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Category: transportation

Containerized waste water system.

BioKube offers containerized wastewater treatment plants for easy setup and relocation. This solution is ideal for remote locations such as mining camps and oil rig sites.

We offer a variety of capasities that can meet your requirements.

As the pre-assembled wastewater treatment plant is located inside a standard 20 or 40 foot shipping container, it can be relocated and installed with ease at other locations. In most cases it is a one to two-day operation and requires only a flatbed truck and a crane.

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With electric vehicles such as the Tesla or the Leaf being all the rage and joined by fresh competitors seemingly every week, it seems the world is going crazy for the electric motor over their internal combustion engines. There’s another sector to electric traction that rarely hits the headlines though, that of converting existing IC cars to EVs by retrofitting a motor. The engineering involved can be considerable and differs for every car, so we’re interested to see an offering for the classic Mini from the British company Swindon Powertrain that may be the first of many affordable pre-engineered conversion kits for popular models.

The kit takes their HPD crate EV motor that we covered earlier in the year, and mates it with a Mini front subframe. Brackets and CV joints engineered for the kit to drop straight into the Mini. The differential appears to be offset to the right rather than the central position of the original so we’re curious about the claim of using the Mini’s own driveshafts, but that’s hardly an issue that should tax anyone prepared to take on such a task. They can also supply all the rest of the parts for a turnkey conversion, making for what will probably be one of the most fun-to-drive EVs possible.

The classic Mini is now a sought-after machine long past its days of being dirt-cheap old-wreck motoring for the masses, so the price of the kit should be viewed in the light of a good example now costing more than some new cars. We expect this kit to have most appeal in the professional and semi-professional market rather than the budget end of home conversions, but it’s still noteworthy because it is a likely sign of what is to come. We look forward to pre-engineered subframes becoming a staple of EV conversions at all levels. The same has happened with other popular engine upgrades, and no doubt some conversions featuring them will make their way to the pages of Hackaday.

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Circa 2019

A full-scale mock-up of the Jetcopter vertical-takeoff-and-landing concept vehicle will be shown for the first time at April’s AERO 2019 show in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

The startup air taxi’s claim to fame is its powerplant: Dual 500 hp, 6,000 rpm motors — converted from automotive applications — push two 200 cm air turbines. The resulting 600 mph airflow velocity powers the Jetcopter to a claimed top speed of close to 200 mph with a 620-plus-mile range.

The Jetcopter is unusual in that it does not have large rotor blades, like a helicopter, fixed wings, or tiltable turbines distributed to the ends of shafts like other air taxis. Instead, its two turbines are fixed above the cabin and it is engineered to divert the airflow to four endpoints, where the air can be vectored in a chosen direction, helping to direct the aircraft, a la the Harrier Jump Jet.

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It was recently shared that yellow Tesla Model 3 taxis have started rolling out in New York City, a year after they were officially approved for taxi service in the city.

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Take a look at the new mass transit vehicle South Korea is developing.

A hyper-tube train currently in development in South Korea reached a record speed of more than 621mph during testing on Wednesday, hitting speeds normally only seen by airplanes.

The Korean Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) announced the major milestone on Wednesday, claiming the train may have gone as fast as 633mph. The hyper-tube system has been in development since 2017, and had previously managed a top speed of 443mph. For comparison, Japanese Shinkansen trains top out at a maximum operating speed of 200mph, with commercial aircraft cruising at speeds between 497mph and 621mph.

KRRI.

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Elon Musk founded The Company “to solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic.” He envisions a network of tunnels where Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEV) can transport passengers at high speeds through an underground transportation system called “Loop”. The Company’s AEVs are made up of modified Tesla Model 3 and Model X. These zero-emission vehicles will shuttle passengers through the tunnels at approximately 150-miles per hour. The first set of underground roads are under construction at Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The tunneling project is almost finished. According to city officials it will be operational by January 2021. The Company plans to expand the LVCC Loop transportation system to other parts in Las Vegas. The Company submitted a proposal this year to the Las Vegas City Planning Commission to expand the tunnel to the downtown area.

On Tuesday, the Las Vegas City Planning Commission held a meeting in which the company received approval to connect the LVCC center set of tunnels to a future tunneling system that will lead downtown. The Commission gave the green light during a meeting, video below. The city council plans to review the proposal to cast a final vote in December. The downtown tunnel will begin at the LVCC, run through Las Vegas Boulevard, connect to Ogden, and lead back into Main Street. The City of Las Vegas shared via Twitter the map of where the tunnel will be built, pictured below.

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DARPA’s SIGMA+ program conducted a week-long deployment of advanced chemical and biological sensing systems in the Indianapolis metro region in August, collecting more than 250 hours of daily life background atmospheric data across five neighborhoods that helped train algorithms to more accurately detect chemical and biological threats. The testing marked the first time in the program the advanced laboratory grade instruments for chemical and biological sensing were successfully deployed as mobile sensors, increasing their versatility on the SIGMA+ network.

“Spending a week gathering real-world background data from a major Midwestern metropolitan region was extremely valuable as we further develop our SIGMA+ sensors and networks to provide city and regional-scale coverage for chem and bio threat detection,” said Mark Wrobel, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Collecting chemical and biological environment data provided an enhanced understanding of the urban environment and is helping us make refinements of the threat-detection algorithms to minimize false positives and false negatives.”

SIGMA+ expands on the original SIGMA program’s advanced capability to detect illicit radioactive and nuclear materials by developing new sensors and networks that would alert authorities with high sensitivity to chemical, biological, and explosives threats as well. SIGMA, which began in 2014, has demonstrated city-scale capability for detecting radiological threats and is now operationally deployed with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, helping protect the greater New York City region.

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