Lifeboat Foundation

Having completed sea trials, it will now have its combat system activated.

Back in December of 2017, we brought you news of the U.S. Navy’s stealth destroyer the U.S.S. Monsoor breaking down during sea trails. At the time, we asked the question if this event would spell the end for Zumwalt-class destroyers?

Continue reading “The Navy’s Last Stealth Zumwalt Destroyer Comes with 80 Megawatts of Power” »

Semiconductor specialist Renesas has announced two new technologies designed to dramatically improve the efficiency of embedded devices built for the Internet of Things — by reducing the power required to write into RAM.

“With the accelerated spread of IoT technology in recent years, there has been strong demand for reduced power consumption in microcontroller units (MCUs) used in endpoint devices,” the company claims in its technology announcement. “MRAM requires less energy for write operations than flash memory, and is thus particularly well suited for applications with frequent data updates.”

“However, as demand for data processing capability surges for MCUs, the need to ameliorate the trade off between performance and power consumption increases. Therefore, further power consumption reduction remains a pressing issue.”

Greenspot lodges development application for Wallerawang battery, and it hopes to have the first stage in operation in just two years.

Privately owned NSW development company Greenspot says it has lodged a development application for a huge 500MW, 1000MWh big battery at the site of the closed Wallerawang coal fired power station near Lithgow, and hopes to bring it into service within two years.

The development application to the state government comes just weeks after the last chimney stacks of the closed coal generator were brought down. The battery will be called the “Wallerawang 9 Battery,” to acknowledge the legacy of units 7 and 8, which were the last coal fired units at the power station.

Continue reading “Greenspot submits application for 1,000MWh big battery at former coal plant” »

Circa 2009 real teleportation not just in the quantum realm.

Ground-state entanglement induces emergence of negative-energy-density regions in quantum systems by squeezing zero-point oscillation, keeping total energy of the systems nonnegative. By use of the negativity of quantum energy density, protocols of quantum energy teleportation are proposed that transport energy to distant sites by local operations and classical communication. The energy is teleported without breaking any physical laws including causality and local energy conservation. Because intermediate subsystems of the energy transfer channel are not excited during the protocol execution, the protocol attains energy transportation without heat generation in the channel. We discuss the protocol focusing around qubit chains. In addition, we address a related problem of breaking ground-state entanglement by measurements.

A flurry of upgrades is on the horizon.

The conference version of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 shows that the U.S. Congress wants new engines to be installed in the current and future F-35 aircraft starting from 2027, Air Force Magazine reported.

We had earlier reported that the U.S. military would be required to look into re-engining its F-35s towards the end of this decade. The F-16s and A-10C Thunderbolts are close to the end of their lifetimes which means that the bulk of the workload for the U.S. military will fall on F-35s’ shoulders. Under the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), the U.S. Air Force has already begun work to develop engines that can deliver more power or range as required.

Continue reading “Could F-35s Get New Engines by 2027? The US Congress Thinks So” »

China has developed what it calls a Quantum Satellite System in a bid to combat any adversary intrusion into its power infrastructure. The country boasts the world’s largest national power grid.

Chinese companies spent 10 years aggressively maneuvering to become the dominant players in solar power. Now they’re seeking to lead the way in developing the next big thing in clean energy: hydrogen.

Top solar manufacturers including Longi Green Energy Technology Co. are ramping up the production of electrolyzers, the equipment needed to make green hydrogen, the cleanest form of the fuel. They are accelerating investments on a bet that a market will boom as industries and consumers switch to lower-carbon fuels.

Amprius Technologies announced that its lithium-ion battery cells with silicon anode (Si-Nanowire platform) achieved a breakthrough fast charging capability of 0–80% state-of-charge (SOC) in just 6 minutes (10C current).

The capability of extreme fast charging has been validated and confirmed by Mobile Power Solutions for three 2.75 Ah sample pouch cells (see report here). It actually took less than 6 minutes to achieve 80% SOC.

0–70% charging takes less than 5 minutes, and 0–90% is usually above 8 minutes. Then, the charging rate is much slower, so 100% is achieved after 25–27 minutes (90–100% takes 17–19 minutes).

The price of the batteries that power electric vehicles has fallen by about 90 percent since 2010, a continuing trend that will soon make EVs less expensive than gasoline vehicles.

This week, with battery pricing figures for 2021 now available, I wanted to get a better idea of what the near future will look like.

First, the numbers: The average price of lithium-ion battery packs fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021, down 6 percent from $140 per kilowatt-hour the previous year, according to the annual battery price survey from BloombergNEF. The new average is a step closer to the benchmark of $100 per kilowatt-hour, which researchers say is the approximate point where EVs will cost about the same as gasoline-powered vehicles.