Rolls-Royce To lead EU’s New Clean Aviation project UNIFIED To Transform And Decarbonise Aviation
The title of this post the same as that of this press release from Rolls-Royce.
These two opening paragraphs add a few details.
Rolls-Royce has been selected by the European Union’s Clean Aviation programme to lead one of 12 groundbreaking new projects aiming to decarbonise aviation. These initiatives, which include new aircraft concepts and innovative propulsion technologies, will receive funding of about €945 million.
The Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking (CAJU) is the European Union’s leading research and innovation programme for transforming aviation towards a sustainable and climate neutral future.
I asked Google AI about the European Union’s Clean Aviation programme and received this reply.
The European Union’s Clean Aviation programme, part of the Horizon Europe research initiative, is a public-private partnership aimed at developing disruptive, climate-neutral aviation technologies, including hydrogen-powered, hybrid-electric, and ultra-efficient aircraft, to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Launched in 2022, it has a budget of €4.1 billion (€1.7 billion from the EU, €2.4 billion from private partners) and focuses on technologies that will be integrated into a new generation of short- to medium-range aircraft with a target entry into service by 2035. Key goals include a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions and energy efficiency compared to 2020 standards for new aircraft by 2030, with a long-term objective of climate-neutral aviation by 2050.
Note.
- Only someone like Trump would think that the key goals in the last sentence were not worthwhile.
- €4.1 billion in the right place could be a very good start.
- There is a Clean Aviation web site.
The press release says this about the UNIFIED project.
UNIFIED – Ultra Novel and Innovative Fully Integrated Engine Demonstrations
The UNIFIED consortium is led by Rolls-Royce and contains key industrial, academic and research partners across France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom. Subject to successful completion of grant preparation, the project will enable ground testing of an UltraFan® technology demonstrator at a short to medium range thrust class for future narrowbody aircraft and also enable the preparation of key activities towards future flight test of the UltraFan architecture.
I am not surprised Ultrafan is mentioned.
The Wikipedia entry for the Rolls-Royce Trent has a section about the UltraFan, which starts with these two paragraphs.
The UltraFan is a geared turbofan with a variable pitch fan system that promises at least 25% efficiency improvement. The UltraFan aims for a 15:1 bypass ratio and 70:1 overall pressure ratio.
The Ultrafan keeps the Advance core, but also contains a geared turbofan architecture with variable-pitch fan blades. The fan varies pitch to optimise for each flight phase, eliminating the need for a thrust reverser. Rolls-Royce planned to use carbon composite fan blades instead of its usual hollow titanium blades. The combination was expected to reduce weight by 340 kg (750 lb) per engine.
Note.
- 25 % is a very good efficiency improvement.
- No thrust reverser.
- A saving of 340 kg. in weight per engine.
It should also be noted that October 2028, will see the hundredth anniversary of Henry Royce sketching the R-type engine in the sand on the beach in Sussex.
The R-type was the engine that won the Schneider Trophy outright and enabled Rolls-Royce’s engineers to design the unrivalled Merlin engine that powered Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mosquitos, Mustangs and Lancasters in World War Two.
Buses On London Route 141 Now Go In Convoy
I took these pictures at the Balls Pond Road stop on the route.
Sometimes you wait as long as twenty minutes for one to come along, but here were three in a similar number of minutes.
When I was at school, there were stories from the Second World War, when after a bus was hit by a German bomb, that buses on one route went in convoy for protection.
Perhaps, the buses are practicing for when Putin decides to attack London?
Or is it just another manifestation of the service on the worst bus route in London?
Wrightbus At Heart Of £6.5bn Hydrogen Mega-Project Set To Transform UK Economy
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Love Ballymena.
These are the first three paragraphs.
Ballymena’s Wrightbus is at the forefront of a transformative £6.5 billion clean hydrogen initiative that promises to create 24,300 jobs across the UK and position the nation as a global leader in renewable energy.
Project HySpeed, unveiled this week, unites some of Britain’s most influential companies—including Wrightbus, Centrica, JCB, and ITM Power—in a landmark effort to scale up green hydrogen production, reduce costs, and accelerate industrial decarbonisation.
The project is a major coup for Ballymena, where Wrightbus, a pioneer in zero-emission transport, has been a vital part of the local economy for decades. As a key member of the HydraB Power group, which spearheads HySpeed, Wrightbus brings its expertise as the producer of the world’s first hydrogen-powered double-decker bus.
