World's First Electric Bus Recharged Right from the Road

10:59 pm

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Public Transport

The Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), is an electric vehicle that can be charged while stationary or driving, thus removing the need to stop at a charging station. Likewise, an OLEV tram does not require pantographs to feed power from electric wires strung above the tram route.

Following the development and operation of commercialized OLEV trams (at an amusement park in Seoul) and shuttle buses (at KAIST campus), respectively, the City of Gumi in South Korea, beginning on August 6th, is providing its citizens with OLEV public transportation services.

Two OLEV buses will run an inner city route between Gumi Train Station and In-dong district, for a total of 24 km roundtrip. The bus will receive 20 kHz and 100 kW (136 horsepower) electricity at an 85% maximum power transmission efficiency rate while maintaining a 17cm air gap between the underbody of the vehicle and the road surface.

The Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), is an electric vehicle that can be charged while stationary or driving, thus removing the need to stop at a charging station. (Credit: Image courtesy of ResearchSEA)

OLEV is a groundbreaking technology that accelerates the development of purely electric vehicles as a viable option for future transportation systems, be they personal vehicles or public transit. This is accomplished by solving technological issues that limit the commercialization of electric vehicles such as price, weight, volume, driving distance, and lack of charging infrastructure.

OLEV receives power wirelessly through the application of the "Shaped Magnetic Field in Resonance (SMFIR)" technology. SMFIR is a new technology introduced by KAIST that enables electric vehicles to transfer electricity wirelessly from the road surface while moving. Power comes from the electrical cables buried under the surface of the road, creating magnetic fields. There is a receiving device installed on the underbody of the OLEV that converts these fields into electricity. The length of power strips installed under the road is generally 5%-15% of the entire road, requiring only a few sections of the road to be rebuilt with the embedded cables.

OLEV has a small battery (one-third of the size of the battery equipped with a regular electric car). The vehicle complies with the international electromagnetic fields (EMF) standards of 62.5 mG, within the margin of safety level necessary for human health. The road has a smart function as well, to distinguish OLEV buses from regular cars -- the segment technology is employed to control the power supply by switching on the power strip when OLEV buses pass along, but switching it off for other vehicles, thereby preventing EMF exposure and standby power consumption. As of today, the SMFIR technology supplies 60 kHz and 180 kW of power remotely to transport vehicles at a stable, constant rate.

Dong-Ho Cho, a professor of the electrical engineering and the director of the Center for Wireless Power Transfer Technology Business Development at KAIST, said: "It's quite remarkable that we succeeded with the OLEV project so that buses are offering public transportation services to passengers. This is certainly a turning point for OLEV to become more commercialized and widely accepted for mass transportation in our daily living."

After the successful operation of the two OLEV buses by the end of this year, Gumi City plans to provide ten more such buses by 2015.

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Foldable Micro Electric Car, Armadillo-T, Unveiled

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s

Aug. 29, 2013 — Looking for a parking space for hours at a busy shopping mall or being stuck on roads jammed with cars releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide are all-too-familiar scenes for city dwellers.

A group of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently developed a possible solution to such problems: a foldable, compact electric vehicle that can be utilized either as a personal car or part of the public transit system to connect major transportation routes within a city.

In-Soo Suh, Associate Professor of the Graduate School for Green Transportation at KAIST and his research team introduced a prototype micro electric car called "Armadillo-T," whose design is based on a native animal of South America, the armadillo, a placental mammal with a leathery armor shell.

Armadillo-T is a small and light pure-electric car that can fold in half for convenient parking. (Credit: Image courtesy of KAIST)

The research team imitated the animal's distinctive protection characteristic of rolling up into a ball when facing with threat from predators. Just as armadillos hide themselves inside the shell, Armadillo-T tucks its rear body away, shrinking its original size of 2.8 meters (110 inches) down to almost half, 1.65 meters (65 inches), when folding.

The Armadillo-T Prototype folds itself nearly in half with the touch of a smartphone button.

