NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade – but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip. This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled […]
Chemical engineering • Food processing • Materials • Mechanical Engineering • Nanotechnology
Imagine a close basketball game that comes down to the final shot. The probability of the ball going through the hoop might be fairly low, but it would dramatically increase if the player were afforded the opportunity to shoot it over and over. A similar idea is at play in the scientific field of membrane […]
Computer science • Energy • Mathematics • Mechanical Engineering
Floating offshore wind (FOW) is one of the most rapidly growing forms of green power. As of 2021 though, there were only 113 MW in operation in Europe, although this figure is predicted to triple by the end of 2024, and escalate up to 10 GW by 2030 and 150 GW by 2050. The current […]
At the end of 2022, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they had observed a net energy gain through nuclear fusion for the very first time. This monumental milestone toward fusion energy represents a huge leap forward in powering our homes and businesses with the carbon-neutral energy source. But converting this scientific achievement into […]
Photo: Gary Bendig / Unsplash We have developed four-winged bird-like robots , called ornithopters, that can take off and fly with the agility of swifts, hummingbirds and insects. We did this by reverse engineering the aerodynamics and biomechanics of these creatures. Our ornithopters have the potential to outperform and outmanoeuvre existing drone configurations with static […]
Twelve years have passed since the world record for rail speed was set. “Operation V150”, which got its name from the target speed for its testbed trainset, 150 metres per second (540 km/h), occupied from January 2007 to April of the same year a team formed by the french railway operator SNCF, the infrastructure manager […]
Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics’ nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines have become in recent years. And while Spot is versatile and […]
Tides are more predictable than winds or sunshine. Then, why are not they already widely used as a source of renewable energy? The simple answer is that designing and building an ocean energy array is quite complex. This complexity has an associated variability in the cost of energy that makes projects difficult to evaluate from […]
Computer science • Mathematics • Mechanical Engineering • Robotics
One thing is designing an object in a computer, and another, quite different, is producing it as a real 3D object. All other things being equal, in general the more curves the designed object has, the more difficult it is to produce. Mathematics can be very helpful in this task. The geometric modeling of a […]
Floating structures are becoming increasingly popular. They are used by several industries, some have been in business for decades, like those dedicated to oil and gas, some are newer, like renewables (wind, wave, tidal), and there are still some other uses, like ports, while there is a constant flow of new ideas that imply their […]