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I suspect that's a market issue rather than a technology issue. Given some of the comments around a shortage of transformers for the upcoming needs of AI and cloud computing it wouldn't surprise me if AI, data centres and grid batteries start shifting to power electronics over transformers in...

Plenty of clever people are working on all these things, AI is the worst it’s ever going to be. The problem of AI running out of images or being re-infected by previous AI generated text and images is pretty solvable. Firstly the models are getting more and better deductive logic put into...

To understand the issue here we have a relatively poor connection at the point where the pantograph head and the wire touch with both occasional arching and small surface areas in contact with each other. When we are moving the area of the wire/shoe in contact changes and can thus cool down...

Archer at the 2028 Olympics. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgnp103zr9o There was meant to be an eVTOL at Paris but it wasn't certified in time (different manufacturer, now bankrupt), Archer is currently flying low rate production aircraft with people on board, they expect to be...

There is a pretty obvious solution to Silverstone and any other similar event that is held infrequently in the countryside, eVTOL. Silverstone is an airfield surrounded by farmland you essentially have unlimited landing space and an incredible amount of "routes" in if you define corridors in...

Given that electric locomotives are frequently ballasted a dual mode battery loco could potentially carry a pretty big battery. For illustrative purposes if we take BYD Seal which has an 82.5KWh LFP battery and scale it up to a 113t Class 99. We would get: 4300 KWh battery 20MWe power output...

I was responding to another poster what stated that there wasn't a strong industry push, I think it is safe to say that there hasn't been a strategy document that has even noted the performance capabilities of BEMUs nor extrapolated into the potential to utilise said performance advantages to...

There is a famous quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”, the car industry didn't lead the charge for electric vehicles and the established manufacturers are now playing catch up. As recently as ~2-3 years ago the IMechE...

That is the sort of target that breeds idiotic solutions, why 75%? This is one of those areas where a "market solution" is needed even if the government puts their fingers on the scale by helping develop specific technologies. Again I suspect such a target will have been done on the basis of...

Well any train with less than ~60-80 people on it is likely less economic benefit than a freight train, with the caveat that some under loaded trains may be facilitating some peak loaded ones and I suspect due to speed differentials on constrained tracks a single freight path might take more...

Several reasons. 1: Performance; if you search for it you can find my high performance BEMU calculations based on class 8XX weights. With todays EV technologies you could get 46,000bhp out of a 9 car train using a battery system that adds no more weight than the bi-mode train. With that power...

Go have a look at the calcs on future BEMU performance and masses based around using car technology. Eventually all trains will be BEMUs even those running exclusively under wires.

That was precisely what I was advocating for as well, I would not advocate for throwing freight off the rails arbitrarily but that some process be used to objectively quantify the relative benefits. I suspect that specific paths fall into a few specific scenarios: 1: Freight that does not...

Since HGVs are very much larger the consequence of them impacting other road users is more likely to causes deaths and serious injuries. The best driver in the world can't stop a pedestrian stepping in front of it and whilst it might nominally be the pedestrians fault it is the HGV bringing the...

One freight train takes 30 HGVs off the road, one passenger train takes 300-600 cars off the road. Road vehicles are in the middle of electrification and will likely beat rail to the punch there. As a rule rail freight should never cost a passenger train path and pricing should reflect this...

I think we'll always be able to improve things, particularly if we get the infrastructure and the rail vehicles enabling each other. Secondly to look more broadly rail will be competing in a space with automation on the roads. Shared automation will enable more road capacity (add extra 0.14...

A few points on this: The economics of aircraft basically boil down to fuel efficiency for most users who highly utilise their aircraft. To put this into context if I improve my engine by 3-5% fuel consumption over yours you literally couldn't give your engine away for free. Improve specific...

That's kind of the point, the design Bureaus could and did fail, not that many people lose work and those that do are likely soon to be working at another design bureau in the same region. The problem with the OKB structure in Soviet Russia was more related to how decisions were made in an...

There is a solution, it's Soviet (and American) one. In the cold war the Soviets had OKBs which were defence industrial engineering design outfits which normally bore the name of their leader (the most famous kept the name even after they retire or died) Mikoyan-Gurevich, Sukhoi, Tupolev...

The most recent BYD car platform supports peak charge rates of 10C so a battery charges at a rate equivalent to 0-100% in 6 minutes. Obviously this rate cannot be maintained for the entire charging of a battery but non the less a 10-90% charge can be done in 10 minutes. At this rate of charge it...