Fuel economy – we can learn to be better, with a little help

One from FIAT: features of the new Panda 4×4 include a really cool smartphone app called eco:Drive Mobile – by syncing the car’s eco:Drive data monitoring system with the smartphone via the car’s USB port, measurements of acceleration, gear shifts and speed are translated into a 1 to 100 personal economy rating. The driver then gets tips on how to improve performance, and the system can track trips on a map, so the driver can compare performance against others on the same route (and even automatically post results to Facebook or Twitter).

eco effort may even save a few pandas

This is a sophisticated version of the feedback data provided directly on the dashboard of some Volkswagen and other cars, which give instantaneous and trip average fuel economy. The extra analysis, considering for example gear changes, has got to be a big help and your correspondent would really like to try this out – it’s stunning to observe that without too much effort it’s possible to cut fuel burn by a quarter compared to ordinary driving, just by accelerating gently, shifting before the revs get too high, keeping it up in 4th or 5th gear and taking an mph or two off of top speed.

Radar alert: wind turbine clutter isn’t just aesthetic

From my technology column at Flight Internationalphoto: Vestas

Wind power may be one of the obvious solutions to the world’s renewable energy conundrum, but the actual generators can create as much noise as they do electricity – and not only from those who question the environmental friendliness of erecting massive towers in formerly scenic vistas. Turbines, in fact, cause visual clutter of more than aesthetic impact, as their whirling blades play havoc with air traffic control radar.

According to Raytheon, whose radar systems form the basis of ATC at many civil and military airfields, the wavelength of signals reflected back to source in normal two-dimensional systems is distorted by the rotating blades.

As motorists caught speeding by hand-held police radar know all too well, this Doppler effect can be used to measure the difference in speed between source and target. However, when the source is an ATC installation, wind turbine blades can cause noise and false targets – amounting to a radar blackout zone.

If a radar installation must look through a wind turbine – or, more typically, an array of turbines installed in the open spaces which may surround an airfield – aircraft can disappear from its view. The UK Royal Air Force has even expressed concern that offshore wind farms pose a national security threat, by offering radar cover for approaching enemy aircraft.

The scale of the problem is, literally, massive – and getting bigger. Lengthening the blades is a good way to improve the low-wind performance of a turbine, but clearly increases the size of the radar target.

A new class of 3MW onshore turbine from market leader Vestas – that will undergo its first installation, in Denmark in 2013 – sits on a 119m (390ft) tower and the blades sweep out a 126m diameter circle, nearly 27% bigger than its predecessor.

And, UK air traffic services provider NATS says it received more than 2,000 wind turbine development applications in 2011 – more than double the previous year. Some 98% raised no objection from NATS, but the others were at least held up over radar “clutter” concerns.

There are, however, several promising approaches to solving this problem. In 2009, NATS asked Raytheon to develop a system capable of overcoming wind turbine interference. Trials of the resulting wind-farm mitigation package of system upgrades began in the Netherlands at the end of 2010, and flight tests have also been made in the USA.

The site acceptance test was successfully completed in October 2012 on the first production kit, at Woensdrecht air force base in Holland, where operational acceptance is expected imminently.

The combination of improved signal analysis algorithms and some equipment upgrades has also been tested at Soesterberg, an airfield some 40nm (74km) southeast of Amsterdam and which is in the vicinity of the 227-turbine Flevoland Polder wind farm.

Brian Cross, Raytheon UK’s head of air traffic management systems, says the before and after effect of a combination of improved signal analysis algorithms and some equipment upgrades has been “phenomenally good”.

By adding a second receiver ahead of the signal processor, Raytheon has been able to add target detection to the radar’s weather channel task, resulting in a “substantial” improvement in radar performance generally; the resulting two-beam system improves low-level performance – that is, at the level where wind turbines are an issue – by a factor of seven, says Cross.

And, he adds, all the upgrades sit within the existing system infrastructure. No new power supply is needed, or other changes that might demand recertification of the system, so the solution is a “straightforward upgrade” that for many locations could be entirely adequate – places, for example, with only a few turbines.