Armadillo-T is a four-wheel-drive, all-electric car with two seats and four in-wheel motors. Since the motors are installed inside the wheels, and the 13.6 kWh capacity of lithium-ion battery pack is housed on the front side, the battery and motors do not have to change their positions when the car folds. This not only optimizes the energy efficiency but also provides stability and ample room to drivers and passengers.

Once folded, the small and light (weighs 450 kg) electric vehicle takes up only one-third of a 5-meter parking space, the standard parking size in Korea, allowing three of its kind to be parked. With a smartphone-interfaced remote control on the wheels, the vehicle can turn 360 degrees, enhancing drivers' convenience to park the car, even in an odd space in a parking lot, the corner of a building, for example.

Professor In-Soo Suh said, "I expect that people living in cities will eventually shift their preferences from bulky, petro-engine cars to smaller and lighter electric cars. Armadillo-T can be one of the alternatives city drivers can opt for. Particularly, this car is ideal for urban travels, including car-sharing and transit transfer, to offer major transportation links in a city. In addition to the urban application, local near-distance travels such as tourist zones or large buildings can be another example of application."

The concept car has loads of smart features on board, too: the cameras installed inside the car eliminate the need for side mirrors and increase the driver's ability to see the car's right and left side, thereby reducing blind spots. With a smartphone, the driver can control Armadillo-T and enable remote folding control. The car has a maximum speed of 60 km/h, and with a ten-minute fast charge, it can run up to 100 km.

Professor Suh explained that the concept of Armadillo-T was originally initiated in 2011 as he focused his research interest on the sub-A segment of personal mobility vehicles (PMVs), which are smaller and lighter than the current compact cars, as a new personalized transport mode.

"In coming years, we will see more mega-size cities established and face more serious environmental problems. Throughout the world, the aging population is rapidly growing as well. To cope with climate, energy, and limited petroleum resources, we really need to think outside the box, once again, to find more convenient and eco-friendly transportation, just as the Ford Model T did in the early 1920s. A further level of R&D, technical standards, and regulatory reviews are required to have these types of micro vehicles or PMVs on the market through test-bed evaluations, but we believe that Armadillo-T is an icon toward the future transport system with technology innovation."

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How Materials Both Conducts and Insulates?

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s

Aug. 23, 2013 — It is well known to scientists that the three common phases of water -- ice, liquid and vapor -- can exist stably together only at a particular temperature and pressure, called the triple point.

Also well known is that the solid form of many materials can have numerous phases, but it is difficult to pinpoint the temperature and pressure for the points at which three solid phases can coexist stably.

The lines of data points are where two of the three solid-state phases of vanadium dioxide
 can exist stably together, and the point where the three lines meet -- the triple point --
is where all three phases can exist together. (Credit: David Cobden/University of Washington)

Scientists now have made the first-ever accurate determination of a solid-state triple point in a substance called vanadium dioxide, which is known for switching rapidly -- in as little as one 10-trillionth of a second -- from an electrical insulator to a conductor, and thus could be useful in various technologies.

"These solid-state triple points are fiendishly difficult to study, essentially because the different shapes of the solid phases makes it hard for them to match up happily at their interfaces," said David Cobden, a University of Washington physics professor.

"There are, in theory, many triple points hidden inside a solid, but they are very rarely probed."

Cobden is the lead author of a paper describing the work, published Aug. 22 in Nature.

In 1959, researchers at Bell Laboratories discovered vanadium dioxide's ability to rearrange electrons and shift from an insulator to a conductor, called a metal-insulator transition. Twenty years later it was discovered that there are two slightly different insulating phases.

The new research shows that those two insulating phases and the conducting phase in solid vanadium dioxide can coexist stably at 65 degrees Celsius, give or take a tenth of a degree (65 degrees C is equal to 149 degrees Fahrenheit).

To find that triple point, Cobden's team stretched vanadium dioxide nanowires under a microscope. The team had to build an apparatus to stretch the tiny wires without breaking them, and it was the stretching that allowed the observation of the triple point, Cobden said.

It turned out that when the material manifested its triple point, no force was being applied -- the wires were not being stretched or compressed.

