Posts tagged electricity
This is the most effective, yet amusing, image I’ve ever seen illustrating the meaning behind Volts, Amps, and Ohms.
The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about. Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.
Tesla Wants Some Engineering Cred | Wired
The Roadster showed Tesla Motors can design a top-notch electric drivetrain. The Model S showed it can design a gorgeous car. Building the S is another story, of course, so now the Silicon Valley upstart wants to show it knows a little something about engineering.
Elon Musk’s upstart automaker rolls into the Detroit auto show with an “alpha build” of the Model Ssedan. The term is a nod to Musk’s insistence that Tesla Motors is more Silicon Valley than Detroit.
That conceit aside, Tesla is talking about a hand-built preproduction car pretty close to what it keeps saying we’ll see in driveways sometime next year. It’s a key milestone for the company and the car that will make or break its future: another sign that Musk just might pull this off.
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Tesla’s keeping mum on the size of the battery pack, but the Roadster has a 53 kilowatt-hour unit. Expect the S to be in the same ballpark. Although the S will be considerably heavier than the Roadster, Tesla says the two cars will use the same amount of energy to cover a given distance. It attributes that to the sedan’s superior aerodynamic and drivetrain efficiency.
The company also has said it is getting more performance out of its packs. Kurt Kelty, director of power storage technologies, says the pack in the Roadster has an energy density of 120 watt-hours per kilogram; that rose to more than 135 in the packs Tesla designed for the Smart Electric Drive prototypes.
Whereas the pack in the Roadster is a 950-pound rectangle directly behind the seats, the pack in the S is a structural element integrated into the unibody. It measures roughly 5 feet by 8 feet and fits between the axles under the floor between the door sills. Rawlinson said that gives the body remarkable torsional rigidity and “unparalleled protection in side-impact collisions.”
“The battery pack does much more than contain the (battery) cells,” he said. “It contributes to the car’s handling, safety and packaging.”
I’ve always been curious as to what will happen to these EVs when their batteries inevitably reach their end of life? Lithium-Ion batteries aren’t exactly known for longevity and they’re extremely expensive to replace. I think that is probably one of the most important considerations when it comes to EVs, and it really bothers me that no one seems to be discussing it.
New DIY Electric Airplane Takes Flight | Wired
The number of flying electric airplanes (and pilots) increased by one with the first flight of John Monnett’s Waiex in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The Waiex is one of several models of kit-built aircraft designed and produced by Monnett’s company, Sonex, and the electric version has been in development for several years.
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The airplane is a standard Waiex kit aircraft modified with the electric power system. The airplane currently has a 54-kilowatt brushless DC motor and a 14.5-kilowatt-hour lithium polymer battery system. In addition the company has also developed its own battery-management system, motor controller and cockpit instrumentation.
I think this is really interesting despite the limitations with the current battery setup (Aprox. 14 minutes at full power).
China Develops First Fuel Cell Light Rail Locomotive | Inhabitat
The fuel cell light rail locomotive has many benefits — its permanent-magnet synchronous motor can be used to efficiently generate power while reducing vibrations and noise, yielding a remarkable degree of energy efficiency. The magnetic motor is able to achieve higher performance than regular motors, while still cutting energy use by 10-20 percent.
Kudos to China.
