Nissan says it has boosted engine thermal efficiency to 50%

https://www.autoblog.com/2021/02/26/nissan-engine-50-percent-thermal-efficiency/


TOKYO — Nissan Motor Co said on Friday it has reached a breakthrough in achieving a 50% thermal efficiency with its in-development e-POWER hybrid technology, which could lead to a further reduction of car CO2 emissions.

This new thermal efficiency level would improve fuel consumption by 25% over the 40% thermal efficiency level in the upcoming e-POWER engine, the company said.

Nissan’s latest approach to engine development has raised the bar to world-leading levels, accelerating past the current auto industry average range of 40% thermal efficiency, making it possible to even further reduce vehicle CO2 emissions,” the company said in a statement.

Nissan did not disclose when the e-POWER technology with 50% thermal efficiency would be launched.

Toshihiro Hirai, senior vice president of the powertrain and EV engineering division at Nissan, told reporters on Friday that the automaker is maximizing the thermal efficiency of e-POWER in order to reduce CO2 emissions while driving.

The e-POWER, first introduced in Japan in 2016, uses a gasoline engine to charge a battery that powers the vehicle.

“It took 50 years to increase thermal efficiency (of conventional engines) from 30% to 40%,” Hirai said.

“But with e-POWER, we can increase it to 50% in several years. That has been the target for the engineering community,” he said, describing that level as the “ultimate, challenging goal”.

To achieve this, Nissan said it strengthened in-cylinder gas flow and ignition, which burns a more diluted air-fuel mixture at a high compression ratio.

“Without building up these fundamental technologies, we are unable to attain carbon neutrality,” said Hirai.

The automaker said last month that all of its new models in key markets would be electrified by the early 2030s to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Nissan has also said it expects sales of more than one million electrified vehicles per year by the end of fiscal 2023.

 

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/1afPJWx

February 26, 2021 at 07:28AM

Toyota develops packaged fuel cell system to cut carbon footprint

https://www.autoblog.com/2021/02/26/toyota-fuel-cell-module/


TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp said on Friday it has developed a packaged fuel cell system module, as it hopes to expand its usage and accessibility of the zero-emission technology amid the industry’s shift towards electric vehicles (EVs).

The world’s biggest automaker, which launched a revamped Mirai in December, has not been successful in winning drivers over to fuel cell vehicles (FCV).

The FCV segment remains a niche technology despite Japanese government backing, amid concerns about lack of fueling stations, resale values and the risk of hydrogen explosions.

The new fuel cell battery system, which has been offered in separate parts, will be available in a compact packaged module to be used as a stationary power generator or in trucks, buses, trains and ships, the company said on Friday.

Toyota said it plans to sell the module to other companies in the spring of 2021 or later, but did not disclose details on price or sales target.

“Toyota has been taking various initiatives toward the creation of a hydrogen society,” the Japanese company said in a statement.

“Through these experiences, the company has learned that many companies involved in FC products in a variety of industries are looking for FC systems that can be easily adapted to their own product.”

The automaker said it plans to offer horizontally and vertically packaged models, weighing about 240kg-250kg, each with a rated output of 60kW or 80kW.

These module models can be combined to flexibly adapt to the output level and amount of installation space available.

The module, which packages individual fuel cell system-related products of the revamped Mirai car with enhanced performance, will be produced at Toyota’s Honsha plant in Aichi prefecture, a company spokesman said.

 

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/1afPJWx

February 26, 2021 at 07:56AM

Texas’ Icy Disaster Makes the Case for Uniting the US Grid

https://www.wired.com/story/texas-disaster-makes-the-case-for-uniting-the-grid/


Take a look at the map above. That WI-EI Seam is the border between the Western and Eastern interconnections. All the blue in the Midwest marks where wind is an abundant resource. The gold in the Southwest means abundant solar. The green bathing Texas is both. While the state is still highly dependent on fossil fuels for energy generation, it’s actually rich in renewable resources. If all the interconnections actually played nice with one another, Texas could be the place where they met in the middle, exporting solar and wind energy to its neighbors and importing their power when needed. You know, like during a polar vortex.

