Metals Tech

The Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking Forum called for speeding up the deployment of hydrogen and fuel cells technologies for a green future.

The Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership designed to boost the collaboration between Industry and SMEs in Europe, and drive research and commercialisation of fuel cells and hydrogen technologies. Its annual stakeholder Forum is a time of renewed collaboration and commitment from its partners.

A green future

“Hydrogen is a key technology for achieving Europe’s climate and energy goals. Its potential benefits for the environment, consumers and European economy can power the transition of Europe’s energy sector towards a green future.” said Maroš Šefčovič, Vice-President of the European Commission for Energy Union.

Valerie Bouillon-Delporte, Chair of the FCH JU Board, added: “As hydrogen becomes increasingly important in the energy transition, the European industry is committed to investing in green hydrogen technologies and keeping its worldwide leadership.”

European fuel cell and hydrogen technologies

The FCH JU Executive Director Bart Biebuyck, who recently spoke to us about European fuel cell and hydrogen technologies, said: “Europe is now ready to accelerate the deployment of hydrogen and fuel cells technology and build on its strong leadership position in this field. Our industry-lead partnership is delivering innovative solutions, while creating 1000s of hydrogen-related jobs. ”

More information on fuel cell and hydrogen technologies from Bart BieBuyck will be available in our upcoming SciTech Europa Quarterly publication.

The Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking commented that the 400 participants at the forum in Brussels “[Took stock of the latest achievements of the sector while addressing the challenges of building the hydrogen infrastructure across the EU. Using hydrogen for renewables integration and sector coupling, and the economic potential of hydrogen in the global context are among the main topics discussed. Stakeholders agree that the partnership is delivering and must continue its work, building on the successes of the past ten years.”

Imagine going back to the late 1990s and being able to be a ground-floor investor in electric vehicles.

Well, you don’t have to imagine.

Hydrogen fuel cell technology is at the same point in development as electric vehicles were in the late 1990s. And for us as investors, a hydrogen fuel cell boom could be a retirement-level event.

Fact is, hydrogen fuel cells have the potential to be superior to all other green technologies.

• They put out no emissions other than water vapor.
• They have a fuel economy equivalent to about 2x that of gasoline combustion engines.
• And they run on hydrogen, which is literally the most abundant element in the entire universe.

There’s just one thing that’s been holding hydrogen fuels cells back…

Their cost.

Up until a few years ago, it cost about $1,000 for every kilowatt-hour produced by hydrogen fuel cells.

But today, the Department of Energy reports that figure is down to $53 per kilowatt-hour.

And with continued development, the DOE expects costs to continue dropping to $40 per kilowatt-hour by 2020.

Hydrogen fuel cells are becoming so affordable that they’re now even being marketed to the public to recharge small electronic devices.

You can get a portable hydrogen fuel cell reactor to charge your tablets, cell phones, etc. right now for under $100.

Heck, you can even choose the color!

This portable hydrogen fuel cell reactor is among the first of its kind. Imagine how much more powerful these things will be in just a few years.

I’m guessing by that time, a hydrogen fuel cell reactor the size of today’s laptop will be able to power an entire house.

Governments and industry leaders all over the world have already begun jumping on board.

The DOE just announced it has plans to collaborate with the U.S. Army on the development of hydrogen fuel cell technologies for military and civilian use.

Of course, working with the military, the DOE was mostly tight lipped about the plans. But military research (which has deep pockets) could fast-forward development of hydrogen fuel cells, making them more affordable, efficient, and faster then currently expected.

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz just announced deliveries of its GLC F-Cell SUV in Germany, claiming it to be the world’s first plug-in hydrogen car.

The GLC features a unique plug-in hybrid powertrain that can also run on hydrogen. Initial sales will be targeted at large fleet buyers. But Mercedes says the GLC will be ready to lease to the rest of the market in early 2019.

Companies like Toyota have been marketing the Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell passenger vehicle, to the retail market for a few years now with limited success. Costs, lack of infrastructure, and limited production have generally held back sales.

Estimates put the current global fuel cell vehicle market at less than $2 billion. Reports show that by year-end 2017, fewer than 6,400 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles had been sold worldwide since 2013.

