The world needs to dig up far more minerals to meet climate goals. But mining poses environmental dangers that are bitterly dividing communities.
“The key take-home from this study is that small electric aircraft can have a notably lower climate impact – up to 60 percent less – and other types of environmental impacts than equivalent fossil-fueled aircraft,” said Dr. Rickard Arvidsson.
In a time when electric cars are increasing in number around the world and contributing to a greener future, can electric aircraft do the same? This is what a recent study published in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden investigated the environmental impact of an electric aircraft versus a fossil fuel-based counterpart. This study holds the potential to help better understand the pros and cons of electric aircraft while underscoring their environmental impact for both the short-and long-term.
For the study the researchers conducted a life cycle assessment of a “Pipistrel Alpha Electro” aircraft and a fossil fuel-based aircraft to determine which was more environmentally friendly. The Alpha Electro’s structure consisted of an approximately 10-meter (33-feet) wingspan and weighs 550 kg (1212 pounds) at full weight. It was powered by a 21 kWh NMC (nickel-manganese cobalt) lithium-ion battery, resulting in a 60 kW engine output. The fossil fuel-based aircraft was comprised of the same structure as the Alpha Electro aside from the gas engine and fuel tank. The goal of the study was to ascertain when the Alpha Electro obtains a “break-even” point with its gas-powered counterpart in terms of the overall environmental impact.
Continue reading “The Role of Electric Aircraft in Reducing Environmental Impact” »
This includes familiar tasks such as rotating the tires, replacing various fluids, and changing out cabin air filters. There are also a number of EV-specific services that drivers of these battery-electric vehicles need to keep on top of.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the United States predicts today’s EV batteries will have service lives between 12 and 15 years if used in moderate climates. This falls to between 8 and 12 years if regular use occurs in extreme environments.
MIT researchers devise new lithium-ion battery material to provide a more sustainable alternative to cobalt-containing batteries for electric cars.
With electric vehicles on the rise in the time of climate change, scientists have been working towards developing more sustainable batteries to prevent excessive waste.
Recently, MIT researchers devised a new lithium-ion battery material that could provide a more sustainable alternative to cobalt-containing batteries for electric cars.
Continue reading “Lamborghini secures eco-friendly organic lithium-ion batteries for EVs” »
Experiments with small falling particles show that their orientations oscillate—which may help explain the settling of volcanic ash and the formation of snow.
Ice crystals and volcanic ash fall through the atmosphere in a complicated way that has been hard to capture experimentally. A new lab experiment has photographed the descent of nonspherical plastic particles that were fabricated to resemble natural particles [1]. The images reveal oscillations in the particles’ orientations as they flitter downward. The results could help in modeling the formation of snow and the transparency of clouds, which is important for weather and climate models.
In order to study how micrometer-sized particles fall in the atmosphere, researchers must address the challenge of zooming in on the particles as they pass quickly in front of the camera. “The problem is that your field of view is so small that you have a very limited chance to see the particle for a long trajectory,” says Gholamhossein Bagheri from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany. Previously, researchers tried to solve this problem by performing experiments in water with easier-to-view centimeter-sized particles. The water slows the particle motion, but the ratio of particle size to fluid viscosity—which can be characterized by the dimensionless Reynolds number—remains roughly the same for larger, waterborne particles as for smaller, airborne particles. This correspondence between the two situations implies that water-based experiments can offer information about the speed and orientation of falling particles in the atmosphere.
But in the past few years, a climate change hero technology has made its way into electric vehicles, one that has improved—but not solved—their cold weather issues: heat pumps. Heat pumps transfer heat from outside the car to help keep passengers warm, and so avoid sucking too much power away from the battery. And yes, heat pumps can still bring warm air into the car even if it’s freezing outside, albeit with mixed success. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there is still a good amount of heat that can be drawn from air that’s, say, 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Today, heat pumps come in many, but not all, new electric vehicles. Teslas have come with a proprietary heat pump tech since 2021. Jaguar’s I-Pace has one built in, as does BMW’s latest i-series cars, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Audi’s newest e-Tron, and Kia’s new electrified flagship, the EV9.
“Any electric vehicle that comes out right now and doesn’t have a heat pump is a dinosaur already,” says John Kelly, an automotive technology professor and instructor focusing on hybrid and electric vehicle technology at Weber State University.
If this year’s holiday discussions veer toward energy and climate issues, I’ve got you covered. Here are 25 facts that will make any honest person think twice about today’s anti-fossil-fuel narrative.
The OpenDAC project is a collaborative research project between Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) at Meta and Georgia Tech, aimed at significantly reducing the cost of Direct Air Capture (DAC).
Direct Air Capture (DAC) involves directly capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and has been widely recognized as a crucial tool in combating climate change. Despite its potential, the broad implementation of DAC has been impeded by high capture costs. Central to overcoming this hurdle is the discovery of novel sorbents — materials that pull carbon dioxide from the air. Discovering new sorbents holds the key to reducing capture costs and scaling DAC to meaningfully impact global carbon emissions.
The DAC space is growing rapidly with many companies entering the space. To engage the broader research community as well as the budding DAC industry, we have released the OpenDAC 2023 (ODAC23) dataset to train ML models. ODAC23 contains nearly 40M DFT calculations from 170K DFT relaxations involving Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) with carbon dioxide and water adsorbates. We have also released baseline ML models trained on this dataset.
Forests serve as crucial players in the fight against climate change due to their ability to absorb and store carbon. A recent study, with contributions from researchers at Northern Arizona University, is poised to revolutionize forest conservation strategies across the United States. This study introduces innovative and precise models designed to more accurately estimate and forecast the carbon storage capacity of forests.
The U.S. Forest Service, along with an impressive list of research partners including those at Northern Arizona University, has introduced new National Scale Volume Biomass (NSVB) models that provide a consistent and scientifically accurate method to predict tree volume, biomass (a term that describes the collective mass of the woody parts of trees) and carbon content nationwide.