I believe we need the Irish dimension in Project HySpeed, as the Irish have a unique way of getting things done.
I am reminded by a story, that I heard from a retired Guards officer about the liberation of Vienna in World War II.
The city was in a desperate state and as he hold me the story, the retired officer said that a woman could be had for the price of two cigarettes.
In the mess one evening, the officers were discussing what to do, when an Irish Guards officer said, “The people need some fun! Let’s organise a horse race meeting!”
They all thought he was joking, but that is what they did!
The guy, who told the story is long since dead, but he believed that day of fun meant that Austria wasn’t taken over by the Soviets, like so many other East European countries.
The Irish do have this unique way of getting things done.
Note that the CEO of Centrica is Chris O’Shea. Does he have Irish roots?
Appeasement 2.0
The low point of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Trummkopf, has repeated Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich and presented Putin with Appeasement 2.0.
I wasn’t around in the days of Munich and Chamberlain, but my father was well-informed, as he was in Geneva doing something possibly at the League of Nations and heard a lot of the truth about what was going on in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine at first hand. He believed there was little to choose between Hitler and Stalin on the scale of evil.
In the 1970s, I worked with an Jewish Austrian engineer, who was called Samuels, at the GLC, who had escaped from Austria just before WW2 and then spent the war in the Royal Engineers in bomb disposal. After the war, he was an observer at Nuremberg.
He was one of the most amazing people, I’ve ever met and he taught me a lot about project management.
Aggregation In Artemis
One of the features of Artemis was aggregation, which enabled the project manager to total up the resources they’d need for a project.
I might have programmed the original aggregation for Mr. Samuels, but I can certainly remember discussing it with him. He needed it to check that particular sub-contractors weren’t overstreching themselves.
I lost contact with Mr. Samuels, when his wife died and he moved to CERN in Geneva. But he’s one of several people, who helped frame the design of Artemis.
Soviet War Crimes
This Wikipedia entry is entitled Soviet War Crimes.
This is the first paragraph.
From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country’s secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
As a teenager, my father used to tell me stories of atrocities by the Soviet Union and told me, he believed Stalin was on a level with Hitler.
One of the worst atrocities was the Katyn massacre in 1940, which is described in this Wikipedia entry and starts with this paragraph.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin’s order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943.
I haven’t found out, what my father was doing in 1940, but I am fairly sure he knew of the Katyn and other massacres, as he occasionally commented.
Note.
- The involvement of the NKVD.
- The Katyn massacre is a sub-plot in the film Enigma, which has this Wikipedia entry.
I took this picture of a memorial to Katyn in the centre of Birmingham.
I believe that we ignore the lessons of Soviet behaviour at Katyn, at our peril.
In Vladimir Putin’s Wikipedia entry, there is this paragraph about his parents.
Putin’s mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.
It appears that Putin Senior left the NKVD destruction battalion before 1942. Does that mean he could have been at Katyn?
I do suspect, that Putin Senior told some interesting stories to his son, about the correct ways to deal with your opponents and wage a war.
Conclusion
We are treading a very similar path over eighty years later.
Funding Awarded For Study On Hydrogen Storage Potential In The East Midlands
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the British Geological Survey.
This is the sub-heading.
A new study has been awarded funding to explore the underground hydrogen storage potential in the East Midlands.
These are the first three paragraphs.
East Midlands Storage (EMstor), a consortium led by Cadent and partnered with BGS, Star Energy Group, Net Zero Strategy and the University of Edinburgh, has been awarded discovery funding by Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund to undertake a new study to evaluate geological storage potential in the East Midlands.
The EMstor study is the first of its kind in the region. It will undertake a feasibility assessment of the East Midlands’ geology to evaluate its potential to host storage technologies, allowing expansion of Cadent’s proposed 100 per cent hydrogen pipeline.
The East Midlands has numerous depleted oil reservoirs, which may have potential to store hydrogen. The study will characterise the potential geological reservoir to establish if it is suitable for hydrogen storage at scale in the local area.
The oilfields of the East Midlands Oil Province have their own Wikipedia entry, which gives full details of the dozens of small oil fields in the area.
- It may not be the world’s largest oil resource, but it certainly helped us during the Second World War.
- Experienced Texan oil-men were even imported, to help boost production.
