Ian

Yes but that requires a custom roll and $$. Standard roofing iron is suitable for a 12m bend. Some types will do 8m without artefacts.

4 hours ago, RFguy said:

Preferred option is on site poured and tilt up  concrete, but I cant seem to get the proposed contractors mind on the job, the has too many late running jobs right now due to wet and boggy condix. they can do four tracks. 

I worked on a number of tilt up concrete construction jobs while I was a uni student and really liked it as a building process. It was never mm accurate and there was lots of optimistic packing when the slabs were tilted. However the sites have aged better than I have over the intervening decades.

I'm a bit less enamoured by concrete at the moment just because I've become a bit more worried about CO2 but there are a lot of pros. Maybe there's a grant somewhere for geopolymer using volcanic tuff. https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=a27746a7-775e-45c9-957a-e8ba0d2e636f&subId=565096

I was playing around recently trying to figure out if you could build the old style hangars cost effectively using glulam arches. A glumlam arch using 10MPa laminates gives about a 50:1 span capability. Standard corrugated iron has a minimum spring curve radius of about 12m so skinning uses standard materials and your height is about 6.5m. Doors remain an issue however at least you get to use some of the area closer to the boundary of your site.

What design/size hangar and door combination did you choose and would you care to share the budget? 

1 hour ago, turboplanner said:

In relation to our discussion about EV charging in Multi Unit complexes, I asked the opinion of a professional fire services engineer.

 

He said:

“It’s a huge problem, just cannot happen. This is the problem with politicians and ignorant narrative.

I don't really rate your fire services engineer. This is a henny penny type argument, it is a basic infrastructure problem and it's an easy problem to solve from a design perspective, electrical engineers design standard circuit types to be deployed in these environments which are specified in Australian Standards, if a standard can't found it should designed by a qualified engineer. For example in some environments low smoke flame retardant non-toxic insulation TPE/TPU is mandated (specified in Australian Standard). Sounds like it would be suitable for deployment in an underground car park with limited insulation. (We did have a discussion earlier of whether there's a difference between a university qualified engineer with a BEng or someone who has put the word engineer in their title)

The technology to solve the peak load problem exists and has been in existence for years and yes even Governments know about it. Essentially it's a modern version of off peak power but smart enough to tell the difference between I need the car charged now or I need the car charged by 9am tomorrow.

https://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid/electric_vehicles.html

Unsurprisingly power companies are also  looking at using your car batteries to stabilise the grid https://www.agl.com.au/residential/energy/electric-vehicles/smart-charging-trial, I wouldn't participate in this unless there is a very large payback, your car batteries wear out.

The other option is experimental, especially if CASA allows non-builders to maintain. Different set of risks

https://saaa.asn.au/courses/mtc-amt3-advanced-endorsements-permissions-to-maintain/

4 hours ago, BrendAn said:

do a bit of research. 82 people in australia have been found with ebv after astrazenica jabs. i have blood tests 3 times a year and this has never been mentioned before i got vaccinated.

You'll have to point out the research papers which show vaccines have caused EBV in 80 people in australia.

As far as I know there are a couple of cases of COVID reactivating EVB.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35349757/

https://immunityageing.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12979-021-00252-x

However, it now seems that “long COVID” could also be related to reactivation of the Epstein Barr Virus (EBV), which lies dormant in a very high percentage of the population

4 hours ago, BrendAn said:

i have never had glandular fever . thats what i am saying. my blood tests have started coming back with it since i got vaccinated and i am not the only one.

You may have had EBV in the past and recent illness of stress may have reactivated it. Or you simply may have been exposed to it recently. I doubt that a vaccine is going to give you EBV. It would take some pretty messy manufacturing controls for that to happen.

9 hours ago, kgwilson said:

I couldn't see it at all till I went full screen. Wow that thing is fast. The G forces must be incredible.

Below is another good video on the theory and story behind the dynamic soaring record which is interesting but a little more esoteric. Who would have thought supersonic airflow would cause a glider to crash. I just like the sound of it going through the air. In it he says that the G force meter topped out at 120G

It isn't like an ordinary glider weight isn't so much of an issue but strength so it can withstand the G forces. I'm surprised that they don't crash more as it's moving so fast.

13 hours ago, BrendAn said:

well i have had 2 astrazenecas and a moderna, now my blood tests keep saying i have glandula fever. it started not long after my third vax. i do not have it but my blood tests say otherwise.

If you're testing positive, the test is picking up the antibodies that you have, so you've been exposed to the  virus . Nothing to do with COVID it's a common infection.