The researchers originally set out simply to learn more about the phase transition and only gradually realized that the triple point was key to it, Cobden said. That process took several years, and then it took a couple more to design an experiment to pin down the triple point.

"No previous experiment was able to investigate the properties around the triple point," he said.

He regards the work as "just a step, but a significant step" in understanding the metal-insulator transition in vanadium dioxide. That could lead to development of new types of electrical and optical switches, Cobden said, and similar experiments could lead to breakthroughs with other materials.

"If you don't know the triple point, you don't know the basic facts about this phase transition," he said. "You will never be able to make use of the transition unless you understand it better."

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How 4 Way Switch Works

11:15 pm

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Physics

A 4 way lighting circuit has made many electricians scratch there heads at some point in time. The magic of the circuit is the  4 way switch. It is a specially manufactured light switch that enables you to put together a lighting circuit that will control a light from 3 different rooms or locations.

The wiring diagram above shows a typical 4 way switch installation.

Here is a schematic of the 4 way switch circuit from the first illustration. Start at switch 1 and follow the black (power), power travels through switch 1 through the black wire (travelers) over to switch 2 (4 way switch) through the 4 way switch, across the red traveler wire over to switch 3 then stops because switch 3 breaks the path. The light is off!

Now we have flipped switch 1, lets follow the power again. Power travels through switch 1 across the red traveler wire to switch 2 then through the 4 way switch to the black wire and over to switch 3, switch 3 passes the power to the black wire going to the light. The light is on!

So far we have been controlling the light from switch 1, now lets go into a different room and use switch 3. The above illustration shows that we have flipped switch 3, you can see that we have broken the power path and the light is now off.

Now lets go into another room and flip switch 2, if you follow the power you can see that the light has come back on. The 4 way switch is feeding power from red wire to red wire now and completing the circuit.

Now lets flip switch 1 again and follow the power. The power stops at switch 3 so the light is again off. 

So there you go, we have turned the light on and off from every room. The circuit is really not that complicated, it is only a 3 way switch circuit with a 4 way switch put in the middle breaking the travelers. 

Just remember to pay attention to the terminals on the light switches, the 3 ways will always have a common, NO, and NC, the common gets the power and the load. The 4 way is always 2 travelers on one side and 2 traveler on the other.

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Tips and Tricks to Make Your Blog Stand Out

10:46 pm

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Physics

It seems like everyone has a blog these days, so it can be really hard to make your blog stand out. For every wildly successful blog with thousands of daily readers, there are dozens of blogs that are lucky enough to get a few clicks a week. If you are wondering why no one is reading your blog, these tips can tell you why and help you stand out from the crowd.

Hone in on Your Target Niche and Audience

The blogs with the highest number of visitors all share the same essential characteristics. They focus on

writing about a single theme of topics and they make sure to write content that is in line with their target audience's interests. Your blog is yours to do whatever you want with it, but if you fail to grasp the attention of an audience, how can you expect it to stand out. Making the blog all about what you want and not about what your potential readers want is one of the most common ways that people irritate potential visitors.

Say Things Worth Saying

The old adage, “content is king” is especially true when it comes to writing a blog. It is not enough just to put a lot of words down on the page and hope people will look at it. You have to focus on writing interesting, informative, and most importantly compelling content if you want to stand out. Establish yourself as an expert in your area and show your readers that you have a lot to teach them. If your content weren’t worth reading, why would visitors bother to stick around?

Have a Good Design

Your blog design doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be visually interesting, functional and free of flaws. You do not have to build your site from scratch, but you don't want to choose a very limited platform either. WordPress is one of the greatest blogging platforms for new and experienced bloggers alike because it is user-friendly and offers a lot of options for customization. You can purchase affordable premium WordPress themes  to add a design flair and organization to your blog. Make sure to keep the design of your blog uncluttered. Keep the number of distracting ads to a minimum, and make sure the content is the most visible part of your blog. Readers aren't too picky when it comes to design, but if your website is hard to navigate or barely functional, readers will not want to stick around.

