Mar
12
A New and Promising Battery Charging Idea
March 12, 2010 | 3 Comments
A group of Mississippi State University researchers in the school’s Center for Computational Sciences, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, the Department of Chemistry with collaborators at Florida State University’s Department of Physics and the Center for Materials Research and Technology has a new lithium ion battery charging technique in early research. The results are quite promising. (a pdf file)
Much is made about energy density, power density and other gross capacity metrics – the metrics of energy by weight and volume matter and are important. Yet batteries that can be used for a short time until depleted to the optimum level can take only tens of minutes and then need hours to recharge. One serious issue is charging time – it will matter in the market – that deserves much more research, marketing and consumer attention.
A hypothetical scenario could be in a few year time that one has a 50-mile range EV or hybrid EV. One would likely run through the 50 miles each day in say about 75 minutes. One assumes, at some risk, that recharge would take place over night between midnight or 1am and 6 or 7am for a six-hour recharge. So what if you need the car at 2:30am? Then what? For this writer it seems that 4 or so times a year someone is wrenching him out of bed for something or another.
Trading 75 minutes for 6 hours isn’t ideal. But say the 75 minutes could be traded for 2 hours? If that is a full recharge, then an hour would be a half charge and the errand in the middle of the night might also allow time for a full morning charge. I’m interested if not wholly in support of such research. Key on and go, with minimized time on charging will have a huge impact sooner or later. With real world experience we can count on sooner.
The team is proposing a new charging method for Lithium-ion batteries that uses an additional oscillating electric field to reduce the average intercalation time, and thus the charging time. The dependence of the intercalation time on the applied field amplitude is exponential, and thus there is the potential for very fast charging times.
Oscillating Wave Effect on Lithium ion Battery. Click image for more info.
Lithium ion battery recharging compels the Lithium ions to diffuse back to the charged state. When the team used an oscillating electric field, within the first 2 nanoseconds of simulation the root-mean-square displacement reaches a value close to its limiting value defined by the finite size of the system, while much slower diffusion is seen for the simulations without the oscillating field.
The lithium ions also need to be, in the case of the researcher’s battery setup, intercalated between the graphite sheets. Over the course of the team’s simulation runs the intercalation was seen to be more responsive to the oscillating field’s amplitude. The diffusion rates meanwhile, seem to be minimally affected by the amplitude changes.
In a lab, with simple battery construction, simulation runs by computer, the teams seems to have a path identified that could cut charge times by 2/3rds or so – just in the first set of simulation trials.
Admittedly this is just a step out of theoretical. Yet as noted in the hypothetical above, shaving charging times will become important. Hacking off two thirds of the charge time would be great – a goal worth considerable effort.
The team’s new input, an external oscillating square-wave field was applied in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the anode graphite sheets, seems to have offered a fascinating starting point for further investigation. While the team’s paper isn’t discussing the field’s total power, and the simulation battery is a quite small custom-built research unit, the application of minor but highly specialized energy inputs that have such impressive results bodes well for future battery performance.
Weight, volume, usable capacity, charge and discharge rate, construction materials, manufacturing costs, interfaces, and the charger expense are all coming into the equation. While not a huge matter for small devices where the power needs are declining along with the battery capacity requirements – vehicle battery installs are going to go the other way. It’s refreshing and something of a relief to see that the research is underway.
The team’s future work will consider the effect of different frequencies, as well as quantitative comparison with electrochemical experiments where samples or lab construction will permit tests. Lets hope this team gets a bundle of funding and some corporate support. We’re in the first years of battery development into the scales where electric vehicles are feasible. Fast recharge might be the difference between simple market acceptance or a market explosion.
A hat tip to Brian Wang at his nextbigfuture site for spotting the news.
Mar
11
Will There Be Enough Fuel For Fusion?
March 11, 2010 | 1 Comment
The National Ignition Lab expects to fuse a compound form of hydrogen made of tritium and deuterium later this year releasing high energy neutrons that should, for the first time, produce more power than the laser itself has put in.. It’s the first large scale and credible attempt after 5 decades of effort and investment.
The problem would come if it works. The fuel supply would partly be the radioactive form of tritium. That in itself isn’t terrible, or dangerous if handled properly. One could make a hydrogen bomb if enough tritium could be located, configured and set up inside of a fission bomb. But the volumes, the complexity and the sophistication are very high – proliferation is a credible matter of some interest.
Tritium Structure. Click image for the largest view.
The basic issue would be coming up with enough tritium at all. If it were only deuterium that was needed – the oceans are said to hold 60 billion years worth for generating power at today’s levels. But tritium is far more rare. Reports have it that only 20 kilograms of tritium remain here on earth. The U.S. had only produced 225 kilograms of tritium from 1955 to 1996. The National Ignition Lab hasn’t said what part of a fuel load is tritium and deuterium.
Currently supplies come principally from nuclear reactors, specifically Canada’s heavy water reactors. They can produce enough tritium to supply current experimental fusion plants but not enough, nowhere near enough, for commercial production. Today’s prices are about $30 million per kilogram. Factor that into the equation and capitalize new reactors to make tritium and a whole new set of issues come in view. Today’s price is likely low and if tritium is needed in any volume, sure to go up.
Professor Steve Cowley, director of the fusion program at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority expects fusion reactors to become self-sustaining, ‘breeding’ their own fuel supply. The professor points out that tritium production can and is done with fission reactors so making the jump over to fusion should work just as predicted. “The principles are right, but there’s a lot of difference between principles and practice and that’s where we have to do our work,” he says.