MULTI-LAYERED PROBLEM

However, Cross notes that depending on local geography and system configuration, this advanced solution can be expensive to install. Critically, he says, it has to be recognised that the wind farm problem is a “multi-layered” one, and any cost-effective solution needs to reflect that complexity by dipping into a “toolbox” of appropriate measures. One obvious answer might be to move the radar installation away from a wind farm. Another is to upgrade the hardware and/or software.

Yet another possibility that may be called for in some locations is to add a “gap-filling” radar system to directly address the area obscured by a wind farm. Real-world tests of one such concept are now beginning following a late-2012 installation near the UK’s Cambridge airport, in the vicinity of Wadlow wind farm. This “3D holographic radar”, developed by technology incubator Cambridge Consultants and being refined and marketed by a specially created spin-off company, Aveillant, promises to reliably distinguish between wind farm Doppler returns and aircraft of all sizes and speeds.

Chief executive David Crisp says the system does away with the familiar radar sweep in favour of a flat panel phased array that effectively stares in all directions continuously, with “hundreds” of beams. The result – made possible by computing power that 20 years ago could only have been achieved using a Cray supercomputer – is to produce a 3D image that characterises targets and gives range, direction and altitude.

Crisp describes the technology, originally devised to track shells on military gunnery ranges, as “disruptive” but, he says, holographic radar will not replace standard ATM systems; rather, he adds, it should be deployed as an extra layer of detection in difficult areas.

The chemicals industry is coming from another angle – stealth. Osgram, a consortium of European companies working with EU funding, hopes to develop a radar-absorbing material that could be applied to blades, nacelles and towers to a thickness of 3mm at a target cost of €200 ($260) per square metre. The challenge is to develop a suitable process to make the conductive polymer – polyaniline – but Osgram believes the concept could be effective against both air traffic control and marine radar signals.

Making wind turbine blades invisible to radar would be a particularly elegant answer to one of the main obstacles to expanding wind power generation. To overcome aesthetic objections, however, somebody is probably going to have to figure out how to make the turbines invisible to the naked eye.

Back on track (Gangnam Style)

London 30 December 2012: Year-end, and it’s time for resolutions. So, I resolve to get Space, Time and Money on track. That probably sounds like something I resolved to do about a year ago, but since when is a mediocre record of resolution-keeping any bar to trying again?

As I said back then, this blog rapidly became an outlet for out-takes and take-offs from my work at flightglobal and Flight International, and as I cover a lot of beats that proved to be a recipe for going all over the shop, as well as being rather too aviation oriented. In the intervening year, apart from being rather too busy I made a fundamental mistake and failed to focus this blog on anything more specific than “stuff that forms our socio-economic environment”.

Now, though, I shall do much better, and stick here at ST&M to one of the socio-economic environment-shaping things that I’m really passionate about, which is science and technology. Other stuff may get another blog, but that’s for another day. So, watch this space – I promise to make it worth at least a bit of your while.

–

For what it’s worth, my forecasts for 2012 were – shock! – of mixed accuracy. On China, I did alright. On Russia, not so well (though I did go to Russia, and it was really good fun). I’d call my Euro results mixed – it survives, but the crisis has eased enough to let us wonder if, really, we could actually imagine a sane world without it. Mitt Romney, of course, did not win and neither, sadly, did the Packers.

For 2013, I’m going to make just one prediction. Psy – he of Gangnam fame – will continue to surprise. The man’s got real style, Korea’s time has come and I can’t be the only one who wants to see more of his backup troupe.

 

Spaceflight: stay home, folks

LONDON 30 December 2012: The Financial Times today ran a astute editorial remarking that in the 40 years since the Apollo programme ended, spaceflight has lost much of its power to inspire – but returning to the days of pumping American money into astronaut jaunts is not the way forward. Rather, argues the FT, we need a series of really jolting robotic missions to stir up passion for unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos.