Find Ways To Bring in New Readers

Getting initial traffic to your blog is one of the hardest things to do as a blogger. If you aren't getting any visitors to begin with, you won't even have the chance to make your blog stand out from the competition. Focus on drawing new visitors to the site with a few simple marketing strategies, and then keep them coming back for more with your stellar content. Your marketing approaches don't have to be expensive or sophisticated, but you will have to work hard to build a steady stream of traffic.

Offer Something of Value

It might seem like a counterintuitive idea to give away your good ideas for free on your blog. However, the best blogs are the ones that offer something of value to the readers. If they don't get any benefit from reading the blog, then you aren't doing your job. Your blog posts should at least be either informative or entertaining, and ideally they would be both. You should strive to make a lasting impression on people with your blog post, by offering useful advice or information, or even by giving them a good laugh.

Read more: http://bloggerknown.blogspot.com/2013/08/tips-and-tricks-to-make-your-blog-stand.html#ixzz2bXg81r1P

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Why Can't the Snakes Cross the Road, Secret Lives of Baby Snakes and Other Questions

12:19 am

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Snakes

Aug. 2, 2013 — Why can't the pine snakes cross the road? Hint: New Jersey traffic might have something to do with it.

Drexel students will bring to light these and other findings about the plight, perils and peculiarities of the Northern Pine Snake in several presentations and posters at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting next week (ESA 2013), based on their research with Dr. Walt Bien's Laboratory of Pinelands Research in the New Jersey Pinelands.

Northern pine snakes are charismatic ambassadors for the Pinelands National Reserve, an ecologically important region -designated as a U.S. Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO and as the first National Reserve in the United States. The pine snakes are large, nonvenomous, docile and beautiful (at least to the non-phobic).

The population in New Jersey is threatened, and the next-nearest population of northern pine snakes is in North Carolina. Protecting these snakes from the human-generated perils in the most densely populated U.S. state can go a long way toward protecting the entire ecosystem they are a part of.

Here is a closer look at some of the Drexel team's research:

Snake surgery is a special skill for conservation

Dane Ward has a rare talent for a graduate student in conservation biology: He is an adept snake surgeon. Many animals are studied using radio telemetry by attaching a radio transmitter to the outside of the body. Radio telemetry is useful for tracking pine snakes because their movements are hard to see through simple observation. But placing a transmitter on the surface of a pine snake's skin would interfere with the animal's slithering movements and feeding via constriction. So Ward has learned to surgically implant the transmitters in snakes instead, through a tiny one-inch incision.

The team has radio-tracked more than two dozen adult pine snakes in recent field seasons. The data have helped them learn more about the snakes' spatial range and behavior and develop population models they hope will be useful for conserving the locally threatened population of pine snakes.

Ever feel lethargic on a hot day? It's worse for snakes.

Radio tracking pine snakes gave Ward and Drexel undergraduate Catherine (Katie) D'Amelio an opportunity to take an unusual approach to studying climate change. Because snakes are cold-blooded, and New Jersey is the northern limit of the pine snake's range, they reasoned that shifts in weather and climate could have an impact on their behavior.

D'Amelio looked at the data from snakes that had been tracked over three seasons, and compared their activity levels with the air and soil-surface temperatures the snakes encountered. At the highest temperatures, snakes' activity levels dropped off.

Comparing the snakes' most active temperature range with predictions of shifts due to climate change, the team pointed out that the timing of seasonal activities may shift in the future -- which could impact their interactions with other species. And they note that freezing to death could be a danger if early-spring warming periods, followed by cold snaps, become common -- something they observed in the spring of 2012.

D'Amelio won a top award at the Mid-Atlantic regional ESA meeting earlier this year for the poster on this work -- earning her a trip to present it at ESA 2013 in Minneapolis.

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What is Causing Power Grid Failure in India?

8:25 am

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s

Power failure hitted India last year, cutting power to more than 600 million people. Here are a few facts about the power crisis:

Power failure hitted India last year due to the collapse of the Northern and Eastern grids, cutting power to more than 600 million people in the populous northern and eastern states including the capital Delhi and major cities such as Kolkata. Around over 300,000 passengers were stranded in over 300 trains across eight states after the northern and eastern grids failed, crippling operations across six railway zones in the country. Here are a few facts about the power crisis in India:

What is an electrical grid?

