Transport & Infrastructure News and Discussions

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weatheriscool
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Candela celebrates the first flight of its C-8 electric hydrofoil boat
By Loz Blain
February 16, 2022
https://newatlas.com/marine/candela-c-8 ... st-flight/
Candela aims to smash electric boat range records with its C-8, using a hydrofoil system that eliminates as much as 80 percent of the drag you'd get from a conventional design. The first prototype C-8 has now flown, and Candela has released video.

The marine sector is going to be hard to electrify. It takes a lot of energy to push through water, as David Hasselhoff would attest, and lithium batteries carry a fairly depressing 2 percent of the energy content of an equivalent weight of gasoline. Thus, electric boats simply don't go very far at the moment.

Candela's solution is to get the hull right up out of the water on hydrofoils. Takeoff speed for the C-8 is 16 knots (18.4 mph, 29.6 km/h), upon which it rises up until nothing but three carbon struts are visible touching the water. Under the surface, the front two are joined by a wing-shaped foil, and the rear terminates in a torpedo-shaped "C-Pod" electric propulsion unit with wings extending out from the sides. These foils are retractable when the water gets shallow, to the point where you can lift the motor out of the water entirely.
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Extreme H is an Upcoming Off-road Racing Series with Hydrogen Cars
by Kris Holt
February 18, 2022

https://www.engadget.com/extreme-h-off- ... 51407.html

Entire Article:
(Engadget) An off-road racing series that uses hydrogen cars is expected to debut in 2024. Extreme H will be a companion championship to Extreme E, an off-road motorsport with electric vehicles that held its first race last year. The two series will hold races in the same locations on the same days using the same format. According to Alejandro Agag, who also founded Formula E, organizers are looking at two options for hydrogen integration: combined racing or full transition.

Development on the Extreme H car is underway and there are plans to have a prototype ready by early 2023. The vehicle will have the same powertrain and chassis that's used in Extreme E. The main difference is that the central power source will be a hydrogen fuel cell instead of a battery.

Extreme H organizers say that the fuel cells will be powered by green hydrogen, which combines water and solar energy. Extreme E uses the same process to power EV batteries, while the paddock runs on a combination of batteries and green hydrogen.
Image
Extreme H
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Toyota and Yamaha are Developing a Hydrogen-fueled V8 Engine
by Anmar Frangoul
February 22, 2022

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/22/toyota- ... ngine.html

Introduction:
(CNBC)Toyota has commissioned Yamaha Motor to develop a hydrogen-fueled engine, with the president of the latter stating that his company was committed to the internal combustion engine.

In an announcement toward the end of last week, Yamaha said the 5.0-liter V8 engine would be developed for automobiles and based on the one used by the Lexus RC F coupe, with alterations made to its cylinder heads and injectors, among other things.

According to Yamaha, the unit is able to deliver as much as 450 horsepower at 6,800 revolutions per minute. The company said it had been working on a hydrogen engine for automobiles for roughly five years.

Yamaha Motor President Yoshihiro Hidaka said that while his company was aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by the year 2050 it also had “a strong passion for and level of commitment to the internal combustion engine.”

“Hydrogen engines house the potential to be carbon-neutral while keeping our passion for the internal combustion engine alive at the same time,” Hidaka went on to say.
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President Biden's Remarks on U.S. Infrastructure in His State of the Union Address

https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2022/

Extract:
(The Whitehouse) America used to have the best roads, bridges, and airports on Earth.

Now our infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world.

We won’t be able to compete for the jobs of the 21st Century if we don’t fix that.

That’s why it was so important to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—the most sweeping investment to rebuild America in history.

This was a bipartisan effort, and I want to thank the members of both parties who worked to make it happen.

We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks.

We’re going to have an infrastructure decade.

It is going to transform America and put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st Century that we face with the rest of the world—particularly with China.

...

We’ll create good jobs for millions of Americans, modernizing roads, airports, ports, and waterways all across America.

And we’ll do it all to withstand the devastating effects of the climate crisis and promote environmental justice.

We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, begin to replace poisonous lead pipes—so every child—and every American—has clean water to drink at home and at school, provide affordable high-speed internet for every American—urban, suburban, rural, and tribal communities.

4,000 projects have already been announced.

And tonight, I’m announcing that this year we will start fixing over 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.
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Research Into Steel Bridges Funded by Three New Federal Highway Administration Grants Will Fortify American infrastructure
March 3, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/945312

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) LAWRENCE — Several awards from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to the University of Kansas School of Engineering will enable research to improve and lengthen the life of bridges, a critical part of American infrastructure.

“Bridges connect our communities, they provide safe passage of people and goods — and when bridges don’t function, communities and the transfer of those goods don’t function, so they’re absolutely critical to our society,” said Caroline Bennett, professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering and Dean R. and Florence W. Frisbie Associate Chair of Graduate Studies, who is acting as principal investigator on two of the new grants.

Bennett pointed to the recent collapse of a 50-year-old Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that injured 10 people as an example of the need to upgrade many steel bridges nationwide.