- It used to be possible to spot the occasional lonely nodding donkey, as you passed through the area.
Surely, if some of the oilfields can be converted to hydrogen stores, this would be very useful.
What Happened In Moscow Today?
I woke up this morning and deliberately stayed at home to watch Navalny’s funeral, as logic told me something serious would happen.
The day started how I would have expected, with hundreds of police lined up ready to arrest those who showed the wrong attitude or laid flowers.
Putin’s parents lost both their first two sons because of illness and WW2. A friend of mine also lost two older brothers and his mother was so overprotective, that it seriously affected his mental health. Later in life, he retrained as a psychotherapist to excise his personal demons.
Putin also has the problem, that his father was a member of an NKVD destruction battalion (think Katyn!), so I suspect he had a good line in bedtime stories for his son.
I wonder if something unexpected happened today.
- Did the sight of Navalny’s mother and her grief, awaken Putin’s memories of his own mother and he backed off?
- Or did the police on the ground, take a words will never hurt us attitude to the crowd? It might have helped, that a proportion of the police probably held some of the same views as Navalny.
I have some further thoughts.
The Grosvenor Square Protests Against the Vietnam War
I can find two references to these in this Wikipedia entry, which is entitled List Of Protests Against The Vietnam War.
- July 3, 1966. A crowd of over 4,000 demonstrate outside of the U.S. Embassy in London. Scuffles break out between the protesters and police, and at least 31 people are arrested.
- March 17, 1968. In London, a violent protest not supported by the Old Left leads to over 300 arrests.
A policeman friend of mine, who was on duty, told me that trouble is defused, if the police have common ground with the demonstrators.
The Number Arrested Today In Moscow
This was given as six, which is consistent with the number arrested at non-violent protests in London against the war in Gaza.
My Experience Of Moscow Police
In September 2001, I went to Moscow to see Ipswich beat Torpedo 2-1. See More…
After the match, the police were looking at the Ipswich supporters, as if they wanted a fight. So I broke ranks and offered both hands to the guy, who looked to be in charge. He shook my hands, gave me a hug and a smile and everybody walked to the coaches.
Nobody wanted a fight, so one didn’t happen.
My Experience Of Minsk Police
In October 2008, I went to Minsk to see England beat Belarus 3-1. See More…
A lot of the England fans were worried after being badly treated by Moscow police, the year before.
But there was no need to worry, as the Belarus Police were dressed to be friends and there was no trouble.
Conclusion
Whatever happened today could be significant!
SolarDuck, Green Arrow Capital And New Developments S.R.L. Sign Collaboration Agreement For A Grid-Scale Offshore Hybrid Wind-Solar Project In Italy
The title of this post, is the same as that of this press release from SolarDuck.
These three bullet points, act as sub-headings.
- 540 MW hybrid offshore wind-solar farm offshore Corigliano, Calabria
- Milestone project to accelerate scaling of Offshore Floating Solar Photovoltaic (OFPV)
- Strategic collaboration proves the potential of the technology in Italy and the wider
Mediterranean region
These three paragraphs outline the project.
SolarDuck, leader in OFPV technology, Green Arrow Capital, leading Italian Independent Asset
Manager in the alternative investment world, and New Developments s.r.l., one of Italy’s
most experienced developers, have agreed to collaborate on the development of a landmark
120MWp OFPV farm integrated with 420MW Floating Offshore Wind (FOW).The project will install SolarDuck’s unique elevated platform technology that allows PV panels
to be deployed in significant wave heights whilst maintaining a safe working environment for
access and maintenance and minimizing environmental impact. In addition, the collaboration
will also allow the harnessing of the complementarity of wind and solar energy resources.“With the current momentum, we believe this is a unique opportunity for the offshore
renewable energy industry to help shape a favorable regulatory framework and facilitate the
scaling of OFPV. This is not just important for Italy, but also for other countries in the
Mediterranean. Our collaboration with New Developments and Green Arrow Capital can also
serve as a catalyst for OFPV in Italy”, says SolarDuck CEO, Koen Burgers.
This Google Map shows the location of Corigliano at the foot of Italy.
Note.
- Corigliano is indicated by the red arrow.
- There is an explanatory video of their technology on SolarDuck’s web site.
Opposite Corigliano on the other side of the can be seen the Italian Naval Base of Taranto, which was the scene of the Battle of Taranto, which was one of the most significant naval battles of Second World War, if not the most significant.
