In 2000, Sam Schmidt, an aspiring racing car driver, crashed during a practice lap and was left paralyzed. Last Sunday, May 18th, some 14 years after his accident, he returned to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This inspiring return was made possible thanks to a specially outfitted 2014 Corvette C7 Stingray, which was modified as part of the ‘SAM’ or semi-autonomous ...
Cape Canaveral, Monday November 18, 1:28 PM (1828 GMT). The NASA launched MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN), the unmanned spacecraft, heading to Mars to study the planet’s atmosphere. The Red Planet remains the source of many questions for scientists such as why it lost its warmth and water over time. Hopefully MAVEN’s expedition will unveil some of its secr...
Coco Chanel once said “If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing”. In 2006, Swiss pilot, Yves Rossy, followed that motto, as he was the first (and only!) man to fly in the most natural way possible. Teaming up with Breitling Jet Team to create his avatar, Jetman, gave him the ultimate chance to fly freely, in three dimensions. We have tamed ...
Slovak designer and engineer, Stefan Klein, has proudly performed the first flight with his AeroMobil Version 2.5, a project he has been elaborating for the past 20 years. As a matter of fact, the AeroMobil Flying Car is not a premiere on the market, but it differs from others thanks to its particularly convenient aspect. Indeed, the Aeromobil runs on regular gasoline, i...
General Electric (GE) and Caterpillar have both been working on building train engines that pollute less in order to stay on the right side of regulations set by the EPA. They are but two of the several large players in the market that are seeking to radically change the way locomotive engines use carbon fuels. While pound for pound trains are less polluting than some ot...
Skunk Works, the experimental division of aerospatial giant Lockheed Martin claims that it will have a fully operative nuclear fusion reactor in ten years; and it will only be the size of a jet engine! But, the real thing that makes you sit up and listen, is that the system will have the same power output as the ITER International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (not...
Typically relegated to low volume prototyping applications, a new GE Aviation additive manufacturing facility set to open in Alabama, USA positions 3D printing as a viable solution for mass production. By the end of 2015 the facility will mass produce engine components for the fuel efficient LEAP jet engine, which is currently being developed by CFM International, a join...
SpaceX has pushed back this week’s planned launch of its Falcon 9 rocket by one day. This comes in the wake of the automatic termination of the F9R (Falcon 9 Reusable) on Friday 22nd of August, which resulted in a large explosion over a test site in Texas. On detecting an anomaly, the rocket’s flight termination system initiated a command to self-destruct (this forms par...
Transporting anything into space is expensive, just ask NASA. SpaceX, the Elon Musk space exploration company is working on making space travel cheaper, but they can only do so much. The sheer complexities involved and distances between Earth and space means every eventuality must be covered before the launch date. This can mean including a large number of tools, parts a...
Space X’s plan to launch the Falcon Heavy has been delayed until 2015. Apparently the company’s schedule is too tight to support a test launch before the end of the year. When launched the Falcon Heavy will be the heaviest rocket since NASA’s Saturn V, which transported the Apollo missions into space. It has a projected Low Earth Orbit (LEO) payload of 53,000 kg, which w...
Lightning Hybrids, developer and manufacturer of hydraulic hybrid systems for medium- and heavy-duty trucks and buses, announced an agreement with Kiessling Transit to supply 35 hydraulic hybrid systems. The sale marks Lightning Hybrids’ largest order to date. Lightning Hybrids’ system has shown improvements of 30% in fuel efficiency and significantly reduced nitrogen-ox...
The little gadget can be built into the vehicle without taking up space. The way it works is particularly reliable, thanks to its special encapsulation. All too often, a driver has only fractions of a second to decide when facing a potential car accident: A brief moment of distraction, overtiredness or inattention – there are several reasons why the number of acciden...
The train brings Europe closer together. Nevertheless, the rail control system of individual countries still differ from one another; for example, train drivers do not use standardized signals or standard procedures when a signal malfunctions. In addition, train control systems – such as the automatic stop for a signal violation – operate differently from one country to ...
Mounted on a carbon fibre single shell chassis, the NTU Venture (NV) 8 will race in the Urban Concept category at this year's Shell Eco-marathon Asia. NTU students have also built the NTU Venture (NV) 9, a slick three-wheeled racer which can take sharp corners with little loss in speed due to its unique tilting ability inspired by motorcycle racing. NV9, featuring ...
Solar Impulse founder André Borschberg was at the controls of the single-seat aircraft when it lumbered into the air at the Al Bateen Executive Airport. Borschberg will trade off piloting with Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard during layovers on a 35,000-kilometer (21,700-mile) journey. Some legs of the trip, such as over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, will ...
The company was founded almost 90 years ago, and today, Bentley Motors' cars are best known for their luxury using skills that have been handed down through generations, alongside engineering expertise and cutting-edge technology. The EXP 10 Speed 6 concept is a British interpretation of a high performance two seater sports car using modern automotive design, highly s...
According to the reseachers, this is the first time an entire aircraft engine has been printed. The 3D printed engine is a replica of a gas turbine engine, an auxiliary power unit used in aircraft such as the Falcon 20 private jet. Its producer, French aerospace company Microturbo (Safran) says it was chosen because they were willing for the internal workings to be disp...
German forklift truck manufacturer Linde Material Handling, together with Hamburg-based Fiat specialists Karabag, has converted a conventional Fiat 500 into an electric car. The Karabag 500E features a three-phase asynchronous motor providing 20 kW of nominal power, and a 125-V, 11-kW lithium polymer battery. Performance of the car is best described as leisurely, but it ...
