The US Department of Energy (DOE) and Canada’s Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) opened a new 1 Megawatt thermal (MWth) facility to test an advanced process to capture CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants. The new 1 MWth facility will test oxy-fired pressurized fluidized bed combustion (oxy-PFBC) as a means to... Read more →

GS Yuasa Lithium Power (GYLP), a US subsidiary of GS Yuasa Corporation (GYC) has received an order from The Boeing Company for the procurement of LSE190 lithium-ion cells to be used in GEO satellite applications.T he 3.7V LSE190 cells use a lithium cobalt dioxide cathode and carbon anode; nameplate capacity... Read more →

Twelve months after the launch of the “Digital Motorway Test Bed” in Germany, Audi is presenting new technologies for piloted driving and Car-to-X-communication at the German Federal Ministry of Transport. Audi is involved in six projects on the test bed; three of them focus on structural measures; the remaining three... Read more →

Ube Industries, Ltd. and Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation have agreed to a tie-up for their electrolyte businesses in China under a 50-50 joint venture to supply highly competitive electrolyte to the market. The JV will enable the two companies to combine their production technologies and mutually to use their technology resources... Read more →

The Volkswagen Group is having a very strong sales year so far in China. For September, deliveries were up 20.1% to 382,300 units compared to September 2015. For the nine-month period from January to September, VW Group deliveries were up 10.7% to 2,853,900 from the year before. As a result,... Read more →

NASA is developing and validating a system that will allow part of an aircraft’s wing to fold in flight to increase efficiency through wing adaptation. Engineers at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, Langley Research Center in Virginia, and Glenn Research Center in Ohio, are working on the Spanwise... Read more →

Engineers at the NASA Electric Aircraft Testbed (NEAT) at NASA Glenn Research Center ran the new facility’s first test in September. Dr. Rodger Dyson, NASA Glenn Hybrid Gas Electric Propulsion technical lead, and his team used 600 volts of electricity and successfully tested an electrical power system that could realistically... Read more →

Constellium N.V. officially opened a new finishing line at its plant in Neuf-Brisach, France, for a total €180-million (US$198 million) investment. The new line is designed to meet the growing demand for aluminium automotive body sheet. With a production capacity of 100,000 tons, the new 240m (787-foot) long finishing line... Read more →

XPRIZE announced the 27 teams representing six countries advancing in the $20-million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, a global competition to develop technologies that convert the most carbon dioxide emissions from natural gas and power plant facilities into products with the highest net value. The semi-finalist teams propose converting CO2 into... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding up to $80 million for a six-year project to design, build, and operate a 10-MWe (megawatts electrical) supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) pilot plant test facility in San Antonio, TX. The project will be managed by a team led by the Gas Technology... Read more →

NASA and France’s Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aerospatiales (ONERA) HAVE signed an agreement to collaborate on research that focuses on mitigating the effects of civil air transportation noise. Noise is a major issue affecting not only the aviation community, but citizens around the world that live near active... Read more →

Cumulative sales of plug-in vehicles in the US topped 500,000 units in September, according to figures gathered by the US Department of Energy (DOE). The introduction of the first mass market plug-in vehicles occurred in December of 2010 with the introduction of the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf. By the... Read more →

XL Hybrids (earlier post) announced the successful installation of its XL3 Hybrid Electric Drive System in Prince George’s County, Maryland cargo vans. The upfitted hybrid vans are part of the County’s Sustainable Energy Program, which aims to reduce government fleet vehicle petroleum consumption by 20%. With more than four thousand... Read more →

AECOM has been selected to construct the $1-billion, 3-million square foot electric car manufacturing plant for Faraday Future (FF) in North Las Vegas, Nevada. AECOM’s industrial construction services practice is currently engaged in demolition, including mass grading for the relocation of phone towers, fence lines and the installation of temporary... Read more →

DENSO Corporation and Toshiba Corporation have reached a basic agreement jointly to develop an artificial intelligence technology called Deep Neural Network-Intellectual Property (DNN-IP), which will be used in image recognition systems which have been independently developed by the two companies to help achieve advanced driver assistance and automated driving technologies.... Read more →

A team from the University of Science & Technology of China in Hefei has developed a three-step process for the conversion of vegetable oils (triglycerides) into cycloparaffinic and aromatic biofuels in jet fuel range. This process cracks vegetable oils into light aromatics over the zeolite catalyst (HZSM-5(80)), followed by the... Read more →

The UK’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) announced a £7.5-million (US$9.1-million) investment in workplace charging, plus £2.5 million (US$3.1 million) for on-street residential infrastructure. The investment in charging infrastructure is part of a £35-million (US$42.7 million) investment in the ultra low emission vehicle sector. The announcement of £10 million... Read more →

