The aircraft, evocatively called Skydweller and built by a U.S.-Spanish aerospace firm Skydweller Aero, could help the Navy keep a watchful eye on the surrounding seas while escorting ships months at a time or act as a communications relay platform. The company was awarded a $5 million contract by the U.S. Navy to develop the aircraft.
To stay airborne for so long, the pilotless craft would have 2900sq ft of solar cells on its wings.
Airports have vast swaths of empty land and rooftops. But it’s not so easy as just covering everything with solar panels.
The Air Force wants Hermeus Corporation to prove the concept for a high-speed transport, and maybe more.
Skydweller Aero’s latest flight test of a modified solar-powered aircraft will provide the real-world data necessary for the U.S.-Spanish startup’s engineers to start developing and testing their proprietary autonomous flight software.
Established in 2019 following the acquisition of Swiss nonprofit Solar Impulse’s Solar Impulse 2 aircraft—which circumnavigated the globe in 2016 — Skydweller is headquartered in Oklahoma, with offices in the Washington D.C. region and a flight test facility in Albacete, Spain, roughly two hours south of their engineering operations in Madrid. During the two-and-a-half-hour optionally-piloted flight demonstration in Albacete, Skydweller’s engineering team completed initial validation of their new flight hardware and autopilot’s ability to initiate and manage the aircraft control, actuation, and sensor technology systems.
A pilot was in the cockpit of the Solar Impulse 2, working in tandem with another operator who controlled the movements of the aircraft remotely from the ground.
This next jump in battery-tech could solve a lot of EV problems.
The world of the internal combustion engine will sadly, but very necessarily, come to a close at some point in many of our lifetimes. Hybrids and electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and more advanced at a rapid pace, which means batteries are taking the place of fossil fuels. This has led to an equally rapid progression in battery technology, with the main goals of improving capacity, charging times, and safety. One major advancement in this field is the advent of solid-state batteries, which promise to push the boundaries of the limitations that current lithium-ion batteries carry.
Electric vehicles have been powered by lithium-ion batteries for years, which are similar to the ones used in laptops, cell phones, and other consumer electronics. They are constructed with a liquid electrolyte inside, which makes them heavy and susceptible to instability at high temperatures. Because each individual battery pack can’t generate all that much energy on its own, several have to be linked together in series, further adding to the weight. The cost of engineering, manufacturing, and installing battery packs makes up a considerable portion of the overall cost of an electric vehicle.
Just like a cell phone, the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles need to be recharged. The speed at which an electric vehicle’s batteries can be charged depends on the vehicle itself, the type of batteries it uses, and on the charging infrastructure. In general, public charging stations fall into either the Level 2 or Level 3 categories, both of which can charge an EV far quicker than a standard household outlet. Level 1 and Level 2 chargers provide power to the on-board charger via AC power, which is converted to DC power to charge the battery. Level 3, which can also be called DC Fast Charging, bypasses that on-board generator and instead charges the battery directly and at a much quicker rate. Over time, however, both the battery capacity and the ability to reach peak charging rates degrade.
Jeep and Dodge are putting a much bigger focus on electrification now that they’re part of the Stellantis group. Jeep plans to release its first series-produced electric vehicle in 2023, and Dodge said its first plug-in hybrid will land in 2022.
Both models appeared on a product roadmap that Stellantis distributed to investors this month. It focuses on electrified vehicles, so it doesn’t list the upcoming non-electrified launches, and it sheds light on what the future has in store for all of the carmaker’s brands. Specific details like the type of car planned weren’t publicly released, so there’s no official word on what Jeep’s first EV will look like, but our crystal ball reveals two likely possibilities.
One is a production version of the Magneto concept (pictured) introduced earlier in 2021. It’s essentially a current-generation Wrangler powered by an electric motor that spins the four wheels via a six-speed manual transmission and a two-speed transfer case. It’s futuristic but not unrealistic, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see it reach showrooms in the coming years. However, another possibility is that Jeep could build a smaller, likely car-derived EV to sell on the European market, where emissions norms are extraordinary strict and the fines for exceeding them are immense. If that’s the case, the model would likely borrow parts from the Stellantis parts bin.
The two airlines aim to be at the forefront of a burgeoning industry but the greatest hurdle might be getting travelers to fly on the new aircraft.
Tesla’s recent move to open its Supercharger network to other automakers will enable the automaker to get access to some of the $7.5 billion in EV charging infrastructure funding as part of the new US infrastructure bill.
For years now, Tesla has been talking about opening up the Supercharger network to electric vehicles from other manufacturers.
Last month, CEO Elon Musk finally confirmed that Tesla plans to open Superchargers to other automakers later this year.
One of the biggest factors affecting consumer adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is the amount of time required to recharge the vehicles—usually powered by lithium-ion batteries. It can take up to a few hours or overnight to fully recharge EVs, depending on the charging method and amount of charge remaining in the battery. This forces drivers to either limit travel away from their home chargers or to locate and wait at public charging stations during longer trips.
Why does it take so long to fully charge a battery, even those used to power smaller devices, such as mobile phones and laptops? The primary reason is that devices and their chargers are designed so the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries charge only at slower, controlled rates. This is a safety feature to help prevent fires, and even explosions, due to tiny, rigid tree-like structures, called dendrites, that can grow inside a lithium battery during fast charging and induce short-circuits inside the battery.
To address the need for a more practical lithium-ion battery, researchers from the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) worked with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to conduct neutron scattering experiments on a new type of material that could be used to make safer, faster-charging batteries. The researchers produced samples of lithium vanadium oxide (Li3V2O5), a “disordered rock salt” similar to table salt but with a certain degree of randomness in the arrangement of its atoms. The samples were placed in a powerful neutron beam that enabled observing the activity of ions inside the material after a voltage was applied.
The paper’s authors said they’ve created an endlessly challenging virtual playground for AI. The world, called XLand, is a vibrant video game managed by an AI overlord and populated by algorithms that must learn the skills to navigate it.
The game-managing AI keeps an eye on what the game-playing algorithms are learning and automatically generates new worlds, games, and tasks to continuously confront them with new experiences.
The team said some veteran algorithms faced 3.4 million unique tasks while playing around 700000 games in 4000 XLand worlds. But most notably, they developed a general skillset not related to any one game, but useful in all of them.