APPLE Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has hundreds of employees working on an electric car project — codenamed “Titan” — that will reportedly resemble a minivan and would be branded as an Apple product. But according to a USA TODAY article, Apple may not be working on a vehicle, but rather a fully integrated dash platform to bring more iP...
Shenzhen Rion technology co., LTD. Design production of Angle sensor, the biggest measurement precision of 0.01 °, not only can accurately detect the cable car orbital tilt change, still can real-time detect cable car itself driving posture, once produce Angle too big can output the corresponding signal so as to realize the monitoring and control system of cable car alar...
LTE-Unlicensed is a communication method which is constructed on unlicensed spectrum of LTE, and runs LTE. Darveen Technology’s ICR-680, which integrates Huawei eLTE-U chip, runs LTE communications on a 5.8GHz unlicensed spectrum, enabling enterprise users to deploy the most specialized and advanced industrial wireless private network on their own. Darveen ICR-680 miniat...
Torque ratings, life and reliability are significantly improved compared to CSF series products of the same size. 30% higher rated torque 30% higher repeated peak torque 30% higher maximum momentary torque 42% longer life (L10 of 10,000 hours) The external dimensions, mass, torsional stiffness, moment stiffness, positional accuracy, repeatability, input moment of in...
The work is for the Danhai light rail transit project. Taiwan’s local industry giant China Steel along with its subsidiaries United Steel Engineering & Construction and Taiwan Rolling Stock will construct the first phases corridors. There will be two lines – one with 11 stations and the other with three – as well as a depot. The project, expected to be completed in 2018,...
Background With the rapid development of science and technology, the traffic volume in the city is growing fast and various problems occurred in the buses management. However, Intelligent electronic bus board system can provide real-time and accurate information for vehicle operation and management to reduce the pressure of public transportation and improve the overal...
A few years after Google entered the race, cofounder Sergey Brin crowed that autonomous vehicles were just around the corner. “You can count on one hand the number of years it will take before ordinary people can experience this,” he said at a press conference. That was in 2012. Since then, nearly every automaker, Google spinoff Waymo, ridesharing companies Uber and L...
Since last April, Luminar has scaled up its partnerships with a select few companies with TRI being the first to deeply integrate its new sensing platform. According to TRI’s Chief Technology Officer James Kuffner, “We moved swiftly and early to adopt the Luminar platform into our fleet, and as a result we’re rapidly advancing our program. The level of data fidelity and ...
Safety, Surveillance And Infotainment Networked cameras are seeing rapid adoption in several large and growing segments such as Automotive for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and Digital Home & Industrial for surveillance and infotainment applications. These applications are characterized by the need for energy efficient, size and cost effective products wi...
The production of carbon fibre chassis is an expensive business â just ask BMW. The German vehicle-maker and its partners have between them spent upwards of â¬700m ($870m) on the mass-production of its i3 and i8 models which feature large amounts of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP). Moreover, these costs do not decrease much for low- and medium-volume manufactu...
The agency says such systems, or “gremlins,” would be deployed with a mixture of mission payloads capable of carrying out a variety of activities in a coordinated manner, providing U.S. forces with improved operational flexibility at a lower cost than is possible with conventional, "monolithic" platforms. The Phase 1 contracts have been awarded to four teams whose propo...
Each spring, as roads that have frozen during the winter begin to thaw from the surface downward, melting snow and ice saturate the ground. The roadbed, softened by trapped moisture beneath the pavement, is more susceptible to damage—and vehicle-weight restrictions are put into force. A major problem with the weight restrictions, however, is that the conditions under th...
"We are more or less reinventing the [van] segment," said Bernhard Glaser, vice president and managing director of Mercedes-Benz Vans USA, at this month's Work Truck Show in Indianapolis. With the introduction of the Sprinter in 2001, the German company was the first automaker to bring a European-style cargo van to the U.S. Last year, the nameplate had record sales under...
The new engine combines two promising technologies—gasoline compression ignition and opposed pistons—to create a "super engine" that could fundamentally change the way internal combustion engines work in the light-duty transportation market. "Conventional spark-ignited engines have improved so dramatically over the past few decades that there is little room to make bi...
The project uses fiber optic technology to assist in its measurement, since it is more accurate than conventional metallic strain gauges, the institute says. The tests measured deformation of CFRP used to make an upper fuselage structure from the cockpit to the wings — one of the most heavily stressed components during flight — on a medium range, 70-passenger aircraft. E...
“Explore” is the restrained word used in the joint press release, which set no deadlines and mentioned no sum of money. Even so, this represents the first solid evidence that anyone might build a large-scale version of the Hyperloop, Elon Musk’s 2013 concept for shooting passenger-carrying pods through partially evacuated tubes at just-barely subsonic speeds. HTT is b...
That short trial run along a lake in the Dutch town of Wageningen marked the first time such a self-driving vehicle had appeared on public roads in the Netherlands. The WePod autonomous vehicle is an electric, driverless shuttle bus that could hit top speeds of 40 kilometers per hour when fully operational. But it maintained a speed of just 8 km/h during the first sho...
In a feature article in the February 2016 issue of Wired, the journalist Alex Davies proclaims that Chevy, with its Bolt crossover, has stolen a march on the Bay Area start-up in the race to produce the first mass-marketed all-battery electric vehicle (BEV). (See my article, “A Tesla in Every Garage? Not So Fast,” on the challenges of producing all-electric supercars for...