Best viewed from the comfort of mission control (photo: NASA/JPL/Univ of Arizona)

I couldn’t agree more, but as a journalist covering this topic for Flight International I’m sorry to say that I find little comfort in the FT’s call for NASA and partners including the European Space Agency to band together and send robots forth boldly. The fact is, that’s already happening on an impressive scale (Curiosity gets a lot of help from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter and a new tracking station and missions like the spectacular Cassini sojourn to Saturn simply wouldn’t be happening without these two partners), but a lack of political will to maintain funding suggests that the politicians don’t sense all that much popular appeal in robotic exploration, at least in Washington. As things stand right now, NASA is readying a 2013 launch to Mars to study its upper atmosphere and will send a soil-sampling spacecraft in 2016 but the next three missions that might be seen as proper follow-ups to the Curiosity triumph are ESA projects that NASA dropped out of for want of cash; Russia’s RosCosmos agency has, fortunately, stepped into the gap, and NASA may yet get back on board, but the sad fact is that the international effort realistically needed to sustain a Mars strategy is struggling to maintain consistent support. ESA does great work and has the advantage of a five-year budget cycle, but the European and US efforts need each other – that’s the reality of space exploration today.

The other great reality is that whatever hunger there may still be for manned spaceflight is little more than a legacy of the 1960s space race. While the balance of scientific community opinion seems to be that the International Space Station is a valuable research platform, it’s just about impossible to justify the cost or danger of any other manned activity. George W Bush, when seeking a Kennedy moment to give his presidency some momentum, set NASA on a budget-busting romp to a manned Mars mission with a Moon base to be set up as a staging post, but the idea soon hit the budgetary buffers and under Obama has been reduced to the vague notion of maybe visiting an asteroid while dispensing large sums of taxpayer money to space-loving Congressmen’s home districts to develop a massive rocket that may or may not ever fly.

China and India look to be rumbling about a new Moon race for national prestige reasons, but other than proving that they can do what America did 40 years ago would achieve little.

In the meanwhile, private sector projects like Elon Musk’s SpaceX are a long, long way from anything resembling the capability to do more than circumnavigate the Moon (a la Apollo 8), and even Musk admits that his dream of a Mars colony would need heavy government investment in on-planet infrastructure to get started (rather like Britain’s early spending on North America).

And, while several hundred people wealthy enough to drop the cost of a Ferrari on a six-minute ride to very low space have not surprisingly signed up for Virgin Galactic‘s soon-to-be-launched suborbital fairground ride, it’s hardly obvious that such ventures will lead to any large scale demand for trips into deeper space – though the technology may prove to be a fast way to fly to Sydney.

It will be interesting to see how this manned-or-not argument plays out once the current generation of scientists and politicians retire – that is, when the people who grew up with Apollo in their heads bow out. My guess is that financial considerations will keep people firmly on the ground and robots in the cosmos for the next 10 years or so, by which time the new guard will wonder what all the fuss was about.

Britain needs an American approach to Olympic success

London 17 August 2012: Writing this week in the Financial Times, James Purnell, the Labour MP appointed secretary of state for culture, media and sport as Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as prime minister in 2007, has proposed “a blueprint for continued sporting success”. Welcome is Purnell’s observation that UK state funding for sport in schools is not as dire as many believe, and this writer certainly approves of his call for emphasis on sport in schools as part of a strategy for continuing the UK’s run of world-class performance through the past couple Olympiads.

However, Purnell makes three crucial errors in assuming that the UK needs a national strategy for success in sport, that state money – from taxpayers or the lottery – should support elite athletes and that there must be a powerful government minister to drive this strategy.

The American example, in which zero public money supports elite athletes and there is no national programme or strategy for sporting success, should be the basis of an approach to sustaining this most welcome improvement in British performance. I say this because if the objective is to win medals, we corrupt the motivation for participation – which is all that can, and all that should, underpin success at the top level.

My comment on Purnell’s article on ft.com is reproduced in full below:

I cannot more strongly disagree with the assumption that tax or lottery money should go to supporting elite athletes, or indeed to the notion that we need a national strategy. I’ve lived in the UK for more than 20 years now, but was born and raised in the USA . As would be expected, that large, wealthy and sports-loving nation produces lots of world-class competitors, but there is no national programme and it is even a point of pride among Americans that never has a penny of public money gone to support Olympians. That money comes from individual sports federations, sports clubs, sponsors and – even in America ! – the sacrifices and hard work of athletes themselves and their families.

