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Diesel-powered aircraft Awesome flying toys A flying car you can buy today 1.3Gbps Wi-Fi Stop eating forever
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HOT GADGETS
Wh At’S ne W / conceP t S & Protot yPeS
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sToR y By lindS Ay h Andmer
B: Hybrid Carcopter Custom flight controller 4x brushless flight motors Brushless drive motor 11.1V 2200 mAh LiPo battery HD Camera 15-minute run time $500 (est.)
Hubs Heavenward
A flying cAr thAt APProAcheS the Problem from the inSide out
kay, so PopSci has promised flying cars for a long time, and while the ultimate commuter flitterjalopy is yet to appear, we can console ourselves with an RC flying car like no other. Built by a young boffin in the UK, B (just B) is a totally unique hybrid car and quadcopter currently on Kickstarter. The design lets you switch from high speed driving to flying on the go, meaning totally crazy stunts are possible. B is built around four high-power brushless electric motors driven by a sophisticated onboard flight controller. The motors are mounted inside the huge 22cm wheels and also have flexible rubber propeller savers for extra protection. A separate electric motor drives the rear wheels, while the fronts use servo controlled Ackerman steering.
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The wheels are one of the most interesting and important parts of B and make the entire project possible. Rather than normal wheels, B uses custom rim-mounted wheels to give enough space for the propellers inside. These driving rings are mounted on a flexible support structure to make the wheels shock absorbant and incredibly robust important during crash landings. The large wheels also mean B can handle tough terrain and tall obstacles with ease. The body itself is made from polycarbonate and will have interchangeable shell designs. As the wheels are powered by a
separate electric motor to the propellers, you can switch between driving and flying on the go. Taking off is an simple as firing up the quad rotors and the controller automatically switches to aircraft flight controls. Pilot control is achieved via a standard RC controller and has a range of at least 300 metres. B also includes an HD (1280 x 720) onboard camera that can record all your thrills and spills. The whole shebang is powered by a 11.1V 220 mAh LiPo battery that gives an average 15 minute run time. B also has some potential future upgrades under consideration, including the ability to vacuum-attach to and drive up walls and ceilings, waterproof water landings and a smartphone controller app. At the time of writing B was closing in on its funding goals so crack out the credit card and get ready to be flydriving by the end of the year. Toy flydriving, we should specify. Final pricing has not been released, but expect to pay up to $500. now all we need is for someone to turn this into a full-size people-carrying vehicle to finally realise our long-held dreams of flying and driving at once...
WH AT’S NE W / REINV ENTIONS
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STOR Y BY LINDS AY H ANDMER
Oil Burning Wings HOW DIESEL AIRCRAFT ENGINES ARE MAKING A SURPRISE COMEBACK
W
hen you think of powered flight, heavy slowturning diesel engines don’t exactly spring to mind - at least compared to the otherwise ubiquitous petrol models. But diesel engines actually have a history as long as aviation and were used in some of the earliest aircraft. Now, the rapidly rising cost of fuel has once again pushed diesel aviation into the limelight. In aviation, diesel engines are used for propeller-driven flight, and in the early days were a real alternative. But then turboprop engines came along, and diesel fell out of favour. Today though, turbos are commonplace in car diesel engines, and are now being adapted for flight. 26 / P OPU L A R SC I E NC E / JU LY 2 0 1 3
A little history: in the 1920s a number of diesel engines were developed and used in aircraft, though they were much more popular in airships. The ill-fated Hindenburg used diesel engines - produced by DaimlerBenz. Many early diesels were aircooled, employing radial designs similar to gasoline engines of the time (when we’re talking fuels, “gasoline” is a more
Thanks to the development of small turbochargers for diesel engines, they are once more considered practical for lighter aircraft. Plus the lower cost of fuel is a major attraction.
technically useful term than “petrol”). Two stroke engines were also popular due to better power outputs. Early diesel engines were favoured for the very low fire risk of the fuel used - diesel does not produce explosive vapours and will not ignite if spilled. In fact, a demonstration flight of a gasolinepowered airship R100 was rerouted JUNKERS JUMO 205 Despite the questionable name, the Junkers Jumo 205 was one of the first and most successful aircraft diesel engines. First produced in the 1930s, the 205 was used in a range of aircraft that included numerous WWII era flying boats and airships. The 205 used an unusual 2-stroke, 6-cylinder, 12-piston configuration that produced 647 kW at 2800 RPM and weighed 595 KG. Sadly the engine proved unresponsive in combat and prone to failure at maximum power and its use was limited to civilian aircraft and airships.
