Lifeboat Foundation

The Throne goes further in its realization of a circular economy by composting the waste produced by users and using this compost locally. Eventually, the teams want to put the technologies and tools in the hands of local communities. When innovation is shared fairly and the carbon footprint created by logistics and shipping of these products can be greatly reduced. The Throne is just one example of the possibilities of what additive manufacturing can do for scaling sustainable design and development – it’s only waste if you waste it!

Designer: Nagami and To:.

It’s rare that faster can also equate to greener in the aerospace industry, but that’s the goal of Australian startup Hypersonix has in sight.

The company has developed a new hypersonic satellite launch system that will make launches more accessible and also more sustainable. The technology could one day also help develop hypersonic airliners capable of crossing the Atlantic in a little over an hour.

“At Mach 5 and above, friction caused by molecules flowing over the hypersonic aircraft can generate temperatures in excess of 2,000˚C (3,632˚F),” the company says in a press statement. “Suffice to say that Brisbane-based aerospace engineering start-up, Hypersonix Launch Systems, is choosing its materials to cope with these extremes.”

There are widely cited forecasts that project accelerating information and communications technology (ICT) energy consumption increases through the 2020’s with a 2018 Nature article estimating that if current trends continue, this will consume more than 20% of electricity demand by 2030. At several industry events I have heard talks that say one of the important limits of data center performance will be the amount of energy consumed. NVIDIA’s latest GPU solutions use 400+W processors and this energy consumption could more than double in future AI processor chips. Solutions that can accelerate important compute functions while consuming less energy will be important to provide more sustainable and economical data centers.

Lightmatter’s Envise chip (shown below) is a general-purpose machine learning accelerator that combines photonics (PIC) and CMOS transistor-based devices (ASIC) into a single compact module. The device uses silicon photonics for high performance AI inference tasks and consumes much less energy than CMOS only solutions and thus helping to reduce the projected power load from data centers.

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Continue reading “Computing With Light” »

The Chinese manufacturer of flexible and lightweight solar modules has commissioned the first expansion of its production capacity of 500 megawatts. Another 500 megawatts will have been added by June of 2022.

Houston-headquartered renewables company EDP Renewables North America has completed a 200-megawatt (MW) solar farm in Randolph County, Indiana, northeast of Indianapolis. It’s now the largest-capacity solar farm in Indiana.

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Riverstart Solar Park has a sole 20-year power purchase agreement with electricity supply cooperative Hoosier Energy, which will use the clean energy to power households in central and southern Indiana and southeastern Illinois.

When he’s not busy with his day job as professor of computer and automotive engineering at Weber State University, [John Kelly] is a prolific producer of educational videos. We found his video tracing out the 22+ meters of high voltage cabling in a Tesla Model S (below the break) quite interesting. [John] does warn that his videos are highly detailed and may not be for everyone:

This is not the Disney Channel. If you are looking to be entertained, this is not the channel for you.

Continue reading “Exploring Tesla Model S High Voltage Cabling” »

A new biologically inspired battery membrane has enabled a battery with five times the capacity of the industry-standard lithium ion design to run for the thousand-plus cycles needed to power an electric car.

A network of aramid nanofibers, recycled from Kevlar, can enable lithium-sulfur batteries to overcome their Achilles heel of cycle life—the number of times it can be charged and discharged—a University of Michigan team has shown.

“There are a number of reports claiming several hundred cycles for lithium-sulfur batteries, but it is achieved at the expense of other parameters—capacity, charging rate, resilience and safety. The challenge nowadays is to make a battery that increases the cycling rate from the former 10 cycles to hundreds of cycles and satisfies multiple other requirements including cost,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Irving Langmuir Distinguished University Professor of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, who led the research.

New satellite images show that Tesla significantly expanded its rooftop solar array at Gigafactory Nevada as it aims for it to become the world’s biggest.

In 2017, Tesla announced plans for a giant 70 MW rooftop array at Gigafactory Nevada, which would be the largest in the world by a wide margin. The project has been lagging for a long time. Tesla finally started construction of the solar array in 2018 and expanded on it throughout the next few years, but it has never grown near the size Tesla has been talking about.

Last summer, the automaker said that it had deployed 3.2 MW at the site. At the time, Tesla also changed its goal to deploy 24 MW instead of 70 MW on the rooftop of the factory, which itself is now smaller than originally planned. The company said that it believes this would still be enough to be the largest rooftop deployment of solar power.

Catherine Labadia, an archaeologist at the State Historic Preservation Office, was on vacation when the first text came in from fellow archaeologist David Leslie. The picture on her phone was of a channel flake, a stone remnant associated with the creation of spear points used by Paleoindians, the first humans known to enter the region more than 10,000 years ago. “I responded, ‘Is this what I think it is?’” “It most definitely is,” texted back Leslie, who was on site at the Avon excavation with Storrs-based Archaeological and Historical Services (AHS). “It was all mind-blowing emojis after that,” Labadia says.

But that first picture was just the beginning. By the time the excavation on Old Farms Road was completed after a whirlwind three months in the winter of 2019, the AHS team had uncovered 15,000 Paleoindian artifacts and 27 cultural features. Prior to this dig, according to Leslie, only 10–15 cultural features — non-movable items such as hearths and posts that can provide behavioral and environmental insights — had been found in all of New England.

The site is significant for more than the quantity and types of artifacts and features found. Early analyses are already changing the way archaeologists think of the Paleoindian period, an epoch spanning from about 13,000 to 10,000 years ago of which little is known due to relatively scant archaeological evidence. The forests of that time, for instance, were likely made up of more diverse species of trees than previously thought. And that opens up new interpretations for what Paleoindians ate. Remains found at the excavation also suggest — for the first time — that Paleoindians and mastodons might have overlapped in the region.