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) antibodies are a group of tests that are ordered to help diagnose a current, recent, or past EBV infection. EBV is a member of the herpes virus family. Passed through the saliva, the virus causes an infection that is very common.

12 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

Old-fashioned thinking; not long ago critics claimed steam trains could never go faster than a horse.

Wind-powered craft Can be faster! 

Yes I used to sail cats and was wondering if anyone would be pedantic enough to call some of the high speed records 😉

How about "In the majority of situations, powered craft will be significantly faster than wind and solar craft". This allows for world speed records on water, air, ice and land.

You missed the wind powered dynamic soaring speeds of 548 miles an hour on a very good day.

11 hours ago, BrendAn said:

I can't see solar being able to propel a loaded vehicle with a family in it very far at a time. The electric vehicles that have crossed the Nullarbor are feather weight single seat contraptions that pick the best time of year to do it. . Some days you can have a 30 kn headwind .other times it is overcast and raining for days on end. That is the challenge I think. What do the solar cells do in those conditions. 

The energy flux of sunlight reaching the surface is about 1kW per m2 and assuming that you have 20% solar panels that about 200W/m2

Compare this will a 200kW subaru WRX and you can see that there's an issue. A car moving at 100km/h requires about 20kW on flat ground so you need an area of about 100m2 ie 10x10m to cruise on flat ground, at midday.... It might be a bit difficult to fit in the garage.

If you had a  local battery with 90% (so make the panel 120m2 and less than optimal charging times) charging efficiency you need to park for an hour at ok generation times (9am-3pm)  for every hours travel.

Most houses with solar don't have panels of this area or mounted at optimal angles. But over a number of days house solar will charge a car.

Solar and wind are diffuse, that's why sailing boats are slow compared to motor boats.

I think that the Government should have done the "Australia Card" properly as a smartcard and collapsed medicare, banking, drivers licences, pilots licences, building access, computing credentials and ASIC cards back into it.

I recently had to sign up to the ATOs mygovid as a company director as yet another form of identity but I can't make it subordinate to my mygov identity.

A central Gov id could have been voluntary allowing those who want to carry 50 different things around the option of doing so.

3 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Take vaxing as an example... what is wrong with refusing a vax and then catching the disease and dying?

What you've identified is not the issue with not vaccinating. I fully support people right not to vaccinate be it on the basis of a conspiracy theory, it being banned by the pixes at the bottom of the garden or on good scientific evidence.

However I don't support those people being able to participate in functions where they pose a risk to others such as healthcare, teaching, policing and interacting with the public on such things as RPT when there is a heightened risk of transmission as their belief system is putting others in danger. If the belief is based on good scientific evidence eventually logic will prevail however if it is because of the first two reasons, basically you're out of luck.

Read the story on Typhoid Mary to understand the risk a carrier can pose to others. I still find the final solution somewhat harsh but the reality was that it achieved a greater good as some estimates put the number of deaths caused by her at 50.

14 hours ago, BrendAn said:

Seriously. He was taking the p15s out of the Greenies that harp on about electric cars when there is a charging station running on diesel. Nuclear power is what Australia needs not all that solar crap you are talking about.

Seriously what Australia needs is both, it's not an either or thing. Solar power is cheap up to a certain percentage of your grid, especially when you have consumers who only care about cheap power not intermittency. Think of a swimming point with a salt water chlorinator as long as you get about X hours per couple of days you're sweet.

However when you're wringing the neck of a process which needs 24x7 power to provide a return on capital its a different story. Think of aluminium refining or ammonia generation or even H2 generation of course you'll buy cheap solar power when it's available however you need a low cost continuous power solution to fall back on. Fossil Gas or Hydrogen is neither cheap not carbon neutral, neither is battery power of scale that you'll need.

Of course you could say well just turn off the refining during the night or dunkelflaute periods however unfortunately many of these components are damaged by cycling processes. And also you're not generating the return on capital of the equipment when it's off so from a business perspective it stinks.

It will take at about 10 years to bring nuclear generation online assuming broad based cross bench support and consensus politics unless of course small modular reactors turn out to be economic however

By the way that generator is powered by biodiesel rather than fossil fuel so its powered by newly captured carbon new sunlight not dinosaur sunlight.

But is does give some some indication of the footprint difference required for a solar-battery-storage solution which would be the size of a couple of a number of tennis courts compared to a bathroom size footprint.  Getting off fossil fuels will be very hard and if done poorly expensive.

1 hour ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I don't like any of this stuff. It reeks of excessive use of power to me, like you would expect from a fascist state.

Nobody was hurt, yet a bloke is going to jail for bureaucratic reasons.

