Hasta La Ideas

Following its debut at SAE Aerotech about a month ago, the Aeromobil 2.5 has been getting a bit of attention from the likes of Flying and Drive (video report below)… because it’s designed to do both. As the story goes, industrial designer and engineer Stefan Klein has been working on the design for some two decades, logging miles while clocking in at Audi, BMW and Volkswagen; co-founder Juraj Vaculík is credited as an “ad man” and “angel investor.” Based in Slovakia, Aeromobil‘s latest working prototype is the proof-of-concept for the third generation of the flying car, and it’s a doozy.

Unlike the accordion-style wings of the Terrafugia, the Aeromobil features a kind of ‘variable-sweep‘ design (apologies if my aeronautics terminology is off the mark), where the wings neatly tuck behind the cockpit when not in use; when extended, the wingspan is 8.2m. Meanwhile, the 100hp Rotax 912 engine powers travel speeds of up to 160kph on the road and 200kph in flight, with a takeoff speed of 130kph; the discrepancy is more or less proportional to the ranges of 500km and 700km respectively. All else equal, the fuel consumption is about the same in either mode, and according to Gizmag:

Klein says that in car mode the Aeromobil fits into a standard parking space and can be refueled at the same gas station as all the other cars—in other words, it does not require special aviation fuel like most aircraft. The flying car is extremely lightweight, coming in at less than half the weight of a compact car like the Ford Fiesta, which weighs 1,041 kg (2295 lbs). The structure is a steel tube frame with a carbon fiber composite shell, a configuration familiar to fans of racing cars.

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After spending several years in the habitation department at NASA, developing living spaces for the International Space Station as well as multiple off earth exploration vehicles, designer Garrett Finney left in 2009 to launch his dream recreational vehicle, the Cricket trailer. At the recent Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Finney introduced a prototype of the FireFly, an even more compact and utilitarian next-gen trailer, designed to fit in the back of a pickup truck or be towed by a small car.

The FireFly’s interior is minimal, lined with folding bench tops for the sleeping/living surface with room for storage underneath. Although he initially hopes to attract the eco-campers who require the robustness of a trailer and the serious off-roader, Finney also envisions industrial or disaster-relief applications, such as deploying temporary base camps in remote and disaster stricken areas. Working with the small team of Evan Twyford (recruited from NASA in 2012) and Cricket Lead Designer Brian Black, the FireFly was designed in a three-week blitz after several months of sketching, mockups and CAD modelling.

“We worked with one of our local metal vendors to cut and fabricate the majority of the exo-skeleton,” Black says of the development process. “Most of these skeletal components were laser cut and bent sheet aluminum which, when fastened together, create rigid structures.”

Combined with the welded square tube sections, this created a rugged yet light weight architecture. We borrowed many construction methods and materials from our NASA/aerospace design experience as well as our experience designing and manufacturing with the Cricket such as the use of light weight yet highly insulative composite panels. These panels are high R-value, inch thick architectural siding with .04inch aluminum skin and an eps foam core. This use of aluminum and composites allowed us to create the rugged volume seen with this prototype while keeping it weight at just over 600lbs.

Evan Twyford sketching

Vehicle profile iterations balance ergonomic sizing and human factors concerns, such as bunk width and ceiling height, with technical sizing constraints such as truck bed dimensions and under-bench stowage.

Early concept sketching depicts multi-mode use on trailers, in a truck bed, and on a notional lander-leg package. Sketches also outline separate habitation module and frame/decking components with modular stowage/water tank compartments.

Firefly with deployable lander leg package. Concept sketch by Evan Twyford.

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We first looked at the Copenhagen Wheel, a powered bicycle wheel with a self-contained motor and batteries, when it won the James Dyson Award back in 2010. It was developed by a team of students at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, a sort of combination think-tank/skunkworks dedicated to solving urban issues.

A year later, in 2011, NYC-based entrepreneur Niko Klansek introduced a line of electric bicycles called FlyKly to the U.S. market. By 2013 he’d gathered a development team that produced a prototype of a self-powered bike wheel that appears very similar to the Copenhagen Wheel.

