SCADA, Telematics & GPS Technologies

The old joke “Hydrogen is the fuel of tomorrow — and always will be” isn’t keeping Mazda from jumping on the H2 bandwagon and stuffing a dual-fuel rotary under the hood of the next RX-8. They might even dub it the RX-9.

Wankels are sweet engines that really scream at full throttle, but they get lousy fuel economy and aren’t terribly green. In an effort to clean things up a bit, the next-gen production rotary reportedly will be based on the hydrogen/gasoline engine in the RX-8 Hydrogen RE (pictured).

Just make sure you aren’t trying to chase down that ZR-1 under hydrogen power.

The Regional Transport Authority of Hyderabad, India, has announced plans to monitor its driving test tracks with an RFID-enabled system designed to automate testing for driver licenses.

The new system will be tested in a pilot program at one of the RTA’s three test tracks. The Nagole track will be equipped with a set of RFID readers buried 15 inches beneath the road surface. Applicants for licenses will drive vehicles outfitted with antennas, and the system will track variations in movement, speed limit and wrong turns within parameters preset by the RTA. Test scores, and the prospective driver’s ability, will be judged in a graph format.

The system takes human judgment out of the test administering, after accusations had been made that driving school agents and motor vehicle inspectors were manipulating test results. As additional insurance, thumb impressions would be recorded on the driving license to avoid manipulations

“No discretion is given to a motor vehicle inspector or others,” transport commissioner Raymond Peter said. “Once we see how it works, we will computerize the rest of the tracks. The system will be in place after the monsoon.”

Source: RFID News

Carspotting: Part of a mesh network, this sensor node embedded in a San Francisco street can detect when a car parks in the spot beside it. It also monitors passing traffic. See following image credit to Streetline.

This fall, San Francisco will implement the largest mesh network for monitoring parking to date. Around 6,000 wireless sensors from the San Francisco company Streetline will be fixed alongside as many parking spots, monitoring both parking availability and the volume and speed of passing traffic. The city hopes that displaying information from the sensors on Web maps, smart phones, and signs on the street will reduce the traffic and pollution caused by circling cars.

A mesh network differs from a typical wireless network in that there’s no central transmitter: every node can transmit to every other node. Mesh networks have generally been used for environmental monitoring, or to grant wireless devices Internet access.

When sensor networks have been deployed roadside, it’s usually been to monitor traffic, not parking. In urban areas, traffic-monitoring systems have been used for congestion pricing: during business hours in downtown London, for instance, the license plates of cars are photographed, and the drivers are sent a bill. Some parking garages also have signs that tell drivers where the available spaces are, but such systems generally rely on manual car counting, not sensors.

In San Francisco, however, clusters of plastic-encased, networked sensors are embedded in the surface of the street. The main sensor in the cluster, which is commonly used to detect cars, is a magnetic one, says Jim Reich, the vice president of engineering at Streetline. Magnetic sensors detect when a large metal object locally disrupts Earth’s magnetic field. One challenge with magnetic sensors is avoiding false positives. “We rely on the magnetometer the most, but in order to fix errors, we use other types of sensors [that] give you much higher reliability,” says Reich. He won’t elaborate on the supporting sensors, but he says that the Streetline system has a high ninety percent accuracy in recognizing parked cars. (more…)

Scientists from Ohio State University have created a new material called thallium-doped lead telluride, which has been designed to convert car engine exhaust heat into electricity.

The research team led by Joseph Heremans said the material could also be used to help power generators and heat pumps. The new material is reportedly able to convert the wasted heat into energy without causing pollution, and do so more efficiently than was previously possible.

“The material does all the work. It produces electrical power just like conventional heat engines — steam engines, gas or diesel engines — that are coupled to electrical generators, but it uses electrons as the working fluids instead of water or gases, and makes electricity directly,” Heremans said in a statement on the OSU web site.

Its expected operating environment, between 450° and 950° Fahrenheit, is the normal range of car engines. Just 25 percent of the energy from a gasoline car engine is used to actually move the car, so the discrepancy between necessary energy and wasted energy is substantial.

Published studies previously indicated as much as 60 percent of energy loss in a gasoline engine is because of waste heat that is not disposed of properly.

Although thermoelectric materials used to generate power aren’t revolutionary, the OSU research team has made several small adjustments to make its material more efficient. They were able to double the efficiency rating from 0.71 up to 1.5.