Shorai Inc., a designer, developer and manufacturer of lithium starter batteries, has launched a battery recycling program in partnership with a US-based recycler. Shorai will collect (free of charge) all brands of lithium starter batteries, at their Morgan Hill, CA office. Shorai will take back any lithium-starter battery or lead-acid... Read more →

Tritium, the Australian developer and manufacturer of the Veefil 50kW DC fast charger for electric vehicles (earlier post), will showcase three new chargers on its stand at eCarTec in Munich this week. The new charging products now create a Veefil range of four chargers—with all the chargers sharing Tritium’ technology... Read more →

Recently, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research awarded project funding for “Convergence of Deep Learning and Machine Learning for HPC Modeling and Simulation.” Abhinav Vishnu, research scientist with PNNL’s High Performance Computing group, will serve as the project’s principal investigator, overseeing the effort, which will... Read more →

Head of MINI brand management Sebastian Mackensen and Head of MINI series management Peter Wolf previewed the brand’s coming first plug-in hybrid model; series development process for this car has almost been completed. AUTO eDRIVE standard mode permits all-electric speeds of up to 80 km/h (50 mph), while in MAX... Read more →

Frontt Capital Management Ltd, a Shenzhen-based investment firm focused on developing the intelligent vehicle industry in China, is making a $27-million investment to advance autonomous, connected vehicles and robotic technologies with the University of Michigan, along with industry and government partners. Under the terms of a memorandum of understanding signed... Read more →

In 2014, researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues successfully engineered poplar trees to produce lignin that degrades more easily, thereby lowering the effort and cost to convert wood to biofuel. (Earlier post.) Now, in an open-access paper published in Science Advances, some of... Read more →

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin­-Madison and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) have used directed evolution to nearly double the efficiency with which the commonly used industrial yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae converts plant sugars to biofuel. The resulting improved yeast could boost the economics of making ethanol, specialty biofuels... Read more →

New work from a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Alexander Goncharov has created a new extremely incompressible carbon nitride compound. They say it could be the prototype for a whole new family of superhard materials, due to the unexpected ratio of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Their work... Read more →

XALT Energy has become the first North American manufacturer of Lithium Titanium Oxide (LTO) battery cells to be certified under China’s new GB/T quality control standard. The new and more stringent standards are issued by the Standards Administration of China and replace the QC/T standard, under which XALT Energy’s LTO... Read more →

Hyundai Motor unveiled the RN30 high-perfromance concept at the Paris Motor Show in September. At the upcoming 2016 K Fair—the leading global trade fair for plastics and rubber—in Düsseldorf from 19-26 October, BASF and Hyundai will showcase some of the new lightweighting and high-performance materials technology that went into the... Read more →

A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside has developed a highly reliable and accurate navigation system that exploits existing environmental signals such as cellular and Wi-Fi, rather than the Global Positioning System (GPS). The technology can be used as a standalone alternative to GPS, or as a... Read more →

UK-based electric forced induction specialist, Aeristech, has developed an advanced 12V electric supercharger system, eCharger. The new system makes use of Aeristech’s motor control technology to derive maximum pressure charging utility from the power available in conventional 12V vehicle architectures. The company introduced a 48V electric supercharger capable of continuous... Read more →

Cummins Westport Inc. (CWI) announced that orders are being processed and production of the ISL G Near Zero (NZ) NOx natural gas engine (earlier post) has commenced. The 8.9-liter ISL G NZ is the first MidRange engine in North America to receive emission certification from both US Environmental Protection Agency... Read more →

Sales of the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV have topped the 25,000 mark in the UK, accounting for approximately half of the total number of plug-in hybrids registered in the UK since the very first of such vehicles were registered in 2010. By the time the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV was launched in... Read more →

BorgWarner is supplying the first combination of its variable cam timing (VCT) technologies, including its patented cam torque actuated (CTA) phasers with mid-position lock and integrated center bolt, for Hyundai’s improved Lambda II V-6 engines. The 3.0- to 3.8-liter gasoline engines debuted in the 2016 Hyundai Genesis EQ900, G90, G80... Read more →

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), together with leading petroleum refining technologies supplier W.R. Grace, and leading pilot plant designer Zeton Inc., built a unique pilot-scale facility that can produce biomass-derived fuel intermediates with existing petroleum refinery infrastructure. This pilot plant, constructed in part with funding from the Bioenergy Technologies... Read more →

Honda unveiled the fifth-generation CR-V, America’s best-selling SUV over the past 20 years. The completely redesigned and reengineered 2017 CR-V, going on sale this winter, features the model’s first turbocharged engine and new features and technologies. US car buyers have purchased nearly 4 million CR-Vs since its US launch in... Read more →

