Bad weather is bad news for any ship. High-speed craft, able to skim open seas at 35 knots or more, are particularly vulnerable in strong winds. But captains may soon base their sail decisions on real-time information, generated by sophisticated new on-board equipment.
Some 300 high-speed vessels today criss-cross busy European sea routes. Though popular with passengers, they are more prone to cancellation than traditional ships when the weather turns nasty. According to Marielle Labrosse o
More traffic, more incidents; an urban traffic manager’s nightmare. Yet tried and tested solutions to predict, detect, verify, and respond to such incidents are a dream come true.
The solutions were the result of research undertaken by the IST programme-funded PRIME project. The objective of PRIME, an acronym for Prediction of Congestion and Incidents In Real Time for Intelligent Incident Management and Emergency Traffic Management, was to develop innovative methods to improve the dyna
Having lost ground to road transport in recent years, rail freight may be on the verge of making a comeback in Europe with the development of a wagon fleet management system that promises to increase efficiency, expand market potential and offer important benefits to society as a whole.
Due to begin trials this summer, the system developed by the IST project F-MAN offers fleet managers, railway companies and end customers with an integrated set of Web-based applications to trace wagons, man
Engineering seniors test their invention on high-tech crash dummy
When a car crash occurs, people with osteoporosis and other brittle bone disorders often suffer more serious injuries. To better protect these “fragile” motorists, three Johns Hopkins undergraduate engineering students have devised a harness and vest system that significantly reduced impact forces when tested on a high-tech crash dummy.
The students were responding to a challenge from the Center for Injury Res
A new international project to reduce aircraft noise is building on pioneering research by UK engineers.
The Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) aims to design an aircraft that will make much less noise than conventional aeroplanes. To help meet its objectives, the project will use noise-modelling techniques devised by engineers at Cambridge University with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). As well as Cambridge Univers
With increased traffic pollution plaguing Europe’s cities, a near real-time vehicle pollution monitoring system that correlates traffic conditions and the resulting levels of pollution has been developed and road-tested and should help to create healthier urban environments.
Maurizio Tomassini, coordinator of the HEAVEN project, describes it as “a system for connecting real-time traffic data to emissions and concentrations due to vehicle pollutants. End products are near-real-time maps
“We can drive from Amsterdam to Rotterdam in the rush hour, and we can do it without touching either the accelerator or the brakes!” says Peter Hendrickx, coordinator of the DenseTraffic project, speaking about the new RoadEye radar sensor the project has developed.
Second-generation adaptive cruise control
The RoadEye radar sensor is a vital component in the new second generation of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems for vehicles. Unlike the ACC fitted to several upmark
A revolutionary steering mechanism for the public transport systems of the future that is safer and cheaper to install than current methods will be developed thanks to an investment of £70,000 from NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts), the organisation that supports UK innovation and creativity.
Warwickshire-based Transport Design International Ltd (TDI) will develop Safeguide, an automatic, electronic steering system for use on rubber-tyred trams or people carri
With often over 200 alarms installed on today’s ships, the risk of information overload is real. TELEMAS’ tool can track and manage alarms by taking input from the various computers and alarms on board and presenting them to the crew in a uniform and structured way.
With funding from the IST programme TELEMAS developed a middleware tool called Umbrella. “It brings together information from various data sources on board. For instance, you might have a cruise vessel that has over 1,
The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) introduces a new driving simulator, Driving Simulator III, after several years of intensive development work.
We at The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute are very proud to have introduced this driving simulator that is unique in many ways. The new driving simulator will play an important role in research about roads and transportation, comments Urban Karlström, Director General at The Swedish National Road
An increasing number of new auto buyers choose diesel engines. For asthmatics and those with allergies this is very unfortunate. Particles in diesel exhaust can both worsen and trigger allergic reactions.
“Tough, raw and macho”. Such is the advertising for many new off-road vehicles on the market today. They can drive in the mud as well as on pavement and they most often use diesel. It is no longer the “macho boys” that drive these vehicles – now they have also become very popular as family
Public transport systems of the future will feature high-tech vehicles supported, behind the scenes, by revolutionary control and scheduling systems that will make timetables redundant say CSIRO scientists.
CSIRO has developed software that simulates the movement of passengers and vehicles around track-based public transport networks that are designed to carry large numbers of people.
The software, called RTSim (Rapid Transit Simulator), lets researchers study the effects of changin
To maximize a plane’s efficiency over a broader range of flight speeds, Penn State engineers have developed a concept for morphing airplane wings that change shape like a bird’s and are covered with a segmented outer skin like the scales of a fish.
Dr. George Lesieutre, professor of aerospace engineering who leads the project, says, “Airplanes today are a design compromise. They have a fixed-wing structure that is not ideal for every part of a typical flight. Being able to change t
A revolutionary new type of vehicle only one metre wide and specially designed to be driven in cities is being developed by a team of European scientists.
The vehicle combines the safety of a micro-car and the manoeuvrability of a motorbike, while being more fuel-efficient and less polluting than other vehicles.
The CLEVER (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport) vehicle is a £1.5 million collaborative project involving nine European partners from industry and rese
Fly-by-wire control systems are well established in the aerospace industry. Now participants in one IST project, PEIT, have ambitious plans to introduce the same capabilities to road vehicles. The objective? Potentially reducing road accidents within the EU by half!
“We know that 98 per cent of vehicle accidents are caused by driver error,” says project leader Ansgar Maisch of DaimlerChrysler, “so giving the driver a virtual assistant able to correct mistakes has the potential to reduce the
The Baltic Sea is the world’s largest brackish body of water and has many rare and unique ecosystems. It is also one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, where the oil and cargo traffic of St. Petersburg and western Russia cross paths with dozens of ferries. And it is about to get busier – Russia is building a giant oil terminal and passenger numbers are expected to increase when Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania join the EU.
There have been hundreds of minor oil spills here ever
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