But as fuel cell technology becomes more affordable, that’s expected to change. By 2022, it’s estimated that the global hydrogen fuel cell market will be worth over $12 billion.

Hydrogen fuel cell technology is at the same point in development as electric vehicles were in the late 1990s.

The Toyota Prius, the first major hybrid electric vehicle to hit the market, came out in 1997. It was a first sign of things to come. Today, electric vehicles are a trillion-dollar worldwide business. The Mirai may serve a similar purpose: the first sign of a hydrogen fuel cell revolution.

There are new developments, such as the recent DOE/Army collaboration and Mercedes’ announcement to roll out a new fuel cell vehicle almost every week.

Even though most are paying attention to lithium battery electric vehicles, there is rapid development of fuel cells happening right now.

Investors should take notice and begin to act.

In mid-December, twin discs will begin glowing blue on the underside of a minibus-sized spacecraft in deep space. At that moment Europe and Japan’s BepiColombo mission will have just come a crucial step closer to Mercury.

This week sees the in-flight commissioning and test firing of the four thrusters – with one or two firing at a time – of the Solar Electric Propulsion System that BepiColombo relies on to reach the innermost planet. This marks the first in-flight operation of the most powerful and highest-performance electric propulsion system flown on any space mission to date.

Each thruster and its associated power processing and propellant flow control units will be tested to full power to check no ill-effects were incurred from launch, culminating in the first twin thruster operations – the configuration to be used throughout most of the mission.

Their first routine firing is scheduled for the middle of next month, and the propulsion system will operate continuously for three months to optimise the spacecraft’s trajectory for the long voyage to Mercury.

BepiColombo, launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 20 October, faces a different challenge from ESA planetary science missions before it: it is headed inward, toward the Sun, not out, and needs to lose velocity instead of gaining it.

Like all objects in the Solar System, the spacecraft is in solar orbit, moving perpendicular to the pull of the Sun’s gravity. BepiColombo therefore has to slow down through a series of braking manoeuvres and flybys, making it more susceptible to the Sun’s gravity and letting it spiral closer to the heart of the Solar System.

The thrust produced by the electric propulsion system serves to decelerate the spacecraft, or in some cases accelerates it to make its braking flybys more effective. No less than nine planetary flybys of Earth (once), Venus (twice) and Mercury itself (six times) are required to place the multi-module spacecraft in orbit around Mercury in seven years’ time.

Space tug

The Mercury Transfer Module portion of the spacecraft, containing the propulsion system, is in essence a high performance ‘space tug’. Its task is to perform all the active trajectory control manoeuvres needed to convey the other portions of the BepiColombo ‘stack’ – ESA’s Mercury Planet Orbiter and Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter – to Mercury orbit.

The high performance of the propulsion system, in terms of the amount of fuel the thrusters require, is critical. Inert xenon gas is fed in to the thrusters, where electrons are first stripped off the xenon atoms. The resulting electrically charged atoms, referred to as ions, are then focused and ejected out of the thrusters using a high voltage grid system at a velocity of 50 000 meters per second.

This exhaust velocity is 15 times greater than conventional chemical rocket thrusters, allowing a dramatic reduction in the amount of propellant required to achieve the mission.

“The propulsion system transforms electricity generated by the Mercury Transfer Module’s twin 15 m-long solar arrays into thrust,” explains ESA electric propulsion engineer Neil Wallace.

“At full power, a thrust equivalent to the weight of three 1-euro coins is developed, meaning that the thrusters have to keep firing for long periods to be effective, but in the absence of any drag and assuming you are patient, the manoeuvres that are possible and the payload that can be carried are dramatic.”
Electrifying spacecraft propulsion

The four T6 thrusters around which the solar electric propulsion system is designed, have a heritage dating back decades. QinetiQ in the UK – formerly the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency and before that the Farnborough Royal Aircraft Establishment – has been researching electric propulsion since the 1960s.

The first flight of their technology came with the 10 cm-diameter T5 thruster, a key element of ESA’s 2009 gravity-mapping GOCE mission, where it allowed the satellite to orbit at the top of Earth’s atmosphere for over three years, skimming through the diffuse atmosphere at the unprecedentedly low orbital altitude needed for the mission.