Notice the time stamps at the bottom of the map. The peak load in most places is between 4 pm and 9 pm, Kroposki says, as people return home and cook dinner and turn on heaters or AC units. If it’s 2 pm in Arizona, the sun is blazing on solar panels just as folks on the East Coast are ramping up their energy usage. “You could be pushing solar energy back east,” Kroposki says. Then as the Midwest moves out of peak usage, it could push wind energy back west.

Also, on the days the sun isn’t shining in the Southwest, those states could import wind power from Texas or the Midwest. If the wind refuses to blow in the Midwest, those states could import solar power from the Southwest or Texas. Ironically enough, Texas—the utility outlaw—could be a uniting force between all these regions.

But the country needs to build out high voltage lines to more intimately intertwine the three regions. “These kinds of things would help integrate more renewables, because you could geographically distribute them,” Kroposki says. “You could put more renewables in the locations where the resources are really good, and move the power easier around the country.”

“The thing that holds all of this up is: Who’s going to pay for this infrastructure?” Kroposki adds. “It benefits everybody, but not in a way that’s easy to collect dollars from.” Realistically, the funding would come down from the feds. President Joe Biden has, after all, promised to build out green energy infrastructure to create 10 million jobs.

Prepare for mountains of red tape, though: We’re talking about miles upon miles of lines crossing through multiple states, each with their own regulatory hurdles. “I think we’re in a world where it’s going to continue to be difficult to site large, long distance transmission lines, and we suggest greater authority for [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] to be able to do that,” says Victor, the coauthor on that National Academies report. “But we’re under no illusion that you’ll wave a magic wand to make that problem easy.”

While we’re waiting for that to happen, there may be another way to reinforce our grids with renewables on the local level: microgrids. Northern California’s Blue Lake Rancheria, for instance, has loaded up on solar panels and batteries so it can “island” itself from the main grid if necessary. Last fall—the peak of the state’s increasingly dire wildfire season—the local utility cut power to swaths of California to keep from sparking a blaze, and some 10,000 locals headed to the rancheria for fuel and supplies.

Without power, gas pumps don’t work and water treatment plants go offline, so you get an additional water crisis, as happened in Texas. But in this case, the rancheria served as a powered-up oasis. “The Blue Lake microgrid is a small drop in the bucket for the California grid, so it didn’t make a big difference,” says Peter Lehman, founding director of Humboldt State University’s Schatz Energy Research Center, which helped develop the microgrid. “But it’s a role model for how we can respond to those situations in the future.”

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

February 25, 2021 at 10:09AM

Newegg is taking on scalpers and bots with a lottery order system

https://www.engadget.com/newegg-scalpers-bots-ps5-xbox-series-x-gpus-162441880.html

Trying to find a new console or graphics card has proven immensely frustrating for many consumers. Scalpers and bots have swooped in to snap them up and sell them at inflated prices. Newegg, however, is trying to give everyone a fair shot at buying products that are in high demand.

Newegg Shuffle is a lottery system. Ahead of each drawing, you can select certain products that you’d like a shot at buying. If you’re chosen, Newegg will notify you by email and place the items in your cart. You’ll then have a few hours to make your purchase or you’ll lose your reservation.

Shuffle events usually start between noon and 2PM ET Monday to Friday. At the time of writing, Newegg is offering customers the chance to claim a PS5 bundle (with three games and an extra DualSense controller) or one of several NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards. Other products that might appear in the lineup include Xbox Series X/S, AMD Radeon 6000 series GPUs and AMD Ryzen 5000 series graphics cards.

Newegg has undertaken other measures to tackle customers who have multiple accounts. It’s banning the IP addresses of people who it believes may be using auto-refresh, autoload and crawler bots.