WH AT’S NE W / REINV ENTIONS
WN to Canada instead of India as it was believed that the heat of a tropical flight would prove too dangerous with petrol fumes. Diesel engines were preferred for their fuel efficiency as well as safety. To this day, diesels offer excellent fuel consumption and higher density fuel, meaning you can go further on the same-sized tank. Yet despite the early popularity of diesel, further development of gasoline engines throughout WWII saw the oil-burners start to fall out of favour. One of the major drawbacks of diesel engines is low power-to-weight ratio - the high compression ratios that improve efficiency mean that the engine has to be built very robustly and therefore weighs more. And during the war, weight, power and speed were more important than efficiency. After WWII, gasoline prices were so low that efficiency was not a great concern and the lighter more powerful petrol engines took over. In more modern times, the focus on jet and turboprop engines meant that diesel engines for aviation use saw little development. But things are changing. Rising aviation fuel costs (especially in Europe) are sending engineers
back to the drawing board, and research into modern diesel engines for aviation is exploding. Er... not literally. As it happens, diesel fuel is also easier to transport, buy and work with in remote or undeveloped locations. With this in mind, a number of companies are currently building modern diesel aircraft and engines that do away with many of the negatives of diesel. Many of these new engines can also run on kerosene, commonly used as jet fuel. To speed up the process, proven diesel technology and engines from cars is being used to produce aircraft engines - turbos being a key tech to boost power. While you won’t see diesel engines replacing the power plants on jet airliners, engines are being produced to retrofit to smaller aircraft such as the very popular Cessna 172 and Piper Cherokee. Even NASA is getting in on the game, and is developing its own low cost small diesel aircraft engine. While it will take some time for diesel engines to become as popular in aviation as they are in automotive uses, we can look forward to a future of better efficiencies and less pollution.
LEADED FUEL
Most small gasoline aircraft run on AVGAS, a high octane fuel similar to petrol used in cars. Unlike automotive fuels which banned the use of lead in the 70s, AVGAS continues to use tetraethyl lead. This potent neurotoxin helps improve combustion stability but contributes to chronic lead poisioning - an issue especially dangerous with children. Diesel engines do not require leaded fuels, reducing the amount of lead released into the atmosphere.
DIAMOND DIESEL DA42
WORLD’S LARGEST ENGINE While it used on a boat, not a plane, the largest diesel engine in the world is Wartsila Sulzer RTA96-C that makes 84,420 kW of power and 7,603,850 Newton metres of torque! It’s a 14 cylinder, two stroke turbocharged engine that spins at a leisurely 22 - 102RPM and has a displacement of 25,480 litres. Just the crankshaft
alone weighs 300 tons, while the entire engine comes in at 2300 tons. Around 160 grams of fuel is used for each cylinder per cycle. Thanks to its large thermal mass and fuel injection technology, it’s one of the most fuel efficient engines in the world, for power produced. Typically the Wartsila is used in ultra large container chips, such as the 397m long Emma Maersk.
Using a modern turbocharged diesel engine based on existing automotive engines, the Diamond DA42 brings excellent fuel efficiency to light aircraft. While slightly heavier than an equivalent gasoline engine, the AE300 uses a turbocharger to get 125kW from two litres. At cruise, the Diamond uses 40 litres of fuel per engine to flit along at 150 knots. It also reduces emissions compared to other aviation fuels. While heavier than a petrol engine, the 185KG A300 is much lighter than aviation diesels used in the past. The DA42 uses twin engines and can maintain level flight and land on one engine if the need arises.
