Boeing 787 Dreamliner Launch

The Boeing Dreamliner was launched for the first test flight yesterday.

The Boeing 787 is around the same size as 767-300. However the 787 is planned to be 20% more fuel-efficient than the 767. The efficiency comes equally from improvements in the engines, aerodynamics and reduced weight by use of composite materials, and the use of improved systems.

20% improvement in efficiency should translate into a 15% saving in operational efficiency.

Each plane can interchangeably use either the General Electric GEnx or Rolls-Royce Trent 1000, due to the design of a common interface. The Rolls-Royce engine was used for the test-flight.

View FCC Austenite in three dimensions

Channel 4 seem to be showing some 3d programs on t.v. the consequence is you can get 3d glasses for free in sainsburys, and you can use them with the Jmol sorfware to view molecular models in three dimensions.

2 FCC unit cells (click image to enlarge)

Tetrakaidecahedra (TKD)

The tetrakaidecahedron can also be called a tetradecahedron one type of tetradecahedron is the truncated octahedron. The truncated octahedron can form three different space-filling tessellations.

Water Powered Car

Reuters are running a story on a car which is powered by water alone.

Lots of interesting information at wikipedia regarding this and previous claims.

The company says it “cannot [reveal] the core part of this invention,” yet, but it has disclosed that the system uses an onboard energy generator (a “membrane electrode assembly”) to extract the hydrogen using a “mechanism which is similar to the method in which hydrogen is produced by a reaction of metal hydride and water”. The hydrogen is then used to generate energy to run the car. This has led to speculation that the metal hydride is consumed in the process and is the ultimate source of the car’s energy, making the car hydride-, rather than water-fuelled.

On Genepax’s english website the company has only revealed that the process uses “a chemical reaction”. The by-line of the website is “Conversion of a glass of water into earth saving energy.”

The Tech-On website seems to have the best technical information about what the company is actually claiming.

Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water. But compared with the existing method, the new process is expected to produce hydrogen from water for longer time, the company said.

Once the hydrogen is produced it is used in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Storing the energy in the form of metal-hydride can be useful if a sufficient efficiency and energy density can be achieved to preform better than batteries or safely storing hydrogen.

View crystal structures

There is a very nice java package which lets you view crystal structures on any computer platform that supports java (Linux, Mac, etc).

Jmol can be downloaded from sourceforge here. Download the latest binary or full package, unpack it and you are good to go.

Either cd into the directory and run ./jmol or add the directory to your $PATH environment and run jmol.

I have a feeling I have referred to Jmol in a previous post but I think I’d only used it as an applet then.

The full version alloys export of the images to graphics formats, as well as lots of options that I don’t understand. You can view molecules in 3D if you have the proper pair of glasses, and you can load crystal structures in the xyz format from sites such as Crystal Lattice*Structures at the U.S. naval research laboratory (note this is very different to navel research). I’m particularly impressed by the ability to change the background colour to white, which is particularly useful if you ever want to print something.