- This web page has the Fleet Air Arm’s account of the battle.
- I have a book, that shows the Japanese visiting Taranto after the battle.
- Did the Japanese use what they learned to plan their successful raid on Pearl Harbor?
- Without Pearl Harbor, would the Americans have stayed out of the Second World War?
I visited Taranto in the 1980s and stood on the Dockside. Perhaps, it is time to go again?
Conclusion
I have a feeling that a hybrid offshore wind-solar farm can generate more electricity in a given area, by making better use of the space available.
It will be interesting to see how this hybrid wind farm performs.
In an area with plenty of sun and wind, it could be a better solution.
Only the mathematics will tell.
World’s Tallest Wooden Wind Turbine Starts Turning
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the sub-heading.
What is made from the same wood as a Christmas tree, held together by glue and manufactured in a Swedish factory for assembly later?
These three paragraphs outline the design of a revolutionary wind turbine tower.
If that calls to mind flat-pack furniture and meatballs, you’re wrong.
If you answered “a wooden wind turbine”, you could be a visionary.
According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world’s tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future.
I feel that it is not as revolutionary as some people might think.
Forty years ago, I built an extension on my house that included a swimming pool and a barn. The swimming pool roof was based on laminated wood beams and the barn was constructed using traditional wooden beams, that were bolted together.
But surely the most amazing wooden structure of the last century is the DH 98 Mosquito.
This paragraph introduces the Wikipedia entry for this amazing aeroplane.
The de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito is a British twin-engined, multirole combat aircraft, introduced during the Second World War. Unusual in that its airframe was constructed mostly of wood, it was nicknamed the “Wooden Wonder”, or “Mossie”. Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, nicknamed it “Freeman’s Folly”, alluding to Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, who defended Geoffrey de Havilland and his design concept against orders to scrap the project. In 1941, it was one of the fastest operational aircraft in the world.
One of my friends from the twentieth century, had been an RAF Mosquito pilot in the 1950s and felt it was an unequalled design of aircraft.
The airframe of the Mosquito was built using similar materials and methods as Modvion’s turbine tower.
I have just found out, that the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, where the prototype Mosquito is displayed, is open at least until the 7th of January.
I shall be going by public transport and if anybody would like to accompany me, use the Contact Page to get in touch.
Counter-Terror Officers Investigate Ulez Camera Explosion
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the sub-heading.
Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism officers are investigating an incident where a Ulez camera was blown up using a “low-sophistication improvised explosive device” (IED).
These two paragraphs introduce the story.
The explosion happened at about 18:45 GMT on Wednesday in Sidcup, south-east London, damaging vehicles and property.
The Met has said it is treating the blast as a “deliberate act”, but not terrorism at this stage.
It also appears that the camera had been cut down earlier and then someone blew it up.
I am 76 and I know several of my generation, who experimented with explosives. One, who was an American, blew his hand off.
But speaking to my children, none said they had experimented.
Is it, that my generation was born closer to World War II?
I don’t drive so ULEZs and Low Traffic Neighborhoods don’t bother me, but if some blow-up cameras and deface the signs, they must bother others.
I can’t help feeling that Sadiq Khan is introducing policies, that some violently object to!
I doubt that is a sensible policy, both practically or politically.
Polish Air Force Memorial – 13th May 2023
I’d heard the Polish Air Force Memorial mentioned many times on traffic reports, but as I had to go to Ealing, I decided to visit.
This is the first paragraph in the Wikipedia entry.
The Polish Air Force Memorial is a war memorial in West London, England in memory of airmen from Poland who served in the Royal Air Force as part of the Polish contribution to World War II. Over 18,000 men and women served in the Polish squadrons of the RAF during the war, and over 2,000 died. The memorial marks the southern extremity of South Ruislip in the London Borough of Hillingdon, near RAF Northolt, where seven Polish-manned fighter squadrons were based at different times in the war.
I took these pictures.
Note.
- As you can see the traffic was bad.
- The small car park only had a couple of cars in it.
- I took an E7 bus from Ruislip Gardens to the memorial and then another E7 after my visit to Ealing Broadway station.
It’s not a difficult place to find by public transport.
It’s certainly a place to be visited. Especially for people like me who grew up in London just after the Second World War. Throughout my schooling, every class had a least one and sometimes as many as three Polish children in it.
The Anonymous Widower 