This is a field fraught with inputs from folks with bias. Jan Beranek of Greenpeace claims that, “to sustain a reaction for a year for just one reactor it would need to burn 50 kilograms of tritium. How he knows this is a mystery, but even so, if he’s only 40% correct, a single reactor would consume the world’s supply on hand in year one. Then what? Right wrong or biased, the question remains.
The flip side has its detractors in Europe too. Dr Michael Dittmar, a physicist at CERN working for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology thinks fusion fuel breeding is a comforting folly, a process fraught with problems in physics, mathematics and engineering. “You put 20 kilograms of this tritium in and then you start to operate a kind of chain reaction. Even to come to the chain reaction, there are so many fundamental problems that cannot be addressed at a single place in the world.” Dittmar believes the vast expenditure on experimental reactors should be halted until the basic fueling problem is resolved.
Dittmar, when overlooking the National Ignition Lab’s laser program, the UK’s Jet effort and the international ITER project says on the fuel breeding matter, “If this (fuel breeding) doesn’t work we can forget the entire rest of the project(s).” He may well be right.
There is cause for confidence though; heavy water fusion reactors make tritium – undeniable. Whether the fusion theory can be made to work on a fuel breeding program is yet to be seen. For certain, a pause would be worthwhile once the National Ignition Lab’s laser is working to ascertain just how to come up with fuel. Perhaps the National Ignition Lab needs to consider in the face of the impending success how to fuel more units before getting too much further into development. Can the fuel breeding theory be applied to laser fusion?
Deuterium seems to be a fuel of good and obtainable sources even if the need to go through incredible amounts of seawater is required to get concentrated amounts. Tritium remains a matter of concern. Breeding in dedicated heavy water reactors might be the only way – and if so, the costs will be high and political fights are going to be very time consuming.
Tritium also has a ‘shelf life’ as it decays relatively quickly. Its not like you can make up a century’s batch and put it away, some form of steady production will have to match the consumption.
All this makes a stronger case for fission both in uranium and thorium and the boron class of fusion reactors.
2010 looks to be a very exciting year. Both Bussard fusion run by Richard Nebel and Eric Lerner’s Lerner fusion efforts are gathering positive data and progressing directly to boron based fuels. The boron fuel of choice is similar to products on sale now at specialty gas and welding suppliers.
This writer wishes all the efforts the best of results in short order. We may be, finally faced with the downline issues this year. Foremost is “where will we get the fuels?”
It’s a question worth some thought – now is a good time to start looking into the matter.
Mar
10
Nuclear Progress in the Face of Overwhelming Odds
March 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is 35 years old. Over those 35 years the NRC has not certified any new reactor types. Not One. Today, only four designs can be referenced for applications to build and operate a nuclear power plant. They are:
1. Advanced Boiling Water Reactor design by GE Nuclear Energy last updated May 1997;
2. System 80+ design by Westinghouse (formerly ABB-Combustion Engineering) last updated May 1997;
3. AP600 design by Westinghouse last updated December 1999; and
4. AP1000 design by Westinghouse last updated January 2006.
These are the four remaining designs approved by the NRC’s predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, which had approved others that have since fallen from favor.
Nuclear Regulatory Commision HQ Bethesda Maryland. Click image for the largest view.
With this in mind you must admire the sheer fortitude of a small group of determined industrialists willing to take extreme uncertain risk in plans to offer technology now at least 35 years newer, more efficient, and if the government would act in the public interest – lower costs for consumer’s kilo watt hours. Quite a dream.
In the face of a hard fact – never having approved a design – the U.S. trusts that the NRC will determine the appropriateness of allowing new designs to be built. That’s a concept that almost makes the mind swim in the brain. Meanwhile the enabling law has required fees such that one major barrier to development is simply paying for the NRC to research and self educate to a point that it believes it can make a determination.
If that isn’t rife with most any conflict imaginable from personal bias to raw misinterpretation, then remember expertise isn’t in the NRC at all. It has to be gathered and judged, a process paid for by the applicant. Mind you – its never been done. That’s enough to make an American consumer quite anxious if not fully disgusted. In fairness the statute was devised in the mid 1970s, when mutually assured destruction, runaway reactors and other hysterical views had credence in the media.
“Never say die!” is the call from a few brave and wealthy. Seven ‘advanced reactors’ are under pre-certification review by the NRC. Some of these groups have the technical skills and capital depth to perhaps get to the point where a customer might get some power. They are:
1. International Reactor Innovative and Secure (IRIS) – Westinghouse Electric Company.
2. NuScale – NuScale Power, Inc.
3. Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) – PBMR (Pty.), Ltd.
4. Super-Safe, Small and Simple (4S) – Toshiba Corporation
5. Hyperion – Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. (A new improved website.)
6. Power Reactor Innovative Small Module (PRISM) – GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy
7. mPower – Babcock and Wilcox Company.
On the list are some strong contenders. Westinghouse, Toshiba, GE Hitachi and Babcock and Wilcox certainly have the wherewithal if the huge amount of time involved doesn’t put the potential buyers off for indeterminate periods. There are massive risks involved, both in cash outlay as well as reputations in a world wide competitive industry.
But the most exciting, NuScale and Hyperion are small firms with outstanding technology, which must also overcome the gauntlet. If the cash runs out before the bureaucrats get up to speed, what might be the most promising and solid technology in generations could be lost. Or lost to foreign competition. It’s enough to make an American cringe in shame.
