Interesting Links for 13-04-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Key principles on in-game virtual currencies in the EU

(tags:regulation money games Europe )

2. Is Airplane Mode on Flights Necessary or Outdated?

(tags:airplanes phones technology )

3. After Paris curbed cars, air pollution maps reveal a dramatic improvement

(tags:air pollution cars Paris GoodNews )

4. The Solid-State Shift: Reinventing the Transformer for Modern Grids

(tags:electricity infrastructure Technology )

5. The largest flood in Earth's history burst through Gibraltar and Sicily and refilled the entire Mediterranean in just a few years

(tags:geology sea Europe flooding )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you! Now I know regarding the airplane mode.

[andrewducker]

My pleasure. And yes, me too! I didn't know if it was still actually useful!

[bens_dad]

Is it me or is the transformer article opaquely written ? I have little idea of what it is trying to tell me.

[armiphlage]

It's written in electrical engineer. As a mechanical engineer working in electronics manufacturing, I might be able to translate.

Transmission lines use high voltage. Homes use medium voltage. Solar panels make low voltage. Transformers change the voltage of electricity to be whatever you need.

In traditional transformers, you wrap transmission line wires many times around a piece of iron. You then wrap home wires around the same piece of iron, but with fewer turns. The pulsing electricity in the high transmission line wire creates a pulsing magnetic field in the iron core. The pulsing magnetic field in the iron core makes a pulsing, lower-voltage magnetic field in the home wires. This keeps the high-voltage transmission line electricity from frying your home appliances designed to work at safer, lower voltages.

However, traditional transformers have several problems.

1) Turning electricity into magnetic fields into electricity wastes energy. Some of the magnetism turns into heat in the iron core. Heat-resistant insulators used in transformers are sometimes toxic.

2. In the mains current, the voltage and electron flow are supposed to peak at the same time, at exactly the same rate (50 times per second in the UK). If the wind suddenly changes, a wind turbine might briefly send electricity pulses faster or slower than it should. If you turn on a washing machine, it puts a brief drag on the mains current, messing up electricity for your neighbours. This wastes energy too.

Instead of using coils of wire wrapped around a piece of iron, you can use lots of computer chips. Each computer chip sucks up a little bit of electricity, and then spits it out again a fraction of a second later. A computer tells the chips when to spit it out, instead of the timing of the mains current. So, if you turn on your washing machine and put a brief drag on your local electrical grid, or the wind suddenly speeds up a wind turbine, the chips will still spit out electricity at the same rate of 50 times per second.

So, instead of a box full of coiled wires and iron cores, transformers could be a box full of chips.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that was excellent.

[bens_dad]

Thanks. I knew that much and hoped it had more to say. You said it much better than they did or I could have done.

I know that wires have resistance, so coils get hot (and for other reasons too, I suspect) which makes traditional transformers inefficient, but I still find it difficult to believe that a computer can make a more efficient transformer. I was hoping this would make it clearer how they do that.

[armiphlage]

Until recently, you were right that computer chips made of silicon dioxide would be even less efficient than a traditional transformer. They started putting a thin layer of gallium nitride (GaN) on top of a silicon or silicon-carbine chip substrate. GaN has low resistance even at high temperatures and high voltages.