Late last week the US Department of Energy [DoE] awarded $9.6 million in grants for six Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy [ARPA-E] projects as a means to “accelerate innovation in clean energy technologies, increase America’s competitiveness and create jobs”. Notable among the grants [...]

No-one following the growth of the wind turbine industry over the last two decades will have failed to have noticed the trend towards larger and taller turbines.   While this might seem to just be the natural order of things [...]

It was interesting to see that Google today honored the birthday of Hans Christian Oersted, with one of their famous Google doodles.  Outside of the magnetics world, Oersted is probably not as well known as individuals like Michael Faraday and Nikola [...]

Earlier this week I came across a rather interesting new technology from Humdinger Wind Energy, LLC. Based in Honolulu, this company claims that “from enabling smart buildings to reducing the cost of wind energy”, they are “researching & developing the world’s [...]

The engineers and scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory [NHMFL] in Florida, announced this week that they had successfully tested a new resistive electromagnet that produces a magnetic field strength of 36 tesla (360 kilo-oersted), breaking the old record of [...]

Progress in the development of commercially-viable direct drive wind turbines took a significant step forward last week, with the official launch by Siemens Energy of its SWT-3.0-101 wind turbine. This turbine has a faceplate rating of 3 MW, has no gearbox [...]

For all of its soaring elegance, it is easy to forget just how complex a machine the modern-day commercial-scale wind turbine really is.  In this article I will focus on the massive, highly engineered electromechanical system sitting at the top [...]

In the course of reviewing information on metals and minerals, I often come across chemical composition information that is written in terms of atomic percent, when I am actually more interested in the weight percent values of the elements involved. [...]