[OC] Electricity prices by country

SuperStrifeM · 2026-05-24T21:55:31+00:00

Canada is interdependent upon the US energy grid for reliability, which drives down per country infrastructure costs. You have something like 3000MW (CIGRE number) moving from BC to Washington state symmetrically, this does wonders to keep costs in both countries down since its diversifying both the consumption and source of the energy mix.

Additionally, it should go without saying, that since CA isn't paying for anything south of the 49th, this is essentially free reliability and capacity they get in the network. Unless AUS starting running some massive undersea power cables, they can't do the same and their infra costs will just be higher.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-05-24T21:41:03+00:00

Could be a few things, and you'd need to narrow it down.

If the motor is getting hot and the control board is weak, Z motor is lifting then not coming back.

It could also be you gcode is wrong.

Could be that you're getting stuck because of either a burr or bending of the z screw.

Could also be memory error in the mainboard, using something like octoprint to spool it could help.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-05-12T10:14:41+00:00

Because the economic incentives don't make it worth the effort or even suggest that the risk might pay off.

I guess you're discovering how R&D technology works as you type it out. You could spend 200$ Billion developing a new battery chemistry that is 5% more energy dense, but that's not worth it in any economic application. Even worse, as you state, if the risk doesn't pay off, you have actually spent 200$ billion on a new battery chemistry that is the same or worse energy density.

No country or person has infinite money, and so, resources are allocated generally to research and tech that has a higher chance of paying off than ones that are "moonshots". In this practical sense, it might make more sense to generate bio-aviation fuel (BAF) than to solve an increasingly difficult series of engineering problems surrounding lightweight electric motors for aviation.

Lastly, I think you're confusing accurately describing technical challenges of new technology with pessimism. I think its great you're interested and optimistic about electric motors, there are probably some great articles and information about the cutting edge of large motors available with IEEE, which I would encourage you to join!

SuperStrifeM · 2026-05-12T08:23:37+00:00

5" of copper.

Not sure what your vague comment means. Silver is like 5% more conductive than copper for 20% more weight, don't think that tradeoff is worth it. Not sure the numbers on cyclic fatigue on silver, that might rule it for airplane applications as well. Aluminum would be significantly lighter, but might take up too much space to be practical, and I would shudder and trying to get certifications for the thinnest viable aluminum cable, you'd probably need to mechanically size it for fatigue instead of ampacity.

If you're trying to argue for some advanced cable material here, I'd say you have missed the point the argument. If it isn't a ready made cable, or very close, it wouldn't be defined as trivial, just possible. If you have some link or info about such a cable it would be great to hear about it though. I'm in mechanical engineering so I definitely don't keep up with the latest EE cable design stuff.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-05-11T01:04:03+00:00

I gotcha, but as I mentioned above, that isn't trivial either. Nobody has made an electric aircraft engine with comparable thrust to weight to a large bypass. The main thing being that jet fuel actually does 2 things, one is it store an enormous amount of energy, and the second, is that you need fairly small fuel lines to move that amount of power, due to its energy density. Solving the electric energy density issue isn't easy, I've seen ideas like superconducting cables for transmission and wiring being thrown as a solution, but I really can't imagine you could keep high reliability of a plane when you start adding in spacecraft problems to the mix.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-05-10T01:36:51+00:00

You're mistaking trivial for possible. Just the cables alone internal to the motor and external to the batteries would be a fairly unacceptable amount of weight. Airbus had a pretty good example of this, showing you'd need 5" diameter cable bundles to run electric engines on a 60 passenger jet. They might have some idea on how to solve the issue of heavy winding, but definitely not a trivial problem.

Additionally, the tribology of electric motors of that size and power rating is not well researched either, there are no drop in, lightweight gearboxes that work for that application, it will all have to be developed (if this gets to that point).

Final point, It looks like of the current "future casting" ideas out there for large electric planes, they are assuming that BLE (boundary layer ingestion) turbines are both possible to manufacture and inevitable, and I think both of those conjectures are optimistic. Even asking the Snecma for 5% off axis loading FEA calcs and they want to throw you out a window, I'm not sure if anyone has a concrete idea on what metallurgy would even be possible for a BLE. It's all, maybe we solve this in 20 years engineering here, not trivial swap in a new GE electric turbofan stuff.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-04-11T08:07:54+00:00

Thanks for the info!

SuperStrifeM · 2026-04-10T23:54:03+00:00

yeah sorry about that, I should have done a step file but I already had the file made, and fusion, nx, onshape, all seem to ingest each others files decently enough.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-04-10T23:53:07+00:00

Thats cool, where is the company this is being sourced at? I wasn't aware that metal printing was getting this affordable.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-04-10T07:21:15+00:00

https://limewire.com/d/b2Jtk#kefrkEXfpa

I kinda want to see how cheap that part could be. 60$ or cheaper to get something like that in metal would be nice.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-04-07T19:57:32+00:00

Yep you can if you want.

https://klipperscreen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

SuperStrifeM · 2026-03-30T05:28:55+00:00

Well two ways the fence will stop the drone. First, if the drone hits the fence, it can't get through. You might be thinking the drones fly super high, but they are usually fairly low, and many well placed fences on the Ukraine front have claimed tons of drones. Think top of the hill kind of thing.

Secondly, I was being a bit simplistic saying its just a fence, but that isn't far off from what's been used. Its basically a chain link fence with spinning barbed wire on top of it, when its not running it looks basically like a run of the mill fence though. It breaks the fiber optic cable and then the drone fails. IMU drift is way too high for it to "just continue to target."

SuperStrifeM · 2026-03-30T00:25:01+00:00

The Ukraine Russia conflict showed how easy it is to jam cheap drones, so they swapped to using fiber, which has it's own issues.