The shuffle system isn’t perfect. Scalpers and bots still have a chance, albeit a smaller one, to grab consoles and graphics cards. Still, it’s encouraging to see a prominent retailer doing more to fight them.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

February 25, 2021 at 10:33AM

More PC Games Get Magical DLSS Support

https://kotaku.com/more-pc-games-get-magical-dlss-support-1846340686


Two more PC games have gotten DLSS support—a form of modern sorcery—from Nvidia, meaning anyone with a card that supports the tech will now be getting much better performance.

Those games are Nioh 2 (which did not launch in the best shape) and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, which should both be getting framerate boosts of around 20-30fps (!!!) depending on your card.

That’s great news for anyone with a card that supports DLSS, but as we saw with Nioh 2, I’m starting to get a little worried—especially in this climate where buying graphics cards isn’t exactly simple—that developers might start using DLSS’ magic as a crutch for poor optimisation, and that’ll leave a lot of people whose cards don’t support DLSS out in the cold.

via Kotaku https://kotaku.com

February 23, 2021 at 08:26PM

Can Hamburger Buns Save Your Pipes from Freezing?

https://www.wired.com/story/can-hamburger-buns-save-your-pipes-from-freezing/


So, imagine this steel container is instead the water line going into your house. (Unless you collect rainwater or make water from hydrogen and oxygen, you probably have one.) If it gets too cold, the water can freeze and literally burst your pipe. That’s bad. Now for some questions and answers.

Why Doesn’t This Happen More Often in the South?

Residential water lines are almost always underground—and that’s a good thing. Although air temperatures can vary drastically from summer to winter, the ground temperature is much more constant. In the southern states, this ground temperature isn’t very likely to get below freezing—so water in the pipes will also be above freezing (and stay liquid).

But there are some exceptions. In some places with warm climates, not all parts of a water pipe system will be underground, and will pass through regions of air. (Heck, I have water pipes in my attic, and I live in a warmer location). Although there is a small temperature difference between cold water (let’s say 1 degree Celsius) and warm ice (0 C), there is a huge energy difference. It takes quite a bit of energy to change water from its solid phase to a liquid. We call this the latent heat of fusion. For water, this has a value of 344 joules per gram. That might be difficult to comprehend, so how about an example?

Suppose you have a liter of ice (with a mass of about 1,000 grams). If you want to take this ice at 0 C and turn it into water at 1 C, it would take 344,000 joules of energy (plus a tiny bit more energy to raise the temperature of water). How much energy is that? Well, let’s say you have a smartphone with a 3,000-mAh battery (milliamp-hours). This is equivalent to 41,000 joules. So, it might have enough energy to run your phone for a full day, but you would need eight or nine of these phones to melt all that ice.

It’s actually a good thing. It means that you can use melting ice to cool off your drinks—and you don’t actually need that much ice. That also means that you need to remove quite a bit of thermal energy from your pipes to get them to freeze. One cold night probably isn’t going to be enough to make your pipes burst.

Does It Help to Leave a Faucet Running?

Yes. OK, imagine you’re inside of a water pipe. (Yes, you are super tiny now.) If the water is stationary, you might be stuck in a part of the pipe that is exposed to cold air. You could actually freeze, and then you would have to break the pipe. But now suppose it’s running water, caused by a faucet that is slightly dripping. You are still a tiny person inside of a pipe, but now you are also moving. You pass through the section of cold pipe and you get cold—but you don’t freeze. Instead, you just move on to other parts of the house.

Oh, but more water from the main underground line is coming into that cold part of the pipe. Would it freeze? It’s not as likely. Remember, the water pipe is at ground temperature, which is almost certainly not below freezing. So, the incoming water isn’t super cold, and hopefully it won’t freeze.

What About Insulation?

