Science
TechnoSanity #30: Peak Oil and the UKERC Peak Oil report
Submitted by reikiman on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 20:16TechnoSanity #30: Peak Oil and the UKERC Peak Oil report is about a report released in October from the UK Energy Research Center. The report is about peak oil and the need for increased action on switching away from a dependency on fossil fuels.
"Global Oil Depletion" a report on Peak Oil by the UK Energy Research Centre is a summary of that report.
Lithium batteries v/s NiMH batteries the Debate! Battery technologies
Submitted by marcopolo on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 04:01In view of the intensity of the debate between Mik and John, relating to different battery technologies. I thought it may be of interest to have a wider range of views about battery technology. After all the heart of any EV is the performance of the battery, so this should be a subject for some really creative contributions and ideas!
Gentlemen???......
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Solar charging an electric vehicle (motorcycle)
Submitted by reikiman on Tue, 05/19/2009 - 09:10Here's some deep physics analysis into the requirements for using solar panels to charge an electric motorcycle or other EV.
http://blog.dotphys.net/2009/05/solar-powered-motorcycle-possible/
Some vehicle makers might add solar panels as a way to woo people into thinking the car is extra cool. Such as Fisk'ers karma which has solar panels on the roof ... but the roof is so small it only provides a modest amount of power, enough to run the in-cabin stuff like air conditioning.
Anyway.. the guy goes to the trouble to calculate wind resistance to estimate power requirements. I think it's a bit simpler, that you can simply measure the power used to recharge the battery averaging over several rides. I've done that with my motorcycle and know it took 0.2-0.3 kwh per mile (over a 10 mile journey I took several times a week).
So if you know you have n kilowatt-hours to put into the bike, how many solar panels for how many hours are required to recharge the bike? And can you manage to fit that many solar panels onto the bike?
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Break though at lithium batteries - longer service life - lower production costs
Submitted by founder on Sun, 03/29/2009 - 05:08Just got to publish a break though in lithium battery technology
Ober 30 years of service life,
Electrolyte is exchangeable.
BMS gives maybe every 10 years a message: please exchange the electrolyte.
Extrem fast charging possible
A car with the new batteries will be shown at the
5th International Symposium of Large Ion Battery Technology and Application (LLIBTA; June 8 - 10, 2009; Long Beach, California). .
Normal car converted - 500km - 5 minute to recharge
70 kWh batteries.
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TED Talks Bill Gross: Great ideas for finding new energy
Submitted by reikiman on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 13:21This talk just came in through the TED Podcast and I thought it was immensely interesting. Bill Gross, the presenter, is the founder of Idealab (linked below) which seems to be a kind of high tech incubator company. It appears from Idealab's website that they spun up a company named Stirling Cycles, which was later sold to Infinia Technology (also linked below). This appears to be unrelated to Stirling Energy Systems who is building some kind of large installation in the Mojave desert.
The idea he talks about is an intelligently designed heat capturing system that feeds heat into a stirling engine to produce electricity.
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How many miles / gallon are you getting with your electric bicycle?
Submitted by reikiman on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 11:33Last weekend I attended a talk by the CEO of Coulomb Technologies. They're making charging stations meant to be deployed around a city for electric vehicle drivers to use. He had an extremely interesting presentation, and it gave me the topics for a series of blog posts.
This first Equating "fuel" efficiency between electric, hybrid, and gasoline vehicles tries to answer the efficiency of an EV over a gas vehicle. For instance Tesla claims its Roadster gets 190 miles/gallon equivalent efficiency.
It seems my electric motorcycle gets 112 miles/gallon and my electric bicycle gets 1120 miles/gallon.
Okay electricity isn't measured in gallons that involves some conversion factors.
Curious what y'all's thoughts are...
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Solar car completes 1st ever round-the-world trip
Submitted by chas_stevenson on Thu, 12/04/2008 - 09:57POZNAN, Poland – The first solar-powered car to travel around the world ended its journey at the U.N. climate talks Thursday, arriving with the message that clean technologies are available now to stop global warming.
The small two-seater, hauling a trailer of solar cells and carrying chief U.N. climate official Yvo de Boer, glided up to a building in Poznan, Poland, where delegates from some 190 nations are working toward a new treaty to control climate change.
Grandpa Chas S.
Phoenix is Dying
Submitted by ArcticFox on Wed, 10/29/2008 - 19:37Email I just received:
Phoenix Mission Status Report October 29, 2008
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander entered safe mode late yesterday in response to a low-power fault brought on by deteriorating weather conditions. While engineers anticipated that a fault could occur due to the diminishing power supply, the lander also unexpectedly switched to the "B" side of its redundant electronics and shut down one of its two batteries.
