Model Airplanes

Ikea Group will not renew its contract with Hanergy Thin Film Power Group Ltd. to fit homes with solar panels.

The Swedish furniture giant has a new business model for its residential solar business that does not include the Hong Kong-based solar technology maker, it said Monday in an e-mailed statement. The contract ended on Nov. 1.

Ikea sold the thin-film solar panels for residential use in 35 stores in the Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. The partnership was said to be uncertain in May after Hanergy lost half its value in a stock selloff and was suspended from trading.

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission is examining Hanergy’s stock trading for signs it was manipulated. Hanergy shares surged more than sixfold in the past year, with its market value surpassing Sony Corp at one point.

“It was a large-scale multi-market pilot project, and we were reviewing the way it works,” said Steve Howard, chief sustainability officer at Ikea. The probe into Hanergy was a ”natural point” in the review, declining to comment further on the case.

The new business model with new partners will be announced early next year. The company is aiming to roll it out in many markets, notably in southern areas with lower population density.

“By 2030, it will be unusual to have a rooftop that isn’t solarized,” Howard said. “The technology is ripe for widespread adoption.” Ikea is planning to have solar as a ”meaningful” and long-term part

Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-02/hanergy-loses-contract-to-distribute-solar-systems-through-ikea

The Formula One racing community has embraced HPC as an essential part of its workflow to build ever-speedier race cars, but suggestions that CFD should obviate the need for wind tunnel testing continue to draw heated commentary. One of the aerodynamics software vendors that supports this move is Exa Corporation. The Burlington, Mass.-headquartered company serves the international automotive and transportation markets and maintains a global customer roster that includes NASA, BMW, Ford, Jaguar and Tesla, and more than one F1 racing team.

At the heart of Exa’s PowerFLOW software suite is a patented Lattice Boltzmann-based implementation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that is known for its high accuracy in low Mach number regimes. Founded in 1991, Exa has spent more than two decades perfecting its use of Lattice Boltzmann-based physics to perform simulations that accurately predict the performance of designs and provide a route to further optimizations.

HPCwire recently spoke with the Exa team about how CFD generally as well as their approach specifically offers benefits over expensive physical testing and reduces the need for expensive late-stage changes. Much of our conversation centered on the limitations of wind tunnels with respect to complexities of the testing process and specific shortfalls that arise due to its being “a simulated version of reality that creates wind in a building around a car that’s not moving and a road surface that’s not moving underneath it.”

Exa finds itself having to counter the perception that wind tunnels provide this perfect representation of

Article source: http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/11/03/accelerating-hpc-in-formula-one/

A world leader in the manufacture of precision composite aerostructures and components, Danish defense and aerospace company Terma’s plant in Grenaa, Denmark, Terma Aerostructures, has fabricated aircraft parts for 45 years. Terma worked at first in aluminum and titanium, and, as new technologies were introduced into aerospace, composites and composite-to-metal bonded assemblies. The General Dynamics F-16 fighter was Terma’s first platform for the application of composites. Since then, the company’s composite components have included panels for the AgustaWestland (Casina Costa di Samarate, Italy) AW101 Merlin helicopter, winglets for Gulfstream (Savannah, GA, US) aircraft, wing structures for Airbus (Toulouse, France), and warhead fairings for the RIM-162 Evolved SeaSparrow Missile (ESSM), built by Raytheon (Waltham, MA, US). 

Today, parent-company Terma A/S is a key partner and major supplier to the multinational acquisition effort for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for which Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, MA, US) is the prime contractor. That and Terma’s significant history in aerostructural development was a strong determining factor in CW’s acceptance of a recent invitation to visit the Grenaa facility.

CW learned that composites — especially on the F-35 program — are a very important segment of Terma’s overall business thrust. Peter Worsøe, Terma’s VP of business development and CW’s tour guide, told us that although they have had a major influence on the aerospace industry for the past three decades, composites are still, in many ways, a new material. And, he says, despite the fact that the aerospace industry is very big, it’s controlled by a relatively small

Article source: http://www.compositesworld.com/articles/terma-aerostructures-grenaa-denmark

Roland Oliphant in St Petersburg and Raf Sanchez in Cairo

Suspicions that foul play or terrorism caused the passenger jet crash in Egypt are growing after the Russian airline’s owners said the plane could only have been brought down by “external factors”.

“We rule out a technical fault of the plane or a pilot error,” Alexander Smirnov, deputy general director of Metrojet, told a news conference in Moscow.

The claim, which appears to support the theory that the Airbus was destroyed by terrorists, was immediately rebuffed by Egyptian investigators as “speculation” and came as fresh allegations of mismanagement drew the company’s safety record into question.

Flight 9268 to St Petersburg crashed in Egypt’s Sinai peninsular shortly after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday morning.

• Could an Isil bomb have caused the Russian plane to crash in Sinai?

All 224 crew and passengers, many of them holidaymakers from St Petersburg, were killed in the worst single disaster in Russian aviation history.

Russian investigators stand near debris, luggage and personal effects of passengers a day after a passenger jet bound for St. Petersburg in Russia crashed in Hassana, Egypt  Photo: AP

In his first public comments on

Article source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11969465/Russian-plane-crash-investigators-examine-theory-that-Isil-bombed-airliner.html