Metals Tech
Chinese firm tests electric flying taxi in Dubai
A Chinese firm tested out an electric flying taxi in Dubai on Monday, offering a glimpse of futuristic technology that could one day whisk people through cities high above any traffic.
The XPeng X2, developed by the Guangzhou-based XPeng Inc’s aviation affiliate, is one of dozens of flying car projects around the world. Only a handful have been successfully tested with passengers on board, and it will likely be many years before any are put into service.
Monday’s demonstration was held with an empty cockpit, but the company says it carried out a manned flight test in July 2021.
The sleekly designed vehicle can carry two passengers and is powered by a set of eight propellers. The company says it has a top speed of 130 kilometers (80 miles) per hour.
Unlike airplanes and helicopters, eVTOL, or “electric vertical takeoff and landing,” vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle.
The pilot-less vehicles could one day ferry passengers across town high above congested roadways. But the sector still faces major challenges, including battery life, air traffic control and safety, and infrastructure issues.
Method to fabricate eco-friendly adsorbents for heavy metal ion removal by 3D printing
One of the leading causes of water pollution is heavy metal contamination which has profound adverse effects on human health and the environment. That’s why Clarkson University researchers have developed a cost-effective, 3D printing technology to create sustainable bio-based adsorbents that can effectively remove toxic heavy metal ions from contaminated environments. The 3D printing technique offers a cost-effective, scalable and simple approach to creating tunable adsorbents for environmental remediation that can be used broadly by the community for environmental remediation and sensing applications.
The work performed in the laboratory of Professor Silvana Andreescu, the Egon Matijevic Chair in Chemistry, was recently featured on the front cover page of the journal, Environmental Science Advances. Nadia Cheng, a biomolecular science undergraduate, and two chemistry graduate students, Abraham S. Finny and Oluwatossin Popoola, were involved in the project. Nadia started her work on this project as a senior in high school and then as a Clarkson School student.
“Our work demonstrates unique capabilities of green and sustainable materials to be additively manufactured and designed so that they have the ability to capture and remove toxic contaminants, providing innovative solutions for next-generation detection and remediation technologies. This work contributes to the development of materials and methods for environmental monitoring and clean up to achieve the global WHO goals for clean and sustainable water,” said Professor Andreescu.
Abraham S. Finny PHD, a Senior Scientist at Waters Corporation and a former member of Prof. Andreescu’s lab, says, “Exposure to such innovative, application-focused, and cutting-edge scientific research at Clarkson makes Clarkson graduates excellent problem solvers who go on to become impactful leaders tackling global challenges; another reason why employers find Clarkson graduates highly attractive.”
Carmakers take control of supply sourcing as battery costs rise
For the first time in more than a decade, the cost of an electric car battery is set to rise this year.
Soaring prices for battery raw materials — such as lithium, cobalt and nickel — have led commodity research provider BloombergNEF to predict the reversal of a long-held trend towards cheaper cells, which had seen costs come down from $1,220 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to $132 per KWH last year.
And a return to more expensive batteries, alongside a supply chain squeeze, calls into question how quickly electric vehicles can become affordable mass-market products — at a time when transport still accounts for a quarter of the carbon dioxide emissions that are a driver of global warming.
Industry analysts forecast that carmakers will experience prolonged production disruptions, akin to those caused by semiconductor shortages over the past two years.
So, faced with constraints on their ability to acquire raw materials, automotive companies are planning to take over the buying of vital inputs themselves, rather than leaving it to a vast base of suppliers.
“Carmakers are worried about critical mineral access,” explains Jon Hykawy, president of research firm Stormcrow Capital, adding that taking the lead on raw material sourcing is the only option they have.
Tesla was the first carmaker to venture onto this path at its landmark Battery Day in 2020, with founder Elon Musk saying the company would intervene directly, where necessary, to supplement the supply of battery materials.
Public evidence of Tesla moving up the supply chain has so far been relatively muted. But filings last month showed the EV maker has applied for tax breaks to build a potential lithium refinery in Texas or Louisiana.
Such a move is seen by many industry observers as necessary to achieve Tesla’s ambition of 20mn electric car sales by 2030. It comes with great risk, though. Lithium refining — complex chemical processing — is a far cry from the carmaker’s core expertise of designing vehicles and relies on the company being able to secure a type of lithium ore known as “spodumene”.
Here, availability and cost problems can be serious. Prices of lithium hydroxide, the refined product, have skyrocketed to more than eight times the level of the start of 2021 at almost $70,000 per tonne, close to the record highs hit in March, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
But, despite the high prices, capital flows into lithium are still meagre placed next to expected soaring demand, says Sam Jaffe, vice-president of battery storage solutions at E Source. As a result, his consultancy revised up its medium-term forecast for battery costs to $138 per kilowatt-hour in 2024 — the same level as last year. A cost of $100 per KWH has long been viewed as the level that will make electric cars affordable.
Tesla is the industry frontrunner in securing battery raw materials but some incumbent automakers, frustrated by supply chain disruption, have recently stepped up their own efforts to secure resources by going directly to producers.
General Motors agreed to pre-pay Livent, a lithium mining group, $200mn to secure supplies, while Ford said it would stump up financing for Liontown Resources to develop a lithium mine. Stellantis has even taken a €50mn equity stake in Vulcan Energy Resources, which aims to produce lithium in Germany.
