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Category: transportation – Page 217

Dutch company Lightyear has unveiled what it claims is the world’s first production-ready solar car. The Lightyear 0 is a family sedan with 5 sq m (53.8 sq ft) of solar panels built in, capable of generating up to 70 km (44 miles) of charge-free driving a day.

Having scaled its workforce up to 500 people and hooked up deals with more than 100 suppliers, Lightyear is deadly serious about this venture and ready to start manufacturing. Its first car is this four-door fastback electric sedan, with enough onboard battery to deliver a very solid 560 km (348 miles) of freeway driving at 110 km/h (68 mph), even without the sun shining.

That’s a pretty impressive number; in WLTP testing, the Lightyear 0 delivers 625 km (388 miles) of range, or nearly 4 percent more than Tesla’s Model 3 Long Range AWD. Lightyear says it’s developed the most efficient electric drivetrain ever, and that these range figures come from a battery pack holding just 60 kWh. For comparison, the Model 3 Long Range AWD is reported to run an 82-kWh pack.

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Conflux has specialized in making heat exchangers since its inception. Previously, the company collaborated with GKN to make its technology available in Europe. We interviewed CEO Michael Fuller, including on the 3DPOD. We also saw how the startup obtainined a series A round. The next step in Conflux’s development is the mass customization of its heat exchange products.

So far, Conflux offers individually designed heat exchangers to order. Usually for F1 teams and high-end industrial applications, these high-value heat sinks have all been unique and made specifically for their applications. That’s all well and dandy, of course, but it won’t really scale.

Now. the company has developed an annular water charge air cooler (WCAC) heat exchanger. WCAC heat exchangers are all the rage in automobiles now because they can potentially be more efficient in engine cooling than plate or other heat exchangers. WCACs could potentially improve mileage, top speed, and reduce A/C consumption in passenger cars. In racing, they probably won’t focus too much on the A/C consumption, but would be very pleased with the other potential advantages.

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NASA said it was interested in UAPs from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA added. The study will begin this fall and is expected to take nine months.

The team will gather data on “events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena — from a scientific perspective,” the agency said.

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After nine years working at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Oliver Toupet is developing cutting-edge AI algorithms that enable the self-driving zoox vehicle to understand and make decisions based on its surroundings, and to optimize trajectories to reach its destination safely and comfortably.

Learn why he says the work he’s doing at Zoox is, in some ways, more challenging than his previous work.

Zoox principal software engineer Olivier Toupet on company’s autonomous robotaxi technology.

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Electro-optic modulators, which control aspects of light in response to electrical signals, are essential for everything from sensing to metrology and telecommunications. Today, most research into these modulators is focused on applications that take place on chips or within fiber optic systems. But what about optical applications outside the wire and off the chip, like distance sensing in vehicles?

Current technologies to modulate light in are bulky, slow, static, or inefficient. Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with researchers at the department of Chemistry at the University of Washington, have developed a compact and tunable electro-optic for free space applications that can modulate light at gigahertz speed.

“Our work is the first step toward a class of free-space electro-optic modulators that provide compact and efficient intensity modulation at gigahertz speed of free-space beams at telecom wavelengths,” said Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, senior author of the paper.

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During the Cold War, there was a need for a new reconnaissance aircraft that could evade enemy radar, and the customer needed it fast. At Lockheed Martin’s advanced development group, the Skunk Works, work had already begun on an innovative aircraft to improve intelligence-gathering, one that would fly faster than any aircraft before or since, at greater altitude, and with a minimal radar cross section. The team rose to the nearly impossible challenge, and the aircraft took its first flight on Dec. 22, 1964. The legendary SR-71 Blackbird was born.

The first Blackbird accident that occurred that required the Pilot and the RSO to eject happened before the SR-71 was turned over to the Air Force. On Jan. 25, 1966 Lockheed test pilots Bill Weaver and Jim Zwayer were flying SR-71 Blackbird #952 at Mach 3.2, at 78,800 feet when a serious engine unstart and the subsequent “instantaneous loss of engine thrust” occurred.

The following story told by Weaver (available in Col. Richard H. Graham’s book SR-71 The Complete Illustrated History of THE BLACKBIRD The World’s Highest 0, Fastest Plane) is priceless in conveying the experience of departing a Blackbird at an altitude of fifteen miles and speed of Mach 3.2.

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Lamborghinis are already marvels of engineering but they become even more so when people decide to upgrade them. This is what designer Michael Hritzkrieg did with this new model called the Lamborghini LMXX2.

You can see from the pictures that it’s got some impressive treads that run all around the car making it clear that it can tackle even the most difficult terrains such as sands, rocks and soil. IE spoke to Hritzkrieg about his innovative design and he surprisingly described it as “a rush job to meet an Instagram competition deadline.”

The competition he is referring to is the AGP Contest on Instagram which asked participants to conceive of a design using the keywords “Desert + Lamborghini + Future”.

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