What America does, at the state, county and municipal levels, is put its public money – and public opinion very much supports this – into school sports. The two hours a week of organised sport supposed played by most British school children is, frankly, so far from adequate as to be comical. At my own, quite ordinary, Los Angeles area high school there was no sport you could think of that didn’t have an organised league, proper coach, reasonable-to-excellent facilities, faculty support and serious after-school training several times per week. Here in wealthy Surrey , my son’s rather large secondary school did a bit of football and some athletics.

In short, while the UK may not still be selling off school playing fields, we’ve hardly recovered from that sorry era. The sort of taxpayer-funded, government-driven strategy Mr Purnell wants is just the sort of top-down approach that only a politician could think of. Britain does not need to hear Chancellors stand up in Parliament and announce millions to bankroll Team GB in Rio – it desperately needs to look across the Atlantic and realise that sporting success comes from nurturing the grass roots.

Those grass roots, let us remember, are under everyone’s feet, and everyone benefits from having at least the opportunity to learn the joy of participating in a sport while developing the physical – and mental – fitness that makes it possible. Mr Purnell and his cronies are kidding themselves if they think their system is reaching out to all young Britons – the current government-driven Team GB regime is, instead, all about spending tax money on the elite who can afford, through private schools and private clubs, to develop early-stage talent.

If all we care about is winning medals, maybe the current regime is the way to go; East Germany and China certainly seem proof of that. If we care about spreading the virtues of sport, though, I fear the London 2012 legacy will be just another bloated government department spinning us a hollow tale of British “success”.

Sic Transit Venus

My wife Glenda and I are for a few days hosting our friends Lynn and Nick from Walla Walla, and yesterday we drove out west to Avebury to see the Neolithic stone circle, created about the time the Egyptians built the pyramids and predating Stonehenge. As it happens, we discussed the distinction between contentment, which might be had from taking time to contemplate the beauty of the string of heres and nows we live through, and happiness, which might be missed if one seeks too anxiously all the highlights of the here and now. Thoughts bounded thus, I arose this morning at 4am, about three hours ago now, to seek the Transit of Venus.
It was early and lightly clouded here in Surrey, and the bed was warm and I was a bit wrecked from having been up yesterday at this hour to scout out a location from which I could see sunrise at the horizon. Thinking that to get up and chase the Transit would be to chase in vain a highlight that would merely tick a box on the happiness chart I decided to stay in bed. But while the forecast had been for rain, there was instead some sky showing and I was awake, so at about 4:20 I decided to go – even though the conditions were the same as 24hr before when it had proved impossible to even find the Sun let alone train a telescope on it. Glenda got up and came with me, which says a lot about why we love each other, and 15 minutes later we were up on Chobham Common.
A few minutes later a man and his boy arrived, and before 5 o’clock we had a woman with us who’d just returned jetlagged from Australia and thought she might as well have a go, another younger couple and another woman. All hopeful, we tried for 20 minutes to find the Sun at all behind the clouds, and were eventually fairly sure we’d worked out where it must have been.
We were armed with the sighting scope from our Newtonian reflector and a piece of white card. From the 2004 transit I knew this technique could show the transit clearly, albeit on an image of the Sun all of 5/16″ or so across. Alas, by 5:55 and the end of the transit the best we’d been able to do this time was to put a spec of Sunlight on the card for a few moments.
The clouds simply hadn’t cooperated. But sunrise on Chobham Common is a sight to behold, and for savouring that we feel very content today (if a bit wrecked!). I like to imagine that our Neolithic cousins, who of course never saw a Transit either, often felt the same as the sky lit up.
[For really spectacular pictures, the European Space Agency is hard to beat; see especially their pictures from the Proba-2 solar weather microsatellite.]