“What we’ve seen, where car manufacturers have been dabbling in the supply chain, is the very beginning stages of what is going to happen,” says Jaffe.
While some see these moves as a much-needed shift in strategy, others say certain deals smack of panic. “It tells you how desperate they are for lithium units — they are willing to do deals with companies that have no production,” says Chris Berry, president of Mountain House Partners, a consultancy.
However, Lukasz Bednarski, principal research analyst at S&P Global Commodity Insights, suggests the doom mongering is overblown.
“The fact that the market is tight is a good enough reason for the automakers to look at their supply chains. Before, they had the mindset: ‘we buy batteries but let’s leave buying the battery materials to the battery manufacturers’. That is changing slowly.”
But, he adds: “It’s still not common for automakers to go out and buy the lithium mine. I don’t think such a trend will really take place because that would be very unusual.”
Higher prices come as western governments commit to industrial policies that will influence where carmakers source their raw materials from, through limits and incentives.
“I don’t think it’s just the pricing environment,” says Yayoi Sekine, head of energy storage at BloombergNEF. “The geopolitical environment has created a lot more questions around securing the supply chain.”
US President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits for EVs with a certain percentage of raw materials sourced from the US, or free trade partners or recycling, which has left automakers and battery cell manufacturers scrambling to rework supply strategies. It also prevents vehicles from accessing those credits if any of the critical materials are extracted, processed or recycled by a “foreign entity of concern”.
Berry says economic and geopolitical changes — which also include soaring energy costs because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and rising interest rates — could turn what would have been a blip in battery prices into something more lasting.
“The entire investment thesis rests on batteries getting cheaper and cheaper every year and getting more energy dense,” he says. “Here we are, for the first time ever, where battery pricing has stagnated.”
“Given so much change across the battery supply chain . . . industry has to turn on a dime, and that means some of these cost pressures could be structural.”
Inexpensive device that can harvest energy from a light breeze and store it as electricity
Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a low-cost device that can harness energy from wind as gentle as a light breeze and store it as electricity.
When exposed to winds with a velocity as low as 2 meters per second (m/s), the device can produce a voltage of three volts and generate electricity power of up to 290 microwatts, which is sufficient to power a commercial sensor device and for it to also send the data to a mobile phone or a computer.
The light and durable device, called a wind harvester, also diverts any electricity that is not in use to a battery, where it can be stored to power devices in the absence of wind.
The scientists say their invention has the potential to replace batteries in powering light emitting diode (LED) lights and structural health monitoring sensors. Those are used on urban structures, such as bridges and skyscrapers, to monitor their structural health, alerting engineers to issues such as instabilities or physical damage.
Measuring only 15 centimeters by 20 centimeters, the device can easily be mounted on the sides of buildings, and would be ideal for urban environments, such as Singaporean suburbs, where average wind speeds are less than 2.5 m/s, outside of thunderstorms.
The findings were published in the journal Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing in September.
Professor Yang Yaowen, a structural engineer from NTU’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), who led the project, said, “As a renewable and clean energy source, wind power generation has attracted extensive research attention. Our research aims to tackle the lack of a small-scale energy harvester for more targeted functions, such as to power smaller sensors and electronic devices.
“The device we developed also serves as a potential alternative to smaller lithium-ion batteries, as our wind harvester is self-sufficient and would only require occasional maintenance, and does not use heavy metals, which if not disposed of properly, could cause environmental problems.”
The innovation has received interest from the industry. The NTU research team is also working toward commercializing their invention.
The study, which presents an innovation that could help cut down on electronic waste and find alternative sources for energy, reflects NTU’s commitment to mitigate our impact on the environment, which is one of four humanity’s grand challenges that the University seeks to address through its NTU 2025 strategic plan.
Riding the wind
The device was developed to harness efficient wind energy at low cost and with low wear and tear. Its body is made of fiber epoxy, a highly durable polymer, with the main attachment that interacts with the wind and is made of inexpensive materials, such as copper, aluminum foil, and polytetrafluoroethylene, a durable polymer that is also known as Teflon.
Due to the dynamic design of its structure, when the harvester is exposed to wind flow, it begins to vibrate, causing its plate to approach to and depart from the stopper. This causes charges to be formed on the film, and an electrical current is formed as they flow from the aluminum foil to the copper film.
In laboratory tests, the NTU-developed harvester could power 40 LEDs consistently at a wind speed of 4 m/s. It could also trigger a sensor device, and power it sufficiently to send the room temperature information to a mobile phone wirelessly.
This demonstrated that the harvester could not only generate electricity to consistently power a device, but that it could store excess charge that was sufficient to keep the device powered for an extended period in the absence of wind.
Prof. Yang added, “Wind energy is a source of renewable energy. It does not contaminate, it is inexhaustible and reduces the use of fossil fuels, which are the origin of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. Our invention has been shown to effectively harness this sustainable source of energy to charge batteries and light LEDs, demonstrating its potential as an energy generator to power the next generation of electronics, which are smaller in size and require less power.”
The NTU team will be conducting further research to further improve the energy storage functions of their device, as well as experiment with different materials to improve its output power. The research team is also in the process of filing for a patent with NTUitive, NTU’s innovation and enterprise company.