Not a wit exists in the Washington D.C. political establishment on getting a statutory fix underway. Instead, with no particular surprise, the hands are out and the political class is answering with guarantees and other ‘incentive’ ideas. There doesn’t seem to be any concern for the rate paying American. Abundant power at low cost has been lost to raw governmental incompetence and supported by new ideas that solve no problems but insert a whole new rent seeking class arrayed against taxpayers and ratepayers.
Does this seem right to you?
Suppose for a moment that government’s role is to insure the public safety and set market standards that drive to the lowest cost and highest productivity. Yet, public safety has been kidnapped by extremists and market standards have been subverted by regulations that increase investment and operating costs.
The potential of American society to reach a higher standard of living, pass on a better world to our children than was left to us is being squandered. Massive natural resources are simply ignored like thorium-fueled reactors and the existing ‘nuclear waste’ sitting at reactors across America.
America and the world have no energy crisis. Its everywhere and more comes with each ray of sunshine, its below our feet for the taking and using, many components can be recycled endlessly in harmony with the ecosystems of the earth.
We only have to figure out how, invest and do the work. The single most devastating problem is government, a creature that seems incapable of getting out of the way, acting in the public interest or promoting a higher standard of living.
At least, lets remind the elected that the job is to serve the citizens, not satisfy extremists, set up new rent seekers or endlessly suffocate technological progress.
Mar
9
Where Policy Starts for Right Now
March 9, 2010 | 11 Comments
Some commentary is so well organized and on point it deserves a wide hearing. At this blog we tend to look down the road at what might be coming, but. We have to get down the road in the meantime. John C. Felmy of the API has thought this through and managed to compress the main concepts with language that anyone can use to good effect. More surprising is the text that follows is an edited version of an answer given as Mr. Felmy was interviewed. The youTube video is included below. Its not a long read, but a good wake up call to getting on with the important matters for our economy. Now if just 200 million or so American’s would catch on. BW.
John C. Felmy of the API.
There’s a lot of discussion in Washington these days about energy policy, and unfortunately a significant amount of it is divorced from the facts. Today’s discussion tends to focus on immature and expensive technologies that hold promise for the future but do not measure up to the expectations of the American public today.
Here in the United States, consumers expect to have a reliable and affordable supply of energy that helps them heat their homes and fuel their transportation needs. Consumers today also are grappling with a serious economic environment. Job losses and uncertainty make it difficult to plan for the future. Having a stable source of energy can help. In fact, expanding energy exploration and production can have a positive impact on the U.S. economy and the lives of all Americans.
We have a vast amount of undiscovered oil and natural gas in the United States. If the energy industry were allowed to develop it, it would generate jobs, revenue for the government, and reduce the trade deficit. And that’s a win-win-win proposition for the American people. But energy discussions tend to focus on just one narrow segment of the energy industry such as renewables. In general, policymakers are talking more about solar, wind and geothermal than they are talking about oil development.
Yes, we are going to need those resources going forward, but solar, wind and geothermal energy are used to generate electricity. Here in the United States, we have 250 million cars that don’t plug in. They’re going to need oil products into the coming decades. We should produce the oil here in the United States where expanded oil development can generate jobs and revenue, and improve the deficit.
This nation needs a rational energy policy. Yes, we’ll need energy efficiency. Yes, we’ll need alternatives, but we’re going to need more oil and natural gas as well. We’re going to need oil for the cars, we’re going to need natural gas for power generation, and we’re going to need coal and nuclear. Nuclear power has a role to play. It’s encouraging to see that our elected officials are reexamining nuclear policy, and we hope that moves forward.
As a nation, we also need to be mindful of the Law of Unintended Consequences. For example, we think it’s important to consider new ways to power vehicles. Advances in battery technology also are likely to help the development and utility of affordable electric vehicles. But the electricity for these vehicles must be generated by power plants that in all likelihood are burning coal. Furthermore, the new batteries contain raw materials, including rare earth minerals from China or lithium from Bolivia, that have to be imported.
It’s quite possible that the United States could find itself trading one import system for another. This means that our policymakers will need to consider whether it’s preferable for U.S. energy security and the trade deficit to import oil or other materials.
Likewise, consideration should be given to nuclear power’s impact on our energy security. Today 80 percent of our nuclear fuel is imported – much of it from former Soviet Union countries.
A well-conceived energy policy also should take care to do no harm to the energy industry, but rather encourage it to make the investments needed to find and develop fuels for the future. Unfortunately, the administration’s proposed 2011 budget contains provisions that would drain $80 billion from the oil and natural gas industry, which would have the perverse impact of reducing investments. This approach was tried back in the 1970s and ‘80s, and it was a colossal failure. It led to a reduction in domestic oil and natural gas production and an increase in imports. The United States should not repeat that mistake.
Likewise, the nation should carefully examine the ramifications of climate policy. Studies show that the Waxman-Markey bill, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year, would uniformly hurt everyone who drives a car, travels by plane, and moves goods and services in a truck by raising energy costs. It also would destroy more than 2 million U.S. jobs and encourage businesses to relocate overseas where stringent environmental regulations do not exist. In this weak economy with the unemployment rate just below 10 percent, this nation should not adopt a policy that exports jobs and increases emissions.
The United States has fueled its economy on affordable and reliable energy for many decades. It can continue to thrive and provide a much needed boost to the economy by expanding the development of traditional energy resources,including oil and natural gas, while investing in energy resources for tomorrow.
John Felmy is the chief economist and manager of statistics at the American Petroleum Institute (API) in Washington, D.C.