Insulation helps. If you wrap some foam insulation around any exposed pipes, it does the same thing as your cooler or insulated drink cup. The insulation decreases the rate that energy is transferred from the hot thing to the cold thing through a thermal interaction. If you put a cold drink out on a table, energy is transferred into the drink to cause it to increase in temperature. Putting the drink in a cooler, on the other hand, increases the insulation and decreases the rate of energy transfer so that it takes longer for the drink to warm up.

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

February 20, 2021 at 08:09AM

Perseverance Has Landed! Mars Rover Begins a New Era of Exploration

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perseverance-has-landed-mars-rover-begins-a-new-era-of-exploration/


Humanity’s on-again, off-again exploration of Mars appears to have lived through its latest make-or-break moment, and scientists around the world are beginning to breathe sighs of relief.

Shortly after 3:44 P.M. Eastern time today, a visitor from Earth fell from a clear, cold Martian sky into a 3.5-billion-year old, 50-kilometer-wide bowl of rock, dust and volcanic ash called Jezero Crater that once held a large lake. Seven minutes earlier, it had touched the top of the planet’s atmosphere at nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour, bleeding off most of its speed through friction, protected from the resulting fireball by a heat shield. A supersonic parachute the size of a Little League baseball field unfurled to slow it further, followed by a final computer-piloted descent on a robotic jetpack called a sky crane, which used a detachable tether to gently lower the visitor to rest upon the crater floor. Far overhead, orbital spacecraft monitored its progress, awaiting the first signals confirming its successful landing, which, beamed Earthward at the speed of light, would arrive at our planet some 11 minutes later.

At long last, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has arrived. Conceived a decade ago and distilled from the dreams of generations of scientists, the SUV-sized, nuclear-fueled rover launched in July 2020, months into a world-transforming pandemic, traveling nearly a half billion kilometers in seven months and surviving a high-tension seven-minute planetfall from space to reach Jezero Crater—where its real hard work will now begin.

Perseverance (or even just “Percy,” for short) is meant to trundle across the terrain for at least a Martian year (two Earth years), following an ambitious to-do list. Explore the environment with rock-vaporizing lasers and ground-penetrating radar, and snap high-resolution panoramas, 3-D stereograms and microscopic close-ups with a suite of sophisticated cameras? Check. Listen to Martian soundscapes, and create weather reports with onboard sensors? Check. Test a device for manufacturing oxygen from the suffocatingly thin air, and launch Ingenuity, a first-of-its-kind four-bladed Marscopter on sorties through those alien skies? Check.

According to Matt Wallace, the project’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a veteran of all previous Mars rover missions, those latter two tasks and Perseverance’s overall complexity make it “the first one I think of as a human precursor mission.” Scaled up, its oxygen-producing experiment, MOXIE, could provide breathable air and rocket fuel for future astronauts, who could also use more advanced Marscopters to scout out their surroundings.

But, truth be told, all of that is secondary or supplemental to Perseverance’s true reason for being, which is to determine if life ever existed on Mars—and if it ever will.

Perseverance’s Quest

“This rover is, at its heart, a robotic geologist and a mobile astrobiologist,” said Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, during a public presentation on Wednesday. “We’re really going after the ability to identify which rocks might be most likely to have preserved the organic fingerprints of life in the past.”

Since the dawn of the space age, the Red Planet has been the most prized target for astrobiological studies, being the closest remotely Earth-like body in the solar system. Although it is presently a cold, hostile desert of a world, billions of years ago it was warmer and wetter—presumably a perfectly fine place for the basics of biology to arise. But somehow, long ago the paths of Mars and Earth diverged, leaving only one planet teeming with life.

Seeing no sign of ancient life on Mars would bolster the case that Earth is indeed rather special, suggesting that despite almost identical initial conditions no wee beasties ever managed to emerge on our sister world. In contrast, finding an independent origin of life on Mars would be potent evidence for the mind-boggling notion that the universe is in some sense built for biology’s blossoming. And while most scientists suspect fossilized microbes to be the most advanced organisms we could discover at the Red Planet, any extant life there—even if single-celled—would spur some to call for a planetary quarantine, to leave Mars to the Martians. A seemingly sterile planet would be, in some respects, the most promising scenario for eventual human exploration and even settlement there.

