Aviation experts said the energetic quality of lithium-ion can be a concern onboard aircraft. "One of the issues with lithium batteries is they get very hot," Freiwald said. "When they ignite, they can burn so hot that Halon 1301 won't extinguish a fire."
Automakers, many of whom use lithium-ion chemistries in hybrids and electric cars, typically operate their batteries with cooling systems. The Chevy Volt, for example, employs a fluid coolant that circulates through 1mm thick channels machined into 144 metal plates sitting between the battery's cells. Other automakers have employed air cooling on hybrids.
Even with cooling, however, lithium-ion automotive batteries have been known to have problems on rare occasions. In 2011, a fire started in a Chevy Volt weeks after government crash testing, causing a ripple of concern. "The chemistry is edgy," Donald Sadoway of MIT wrote in an email to Design News after the incident. "The electrolyte is an organic fluid that is flammable, highly volatile at even moderately elevated temperature and in the presence of metallic lithium, which can form on the negative electrode at high charging rates."
Although it's not known whether the Dreamliner employs battery cooling systems, its batteries are smaller than those of plug-in hybrid cars. A National Transportation Board (NTSB) examination of an auxiliary power battery unit from the JAL Boeing 787 that caught fire in Boston's Logan Airport on January 7 showed that it measures 19 inches x 13 inches x 10 inches and weighs just 63 pounds. In contrast, electric vehicle batteries can weigh more than 400 pounds.
Freiwald said he doubts the two reported fuel leaks are related to the overheating incidents. Those were more likely to have been caused by human error, he said.
Experts who spoke with Design News emphasized that the cause of the problems isn't fully understood yet, and that such incidents need to be put into perspective. "None of these were catastrophic failures," Dietz told us. "The engineering systems provided an alert to the failures and action was taken. There should be some solace in that."
Seems like the batteries are the culprit, but as of now no one knows why. They've x-rayed the batteries, put them through CT scans, disassembled them and checked the associated wiring bundles and battery management circuit boards. As of now, regulators have said that overcharging doesn't seem to be the issue, but we don't know much more than that. We'll have more coverage on this coming up.
max take off weight of 787-9 is 251 metric tons (modification for long distanses 15700km), total force from engines 64.4tons
amazingly 787-3 (not in production) has near 170 tons weight and flight distance 5500km, total engine force 48 tons - look like very different plain, but with same design & engines.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
Now that solar and wind harvesting technologies are a thriving market, researchers are seeking other environmentally related energy sources for which they can create harvesting devices.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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