Prepared by:
Jane Van Ryan
Senior Manager, Communications
vanryanj@api.org
American Petroleum Institute (API)
Check out our blog at http://blog.energytomorrow.org/
Mar
8
The Transonic Way to Improved Gas Mileage
March 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Transonic was exhibiting at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington earlier last week with a supercritical fuel injection system that can improve the fuel economy or gas mileage of internal combustion engines by between 50-75%.
That’s almost unbelievable, but stay with me. The Transonic fuel injection system is based on supercritical fluid principles, that is any substance at a temperature and pressure above its thermodynamic critical point. The TSCi Fuel Injection System (Transonic Super Critical Injection) comprises new fuel injectors that take the fuel charge to a supercritical state just prior to its direct injection at Top Dead Center (TDC) of the cylinder.
TSCi Fuel Injection Operation. Click image for more info.
Michael Frick, Transonic Vice President for Engineering explains, “A supercritical fluid is basically a fourth state of matter that’s part way between a gas and liquid.” A substance goes supercritical when it is heated beyond a certain thermodynamic critical point so that it refuses to liquefy no matter how much pressure is applied. “People might remember from chemistry class that there’s a triple point on the [temperature vs. pressure] phase diagram of water, for instance, at which water exists simultaneously as ice, water, and vapor, but few know that there’s another critical point at and around which a fluid will exhibit gas-like and liquid-like properties,” he explained.
Supercritical fluids have unique properties. To begin, their density is midway between those of a liquid and gas, about half to 60% that of the liquid. On the other hand, they also feature the molecular diffusion rates of a gas and so can dissolve substances that are usually tough to place in solution. Also supercritical fluids have very low surface tension. This enables quicker mixing, and it exhibits catalytic activity that is two to three orders of magnitude faster than the purely liquid form of the substance.
Transonic’s TSCi gasoline fuel charge enters the cylinder at around 400 °C—compared to about 100 °C for a conventional liquid direct injection fuel charge—at precisely Top Dead Center (TDC, 0° crank angle). The supercritical charge facilitates short ignition delay and fast combustion, with the energy released focused just on pushing the piston down. The fast combustion minimizes crevice burn (between the piston and cylinder wall) and partial combustion near the cylinder walls, and prevents droplet diffusion burn. The TSCi system supports more efficient engine operation over the full range of conditions—from stoichiometric air-to-fuel ratios at full power to lean 80:1 air-to-fuel ratios at cruise.
Transonic Technology Injector Demonstrator
So what’s actually happening? The injector is acting much like current technology except that the fuel is heated to the supercritical level. At such temperature the injection brings along the heat needed for injection, the fuel(s) are already in a near gas state with almost no liquids to burn, thus the ignition is very fast and the fuel needed can be metered to provide the needed pressure in the chamber to achieve power. At low power one might suspect the flame front doesn’t get to the cylinder wall before the fuel is consumed. Thus the making of excess heat, the major share of efficiency losses is minimized if not avoided.
The TSCi system puts the supercritical fuel in place where most of the combustion in the hot eddy of gas forms at the center of a standard diesel cylinder chamber. By changing the ignition delay so that the fuel is ignited in the close confined area, the flame can be kept away from contact with the walls, which take heat out of the engine. Transonic has also decided to limit combustion to within the first 20 to 30 degrees past top-dead center, to make full use of the mechanical energy created by burning while reducing the heat lost to the exhaust.
Mike Rocke, Transonic Vice President of Marketing and Business Development says the TSCi systems are “almost drop-in” units, including “a GDI-type,” common-rail system that incorporates a metal-oxide catalyst that breaks fuel molecules down into simpler hydrocarbon chains, and a precision, high-speed (piezoelectric) injector whose resistance-heated pin places the fuel in a supercritical state as it enters the cylinder.
Software fuel management and control is key to facilitating the extremely fast combustion and is provided by advanced microprocessing technology. The TSCi injection system can also be supplemented by advanced thermal management, exhaust gas recovery, electronic valves, and advanced combustion chamber geometries. Through the use of its software, the TSCi system can optimize the use of any combustion chamber geometry or piston bowl shape.
To minimize friction losses, the Transonic engineers have steadily reduced the compression of their test engines to between 20:1 and 16:1, with the possibility of 13:1 for gasoline fueled engines.
There is a wealth of unanswered questions. Most obvious is that the engine will need built to diesel strength. Then the more obscure such as will air throttling be needed? One wonders how well the injectors might last, the fuel pressures involved, and the fuel heating system and its lifespan as well.
Transonic’s own testing using a mid-size vehicle on a chassis dynamometer resulted in EPA highway fuel economy of 64 mpg (3.7 L/100km), with city testing being finalized this year, estimated at 47 mpg (5.0 L/100km). Compare that to the 2010 Prius which delivers 51 mpg US (4.6 L/100km) EPA city and 48 mpg (4.9 L/100km) highway. According to Rocke the TSCi system would add about $1,500 to the cost of the vehicle in substituting TSCi for a current technology injection set, compared to about a $4,000 expense for a current full hybrid solution.
One can expect if Transonic can use a business model that runs to volume over high individual fees, the adoption and further innovation and improvements could come fast and furious. Lets hope so.