During safe mode, the lander stops non-critical activities and awaits further instructions from the mission team. Within hours of receiving information of the safing event, mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. , and at Lockheed Martin in Denver, were able to send commands to restart battery charging. It is not likely that any energy was lost.
Weather conditions at the landing site in the north polar region of Mars have deteriorated in recent days, with overnight temperatures falling to -141F (-96C), and daytime temperatures only as high as -50F (-45C), the lowest temperatures experienced so far in the mission. A mild dust storm blowing through the area, along with water-ice clouds, further complicated the situation by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the lander's solar arrays, thereby reducing the amount of power it could generate. Low temperatures caused the lander's battery heaters to turn on Tuesday for the first time, creating another drain on precious power supplies.
Science activities will remain on hold for the next several days to allow the spacecraft to recharge and conserve power. Attempts to resume normal operations will not take place before the weekend.
"This is a precarious time for Phoenix," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of JPL. "We're in the bonus round of the extended mission, and we're aware that the end could come at any time. The engineering team is doing all it can to keep the spacecraft alive and collecting science, but at this point survivability depends on some factors out of our control, such as the weather and temperatures on Mars."
The ability to communicate with the spacecraft has not been impacted. However, the team decided to cancel communication sessions Wednesday morning in order to conserve spacecraft power. The next communication pass is anticipated at 9:30 p.m. PDT Wednesday.
Yesterday, the mission announced plans to turn off four heaters, one at a time, in an effort to preserve power. The faults experienced late Tuesday prompted engineers to command the lander to shut down two heaters instead of one as originally planned. One of those heaters warmed electronics for Phoenix's robotic arm, robotic-arm camera, and thermal and evolved-gas analyzer (TEGA), an instrument that bakes and sniffs Martian soil to assess volatile ingredients. The second heater served the lander's pyrotechnic initiation unit, which hasn't been used since landing. By turning off selected heaters, the mission hopes to preserve power and prolong the use of the lander's camera and meteorological instruments.
Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic. As the Martian northern hemisphere shifts from summer to autumn, the lander was expected to generate less power due to fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels. "It could be a matter of days, or weeks, before the daily power generated by Phoenix is less than needed to operate the spacecraft," said JPL mission manager Chris Lewicki. "We have only a few options left to reduce the energy usage."
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver . International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.
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Our little lander's been working so hard - it's going to be sad to find she won't power back up next Mars summer.
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Introductory "lecture" on Petroleum science and Peak Oil
Submitted by reikiman on Sun, 10/26/2008 - 11:16Last month I attended the Association for the Study of Peak Oil USA conference in Sacramento. I'm finally getting around to posting the audio I recorded at the conference and thought one of them would be interesting to this crowd. Everything is being posted through my podcast, the home page for the podcast is here: http://www.7gen.com/technosanity
Technosanity #14: Petroleum & Peal Oil 101 was given by Dr. Ken Verosub, a geology professor at U.C. Davis. He gave a high level overview of the science behind how this planet produces oil, the model behind the peak oil claims, and a few simplistic calculations related to near term production of oil and the looming crunch in oil demand versus oil production.
Slides: http://www.aspo-usa.org/aspousa4/proceedings/Verosub_Ken_Petro_101_ASPOUSA2008.pdf
Audio: http://audio.davidherron.com/technosanity/episode-14-petroleum-101.mp3
Podcast feed: http://www.7gen.com/technosanity/feed
Destructive patterns in technology
Submitted by reikiman on Wed, 10/08/2008 - 19:28A while back I had this idea come to me.. one that seems so right on the more I think about it.
It's about the pattern our society follows in destructive use of our resources. The destructive pattern is to take something, use it, destroy it by using it, and throw away the shards that remain from the destruction.
Oil is a great example but there are many more examples. With fossil oil the oil companies pump it out of the ground, refine it into various products, and generally the refined oil is burned hence destroyed. This destructive pattern happens with all kinds of minerals and so much more. One attribute is the "throw away society" ...
A living pattern is one where one persons garbage is another persons gold, and everything is constantly recycled through the system of life. Where the destructive pattern can only end in death, the living pattern can live forever because it is nurturing and self sustaining.
By following the destructive pattern it is inevitable the resource being destroyed will eventually run out. And if the resource being destroyed is vital for livelihood then how can livelihood continue if the resource has petered out?
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