381 research outputs found
Organisational adaption in the German automotive industry after the emission scandal
In September of 2015 it was uncovered that the Volkswagen Group (VW) has been manipulating
emission tests and statistics on a wide range of its diesel vehicles. This thesis explores organisational
adaption of manufacturers from the German automotive industry after the emission
scandal with a single case study approach. The results give four main insights. First, German
manufacturers did not show a significant operational reaction to the scandal, as neither consumer
preferences, nor environmental regulation changed immediately. Second, the emission scandal
seems to have reduced uncertainty about future environmental regulations among manufacturers,
which led firms to adjust their strategic behaviour. Third, firms re-evaluated and adapted
ambidexterity in their organisation. Whereas electric mobility focusses on more exploitative
search processes to achieve economies of scale and scope for industrialisation, internal combustion
engine (ICE) technology needs more explorative search processes to simultaneously remain
compliant with worldwide regulation and maintain a competitive cost position. Fourth, managers
showed mixed results regarding the framing of change as either opportunity or threat
Low-cost Sensor Glove with Force Feedback for Learning from Demonstrations using Probabilistic Trajectory Representations
Sensor gloves are popular input devices for a large variety of applications
including health monitoring, control of music instruments, learning sign
language, dexterous computer interfaces, and tele-operating robot hands. Many
commercial products as well as low-cost open source projects have been
developed. We discuss here how low-cost (approx. 250 EUROs) sensor gloves with
force feedback can be build, provide an open source software interface for
Matlab and present first results in learning object manipulation skills through
imitation learning on the humanoid robot iCub.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Workshop paper of the International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015
Meeting Global Cooling Demand with Photovoltaics during the 21st Century
Space conditioning, and cooling in particular, is a key factor in human
productivity and well-being across the globe. During the 21st century, global
cooling demand is expected to grow significantly due to the increase in wealth
and population in sunny nations across the globe and the advance of global
warming. The same locations that see high demand for cooling are also ideal for
electricity generation via photovoltaics (PV). Despite the apparent synergy
between cooling demand and PV generation, the potential of the cooling sector
to sustain PV generation has not been assessed on a global scale. Here, we
perform a global assessment of increased PV electricity adoption enabled by the
residential cooling sector during the 21st century. Already today, utilizing PV
production for cooling could facilitate an additional installed PV capacity of
approximately 540 GW, more than the global PV capacity of today. Using
established scenarios of population and income growth, as well as accounting
for future global warming, we further project that the global residential
cooling sector could sustain an added PV capacity between 20-200 GW each year
for most of the 21st century, on par with the current global manufacturing
capacity of 100 GW. Furthermore, we find that without storage, PV could
directly power approximately 50% of cooling demand, and that this fraction is
set to increase from 49% to 56% during the 21st century, as cooling demand
grows in locations where PV and cooling have a higher synergy. With this
geographic shift in demand, the potential of distributed storage also grows. We
simulate that with a 1 m water-based latent thermal storage per household,
the fraction of cooling demand met with PV would increase from 55% to 70%
during the century. These results show that the synergy between cooling and PV
is notable and could significantly accelerate the growth of the global PV
industry
Meeting Global Cooling Demand with Photovoltaics during the 21st Century
Space conditioning, and cooling in particular, is a key factor in human
productivity and well-being across the globe. During the 21st century, global
cooling demand is expected to grow significantly due to the increase in wealth
and population in sunny nations across the globe and the advance of global
warming. The same locations that see high demand for cooling are also ideal for
electricity generation via photovoltaics (PV). Despite the apparent synergy
between cooling demand and PV generation, the potential of the cooling sector
to sustain PV generation has not been assessed on a global scale. Here, we
perform a global assessment of increased PV electricity adoption enabled by the
residential cooling sector during the 21st century. Already today, utilizing PV
production for cooling could facilitate an additional installed PV capacity of
approximately 540 GW, more than the global PV capacity of today. Using
established scenarios of population and income growth, as well as accounting
for future global warming, we further project that the global residential
cooling sector could sustain an added PV capacity between 20-200 GW each year
for most of the 21st century, on par with the current global manufacturing
capacity of 100 GW. Furthermore, we find that without storage, PV could
directly power approximately 50% of cooling demand, and that this fraction is
set to increase from 49% to 56% during the 21st century, as cooling demand
grows in locations where PV and cooling have a higher synergy. With this
geographic shift in demand, the potential of distributed storage also grows. We
simulate that with a 1 m water-based latent thermal storage per household,
the fraction of cooling demand met with PV would increase from 55% to 70%
during the century. These results show that the synergy between cooling and PV
is notable and could significantly accelerate the growth of the global PV
industry
Techno-economic model of a second-life energy storage system for utility-scale solar power considering li-ion calendar and cycle aging
While the use of energy storage combined with grid-scale photovoltaic power
plants continues to grow, given current lithium-ion battery prices, there
remains uncertainty about the profitability of these solar-plus-storage
projects. At the same time, the rapid proliferation of electric vehicles is