I'm not so sure, my take is the guy is simply a clown and thought he could make a quick buck. Until he was caught he was boasting about how clever his scam was. Not much different from a someone pretending that they're a doctor, policeman or engineer.

It's not a simple case of bending a few rules, he was actively recruiting work that he knew he was unqualified to offer without the correct training or permits.

Creating areas for plugging in cars is not an enormously difficult piece of infrastructure work. If you really want to run a cable from your house you can already buy simple footpath safe covers which are approved in Australia, they're used in the building industry already.

The whole henny penny issue of "not enough charging points" is lets face it, pretty easy to solve and is only required for inner city areas without offstreet parking which isn't the majority of Australian car owners. City planners want residents of high density housing to catch public transport.

The extra generating capacity and load on the grid is a much more difficult, especially given the fact that fossil fuels are being progressively phased out. Cars tend to be at home during the evenings and at work during the day when solar is generating cheap power. Given that solar and wind often generate more power than the grid is absorbing, are you going to pay people to charge their cars during these peak times to take power off the grid? If so who's going to pay?

Services and infrastructure will adapt, often in an unexpected manner and often to the chagrin of city planners and Governments.

A good example of adaptation is the creation of the suburbs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb historically these were created by better transport options and now 70% of Australians live in the suburbs. Given that most people tend to like to live in a house houses compared to apartments this trend will accelerate now that many workers have demonstrated the ability to work remotely as the requirement to commute has evaporated for this set of workers.

Property developers and city planners have been actively marketing the concept of "liveable cities", with convenient local shops, high density housing and mass public transport, prizes are given for the "best cities" which demonstrate "high density" services however these are sponsored by vested interests.  Large active marketing budgets trick people into buying into this concept, as the profit margins are better on apartment blocks, and it allows Governments have large centralised service centres such as industrial hospitals. However given the choice people pick free-standing homes, views and larger living areas. Economically this preference is easy to demonstrate, the percentage of high income earners living in apartments is significantly lower than the general population. The whole e-working concept will create a second wave of urbanisation as knowledge workers can now live further from their "work offices".

Road rage at petrol station.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/knife-pulled-out-during-petrol-station-confrontation/5c3153d2-6f53-4323-bd3c-13f8a56541ac

Rage at airport

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4183992/Air-passengers-fight-queue-jumping-row.html

Rage at resturant

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-broke-womans-elbow-punched-8860869

Yes, people don't like to queue, and you'd expect with a significant increase in vehicles that as charging point patronage increases.

However the situation is Australia is significantly different in Australia, where garages are commonplace so changing can occur at home. 

For instance you probably have a garage and if you bought an BEV you'd also get a charger installed at home. Most people will do the same.

20 minutes ago, RFguy said:

It's currently written in a mix of python and C++. It will need to be all C++ to go into an embedded platform.  

You may be able to leverage an openCL Kalman filter on an embedded platform using an onboard GPU. I've got a multicore embedded AMD Ryzen board somewhere with fairly powerful integrated GPU somewhere that would probably be overkill but OpenCL provides an abstraction between CPU and GPU which is good for this type of operation

Out of curiosity what language and library have you written this in and how computationally expensive is it?

6 hours ago, onetrack said:

The day I believe the exaggerated claims by the Chinese for electrical output of every single thing they make, will be a wondrous day indeed. The Chinese have long believed that those who tell the biggest lies about performance, win the most sales.

 

Every single genset produced by the Chinese has overstated output and ratings, and their engines are no different. The Chinese know there's no penalty in overstating performance, it's just another "marketing advantage".

One thing that I can say about the Chinese economy is that they make a lot of stuff. The Australian economy appears to be based on digging stuff up, growing stuff, moving it around and housing. Housing doesn't actually produce anything except debt and yet we have a tax system which prioritises it. 

The only thing which weighs against the Chinese is their Government which in the long term will be unable to manage the complexity of their economy efficiently

The issue in the near term isn't reserves its pollution and its impact on climate. If we get another la nina next year that should raise a few eyebrows we might see some talk of a locked in la nina.

13 hours ago, turboplanner said:

I'm monitoring the World market shares on a regular basis, and in several countries Hygrids have peaked and dropped in market share compared to previous years. This has surprised me and I'm not sure of the reason. A cousin has one and has had several years good service out of it.

I think that the reason why is that hybrids are a bit of a camel, both electric and ICE so essentially they have higher build costs and maintenance costs. Going 100% electrical appear to be cheaper and more economical in terms of both upfront and ongoing costs.

