Do you knew"Aerodynamic Truck Trailer Cuts Fuel And Emissions By Up To 15 Percent"

Creating an improved aerodynamic shape for truck trailers by mounting sideskirts can lead to a cut in fuel consumption and emissions of up to as much as 15%. Earlier promising predictions, based on mathematical models and wind tunnel tests by TU Delft, have been confirmed during road tests with an adapted trailer. This means that PART (Platform for Aerodynamic Road Transport), the public-private partnership platform, has produced an application which can immediately be put into production.

It is expected that the cost of fitting aerodynamically-shaped sideskirts will be recouped within two years. Furthermore, the sideskirts can be fitted to approximately half the trucks currently in use in the Netherlands as the skirts can also be retrofitted.

Carbon Dioxide reduction

Prof. Michel van Tooren of TU Delft’s Aerospace Engineering faculty: 'In 2005, 10,000 new trailers were taken into use in the Netherlands. With an average fuel consumption of 30 litres per 100 kilometres, that translates into 750 million litres of diesel consumption in the Netherlands each year. We can cut fuel consumption by 5% or more for 50% of those trailers. That means a reduction of 50 million tons of CO₂ emissions a year. This research can therefore result in a substantial, structural contribution to cutting fuel consumption and an annual saving of tens of millions of Euros, next to that cut in CO₂ emissions by the road transport sector.'

He continues: 'Together with this sector we have created a practical platform for further research and development, but we still need active government participation. Just obtaining permits for all the road tests has involved a huge amount of time, energy and frustration. The next step is realizing a practical partnership between the government and industry in order to put the solutions into practice.'

see this Pagani Zonda F wind-tunnel testing

Here are two wepsites for read more formation's:

http://www.whistle.gatech.edu/archives/05/jan/10/fueltruck.shtml

Here's a company that sells them:

http://www.freightwing.com/index.html

Shedding Light on Thin-film Solar Cell Efficiency Research

Recently, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced that they have moved closer to creating a thin-film solar cell that can compete with the efficiency of the more common silicon-based solar cell. The Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9% efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record, according to NREL.

This is still far from the highest efficiency that was achieved in July 2007 by a consortium of researchers led by the University of Delaware (42.8% using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform) but of course there are big differences in the manufacturing costs of these two technologies as well as the potential fields of application for them.

The combination of optimizing material systems as well as optimizing processing techniques for these materials gives multiple pathways towards achieving increase in performance from solar cells that can eventually lead to grid parity in terms of cost and efficiency, which seems to be one of the biggest challenges that solar technologies are currently facing.