It’s not clear if Klansek had been developing his idea with parallel timing to the Copenhagen Wheel, or if there was team overlap, or if something less pleasing was afoot; since we don’t have the facts we must give him the benefit of the doubt. But what isn’t in doubt is that self-powered bicycle wheels are coming. Just yesterday Superpedestrian, a Boston-based company founded by MIT SENSEable City Laboratory Associate Director Assaf Biderman (part of the original Copenhagen Wheel crew), announced they’d landed $2.1 million in funding to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel. “We’re now less than 60 days away from introducing the first-ever commercial model of the Copenhagen Wheel,” Biderman reports.

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Reporting by Ray Hu and Rain Noe

HEVO Power has been making headlines this week following the announcement not of the product itself but the fact that they’ve made the semifinalist round for the SAFE (Securing America’s Future Energy) Emerging Innovation Award. That and the fact that they’ll be launching a pilot program for their flagship wireless electric vehicle charging system in New York City in early 2014. HEVO Power is founder Jeremy McCool’s approach to reducing America’s dependence on foreign fuel—he served in Iraq before recently completing his Master’s in Urban Policy at Columbia—a solution to overcome certain barriers to EV adoption (which we’ve previously explored in relation to BMW 360° Electric). Wired reports:

McCool and his crew opted for a resonance charging system rather than the traditional inductive charging system used by some smartphones, tablets, and retrofitted EVs like the Nissan Leaf.

Traditionally, inductive charging requires a primary coil to generate an electromagnetic field that is picked up by a second coil mounted underneath the EV to juice up the battery pack. But it’s not particularly efficient, with large amounts of energy dissipating through the coil. With a resonance-based system, both coils are connected with capacitors that resonate at a specific frequency. The energy losses are reduced and you can transmit more energy at a faster rate and further apart.

Hevo’s system comes in three parts: a power station that can either be bolted to the street or embedded in the pavement, a vehicle receiver that’s connected to the battery, and a smartphone app that lets drivers line up their vehicle with the station and keep tabs on charging.

To be honest, I’m not so impressed by the fact that they ‘blend in’ to extant infrastructure, I see it as a kind of quasi-skeuomorphism: Granted, HEVO is not a vestige of an outdated sanitation system, but the manhole-cover aesthetic is essentially a marketing hook for a subtle, street-based. (Then again, the idea of transposing a charging port onto the traditional gas tank is as good an example of the S-word as anything.)

In any case, the pilot program—HEVO is partnering with NYU to install a pair of stations for electric Smart ForTwo’s near Washington Square Park—is widely being hailed as a major step towards greater adoption of electric vehicles… ostensibly because New York City is a tougher crowd than, say, the Greater Bay Area. Yet a far more ambitious plan in Gumi, South Korea, is already underway. Engineers at KAIST have developed what (I assume) is a similar resonance charging system, SMFIR, which boasts a whopping 85% transmission efficiency and will be embedded in bus lanes in Gumi, under certain stretches of road.

The other upshot of KAIST’s SMFIR system is that the buses can incorporate smaller batteries, which allows for weight and cost savings, as well as reducing the unquanifiable variable of range anxiety. With a bit of data, I’m sure someone could undertake a cursory CBA of whether installing a widespread induction/resonance charging system—cf. Citibike stations: start dense within a limited area and slowly expand, maintaining the same density—would bring down the cost of (and resistance to) the vehicles themselves, and what the break-even point would be. (It’s also worth noting that only certain battery systems will work with these charging systems.)

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Image via National Archives

Say the words “blimp,” “dirigible” or “zeppelin” to most folk and they get an instant image of either the Hindenburg or Jimmy Page. While Germany’s famously combustible blimp is the enduring picture in most peoples’ minds, The Atlantic recently scoured a host of photography archives to compile some stunning shots. A mere excerpt of these visuals will teach you at least one or two things you didn’t know about blimps. For instance:

There were nose-based blimp-to-building docking solutions. Here’s a shot of British politicians, sometime in the 1920s, boarding a flight out of Cardington, England. I always thought blimps docked only via the undercarriage, which proves I am dirignorant.

Image via Library of Congress

There were experimental aircraft carrier blimps. Here was see a British Royal Navy airship in 1926 and its attendant biplanes that could be deployed mid-air. Below that, a shot of a U.S. Navy blimp doing their own flight test of a similar arrangement.

Image via Deutsches Bundesarchive

[Image via U.S. Navy]

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