The scaled-up T6 thrusters are 22 cm in diameter, the increase in size required for the higher thrust and lifetime requirements of the BepiColombo mission. And unlike GOCE’s T5, these T6 thrusters are manoeuverable, courtesy of gimbal systems developed by RUAG Space in Austria.

“They are clever mechanisms that complicate the system design a bit – all the electrical cables and pipes have to cross a moving boundary – but add a lot to performance,” adds Neil. “They ensure the thrust vector of either a single or double engine firing crosses through the centre of gravity of the spacecraft, which changes over time as propellant is used up.”

Thruster operations are controlled using two Power Processing Units, the architecture of which are designed to support the firing of two T6s simultaneously even in the event of any system anomaly, guaranteeing the maximum thrust of 250 mN can be maintained.

Injecting intelligence

“The intelligence of the system for autonomous thruster operation comes from these Power Processing Units – contributed by Airbus Crisa in Spain,” explains Neil, “which supply the regulated voltages and currents to the thrusters based on instructions from ground control via the spacecraft on-board computer.”

The other key elements are propellant Flow Control Units, also overseen by the PPUs, and the high-voltage electrical harness. The FCUs ensure the correct flows of xenon gas are supplied to the thrusters and were developed by Bradford Engineering in the Netherlands to provide programmable flow rates.

The various elements of the propulsion system have undergone individual and extensive performance and qualification testing ultimately concluding in a series of tests performed at QinetiQ’s Farnborough site.

Testing times

The spacecraft configuration and the extreme nature of the BepiColombo mission – needing to function in thermal conditions akin to placing it in a pizza oven – often demanded similarly extreme test scenarios, pushing the solar electric propulsion technology and test facilities to their limits.

“One important test early in the programme was to ensure that two thrusters could be operated in close proximity for prolonged periods without harmful interactions,” adds Neil. “They turned out to be remarkably tolerant of each other with no measureable effects.”

One of the biggest ironies of the thruster qualification for BepiColombo, heading close to the Sun, was the extreme minimum temperatures experienced by its ion thrusters.

Neil explains: “Despite the fact the mission is headed to Mercury, the bulk of the spacecraft shadows the thrusters for very long periods and when not operating they naturally cool to temperatures way lower than ever tested in the past. We needed to prove they would turn-on and operate within specification when cooled to minus 150 C.

“It was a remarkable testament to the robustness of the technology that even after temperatures sufficient to freeze the xenon in the pipes the thrusters were able to start and operate flawlessly.”

End of the journey

The propulsion system is dependent on the Mercury Planetary Orbiter’s onboard computer for its control and command, so by itself it will not be able to function. Its ultimate fate is to be cast off, when the three-module BepiColombo stack separates before entering Mercury orbit, to circle the Sun indefinitely in the vicinity of the planet, letting the two science modules go to work.

“At one point while planning the BepiColombo mission, the Mercury Transfer Module was planned to impact the planet,” Neil comments, “a sort of Viking funeral that seemed fitting to all of us engineers.”

Gridded ion thruster technology will have a life far beyond BepiColombo however, with commercial applications in development, and future, even more ambitious ESA science missions set to rely on the technology.

The symmetries that govern the world of elementary particles at the most elementary level could be radically different from what has so far been thought. This surprising conclusion emerges from new work published by theoreticians from Warsaw and Potsdam. The scheme they posit unifies all the forces of nature in a way that is consistent with existing observations and anticipates the existence of new particles with unusual properties that may even be present in our close environs.

For a half-century, physicists have been trying to construct a theory that unites all four fundamental forces of nature, describes the known elementary particles and predicts the existence of new ones. So far, these attempts have not found experimental confirmation, and the Standard Model—an incomplete, but surprisingly effective theoretical construct—is still the best description of the quantum world. In a recent paper in Physical Review Letters, Prof. Krzysztof Meissner from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, and Prof. Hermann Nicolai from the Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik in Potsdam have presented a new scheme generalizing the Standard Model that incorporates gravitation into the description. The new model applies a kind of symmetry not previously used in the description of elementary particles.