Air Products and the National Institute of Clean-and-Low-Carbon Energy (NICE) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that lays out a collaborative effort potentially to work together on hydrogen fueling projects in China. The MOU was signed by representatives of both companies during a ceremony at the opening of NICE America... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) announced (DE-FOA-0001627 NOI) approximately $2 million in federally funded financial assistance for the first phase of cost-shared projects aimed to achieve small-scale production of salable rare earth elements (REEs) from domestic sources of pre-combustion... Read more →

In a program track on Charging Infrastructure at the World of Energy Solutions Conference in Stuttgart, Germany this week, Jesse Schneider (BMW), SAE Taskforce Chair, Wireless Power Transfer and Alignment Methodology, presented the recently published SAE TIR, Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) for Light-Duty Plug-In/ Electric Vehicles and Alignment Methodology (earlier... Read more →

PD Glasseiden, a Germany-based producer of fiberglass; European Carbon Fiber GmbH; and the ForschungsCampus Open Hybrid LabFactory e.V., established under the auspices of the Lower Saxony Research Centre for Vehicle Technology at the TU Braunschweig and Volkswagen AG have formed a joint venture—CarboSax GmbH—to pursue developing, manufacturing and distributing more... Read more →

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an electrocatalyst which operates at room temperature and in water for the electroreduction of dissolved CO2 with high selectivity for ethanol. Their finding was serendipitous. An open-access paper on their work appears in the journal ChemistrySelect. The... Read more →

Wrightspeed Inc., a developer and manufacturer of advanced range-extended electric vehicle (REV) powertrains for heavy-duty applications (earlier post), is gearing up for a commercialization push with the appointent of four advanced engineering and commercialization executives. Tim Dummer, Greg Anderson, Erin Sawyer and Vlad Kalika are joining the Business Operations, Production... Read more →

Speaking on the future of powertrains at the Aachen Colloquium, Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management at BMW AG, Development, said that BMW will enter the fuel cell market early in the next decade, starting with very small production runs. Fröhlich noted that at least until 2025 costs... Read more →

The California Energy Commission and the Department of the Navy signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) formalizing a partnership that supports Navy and Marine Corps installation efforts to develop alternative energy resources and increase energy security and reliability. Following the MOU signing, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations... Read more →

BMW has unveiled the seventh generation of the BMW 5 Series Sedan, which will go on-sale in markets around the world in February 2017. The 5 Series has been a major hit for BMW, selling 7.6 million units since its first introduction in 1972. Further enhanced dynamics, assistance systems, connectivity... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office (FCTO) plans to add $1 million for hydrogen and fuel cell topics related to the DOE Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO)-supported multi-lab consortium on roll-to-roll manufacturing capabilities. The four-lab consortium currently includes Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Argonne National... Read more →

ITT, through its Cannon brand, will introduce a next-generation, ultra-fast DC charging solution that can significantly reduce electric vehicle charging time at eCarTec 2016 in Munich next week. ITT will debut the high-performance, cooled ultra-fast charging DC solution as well as an improved contact system for its global portfolio of... Read more →

Leading geographic information systems (GIS) company Esri is partnering with Waze, the free, crowdsourced traffic and navigation app, to make it easier for governments to begin building intelligent transportation systems in their communities. Governments already using the Esri ArcGIS platform can now quickly and easily exchange data through the Waze... Read more →

On schedule, 24M has successfully delivered an initial quantity of production-size battery cells to NEC Energy Solutions, Inc. (NEC ES), meeting the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) the two companies signed last year at this time. (Earlier post.) 24M is leveraging existing, preferred energy storage chemistry but using... Read more →

Suzuki Motor Corporation (Suzuki) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) have agreed to start exploring ideas that are directed towards a business partnership. In a joint statement, the two companies said that, given the rapid change in the auto industry, the industry is required to work not only on conventional automobile... Read more →

Maxwell Technologies, a leading developer and manufacturer of ultracapacitor-based energy storage and power delivery solutions, has introduced a 51-volt (51V) module, the newest addition to its ultracapacitor product offerings for rugged applications. The 51V module uses Maxwell’s leading 2.85V, 3,400-farad (F) ultracapacitor cell to deliver the company’s highest available energy... Read more →

Gevo, Inc. has completed production of the world’s first cellulosic renewable jet fuel that is specified for commercial flights. Gevo successfully adapted its patented technologies to convert cellulosic sugars derived from wood waste into renewable isobutanol, which was then further converted into Gevo’s Alcohol-to-Jet fuel (ATJ) fuel. (Earlier post.) This... Read more →