Mar
5
Mini Ethanol Plants to be Built This Year
March 5, 2010 | 4 Comments
The entrepreneurs at eFarms LLC believe they have an answer for farmers with crop overproduction, high fuel costs and the need for quality animal feed. Build a farm size mini ethanol plant.
eFarms Operations Manager Richard Edmonds says, “This is a stand-alone machine that a farmer can put in a 24-by-24 pole barn and run it themselves, getting not only fuel for the farm, but nutritious feed.” He notes the planned design would take in any crop with a high enough sugar content that could be used for processing.
eFarms is out of Holland Michigan where winters are ‘mild’ due to the winds coming off Lake Michigan adding snow and keeping the temperatures from getting very cold. The area is rich in farming for orchard crops and other very high value fruits such as grapes. Holland is southwest of Grand Rapids and about across the lake from Milwaukee.
The company is developing a “Renewable Fuel System,” which will take crop products including corn, apples, cherries and other fruits and vegetables and turn them into “diesel” ethanol and animal feed. You might wince, but a lot of the total production in fruits and vegetables isn’t suitable to sell for human consumption. Currently, its mostly just wasted or goes to livestock feed.
The company has a prototype in development for testing and refinement, with plans to have five or six full-scale machines ready for testing on farms this summer. eFarms is looking for about five farmers to test its new ethanol and feed production system. For more information, call Richard Edmonds at 616-395-8975 or e-mail Richard@efarms-us.com. It’s not likely that they’d be willing to go far for the on farm testing, but the interest expressed from anywhere will assist in attracting customers, financing and talent.
Tom Burgess of eFarms. Click image for more info.
eFarms has received a $120,000 development loan from the state’s Pfizer Retention Fund that was set up to hire Pfizer workers. Company President Tom Burgess, one of the lead investors who also owns the Merestone Group LLC development company in Hudsonville says, “Up until now, we have been working with funding from an investment partnership. The development loan will help move us to the next stage.” With a current full-time staff of three, eFarms recently moved into space at the MSU Bioeconomy Institute in the former Pfizer development plant, 242 Howard St. in Holland Township, to complete development of the product.
Burgess estimates the machine should produce 5 1/2 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. Other crops are being tested for output results. The RFS has a 7,500-gallon capacity for organic material, which is mixed with water and processed to produce the ethanol and feed. That 5 ½ gallon per bushel of corn number seems really high, they might be using corn species such as “sweet corn” found in the grocery store. But, in fairness, miss quotes and such at this stage are not big deals.
What matters is that local sized units look to be affordable investments. One press piece suggests units might be priced at less than $100,000. At that price local production in rural America might take off. That would drive a whole range of E-something using products such as E-85 vehicles and ‘E’ conversion work. Leave it to rural America to come up with self-sufficiency activities that urban America will watch and complain about.
The other aspect is that local ethanol production leftovers will very likely stay in the “wet” form of the refuse or distillers grain. The drying of the refuse is one of the main uses of natural gas in ethanol production; so immediate use will save even more and improve the ratio of energy in to energy out of ethanol.
Urbanites might also need to be aware that lots of local ethanol supply will be an incentive for direct ethanol fuel cells. There’s more folks out there than most city dwellers realize. As a market, rural America is a very large market indeed. Add in the small towns and cities that could conceivably become fully energy independent, then the large metros would be come more secure as well.
Speculatively speaking in a very rough way, say a farmer loads 1,000 bushels of corn worth about $3,500 today. From that the farmer would get (more likely) 2,500 gallons of ethanol, worth about $4,625 ($1.85 a gallon for the ethanol) the distillers grain cleared of the carbohydrates leaving the cellulose and proteins for the cost of the investment, some natural gas or other heat source, which at this size could be solar, and the enzymes needed to get to yeast digestable sugars. It should work.
Ethanol is an American story that was built from the farmer up through to taking better than 10% of the U.S. gasoline market. No one has to tell successful farmers that fuels and foods are incredibly similar things. A BTU whether sourced from fossil fuel or biomass is still a result of oxidation whether by a living cell or an engine, is still a BTU.
Less than a century ago, all the food people consumed was powered by corn and other crops fueling animals such as horses and mules. A large share of the acreage farmers worked was dedicated to that ‘animal fuel.’ Petroleum pushed that acreage share back for a while, but now the price of petroleum products is pushing the other way.
Be grateful for ethanol. You want (affordable) food to eat don’t you? Best to hope this kind of technological trickle down works in a big way.
Mar
4
A Major Lithium Ion Battery Improvement Is Verified
March 4, 2010 | 4 Comments
Planar Energy has received the official confirmation of engineering samples performance from the University of Central Florida that verify the company’s internal tests. Scott Faris, President and CEO of Planar Energy says, “This fundamental materials breakthrough, coupled with our proprietary low-cost manufacturing process, will render traditional chemical batteries obsolete.” Bold words . . .
“It will allow solid state battery fabrication that will enable manufacturers to increase their capacity by 200-to-300 percent, while reducing costs more than 50 percent. This is what the automotive industry needs to make electric vehicles practical and affordable,” he continued. There is meat on these bones.
Planar Energy Samples. Faris holds a block of eight ultra-thin batteries made from elements that are vaporized in an evaporator at left.
Planar Energy is a developer of large-format, solid-state batteries co-founded by Scott Faris, who is a serial entrepreneur, and Battelle Ventures in 2007 as a spin-out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Planar’s products are based upon a portfolio of patents in the areas of materials deposition, new materials and battery design technologies. This is not to be taken lightly. It seems Planar Energy has developed a new generation of inorganic solid-state electrolyte and electrode materials along with a proprietary manufacturing process called “Streaming Protocol for Electroless Electrochemical Deposition,” or SPEED.