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popular science
T h e Th r ee M o sT C r iT iC a l av iaTio n advanCe s Th is Ye ar Designers have a new generation of enabling technologies R F ID Tags A regular addition to cellphones and bank cards, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are creeping into airplane cabins. With tags in life vests, seats, medical kits, and other frequently inspected equipment, attendants can cut down inspection times tenfold, saving money and improving plane turnarounds.
Ca R bo n -F I beR a I R F R a m es Carbon fiber is much stronger and stiffer than aluminum. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was the first airliner to use a predominately carbonfibre airframe. The Airbus A350 will join it this summer. The lighter frames allow increased fuel efficiency, and a stronger fuselage allows more comfortable cabin pressures.
baT TeRy s en so Rs Batteries are little black boxes of chemistry, and when they fail, it can be hard to diagnose the problem. Scientists at PARC have embedded batteries with fibre-optic sensors. With internal data, engineers could optimise performance in real time or pinpoint the source of a problem to fix the trouble in future designs.
COURTESy EPFL. OPPOSITE: COURTESy TERRAFUgIA
skynet Researchers in Switzerland recently developed a concept to use a swarm of UAVs as a local communication network for emergency workers in disaster areas.
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SELF
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SCO T T LYNCH
VO LU N TEER FIR EFIGH TER S COT T LYN CH’S NEX T B O OK, T H E R EPU BLI C OF T HI EV ES, WIL L H I T SHELVES IN O CT O BER .
PICKL E- JA R TECH NO LO GY hasn’t moved an inch in nearly three hundred years, and the cap on the jar in my hands won’t move either. The kids find it hilarious, and their fingers fly above the table as they sketch ghostly images for my benefit. My visual augments display their bright illusions in the air around me—there’s the framework of an unlikely Rube Goldberg device, along with a caricature of me caught in the grip of a huge anthropomorphic pickle jar about to twist my head off. I grin and fire back with a double nod of my head, the signal for the house’s backbone computer to upload the week’s chore schedule to their visual augments. While they flick their eyes over the words of Parental Writ (invisible to me), I finally manage to pop the jar open. A satisfying scent of brine and mustard fills the air. Dinner is classic American comfort food from my childhood: tomato salad, garlic naan, flash-fried wasabi chicken. The pickled cucumbers, bell peppers, and okra are from our garden, laid down in rows beside In 2012, the solar tarps. researchers The backbone comp banishes the light successfully created photosketches and seals the family’s network connecvoltaic fibres tions behind emergency-only courtesy walls. from silicon. The outside world goes away for the day’s big formal meal, and the assorted information scrolls and data overlays behind everyone’s eyes begin to unroll gibberish. For those networked since toddlerhood, total disconnection is anything but restful, so the backbone comp temporarily supplies meaningless data that can be ignored. Enwombed in soothing white information, I smile and pass the pickle jar around. CI T Y
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IAN MCD ONALD
I A N M CD ONA L D L IVES IN BEL FAST, N O RTHE RN I R EL A N D. HIS L ATEST N OVEL , BE M Y ENEMY , WAS PUBL ISHED IN 2 012.
TH E GH OS T S A RRI V E D in 2014 when Hakon Evevoldsen first kissed his wife, Ales, over a flat white at the Tim Wendelboe roastery on Grüners Gate in Oslo and pinned the photograph to Thissis, the then-new Augmented Reality app that turned streets into social history. Within a year, every building in every city in the world was overlain with pictures, posts, comments, poems, stories of love and hate, hope and failure, life and death, all accessible to every passerby: first through AR glasses, now through neural implant. Over The first years, decades, centuries, each street bionic-eye and building accumulated layer upon implant to restore sight layer of the lives that passed through in patients got or by them—sometimes a moment, FDA approval like Hakon’s kiss, sometimes a lifein February time. Now, in 2298, every city is 2013.
many cities—histories and lives stacked on top of each other. Sometimes buildings, sometimes whole districts have gone, or changed, or flooded, but the ghosts remain—the ghosts of people, the ghosts of the buildings. Walk down any street: The walls whisper, We lived here. We each live ten thousand lives, ten thousand loves. WORK
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NANCY KRESS
NAN C Y KRESS LIVES IN SEAT TLE. HER B O OK AF T E R T HE FALL, B EFO RE T HE FALL, DURING T HE FALL WON THE 2 012 NEBUL A F OR BEST N OVELL A.