An alloy called sodium-doped lead telluride previously was the most efficient material, which had the 0.71 rating.

The discovery by Heremans at OSU is the latest in a string of events that started after years of research by other universities. Michigan State University researchers who published a quantum mechanics report on thallium and tellurium in 2006 helped OSU better understand what they were dealing with beforehand.

Furthermore, OSU was helped in testing the material from Osaka University and the California Institute of Technology.

Moving forward with their research, Heremans and his team hope to further increase the efficiency rating of the new material.

Source: Beta News

It’s easy to argue that road taxes are quite unfair because they’re flat: You pay fees to drive around; it doesn’t matter how much you actually use the car.

The Netherlands has decided to improve the country’s road tax by taxing according to the vehicle type, usage, hour and roads the vehicle is using. The system uses GPS, a car transmitter and a standard cell phone GSM network to send this information to a central computer that processes the information. Once these figures are calculated, the driver is charged. Congestion and the environment are both taken into consideration in the rate scheme. Using a highway that enters a city in peak hours while driving an SUV will be taxed more than driving a small car in a rural area where private vehicles are more of a necessity.

Dutch officials hope the system will reduce CO₂ emissions and congestion, because the Dutch government claims that there is no more room to build more roads. Critics say this system is an attack on privacy: a computer will know where and when you’ve driven, although the company that implements the system guarantees that this information won’t be stored once translated into money. The system starts in 2011 for freight transport and will be expanded to include cars in 2012. Full deployment of the system is scheduled to be completed in 2016. A similar system has been under study in the UK.

Source: Qué!, Motor Authority

Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise (FTE), which manages the statewide SunPass system, has selected TransCore’s eGo Plus RFID sticker for use on the state’s 460 miles of toll road. The paper-thin, batteryless tags will be sold as the SunPass “Mini” and be available this summer.

The eGo Plus sticker tag is a 915 MHz programmable, beam-powered, windshield-mounted tag packaged as a flexible sticker. Each eGo Plus sticker tag comes equipped with a factory-programmed unique tag identification number to prevent the tag from being duplicated. The eGo Plus technology is also being used by Houston’s Harris County Toll Road Authority, the Texas Department of Transportation, and the Washington Department of Transportation.

The FTE’s initial order with TransCore is for 1.5 million of the tags, which will join the more than three million hardcase SunPass tags currently in use on the state’s roads.

Source: RFID News

The system uses two processors and a camera — called, appropriately, the Front Camera System — mounted near the rear-view mirror. One processor identifies familiar shapes, symbols and digits on common road signs and conveys the information to the driver via a digital display in the gauge cluster. The other alerts the driver when he or she strays from the lane.

“These new features follow Opel’s philosophy of enhancing driving excitement by assisting drivers without reducing their level of control,” says Hans Demant, managing director of GM Europe Engineering. “That means the system gives the drivers information, but it doesn’t intervene.”

We’re not entirely sure why GM thinks it’s easier to read a speed-limit sign on a tiny display between your speedometer and tachometer than on a big road sign. Dement says “a car that can see and warn the driver well in advance of potential hazards is another important step in our long-term accident prevention strategy.” GM Europe also is developing vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems that allow cars to exchange information about their position and speed.

Source: WIRED

Graphic by GM.

Following the hike madness in global fuel price, Gussmann Technologies is revealing their precious Fuel Consumption Management module in their AVLS/Fleet Management software. Some charts & consumptions reporting are told to be as additional features in current version of the application, ver3.2. They also developed special fuel flowmeter & level sensor for this purpose.

Gussmann Technologies website, G1 web application

IPICO Inc. and McMaster RFID Applications Laboratory have been awarded a $1.2 million (Canadian dollars) grant to create an RFID system that would capture and analyze data related to traffic use and capacity, without a corresponding increase in investment in road infrastructure. The technology also could be used to help manage traffic, reducing road delays and transit time, and then reduce both emissions and dependency on fossil fuels.

The grant was from the International Science and Technology Partnerships Canada Inc. and the Global Innovation & Technology Alliance. McMaster and IPICO will work with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Strategic Consultants, both of New Delhi, India.

The consortium had submitted a proposal to develop and create a platform for a specially designed passive commercial RFID transponder that would be capable of carrying significant, safe, secure and accurate information pertaining to the vehicle itself, including its identity. This information collected would be used to manage transportation flows on highways and roads.

Source: RFID News