Planar is describing SPEED as a low-cost, high-speed, roll-to-roll deposition process, which is significantly more flexible and scalable than existing deposition methods. This eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming vacuum deposition usually required for inorganic films. It also produces energy storage films that are significantly superior to slurry and polymer-based films used in traditional chemical batteries.
SPEED uses water-based precursors, allows for the direct growth of self-assembled films directly on flexible substrates or directly on top of other films. The film growth is done under ambient conditions and with growth rates exceeding 1 micron/minute over large surface areas. The SPEED-deposited films can range from single element films or complex inorganic chemistries with excellent stoichiometry. The process is compatible with a large array of known compound materials systems and it enables use of entirely new compound materials not workable in vacuum or slurry-coating processes. As an example, Planar Energy’s proprietary electrolytes are based upon unique chemistries that cannot be achieved in vacuum deposition.
Here are the points noted in the letter provided for public release by University of Central Florida’s Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center (AMPAC):
- Planar Energy has identified a new class of solid-state electrolytes that have conductivity of 10-4 in measured samples and 10-3 in functional battery calculations. The conductivity ranges displayed allow for high-rate batteries required in automotive applications.
- Planar Energy’s solid-state electrolyte materials are deposited as thin films directly on active layers in the battery, eliminating the historic process of having to deposit films on separate substrates and then mechanically joining them.
- Planar Energy’s electrolytes demonstrate the same performance level of liquid electrolytes currently used by the lithium-ion industry, but they are in a solid form factor.
- Planar Energy’s change in form factor simplifies the battery manufacturing process and enables existing battery chemistries to function at 95% of their theoretical value.
- Planar Energy’s batteries will be intrinsically safe, allowing customers to further reduce packaging requirements, as well as simplify the battery management system.
- Planar Energy’s batteries have virtually no self-discharge, allowing them to sit for long periods of time while retaining their charge. Traditional lithium-ion batteries have high discharge rates that are problematic for automotive applications.
This is an impressive listing. While not directly addressing the 2 to 3 times the energy built at half the price, the technology transfer is yielding results.
Notable in the industry is that Japanese firms have roll to roll production technology on line now, but not at the performance Planar is claiming. The “how” looks fully doable. Roll to roll techniques are gaining market share in solar panels as well.
The questions are in the electrolytes, the connections, anode and cathode materials and designs and a host of construction matters over the course of building a battery. That area is where the meaningful questions lay.
If it all can go to scale, then the signaling to the market will have to crack the market itself wide enough for mass production. With Faris on board and a list of awards and acclaims, getting the attentions seems assured.
Faris seems bent on getting to a 75% cost reduction with the 2 to 3 fold capacity increase. The capacity matter seems consistent across the limited and short period of online info this writer reviewed for back grounding this post. That implies the materials involved are part of the original technology transfer.
By any measure, if Planar and Faris can get production costs down 75%, it won’t be ”hard to do marketing”. Lots of work remains, building prototypes, testing, looking into any heat issues, getting cycling results, lifespan expectations, and identifying markets with needs.
A lithium ion battery that’s physically lighter by two thirds, offered at half or perhaps 25% the price of competitive batteries bodes well for the firm’s chances – and much less expensive consumer products.
Mar
3
A Breakthrough In Biomass Production
March 3, 2010 | 1 Comment
Stanford University molecular biologist Sharon Long says, “We have discovered a new biological process, by which leguminous plants control behavior of symbiotic bacteria. These plants have a specialized protein processing system that generates specific protein signals. These were hitherto unknown, but it turns out they are critical to cause nitrogen fixation.” This is a critical matter in feeding and fueling our populous planet. Here’s why.
Professor Sharon Long of Stanford University
Nitrogen is vital for all plant life from algae to trees. It’s one of the three main fertility elements, the others being phosphorus and potassium. Without these plant life as we need it would not support humanity. Our numbers now require synthesized fertility application, and more will be needed. Thus any breakthrough that makes more plant food available is of major importance. One plant family, legumes you’ll recognize as peas, beans, and the livestock foods alfalfa and clover have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that captures nitrogen from the air and turn it into plant food, a sort of “do it yourself” solution. The system has been poorly understood, even while being exploited by farmers for centuries, but now the little universe has been cracked open.
The key part of the process that Long’s research group uncovered is a plant gene that triggers a critical chemical signal. Without the signal, no nitrogen gets fixed by the bacteria. Dong Wang, a postdoctoral scholar in Long’s lab who pinned down the gene, is first author of a paper describing the work, published Feb. 26 in Science. Long, a Stanford University Professor of Biology, is the senior author.
The beneficial bacteria in question reside inside root nodules of where they pluck molecules of nitrogen from air in the soil and turn it into ammonia, which feeds the plant. It sounds simple, but it is a complicated and poorly understood process. Only bacteria that contain a special enzyme are capable of this sort of “nitrogen fixing” using airborne nitrogen – no other type of living organism can do it. All other plants have to get their nutrients from using already fixed nitrogen in the soil. This special ability allows legumes to flourish in nitrogen-poor soils, whereas other plants require applications of manufactured nitrogen fertilizer to grow well. This is “magic,” a holy grail if you’ll allow, for massive increases of biomass and reductions in synthetic ammonia manufacturing from natural gas and adding more soils to food and fuel production.
Nitrogen Fixing Root Nodules. Click image for more info.
Long said, “When you deal with a natural soil, you are dealing with a lot of complexity. Everything we learn about what makes symbiosis work gives us a tool to understand why, sometimes, symbiosis fails. Plant breeders who are trying to help develop better-adapted plants can now analyze traits such as this. We’ve given them a new tool.”
