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UK Renewables Strike Prices
Strike prices of various renewable energy projects in the UK, from the Low Carbon Contracts Company, which provides a register of various energy projects, both operational and planned.
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Sidewinder X1 Extruder Stepper Upgrade
Recently I purchased a second hand Artillery Sidewinder X1 3D Printer with extruder problems. The stepper would frequently lose steps regardless of the pinch roller tightness, causing prints to fail. To combat this I made the decision to upgrade the extruder’s 23mm pancake motor. The pancake NEMA17 stepper was first swapped for the 38mm x-axis…
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NZART/NZ Amateur Operators Certificate Anki Flashcards
This post is a link to an Anki flashcard version of the NZART NZ General Amateur Operators Certificate Exam, created from the JSON question-answer file used to create the original exam generator program. The Anki deck contains the full 600 questions for comprehensive revision, or targeted study – each question is tagged with which of…
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New Zealand Energy Use
New Zealand emissions data extracted from the MBIE energy balance spreadsheets using the Python Pandas library, spanning from 1974 to 2019.
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FreeCAD Learning Resources
The following is a collection of resources helpful for getting into FreeCAD, which is is now in stable release 1.0 after many years of development. Installation and Weekly Builds https://www.freecad.org https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases Wiki and Downloading the PDF/EPUB Manual Follow the Wiki instructions for running the Python script to generate the PDF and EPUB files from the…
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Engine Volumetric Efficiency and Theoretical Power Output.
This post covers some basic calculations of internal combustion engine volumetric efficiency, and compares at theoretical vs rated shaft-power outputs for some notable engines. Composition of Air Atmospheric air is comprised primarily of Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon, making up 78.08%, 20.946%, and 0.934% respectively by molar composition (and by volume if an ideal gas is…
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Economics of Thermal Power Conversion
In discussions on the economic viability of Fusion as an energy source, the costs of thermal power conversion are often cited as a limiting factor in the achievable cost of electrcicity. The argument goes that no matter the cost of the fusion reactor, the capital and operating costs of the power conversion (typically a Rankine…
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Custom Motorcycle Oil Cooler Analysis
Due to overheating problems on my air-cooled Honda NBC110 during long uphill climbs, I have decided to install an oil cooler. This task is complicated by the lack of accessible oilways in the cylinder head (as are present on some models), necessitating the use of an external oil pump. I have settled on an HEP-02A…
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BWRX-300 vs Renewables
This is a comparison between the 300MWe BWRX-300 small modular [fission] reactor (SMR), and the equivalent amounts of solar and wind power.
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An Argument for Superconducting HVDC Interconnects
Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the availability of REBCO superconducting tapes, commonly referred to as high temperature superconductors (HTS) for their ability to function up to liquid nitrogen temperatures (77K). Current capacity under these conditions is limited however, and much more important particularly in fusion applications is the higher magnetic field tolerance…
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25B Bus Acceleration Profiles
These charts were created in 2021 for a university course. The data was collected using an MPU6050 accelerometer and Arduino Nano, outputting the approximately 87,000 data points over serial.