“These sorts of things are happening with increasing frequency, and when they happen not only does it stop transfer of people and goods but it also really decays people’s faith in our societal functioning and their faith in how our infrastructure works — it decays the faith in this nation,” she said. “All of these projects are focused on improving this. They all speak directly to the heart of making our infrastructure safer, more reliable and better functioning for citizens of the U.S.”
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Improving asphalt road pavement using engineered nano mineral composites
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-asphalt-r ... neral.html
by Swansea University
A novel and eco-friendly nano asphalt binder has been developed by researchers at Swansea University and the Technical University of Braunschweig.

The product generates a new class of warm mix asphalt (WMA) additive that significantly reduces energy consumption while simultaneously minimizing vapors and greenhouse gas emissions during the production of asphalt mixtures when compared to conventional asphalt, it also works effectively at a large scale.

To achieve net-zero carbon emissions, Highways UK is increasing the adoption of WMA as a standard across its supply chain. When compared to conventional hot-mix asphalts, WMA technologies can provide increased efficiency and reduce carbon production, with CO2 reductions of up to 15%. WMAs are produced at temperatures of up to 40°C lower than ordinary asphalt, therefore, switching to them would save roughly 61,000 tons of CO2 each year in the UK, which is the equivalent of reducing 300 million miles of automobile travel.

To address these issues in WMA technology, a team from the Braunschweig Pavement Engineering Centre (ISBS) at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University have discovered the potential for engineered clay/fumed silica nanocomposites to be used as an anti-aging binder that can not only serve to reduce temperatures but also overcome significant limitations caused by moisture susceptibility.
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Airbus flies A380 passenger jet on 100% biofuel for the first time
By Nick Lavars
March 31, 2022

As part of a broader push on part of the aviation industry to reduce its carbon footprint, Airbus has conducted the first ever flight of its giant A380 jumbo jet using 100 percent biofuel. This is the third Airbus aircraft to fly using the sustainable fuel made up of primarily cooking oil, as the company works to certify the technology by the end of the decade.

The aircraft featured in the groundbreaking flight is the Airbus ZEROe Demonstrator, an A380 adapted for use as a flying testbed and one the company plans to also use to test out hydrogen combustion jet engines.

For this particular outing, the aircraft was loaded up with 27 tonnes of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), made mostly with cooking oil and waste fats. This powered the A380's Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine across a three-hour test flight out of the Blagnac Airport in Toulouse France on March 28, with a second flight then carrying it all the way to Nice Airport on March 29.

This demonstration follows successful flights of the Airbus A350 and the Airbus A319neo single-aisle plane using SAF last year. Using the biofuel to now power the world's largest passenger jet marks another step forward for the testing program, as Airbus aspires to bring the world's first zero-emission aircraft to market by 2035.
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/airbus-a3 ... st-flight/
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Buttigieg unveils stricter fuel economy standards for US vehicles
Source: ABC News
New cars in the U.S. will need to meet stricter fuel economy standards, the Biden administration announced Friday.

The rule will require passenger cars, trucks and vans produced for the model year 2026 to average 49 miles per gallon, the Department of Transportation said. It will also increase fuel efficiency 8% annually for model years 2024-2025 and 10% annually for the model year 2026.

"Starting in model two-year 2024, when these standards take effect, Americans buying a new vehicle will spend less on gas than they would have if we hadn't taken this step," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at a press conference at the agency's headquarters Friday.

The administration says the new requirements will reduce fuel use by more than 200 billion gallons through 2050, and estimates it will prevent 5.5 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere between now and 2050.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/butti ... ar-AAVLNoa
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Unruly US airline passengers hit with record fines by FAA
Source: The Guardian

Reuters
Sat 9 Apr 2022 06.48 EDT

An American Airlines passenger who allegedly pushed a flight attendant and spat at crew members has been hit with the biggest fine ever issued by US aviation regulators, and another fine topping $75,000 (£57,500) was issued to a Delta Air Lines passenger who bit a fellow passenger after trying to hug and kiss another.

Since January 2021 when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a zero-tolerance policy, the agency has proposed fines of about $7m for disruptive passengers. Two new fines issued on Friday were the highest yet.

The FAA proposed a $81,950 fine for an American Airlines passenger on a July flight from Dallas to Charlotte in North Carolina, alleging the passenger “threatened to hurt the flight attendant that offered help to the passenger after she fell into the aisle. The passenger then pushed the flight attendant aside and tried to open the cabin door.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -fines-faa
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Every City’s Cycleway Network Should Be as Dense as Road Network, Says American Academic
by Carlton Reid
March 31, 2022

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonrei ... 4ba7a028e6

Introduction:
(Forbes) “People on bicycles want to reach all destinations in a city just the same way that people in cars want to be able to reach all parts of the city,” says American academic Marcel Moran.

“A city’s bike network should be equivalent to the road network,” he told me via a Zoom call.

“The challenge is not where bike lanes should go, but where shouldn’t they go? And there are very few places we shouldn’t have safe bike infrastructure.”

The University of California Berkeley doctoral candidate is a specialist in people-friendly city planning. He has mapped every single one of San Francisco’s 6,399 intersections, pinpointing which have crosswalks. And he has just published a paper on the pop-up “Corona cycleways” of Paris, plotting how planners plugged gaps in the French capital’s growing network of bike lanes.

He believes cities should design for people, not cars, and is unapologetic that this would be considered by many to be an activist’s stance.
Don't mourn, organize.

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