The legume that Long’s team worked with is called barrel medic, a forage plant similar to alfalfa. They tracked down the newly discovered gene by studying mutant plants that were failing to produce healthy nodules on their roots.
While bacteria inside normal nodules will thrive, in the defective nodules of this plant those bacteria can’t provide the benefit they are wired to deliver. Long said that the mutant “contained perfectly good bacteria, but was making these lousy nodules.”
Wang found that the mutant plants generated the proper precursor to the protein needed to nudge the bacteria into fixing nitrogen. But the critical enzyme for processing that precursor into the final signal was missing. So the bacteria simply sat, the nodules didn’t develop and no nitrogen got fixed.
By comparing the genome of the mutant plants with normal plants, the group found a gene that was missing from the mutants. Suspecting that gene might be the culprit, the researchers took a functional version of the gene from normal plants and put it into the mutants. The mutant legumes then began fixing nitrogen the same as normal ones, “proving that we found the right gene,” said Wang.
Since about the mid 1950s when hybrid seed corn and nitrogen fertilization took off nitrogen fertilizer use has skyrocketed. Anhydrous ammonia nitrogen fertilizer is pretty good at escaping the soil – much has left by water runoff to fertilize algae blooms as large as 7,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico creating ‘dead zones’ of other sea life. Anhydrous ammonia’s dependency on natural gas has introduced dramatic costs to food and fuel production.
Long accurately observes, “That might make things more expensive for American farmers and increase food prices for consumers, but this is going to wipe out people in developing countries, whose soils are perhaps most in need of fertilizers. This is a crucial issue. And nitrogen fixation is a key to sustainability.” The world is going to need a lot more nitrogen plant food.
“The rhizobium bacteria are a critical partner in whether that kind of extension of serviceable land can occur,” she said. “In order for us to take existing symbioses and help make them better, optimize them for being productive even when conditions start to deteriorate, tools such as understanding how to improve nitrogen fixing in legumes are crucial.”
The bigger picture hints that the plant genetics and the rhizobium bacteria could be modified into other major food and fuel crops. That’s the holy grail – filled with wine.
For all the attention we give to the biomass process technology, just getting the biomass is job one. Without the element plant foods in adequate and low cost supply, the process technology wouldn’t matter.
Mar
2
Dawn Of The Thermo Cell
March 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
A thermocell is a device that captures heat energy and converts it to electricity, an idea with the potential of doubling or tripling the available power supply if applied to the various thermal heat engines that are used to generate electricity. Success at high efficiency, scale and price would have a dramatic effect of power costs worldwide. As the numbers below show, applications could be widespread. This is definitely a field to watch closely.
An international team of researchers from the US (link to University of Texas Dallas), India and Australia demonstrated thermo-electrochemical cells in practical configurations from coin size and shaped cells to cells that can be wrapped around exhaust pipes that harvest low-grade thermal energy (temperature below 130 °C), using relatively inexpensive carbon multiwalled nanotube (MWNT) electrodes. Applications can be anywhere heat is a source and electricity is a part of the energy use.
Thermocell Installed Over Pipe. A thermocell is wrapped around a stainless steel pipe to generate electrical power.
The team’s work paper was published online February 19th in the ACS journal Nano Letters.
International Team's Thermocell Function. Click image for the largest view.
The thermocell is a structure that has an anode that operates in the heat source and a cathode that operates in cooler or cold source. The team’s anode and cathode provide high electrochemically accessible surface areas and fast redox-mediated electron transfer. The surfaces the team has designed significantly enhance thermocell current generation capacity and overall efficiency. The team showed efficiency of thermocells with MWNT electrodes to be as high as 1.4% of Carnot efficiency – 3 times higher than previously demonstrated thermocells. They are getting somewhere with a good jump.
So far low efficiencies and costly electrode materials have limited harvesting of thermal energy as electrical energy using thermo-electrochemical cells. With the cost of MWNTs decreasing, MWNT-based thermocells may become commercially viable for harvesting low-grade thermal energy. One part of the team’s astonishing result is from efficiency further improved by directly synthesizing MWNTs as vertical forests that reduce electrical and thermal resistance at electrode/substrate junctions.
The team developed the carbon nanotube -based thermocells utilizing the ferri/ferrocyanide redox couple and electrodes made from carbon-multiwalled nanotubes (MWNT) buckypaper and vertically aligned MWNT arrays. The buckypaper is made by a filtration process that is analogous to that used for making ordinary paper. That common process for making thermocells is very encouraging.
They found that the performance of MWNTs as thermocell electrodes supersedes that of conventional electrode materials, including expensive platinum foil and graphite sheet. With a hot-side temperature of 65 °C and a temperature difference of 60 °C, they achieved a maximum output power of 1.8 W/m2 in a stagnant cell, justifying the efficiency claim of Carnot cycle efficiency of 1.4%. Cheap enough – this could make great sense. The temp zone is below what is being seen for binary generator sets. From the paper (a pdf file link):
“…Thermocells using aqueous potassium ferrocyanide/ ferricyanide redox solution have been studied by many groups because this redox system reversibly exchanges one electron per iron atom and produces a large reaction entropy, yielding Seebeck coefficient (>1 mV/K) and high exchange current. However, to obtain efficiencies of reasonable interest noble metals such as Pt are usually required as electrode materials in thermocells, and this restricts commercial viability. Also, the best prior-art thermocells typically have efficiencies of~0.40% of Carnot efficiency (when efficiency is correctly evaluated, as discussed below). In fact, it was previously predicted that a power conversion efficiency of 1.2% of the Carnot efficiency would be difficult to achieve.
