Renewables

Mustafa Dinc, Global Director, Automotive Business Development, Vishay Intertechnology, looks at what EV designers need to address in terms of power management and component design.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have developed a type of solar cell that combines two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material in order to harvest a broader range of the sun’s energy. The development could lead to photovoltaic cells that are more efficient than those currently used in solar-power installations, the researchers say.

A form of fast, reliable and low-cost driverless personal transport, developed at the University of Bristol, is now being used by thousands of passengers every day at Heathrow Airport. Researchers from the Department of Aerospace Engineering have removed the queuing and inefficiencies associated with bus transfers to Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport.

In January 2015, WELTEC BIOPOWER started building an anaerobic digestion plant in Loughgall, Northern Ireland. The customer and operator of the 500kW plant is the vegetable producer Gilfresh Produce, which grows various products and processes them into food. The plant is set to reduce the amount of wastage incurred on the site, as well as generate energy to be used in production and to be fed back to the grid.

A creative project from a product design student at London's Royal College of Art is making waves as it combines energy efficiency with modern-day 3D art. The design, which won an iF design concept award in 2014, features two turbines which rotate as the water passes through, creating a twisting, flowing lattice effect.

Harnessing tiny amounts of ambient energy from sustainable sources works well in theory, but are there any practical solutions to achieving it? By Tony Armstrong, Director of Product Marketing, Linear Technology.

  Graphene has the potential to influence many areas of technology, not least of all the future of solar cell design. By Dr Craig P. Dawson, 2-DTech.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Toho Gas have jointly developed a 450kW gas cogeneration system, to be launched into the Japanese market on 1st April. The gas cogeneration system, which is based on a previously introduced 380kW system, achieves a power output of 450kW, made possible primarily through optimisation of combustion and the adoption of efficient components. 

Cree has demonstrated that its SiC MOSFET and diode technologies enable previously unattainable levels of power density in string solar inverter products, yielding efficiencies greater than 99.1% at peak, at 20% of the average size and weight of today’s silicon-based inverter units.

A 100kW automotive fuel cell architecture has been announced by Intelligent Energy, providing vehicle manufacturers with a high performance option for next-gen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs). The architecture has been developed in response to increasing demand for next-gen, high power automotive fuel cells and is the result of extensive R&D undertaken by the company’s Motive division.