In physics, symmetries are understood somewhat differently than in the colloquial sense of the word. For instance, whether a ball is dropped now or one minute from now, it will still fall in the same way. That is a manifestation of a certain symmetry: the laws of physics remain unchanged with respect to shifts in time. Similarly, dropping the ball from the same height in one location has the same result as dropping it in another. This means that the laws of physics are also symmetrical with respect to spatial operations.

“Symmetries play a huge role in physics because they are related to principles of conservation. For instance, the principle of the conservation of energy involves symmetry with respect to shifts in time, the principle of the conservation of momentum relates to symmetry of spatial displacement, and the principle of the conservation of angular momentum relates to rotational symmetry,” says Prof. Meissner.

Developing a supersymmetric theory to describe the symmetries between fermions and bosons began back in the 1970s. Fermions are elementary particles whose spin, a quantum property related to rotation, is expressed in odd multiples of the fraction 1/2, and they include both quarks and leptons. Among the latter are electrons, muons, tauons, and their associated neutrinos (as well as their antiparticles). Protons and neutrons, common non-elementary particles, are also fermions. Bosons, in turn, are particles with integer spin values. They include the particles responsible for forces (photons, carriers of the electromagnetic force; gluons, carrying the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons, carrying the weak nuclear force), as well as the Higgs boson.

“The first supersymmetric theories tried to combine the forces typical of elementary particles, in other words the electromagnetic force with a symmetry known as U(1), the weak force with symmetry SU(2) and the strong force with symmetry SU(3). Gravity was still missing,” Prof. Meissner says. “The symmetry between the bosons and fermions was still global, which means the same at every point in space. Soon thereafter, theories were posited where symmetry was local, meaning it could manifest differently at each point in space. Ensuring such symmetry in the theory required for gravitation to be included, and such theories became known as supergravities.”

Physicists noticed that in supergravity theories in four spatiotemporal dimensions, there cannot be more than eight different supersymmetric rotations. Each such theory has a strictly defined set of fields (degrees of freedom) with different spins (0, 1/2, 1, 3/2 and 2), known respectively as the fields of scalars, fermions, bosons, gravitinos and gravitons. For supergravity N=8, which has the maximal number of rotations, there are 48 fermions (with spin 1/2), which is precisely the number of degrees of freedom required to account for the six types of quarks and six types of leptons observed in nature. There was therefore every indication that supergravity N=8 is exceptional in many respects. However, it was not ideal.

One of the problems in incorporating the Standard Model into N=8 supergravity was posed by the electrical charges of quarks and leptons. All the charges turned out to be shifted by 1/6 with respect to those observed in nature: the electron had a charge of -5/6 instead of -1, the neutrino had 1/6 instead of 0, etc. This problem, first observed by Murray Gell-Mann more than 30 years ago, was not resolved until 2015, when Professors Meissner and Nicolai presented the respective mechanism for modifying the U(1) symmetry.

“After making this adjustment we obtained a structure with the symmetries U(1) and SU(3) known from the Standard Model. The approach proved to be very different from all other attempts at generalizing the symmetries of the Standard Model. The motivation was strengthened by the fact that the LHC accelerator failed to produce anything beyond the Standard Model and N=8 supergravity fermion content is compatible with this observation. What was missing was to add the SU(2) group, responsible for the weak nuclear force. In our recent paper, we show how this can be done. That would explain why all previous attempts at detecting new particles, motivated by theories that treated the SU(2) symmetry as spontaneously violated for low energies, but as holding in the range of high energies, had to be unsuccessful. In our view, SU(2) is just an approximation for both low and high energies,” Prof. Meissner explains.

Both the mechanism reconciling the electric charges of the particles, and the improvement incorporating the weak force proved to belong to a symmetry group known as E10. Unlike the symmetry groups previously used in unification theories, E10 is an infinite group, very poorly studied even in the purely mathematical sense. Prof. Nicolai with Thibault Damour and Marc Henneaux had worked on this group before, because it appeared as a symmetry in N=8 supergravity under conditions similar to those during the first moments after the Big Bang, when only one dimension was significant: time.

“For the first time, we have a scheme that precisely anticipates the composition of the fermions in the Standard Model—quarks and leptons—and does so with the proper electric charges. At the same time it includes gravity into the description. It is a huge surprise that the proper symmetry is the staggeringly huge symmetry group E10, virtually unknown mathematically. If further work confirms the role of this group, that will mean a radical change in our knowledge of the symmetries of nature,” Prof. Meissner says.