With improvements in cell design and optimization of MWNT properties and electrode structure, thermocell efficiency is likely to increase. Thin coin-like thermocells were fabricated and operated for three months to provide essentially constant power output.
In such configurations, direct synthesis of MWNT forest electrodes was shown to provide improved thermal contact that contributed to a 30% increase in efficiency as compared to buckypaper electrodes that required secondary attachment to the package substrates. The performance of MWNT-based thermocells was shown to be scalable and amenable to complex systems.
With the cost of MWNTs decreasing, thermocells with the performance reported here may develop into an economical solution for harvesting untapped supplies of low-grade heat. Moreover, the enhanced thermocell performance demonstrated in this study using MWNT electrodes suggests that other nanostructured electrode materials might also be applied to significantly enhance the efficiency of thermocell devices.
Thermo-electrochemical cells (otherwise known as thermogalvanic cells or thermocells) that utilize the temperature dependence of electrochemical redox potentials (i.e., the Seebeck effect) to produce electrical power may become an attractive alternative for harvesting low-grade heat, given their simple design, direct thermal-to-electric energy conversion, continuous operation, low expected maintenance, and zero carbon emission.”
This is just Version 1 of the latest thermocell leap. The list of possible applications just boggles ones’ thoughts. With a starting point of only 65 °C and a temperature difference of 60 °C the team’s efforts are addressing a huge store of energy with higher temperature application research surely in mind.
Thermocell may well have a role in cogneration. In an ideal energy production, all the heat would go out in work. That level of overall efficiency would change the entire field of view in energy production and use. The team’s work is an effort worthy of congratulations.
Mar
1
A New Way to Make Fuel
March 1, 2010 | 2 Comments
James Dumesic, the Steenbock Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with postdoctoral researchers Jesse Bond and David Martin Alonso, and graduate students Dong Wang and Ryan West have published details of a highly efficient, environmentally friendly process that selectively converts gamma-valerolactone, a biomass derivative, into the chemical equivalent of gasoline to jet fuel. The paper has been published in the Feb. 26 edition of the journal Science. Professor Dumesic just continues to amaze at identifying new pathways.
The new and simple process preserves about 95 percent of the energy from the original biomass, requires little hydrogen input, and captures carbon dioxide under high pressure for future use.
The team’s new method exploits sugar’s tendency to degrade. Sugar molecules frequently degrade to form levulinic acid and formic acid – two products previous methods couldn’t readily transform into high-energy liquid fuels and something carbohydrate processors deal with in many industries. Dumesic says, “Instead of trying to fight the degradation, we started with levulinic acid and formic acid and tried to see what we could do using that as a platform.” Everyone is trying to avoid the acids forming, just imagine what would happen if there was a high value market instead.
In the presence of metal catalysts, the two acids react to form gamma-valerolactone, or GVL, which now is manufactured in small quantities as an herbal food and perfume additive. Using laboratory-scale equipment and stable, inexpensive and commercial catalysts, Dumesic’s group converts aqueous solutions of GVL into jet fuel. “It really is very simple,” says Jesse Bond, of the two-step catalytic process. “We can pull off these two catalytic stages, as well as the requisite separation steps, in series, with basic equipment. With very minimal processing, we can produce a pure stream of jet-fuel-range alkenes and a fairly pure stream of carbon dioxide.” This truly bodes well for scaling up. The temperatures are low, too, running under 710 ºF at highest testing range.
The light alcohols methanol and ethanol work well, are becoming more popular as blending agents in automobile fuels and have potential for fuel cell applications. But they have limitations for use in flight such as jet fuel because of their low energy density. Given the present internal combustion engine designs on the market, the light alcohols cannot fully replace petroleum-derived hydrocarbons. The team’s results produce products of condensable alkenes with molecular weights higher than the light alcohols that can be targeted for gasoline and/or jet fuel applications. The new process is more complex than the evolved ethanol production of today, but now biomatter could fill a huge range of the fuel market.
Research team member David Martin Alonso says, “The hydrocarbons produced from GVL in this new process are chemically equivalent to those used in the present infrastructure. The product we make is ready for the jet fuel applications and can be added to existing hydrocarbon blends, as needed, to meet specs.”
Dumesic, who has prior work in proceedings going on to commercial use, has learned to look for the commercial hurdles. He observes the biggest barrier to implementing the renewable fuel is the cost of GVL. Until now there has not been an incentive to mass-produce the compound. Thus “The bottleneck in having the fuel ready for prime time is the availability of cost-effective GVL,” he says.
With a process in hand to get from GVL to fuels, Dumesic and his students are developing more efficient methods for making GVL from biomass sources such as wood, corn stover, switchgrass and others. “Once the GVL is made effectively, I think this is an excellent way to convert it to jet fuel,” he says.
The press release says, “The simple process preserves about 95 percent of the energy from the original biomass, requires little hydrogen input, and captures carbon dioxide under high pressure for future beneficial use.” The paper’s abstract says, “ . . . (the) integrated catalytic system that does not require an external source of hydrogen.” So there is a bit of confusion up in Madison. There are also some questions about the residuals and waste, what might be returned to the soil and a range of other questions.
But this has to seize the attention of a huge range of biomatter processors. Should the paths from biomatter to the levulinic acid and formic acid be developed at low capital and operational cost, fuel production could become a small business with substantial rewards.
Quite a fellow, this Professor Dumesic. Quite an idea as well, that seems to work quite well too.