Perseverance promises to bring us closer to answers for these interlinked mysteries than any other mission in history. Not the least because of its landing site, Jezero Crater, which harbors one of the planet’s largest ancient lake-and-delta systems and is filled with sediments (and, just maybe, microfossils) washed in from the surrounding watershed.

Additionally, Jezero is sandwiched in space and time between two formative occurrences in Mars’s history. It lies within Syrtis Major, a volcanic complex that formed about 3.8 billion years ago, which itself sits adjacent to the Isidis Planitia basin, a gargantuan impact crater that formed about a hundred million years before Syrtis’s first eruptions. The site “is bookended by these major planetary events… we see their influence in the rocks around Jezero,” said Katy Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at JPL. At Jezero, she said, “we have this window into early solar system evolution, and the period of time when life was emerging on Earth and might have been emerging on Mars as well.”

Sampling on the Shoulders of Giants

Of the nearly 50 spacecraft that have been sent to Mars since the 1960s, to date only five—all from NASA, and including Perseverance—have successfully traveled across the surface (China’s Tianwen-1 lander, slated to touch down in May of this year with a rover of its own, seeks to be the sixth). First came a tiny pathfinder, Sojourner, that in 1997 showed roving was possible. Next were the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that arrived in 2004 to “follow the water” and establish the local abundance of life’s liquescent cornerstone. Those were followed by Perseverance’s near-clone and precursor, Curiosity, which reached the planet in 2012 to perform still-ongoing investigations of its habitability. None, however, came anywhere close to doing what many Earthbound experts believe to be the most crucial step in Mars exploration: Bringing modest, pristine pieces of the planet back to Earth, where researchers can study them for signs of biology using laboratory equipment that cannot fit into any conceivable rover.

“In my view, sample return from Mars is the planetary science endeavor of our generation,” said Bobby Braun, the director of planetary science at JPL. “It’s the ambitious, challenging, scientifically compelling goal that—if we work together over timescales of decades—is just within our reach.”

Unlike all its predecessors, Perseverance will be the opening shot in this audacious effort, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency dubbed the “Mars Sample Return” (MSR) campaign.

The Interplanetary Relay Race Begins

The crux of Perseverance’s MSR work will take place via a turret packed with cameras, spectroscopes, and drilling equipment at the end of its two-meter-long robotic arm. Wallace and others have compared this rugged assemblage to a miniaturized chemistry lab and clean room mounted on a jackhammer, all operating near the limits of technological tolerance for the dust, radiation and wild swings in temperature that define the Martian surface environment. Mission scientists will use the turret to identify and retrieve material of astrobiological interest, filling up to 43 test tube–like containers that will then be cached for later pickup by subsequent follow-up missions presently in development.

According to Stack Morgan, she and her colleagues are tentatively targeting several regions for prioritized sample-gathering, such as Jezero Crater’s floor and rim, as well as the site’s enormous delta and the margins of its ancient shoreline.

Now that Perseverance is safely on the surface, the clock is ticking. “We need to collect a lot of those samples very quickly,” Wallace said, citing 20 samples in one Martian year as the mission’s baseline goal. However many Perseverance collects, they all must be ready for eventual pickup by a tag-team duo—a Sample Retrieval Lander and an Earth Return Orbiter—that could launch late this decade. Working together like partners in a relay race, they could bring the baton—perhaps a half kilogram of precious specimens—across the terra firma finish line as early as 2031.

“The science that Perseverance will do is going to inform our world for decades,” Braun said. “There are scientists in schools today and perhaps not even born yet that will benefit from what’s about to happen…. Perseverance is the first step that initiates the sample return campaign, but already in the U.S. and across Europe we’re working on the next two missions.”

via Scientific American https://ift.tt/n8vNiX

February 18, 2021 at 03:01PM