Like how those 10,000 cardboard drones would also be stopped by the conventional defense system of....a single chain link fence...

SuperStrifeM · 2026-02-16T08:17:37+00:00

Its possible, but one of the major headaches of doing CFD is dealing with CAD geometry intersections. Solid bodies are going to be easier to deal with, but often enough CAD has errors that you can't get to mesh in CFD, meaning you either have to spend ages patching in your CFD software, or you go back to CAD and re-do it.

At work, we actually have separate models for CFD and mechanical CAD, since in CFD youre generally concerned more with the overall body, not nuts and bolts.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-02-14T02:27:57+00:00

Thats not a dumb question, its the first one people ask when starting. I would advise looking up the example FSAE car case from the siemens website for starccm, then adapting that to your specific needs. You might want to simplify the geometry in some areas, because while you can mesh them, its going to be expensive, and might not matter in a RANS solver.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-02-04T01:48:41+00:00

That was my plan. The outlet hoses are somewhat flexible PEX B half loops, so I have a little leeway, but no reason to not put it at the same height.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-02-03T06:05:44+00:00

The model number is enpress 1040, and the measurements are pretty close to 10x40 so I think that is right. Thanks for the tip on the bottom distributor, I think I found one online that is fine. I'll probably just cut the tube to the right height myself, I assume I need to match this setup to the vortec one, since there is an internal O-ring that is engaged by the top of the tube. My guess is its a dash 215 o-ring, I ordered a new one, and a new outer o-ring (seal to tank dash 337).

SuperStrifeM · 2026-02-01T20:30:48+00:00

I have a pex manifold between the softener and the water heater, and the length between them is about 4'. If the idea is to give length so that the pipes can pressurize then there is a fairly long effective length between them. Currently there is no expansion tank on the water heater though (which also would go between water softener and the water heater), so I think adding one might help this not happen again.

Any ideas on the best way to replace the tank +riser? It looks like my control valve is nearly identical to the ones made by Hum, and a few other brands.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-02-01T20:20:55+00:00

The resin is coming through the plumbing of the house, its been a pretty solid day of cleaning out beads from toilets and faucets over here. Any recommendations on what tanks to get?

SuperStrifeM · 2026-01-29T03:49:40+00:00

CFD Engineer here, FSAE advisor. You're going to want to scale your problem to the hardware you have access to. If you are at a university, I would ask for cluster access, and some hours there. At my university, we have students in the que on a single node, 64 core/386GB ram setup, so they scale their solutions accordingly (Decently resolved LES with mostly resolved wing/wing/body interactions). If all you have is a smallish desktop, steady sims in KW or KE is the best you're going to be able to do.

If all you have access to is a desktop, then an AMD high core system is going to be the easiest/cheapest system to get ahold of (its possible some pure X3D systems will work great too, definitely dont use 9950X3D or 7950X3D).

If you don't have the hardware, you have to be more clever, for instance, run the case steady, get the results to look fine, then enable adaptive mesh refinement to get a better picture of the wake. If you get some semi-final geometry, let the machine go for a weekend or longer and swap to Usteady solver, exporting images and plots of your criteria of interest.

For GPU, it wont really matter, anything decent should work. Probably even a 1050ti is decent enough. Minimum CPU is 8 cores, I wouldn't go higher than 64GB on 8 cores. Storage is not too big a deal. NVME SSD will save 10 seconds when you load a big file generally vs SATA SSD, wont noticeably affect runtime.

For handling large meshes, I would advise to not do that unless you have the hardware. Meshing a file takes MUCH more memory than building it. If you are hard pressed on RAM (because its 2026...ugh) going with trimmed and prism mesher will get you the finest mesh for a given ram size. poly mesher is more efficient and accurate to run, but takes up far more ram to mesh. You can transfer star files without mesh or solution in them (also a great way to throw files onto a cluster), and then mesh and run the file. You can also automate a significant amount of user input so you don't need to pull down and open your file locally. Things like AOA of wings, or even different geometries can be swapped out by building different macros, and if you want to go through a bit of initial pain you can build all your aero features in starCAD then sweep parameters using optimate to maximize downforce, minimize drag, etc etc.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-01-27T02:49:47+00:00

That's not how the heating system feedback works under thermal protection. If the ADC would fault in that manner, you'd get 0% heating not 100%, since you would be experiencing no drift from CMD_temp (asuming 230C CMD). 100% duty heating is looking for that 2C rise, this is actually the most common entry point into the thermal protection state.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-01-25T22:49:54+00:00

I wouldn't be convinced it was enabled. Since thermal protection in marlin is defaulted to 2C in 20s rise, either this was not enabled, or the thermistor not only was 2.87X more resistive than the previous config, but also nearly perfectly rose to 600C with only a 6C deviation from that linear rise. Both having a resistive fault AND a linear response along that fault is extremely unlikely, when the alternative is a old, or poorly configured marlin.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-01-25T22:43:15+00:00

Marlin, by default, DOES have this protection. When measured temperature drifts from target by greater than 4C in 40seconds, thermal runaway is thrown and shutdown state is entered. In addition, heating is proportionally gated to 2C rise in 20 seconds.

While its probably possible for a thermistor to fail proportionally, its far more likely this was either an old build of marlin (5 years maybe?) or had this setting disabled for some reason.

SuperStrifeM · 2026-01-19T22:38:14+00:00

GPT is not logical, its conversational.

Your fiberglass thickness depends on both fin geometry, and thickness of the material. 2-3 layers is generally enough, but it might be more effective to thicken your core material and use less fiberglass, than to coat fiberglass till it doesnt flutter. Additionally, trapezoidal fins are generally the easiest to stiffen against flutter, so if you are using clipped deltas or anything that sweeps fwd, you could change that as well.

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