices to market. He was on the early engineering team at Atheros, as VP Analog/RF Engineering, and VP Engineering with Qualcomm following the 2011 acquisition of Atheros. He was also at HP for several years.

Dr. Su earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) and Master of Engineering (MEng) in Electrical Engineering, from University of Tennessee, a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and has been a Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow.

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Collective dynamics are ubiquitous in the natural world. From neural circuits to animal groups, there are countless instances in which the interactions among large numbers of elementary units bestow surprisingly complex patterns of tantalizing beauty on the collective. One of the longstanding goals of researchers in many fields is to understand behaviors of a large group of individual units by monitoring the actions of a single unit. For example, an ornithologist can learn many things about the behaviors of a flock by monitoring only a single bird.

Of greater difficulty is understanding the size of a collection of units by observing a single unit. No matter how many birds one tags with monitoring equipment, one can never be assured of having tagged the entire flock. Yet, while the ability to calculate the size of a collective from individual behaviors would be a key tool for any field, there are only a handful of recent papers trying to tackle the seemingly unsolvable problem.

In a newly published study appearing in Communications Physics, investigators led by Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering; and Pietro De Lellis of the University of Naples, Italy, offer a paradigm to solve this problem, one that builds upon precepts that can be traced back to the work of Einstein.

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Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to “cloud squatting,” which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company. If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

“There are two advantages to leasing server space,” said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. “One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt.” As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.

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The British James Dyson Foundation presented the first Sustainability Award to Carvey Ehren Maigue, an electrical engineering student in the Philippines. He was awarded for creating new material from recycled crop waste that has the ability to transform ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun into electrical energy. The technology could soon be turning the windows and walls of buildings into a rich new source of electricity.

The invention of the Filipino university student is called AuREUS (Aurora Renewable Energy and UV Sequestration). Both AuREUS devices (Borealis Solar Window and Astralis Solar Wall) use the same technology used in the beautiful Northern and Southern lights. High energy particles are absorbed by luminescent particles that re-emit them as visible light. A similar type of luminescent particles (derivable from certain fruits and vegetables) were suspended in a resin substrate and is used as the core technology on both devices.

When hit by UV light, the particles absorb and re-emit visible light along the edges due to internal reflectance. PV cells are placed along the edges to capture the visible light emitted. The captured visible light is then converted to DC electricity. Regulating circuits will process the voltage output to allow battery charging, storage, or direct utilization of electricity.

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These chips might be the future of neuromorphic computing.

Honey could be the next material used to create brain-like computer chips. Its proven practicality marks another step toward creating efficient, renewable processors for neuromorphic computing systems, using biodegradable products.

Research engineers from WSU’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Zhao and Brandon Sueoka, first processed honey into a solid. Then they jammed it between two electrodes, using a structure design similar to that of a human synapse. They’re known as ‘memristors,’ and are proficient at learning and retaining information just like human neurons.

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The U.S. still imports lithium from other countries like Argentina, Chile, Russia, and China. Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheaper solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But this may soon change – for an unexpected reason.

DWR’s Salton Sea Unit supports the California Natural Resources Agency’s Salton Sea Management Program (SSMP), created by then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s Salton Sea Task Force to address the urgent public and ecological health issues resulting from the drying and shrinking of the Salton Sea. The issues include air quality impacts from dust emissions and loss of important wildlife habitat.

While the SSMP is a long-range program, its immediate focus is on the development and implementation of the Phase I: 10-Year Plan. We support the SSMP and the Phase I Plan by providing planning, engineering, and environmental expertise for design and implementation of dust-suppression and habitat projects. The Phase I Plan includes projects that will be completed as early as the end of 2022. Proposition 1 provided $80 million in funding for SSMP implementation.

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The U.S. Air Force and General Electric (GE) have begun the Phase 2 testing of GE’s second XA100 adaptive cycle engine at the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) in Tennessee.

The Phase 1 testing of this XA100 engine was completed in November 2021 in Evendale, Ohio. Developed by GE Edison Works advanced program unit, the XA100 is a three-stream adaptive cycle engine demonstrator that can direct air to the bypass third stream for increased fuel efficiency and cooling or to the core and fan streams for additional thrust and performance.

GE’s XA100 engine is uniquely designed to fit both the F-35A and F-35C without any structural modifications to either airframe, enabling better aircraft range, acceleration, and cooling power to accommodate next-generation mission systems, while also ensuring durability and enhanced readiness.

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