Sunrise, Transit of Venus in progress

Simple but effective Transit viewing (just add Sun)

a Transit hopeful

The Colour of Money is Blue

NEW YORK 9 MAY 2012: I haven’t lived in the States for a lot of years now, and some stuff has clearly got away from me. I’ve just had a couple hours to wander around New York after arriving on a business trip, and am staying in the (rather fabulous) Standard hotel at 13th and Washington, in the meatpacking district.
A couple blocks from here there’s a Levi’s store, near Diane Furstenburg (sic), and I thought I’d walk in and see what a pair of jeans costs these days. And, I kid you not, it was like $289. I thought “501″ was the model, not the price, but it’s not far off.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I asked a shop assistant if their prices were normal, or if something special was going on and, fortunately, it turned out to be the latter.
But, as the saying goes, ya’ gotta love it. Levi’s “MTPKG.” shop is a premium outlet (it had best be, given the prices), but in this case that actually means something.
The jeans on sale are all US-made (OK, I’m a bit surprised to learn that Levi’s come from China nowadays) and made from authentic fabrics spun on original mills, and other such extras that don’t feature on the normal department store models. And, you can actually buy authentic reproductions of Levi’s as they were made in years past, like 1944 or 1913 or 18something. According to Khiratullah, the 1978 versions are due soon, which brings me back to my teens, I guess – though the nostalgia won’t extend to the price, which I remember as being a then-steep $30 or so.
Anyway, she says it’s about bringing something back home to the USA, and also supporting some outside, American, suppliers who make denim products or sympathetic items like buffalo hide mocassins. And, she adds, it’s product she can believe in.
Nothing worth believing in comes cheap, of course.

That’s a price tag, almost

Roads aren’t free (and that’s a Good Thing)

Herewith some delightful purity from Britain’s Department for Transport; in a bid to ease congestion caused by roadworks, Transport for London is going to charge utility companies rent on any lanes they dig up. Depending on how busy the road and what time of day it’s being disrupted, the fee could be as high as £2,500 per day.

Transport Secretary Justine Greening reckons the scheme, set to begin in June, will encourage utility firms to work faster and avoid peak travel hours: “Anyone who has travelled on London’s roads knows how frustrating it is to find major routes being dug up in the middle of the rush hour or – even worse – lanes coned off when no one is even carrying out any work.

“It’s not just inconvenient but expensive, costing the economy £4 billion a year.

UK readers will appreciate Greening’s reference to pointlessly coned-off lanes. That’s a problem which goes back at least to the John Major administration in the 1990s, when the government’s response was to set up a “cones hotline” that citizens could ring when they found a utility company had commandeered great swathes of a road for no apparent purpose but to cause a traffic jam. Needless to say, the cones hotline was a lighting rod for frustration and ridicule, and such moral suasion seemed to do little to address what may well be a genuine problem.

The lane rental scheme, in contrast, is pure economic theory put into practice – let’s hope it works.

(Anyone who doubts that utility works and roadway disruption have a special place in modern British culture should watch this 1990s television advertisement.)

Finance gets more American

Here’s an interesting example of a trend we’re seeing in finance – money deals that might in the past have been naturally placed in Europe are moving to other regions. The problem is that European banks are being forced to trim their balance sheets to toughen themselves up against the cold wind of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, and also meet forthcoming regulations on debt to capital ratios that are designed to cut the risk of default in the banking industry. More broadly, European banks are struggling against the general global liquidity crunch to raise as much US dollar finance as they’ve been accustomed to working with.
The most visible aerospace implication of these factors to date has been European banks’ cutback of exposure to new airliner finance deals, whereas in recent years it’s been Europe taking the lion’s share of the debt that keeps the aircraft rolling off assembly lines at Airbus, Boeing, et al. The sale of RBS’s aviation business to Mitsubishi in Japan has been the headline example of this trend, but it’s clearly widespread.
Today, though, we learn that Safran – the French aerospace and security technology giant – has successfully gone to the US corporate bonds market to place $1.2 billion of unsecuredc notes with 7-, 10- and 12-year maturities, at coupon rates of 3.7% to 4.43%.
According to Safran:

“This transaction enables Safran to diversify its funding sources at attractive conditions, to lengthen the maturity of its debt profile and to provide long term funding for the acquisitions made in the past 3 years, notably in the US.

“The placement which was made to a broad group of accredited institutional investors demonstrated the confidence that debt investors have in the Group’s strategy and long term development.”

Confidence, for sure – Safran is borrowing much cheaper than several European countries, probably including France. And, it’s inherently a good thing for a company like this to borrow broadly; stable long-term relationships with lenders in a home region are good things, but for borrowers as well as lenders, spreading risk is a wise strategy for the long term.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 30 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.