THE MON ITOR A L ARM woke me at 5 a.m.: problem in a desalinisation plant supplying fresh water to New York. The robocrew couldn’t repair it, and I couldn’t fix it remotely. Groggily, cursing the AI that is always promised but never quite arrives, I boarded the maglev train.
5 6 / P OPUL AR SCIENCE / J ULY 2013
FEAT URED ARTIST
DAVID PALUM B O
It was crowded with people going to the floatingpavilion beaches over lower Manhattan, with all its crafts, hologram entertainments, musicians, specialty cooks, sex workers, and VR parlors. The three-day workweek gave everybody so much free time that half of all jobs are leisure-related—no other way to create full employment. My grandfather hated the Uniform Wage Act, which enforces equal wages for everybody so that even the CEO of Asteroid Mining makes the same salary as I do. I used to tell Grandpa, “Would a revolution have been better? Because that’s what we’d have got if we didn’t restructure the economy and curtail population growth.” He could never see it, but the new system works. The desalinisation plant contained only bots: operations bots, cleaning bots, repair bots, security bots, all built atomby-atom with nanotech. I was the first human on-site in three months. After I found and fixed the software problem, I stopped at a black-market place to buy my daughter a genemod pupcat. Technically illegal—but so cute! When it
Demographer James Vaupel advocates that adults work only 25 hours a week, but until they’re 80.
“Though food and basic needs are relatively unchanged (and abundant), the social aspect of the family at dinner is unapologetically isolated as each individual pursues distractions.”
barked, its implanted software translated the bark into words: “Pet me!” Half a week’s salary, but Cassie will love it. After all, what’s money for? WORK
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IAN T REGILLIS
IAN TREGILLIS CONSORTS W I TH SC IENTISTS, W RI TERS, AND OTHER DISREPU TABLE T YPES. HI S N OVEL N E C E SSARY EVIL CAM E OU T IN APRIL .
JOIN THE N ERE RE VOLUTION! Clean water is a fundamental human need that unites our far-flung species: those of us who remain on Earth, those colonising the asteroid belt, and even those en route to the stars. But the
JU LY 2013 / P OPUL AR SCIENCE / 57
Build a squirt cannon with PVC pipes
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EXTERMINATE! Jim Rossiter hacked a six-channel R/C remote to toggle the Dalek’s lights, swivel its head, and move its eye and arms up and down.
YOU BUILT WHAT?!
Evil Alien Cyborg THE ULTIMATE ANTIHERO FROM A SCI-FI TV SERIES
D
espite his devotion to Daleks—those cruel, armor-clad extraterrestrials from the TV show Doctor Who, now in its 50th year—Jim Rossiter has no interest in annihilating other civilisations. The 57-year-old Aussie just likes how the aliens look. After decades of building radio-controlled vehicles, Rossiter made his own eerily accurate Dalek, right down its screeching battle cry: “Exterminate!” A typical Dalek resembles a giant saltshaker outfitted with a ray gun, a menacing eye on a long stalk, and a third appendage shaped like a sink plunger (which, on the show, can suck its foes to death). Beneath the exoskeletal armour lives a tentacled mutant soldier whose mission is to destroy all other life. Still, Daleks have an unusual B-movie charm that inspires fan adoration. Rossiter, a machinist by trade, found himself part of a global community of passionate Dalek builders who share plans, tips, and tricks, including advice about 3D–printing replicas of rare 1960s ray guns.
STOR Y BY GREGORY MONE PHOTOGR APHS BY JIM ROS SITER
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TIME 14 Months COST About $2,000
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WAR NING We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.
EDITED BY DAVE MOSHER