A power grid is an interconnected network of transmission lines for supplying electricity from power suppliers to consumers. Any disruptions in the network causes power outages. India has five regional grids that carry electricity from power plants to respective states in the country.

What leads to a grid failure?

Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia said the blackout may have been caused by a mix of coal shortages and other problems on the grid. The power deficit was worsened by a weak monsoon that lowered hydroelectric generation and kept temperatures high, feeding the appetite for electricity.

Farmers using energy-intensive water pumps for irrigation to save their recently sown crops may also have pushed up the demand.

If the monsoon does not pick up, the grids are expected to come under more stress. Hydro-power accounts for about 20 per cent of installed power capacity but reservoirs have only 24 per cent of the water they can hold -- just about half of what they carried at this time last year.

Many state governments give farmers free or near-free electricity, triggering a vicious cycle of unviable power boards whose supply is so erratic that farmers are forced to pay a steep price to run diesel pumps and generators. Many states have not adjusted tariff for 10 years.

The industry has advocated abolishing a 1973 Act that nationalised coal mining. Changes to the law are expected to allow professional miners to scout for and mine coal.

India's power shortage

India is slow to set up new power capacity principally because it is short of fossil fuels. Coal is mined hesitantly and natural gas, the other feedstock for power plants, is just beginning to flow in from new offshore finds. The government rations both. 

The immediate response to a power sector in distress - thermal plants are idling a quarter of their capacity - is to give it a bigger slice of the pie. The sustainable response will need the pie to grow overall. 

This January, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh set up a committee to work through the issues that have been bedeviling electricity generation: a host of problems ranging from coal and gas shortages to environmental clearances to the price at which power is sold in the country. 

India's basic energy shortage is compounded by the policy of selling electricity to consumers at politically correct prices. The government-owned distribution monopolies in the states have all but lost their ability to buy power because their political bosses force them to sell it cheap, sometimes free, to voters. This opportunism is hurting the economy: the government estimates unaccounted for sale of power in India, at a third of the total, costs the country 1% of its gross domestic product.

The road ahead

The road ahead for reforms in the power sector is well lit. Introduce competition in all three areas of the business - generation, transmission and distribution - to enhance productivity and contain leakages. Create an independent watchdog that can withstand the political pressures playing on different links of the nation's power supply chain. 

Finally, free up pricing to make consumers more responsible for the electricity they use. This has been the broad course of electricity reforms the world over. India's energy pricing, including transport and cooking fuels, is hopelessly caught in competitive populism. Serious attempt to extricate it will need more grids to trip.

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Buying a Used Car? Be Sure to Flatter the Seller

8:39 am

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Physics

July 26, 2013 — Consumers set high prices when selling their possessions because they feel threatened, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"When consumers consider selling a product they own, they feel threatened by the impending loss. In order to counter this threat, they increase the product's value," write authors Promothesh Chatterjee (University of Kansas), Caglar Irmak (University of Georgia), and Randall L. Rose (University of South Carolina).

Due to a phenomenon called the "endowment effect," consumers seek much higher prices when selling a product they own than they would be willing to pay to purchase the same product.

In one study, consumers were assigned either a seller or buyer role and presented with a coffee mug. Sellers were told they could keep the mug or sell it, while buyers were asked to evaluate the mug. Then, both sellers and buyers were shown a series of words on a computer screen consisting of threat-related words (endanger), neutral words (wood), and non-words (tlun). Sellers responded to threat-related words much more quickly than buyers, and this difference in their response time led to significantly higher selling prices compared to buying prices.

Consumers should be aware that sellers can feel threatened when parting with even the most mundane possessions. Complimenting or flattering a seller can make them feel less threatened and lead them to lower their selling prices.

"Affirming a seller leads to elimination of the endowment effect. Buyers may want to affirm sellers to make them feel less threatened by the loss of a possession and therefore willing to set lower prices. Next time you are buying a second-hand car, for example, you may want to start the negotiation by telling the car owner what a wonderful family she has," the authors conclude.

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