Although the dynamics is not yet understood, the scheme proposed by Professors Meissner and Nicolai makes specific predictions. It keeps the number of spin 1/2 fermions as in the Standard Model but on the other hand suggests the existence of new particles with very unusual properties. Importantly, at least some of them could be present in our immediate surroundings, and their detection should be within the possibilities of modern detection equipment. But that is a topic for a separate story.

 

A team of researchers from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Harvard University and Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology has developed a way to make batteries in almost any shape that can be imagined. In their paper published in the journal ACS Nano, the researchers describe the process used to make the batteries and the device they created to prove the concept sound.

The shapes of many small devices are constrained by the limits of battery shape—smart watches, for example. Small batteries are typically coin-shaped, rectangular, cylindrical or pouch-shaped. The researchers with this new effort developed a new way to make a battery that could be almost any shape a product manufacturer could design.

The researchers report that they chose zinc-ion batteries because they can be used safely in the open air—this is because they make use of water-based electrolytes. They looked at manufacturing methods used for various products, searching for techniques to make battery components in different shapes. For the cathode, they found that electrospinning allowed batteries to be cut into a desired shape. For some other parts, they used micromachining. For packaging, they used stereolithography. The electrical connections were produced using a 3-D printer. They put all their ideas together and produced some batteries in the shape of letters, rings and circles.

To test their ideas, the researchers created a battery that could be used to power a light sensor affixed to a ring worn on the finger. By successfully demonstrating such a device, the team showed that their ideas were sound. They note that the same process could be used to create other novel devices, and that other options are also available, such as using zinc-manganese batteries to power a graphene supercapacitor.

The researchers also note that the designer batteries they created can be discharged very quickly—and can be fully charged in just a few minutes. They suggest their batteries could be used in such applications as implantable or wearable devices and other novel products.

 

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory have discovered how to make “superalloys” even more super, extending useful life by thousands of hours. The discovery could improve materials performance for electrical generators and nuclear reactors. The key is to heat and cool the superalloy in a specific way. That creates a microstructure within the material that can withstand high heat more than six times longer than an untreated counterpart.

“We came up with a way to make a superalloy that is much more resistant to heat-related failures. This could be useful in electricity generators and elsewhere,” said Subhashish Meher, an INL materials scientist. He was lead author of a new Science Advances paper describing the research.

Alloys are combinations of two or more metallic elements. Superalloys are exceptionally strong and offer other significantly improved characteristics due to the addition of trace amounts of cobalt, ruthenium, rhenium or other elements to a base metal. Understanding how to build an improved superalloy is important for making the metallic mixture better for a particular purpose.

INL scientists have been studying nickel-based superalloys. Since these superalloys can withstand high heat and extreme mechanical forces, they are useful for electricity-generating turbines and high-temperature nuclear reactor components. Previous research had shown that performance can be improved if the material structure of the superalloy repeats in some way from very small sizes to very large, like a box within a box within a box.

This is called a hierarchical microstructure. In a superalloy, it consists of a metallic matrix with precipitates, regions where the composition of the mixture differs from the rest of the metal. Embedded within the precipitates are still finer-scale particles that are the same composition as the matrix outside the precipitates—conceptually like nested boxes.

Meher and his coauthors studied how these precipitates formed within a superalloy. They also investigated how this structure stood up to heat and other treatments.

They found that with the right recipe of heating and cooling, they could make the precipitates two or more times larger than would be the case otherwise, thereby creating the desired microstructure. These larger precipitates lasted longer when subjected to extreme heat. Moreover, computer simulation studies suggest that the superalloy can resist heat-induced failure for 20,000 hours, compared to about 3,000 hours normally.

One application could be electrical generators that last much longer because the superalloy that they are constructed of would be tougher. What’s more, INL scientists may now be able to come up with a procedure that can be applied to other superalloys. So, it may be possible to adjust a superalloy’s strength, heat tolerance or other properties to enhance its use in a particular application.

“We are now better able to dial in properties and improve material performance,” Meher said.

The research appeared Nov. 16 in Science Advances, “The origin and stability of nanostructural hierarchy in crystalline solids.”