creating a fleet of millions of lithium-ion batteries that will be deemed
unsuitable for the transportation industry once they reach 80 percent of their
original capacity. The repurposing and deployment of these batteries as
stationary energy storage provides an opportunity to reduce the cost of
solar-plus-storage systems, if the economics can be proven. We present a
techno-economic model of a solar-plus-second-life energy storage project in
California, including a data-based model of lithium nickel manganese cobalt
oxide battery degradation, to predict its capacity fade over time, and compare
it to a project that uses a new lithium-ion battery. By setting certain control
policy limits, to minimize cycle aging, we show that a system with SOC limits
in a 65 to 15 percent range, extends the project life to over 16 years,
assuming a battery reaches its end-of-life at 60 percent of its original
capacity. Under these conditions, a second-life project is more economically
favorable than a project that uses a new battery and 85 to 20 percent SOC
limits, for second-life battery costs that are less than 80 percent of the new
battery. The same system reaches break-even and profitability for second-life
battery costs that are less than 60 percent of the new battery. Our model shows
that using current benchmarked data for the capital and O&M costs of
solar-plus-storage systems, and a semi-empirical data-based degradation model,
it is possible for EV manufacturers to sell second-life batteries for less than
60 percent of their original price to developers of profitable
solar-plus-storage projects.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure
Pressure study on the interplay between magnetic order and valence-change crossover in EuPd(SiGe)
We present results of the magnetic susceptibility on high-quality single
crystals of EuPd(SiGe) for Ge concentrations 0 0.105 performed under varying hydrostatic (He-gas) pressure 0 0.5 GPa. The work extends on recent studies at ambient pressure
demonstrating the drastic change in the magnetic response from
valence-change-crossover behavior for = 0 and 0.058, to long-range
antiferromagnetic (afm) order below = 47 K for = 0.105. The
valence-change-crossover temperature shows an extraordinarily
strong pressure dependence of d/d = +(80 10) K/GPa. In
contrast, a very small pressure dependence of d/d +(1
0.5) K/GPa is found for the afm order upon pressurizing the = 0.105
crystal from = 0 to 0.05 GPa. Remarkably, by further increasing the
pressure to 0.1 GPa, a drastic change in the ground state from afm order to
valence-change-crossover behavior is observed. Estimates of the electronic
entropy, derived from analyzing susceptibility data at varying pressures,
indicate that the boundary between afm order and valence-change crossover
represents a first-order phase transition. Our results suggest a particular
type of second-order critical endpoint of the first-order transition for =
0.105 at 0.06 GPa and 45 K
where intriguing strong-coupling effects between fluctuating charge-, spin- and
lattice degrees of freedom can be expected
Innovation activities of firms in Germany - results of the German CIS 2012 and 2014 : background report on the surveys of the Mannheim Innovation Panel conducted in the years 2013 to 2016
Innovation is regarded as a key driver of productivity and market growth and thus has a great potential for increasing wealth. Surveying innovation activities of firms is an important contribution to a better understanding of the process of innovation and how policy may intervene to maximise the social returns of private investment into innovation. Over the past three decades, research has developed a detailed methodology to collect and analyse innovation activities at the firm level. The Oslo Manual, published by OECD and Eurostat (2005) is one important outcome of these efforts. In 1993 both organisations have started a joint initiative, known as the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), to collect firm level data on innovation across countries in concord (with each other). The German contribution to this activity is the so-called Mannheim Innovation Panel (MIP), an annual survey implemented with the first CIS wave in 1993. The MIP fully applies the methodological recommendations laid down in the Oslo Manual. It is designed as a panel survey, i.e. the same gross sample of firms is surveyed each year, with a biannual refreshment of the sample. The MIP is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and conducted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) and the Institute for Applied Social Science (infas). This publication reports main results of the MIP surveys conducted in the years 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. The surveys of the years 2013 and 2015 were the German contribution to the CIS for the reference years 2012 and 2014. The purpose of this report is to present descriptive results on various innovation indicators for the German enterprise sector
Prospective Sustainability Screening of Sodium-Ion Battery Cathode Materials
Sodium-ion batteries (SIB) are considered as a promising alternative to overcome existing sustainability challenges related to Lithium-ion batteries (LIB), such as the use of critical and expensive materials with high environmental impacts. In contrast to established LIBs, SIBs are an emerging technology in an early stage of development where a challenge is to identify the most promising and sustainable cathode active materials (CAM) for further research and potential commercialization. Thus, a comprehensive and flexible CAM screening method is developed, providing a fast and comprehensive overview of potential sustainability hotspots for supporting cathode material selection. 42 different SIB cathodes are screened and benchmarked against eight state-of-the-art LIB-cathodes. Potential impacts are quantified for the following categories: i) Cost as ten-year average; ii) Criticality, based on existing raw material criticality indicators, and iii) the life cycle carbon footprint. The results reveal that energy density is one of the most important factors in all three categories, determining the overall material demand. Most SIB CAM shows a very promising performance, obtaining better results than the LIB benchmark. Especially the Prussian Blue derivatives and the manganese-based layered oxides seem to be interesting candidates under the given prospective screening framework
- …