13 hours ago, facthunter said:

The Nuclear power station matter in Japan Hit a lot of manufacturing  there.  Nev

I watched this a while ago and it made me do an about face on my views on nuclear. The presenter is a bit of bit of a green tree hugger type and was involved significantly in solar and wind projects. In this he digs into the out some interesting facts and it made me realise it was an area I didn't know much about.

3 hours ago, turboplanner said:

The EV does have brake fluid, but it's water absorbtion that requires regu;ar brake fluid maintenance and changeovers.

Hi Turbs, I agree that maintenance remains a significant factor with all vehicles, even my pushbike requires regular work. Personally I think that BEVs suck in many way compared to the convenience of liquid fuels and ICE however times are a changing. However if someone cracks the solar fuel cell which efficiently makes butanol or other liquid fuel all bets are off. 

I think that Toyota will struggle for the same reason that numerous companies went under when the line shaft went out of fashion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_shaft

It took 30 or so years after electrical engines became commonly available before people realised that electrical engines enabled the factory layout to be tailored to the workflow rather than the other way around. Numerous companies didn't grasp the significance of the change and sank.

When you look at Tesla compared to a Toyota BEV the comparisons from a technology point of view are stark. Toyota remains a car company, buying technology components from third parties whereas the Tesla is an integrated whole and software and electronic are seen as core to the vehicle and done in house. When you sit in a Toyota you can see how the modular discrete electronics and associated software have come in a box and are plugged in. Many people might think that this is a subtle distinction however I think that overcoming this divide will be a decade or more struggle for Toyota. My gut feeling is that Toyota reliability engineering and build quality far exceed what Tesla can do however I still think that this philosophical divide will crush them. It's not that they can't adapt, from a management perspective they don't want to.

5 hours ago, turboplanner said:

What did they do wrong?

 

ALL BEV market share for Australia for the same 12 months was 1.98%

Maybe they bet the farm on making fuel cell and hydrogen powered vehicles and the world has moved to BEV now they're reluctantly playing catch up. Maybe it's the fact that BEVs appear more competitive and cheaper than hydrid vehicles and have lower emissions. Maybe its because a number of their largest markets have set zero emission targets by 2030 and it doesn't align with their strategy.

https://thedriven.io/2021/12/15/toyota-joins-electric-race-with-16-new-bevs-and-massive-boost-to-sales-target/

Half their investment funds are still going towards hybrid vehicles and they're actively lobbying Government not to set zero emission targets.

Australia is a tiny market which is well behind the curve in terms of transition to low emission vehicles which is a legacy of a Government which couldn't see the writing on the wall. It's the same team that thought WA's reservation system for gas was a dumb idea, and for decades I voted for those clowns, more fool me.

Australia's a bit an ICE dumping ground at the moment and the lead times on BEV's are up around the 12 month mark.

13 hours ago, turboplanner said:

In my industry you'd be fired for a fairyland maintenance story like that.

Luckily I don't work in your industry however the demand is pretty good where I am. 😉

And the article you posted appears to back up what I stated, or possibly I expected people to be able to extrapolate high level concept into ongoing costs. But here are a few points from the article.

Quote

It will take time to see if real-world data validates expectations, but for now, experts tend to agree that the range is somewhere between 25 and 40% when comparing gasoline engines to electric powertrains.

The new Lightning Pro pickup would have a 40% maintenance cost reduction versus a F-150 with a 2.7L EcoBoost V6 engine.

......

A traditional vehicle’s structure is far more complex than an EV’s.The former has a wide range of components that need maintenance, while the latter has a simple structure of three main parts where most maintenance work is required. These parts include the engine, inverter, and onboard charger.

.....

Regenerative braking in EVs helps to save on brake maintenance expenses. That is about half of what would have been spent on maintaining the brakes of a conventionally fueled

And due to fewer servicing requirements, there should be less vehicle downtime.

....

Electric vehicles utilize a lower number of fluids that require maintenance than conventionally fueled vehicles.

 

The reason why an EV vehicles fluids last is that the environment is less polluting and corrosive.

The structure is simpler because things like the drive train is simpler.

12 hours ago, octave said:

I am pretty sure that the  price per KWh  lithium-ion batteries has  dropped substantially...................

................   Airlines are already using small amounts of biofuels Biofuels are Taking Off with the Airline Industry On Board

Pretty much agree with everything said and the sentiment behind it.

My son has been a big fan of EV's for years and I've gently teased him about my vehicles and their less than planet loving ways, however I can see the writing on the wall and ordered an EV for my wife. When my car is a few more years older I suspect it too will be replaced with an EV.  From a numbers and morality perspective its becoming more difficult to justify not doing it.

The story with planes is more nuanced however in the final analysis we need to target net zero emissions.