Technology

A silent revolution has transformed driving in Norway.

Eerily quiet vehicles are ubiquitous on the fjord-side roads and mountain passes of this wealthy European nation of 5.3 million. Some 30 percent of all new cars sport plug-in cables rather than gasoline tanks, compared with 2 percent across Europe overall and 1-2 percent in the U.S.

As countries around the world—including China, the world’s biggest auto market—try to encourage more people to buy electric cars to fight climate change, Norway’s success has one key driver: the government. It offered big subsidies and perks that it is now due to phase out, but only so long as electric cars remain attractive to buy compared with traditional ones.

“It should always be cheaper to have a zero emissions car than a regular car,” says Climate and Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen, who helped push through a commitment to have only sell zero-emissions cars sold in Norway by 2025. The plan supports Norway’s CO2 reduction targets under the 2015 Paris climate accord, which nations last agreed rigorous rules for to ensure emissions goals are met.

To help sales, the Norwegian government waived hefty vehicle import duties and registration and sales taxes for buyers of electric cars. Owners don’t have to pay road tolls, and get free use of ferries and bus lanes in congested city centers.

These perks are being phased out in 2021, though any road tolls and fees would be limited to half of what gasoline car owners must pay. Gradually, subsidies for electric cars will be replaced by higher taxes on traditional cars.

Registration tax on new cars is paid on a sliding scale with a premium for the amount of emissions produced. Elvestuen pledges that the incentives for electric vehicles will be adjusted in such a way that it does not scupper the 2025 target.

“What is important is that our aim is not just to give incentives,” he says. “It is that we are taxing emissions from regular cars.”

Using taxes to encourage consumers to shift to cleaner energy can be tricky for a government—protests erupted in France this autumn over a fuel tax that hurt the livelihood of poorer families, especially in rural areas where driving is often the only means of transportation.

In this sense, Norway is an outlier. The country is very wealthy after exporting for decades the kind of fossil fuels the world is trying to wean itself off of. Incomes are higher than the rest of Europe, as are prices.

Some 36 percent of all new cars sold are SUVs, which provide safety in the country’s tough winters. Tesla’s SUV, the Model X – the motor of choice for well-to-do environmentally-minded Norwegians – costs around 900,000 Norwegian kronor ($106,000).

“Buying a Tesla model X is not much more expensive than buying a standard premium Volvo because gasoline cars are taxed heavily. That is also the reason Teslas sell well,” says Christina Bu, General Secretary of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association.

The premium gas-powered Volvo XC90 SUV, for example, starts at 919,000 kroner ($107,100) in Norway compared with $47,700 in the U.S.

To date, with its longer battery life, Tesla has dominated the upmarket family car space for electric vehicles, but more premium marques are entering the market, like the Audi Quattro e-tron. Demand is still outstripping supply, with Norwegians having to wait up to a year to get their hands on the steering wheels of their new electric vehicles.

Norway has pledged to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 40 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. The country has work to do: by 2017, emissions were up 3 percent compared to the 1990 baseline. Cutting emissions from road transport will allow Norway to reduce the amount it has to spend buying up emissions certificates from other European countries to meet its target. The savings are likely to run into billions, potentially balancing out the cost of subsidizing electric cars.

Norway is looking to China for help in developing the market.

China has invested heavily in electric vehicles as it looks to meet its own Paris climate accord commitments, to clean up its choking cities and to get in early in a growing area of manufacturing. In October, 6 percent of new cars were electric, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, up almost 50 percent from a year earlier. The market has huge growth potential, experts say, and like Norway, the market boom has relied on government incentives.

The hope in Norway is that the sheer size of China’s market will encourage the industry to develop the technology more quickly—improving battery life, for example—and force down prices.

Experts say the electric vehicle market needs to develop more for sales to keep growing.

Battery life on smaller vehicles is slim and the resale market is untested. Fast battery charging points are slow compared with gasoline pumps, and on Norway’s often empty mountain roads, these points are uneconomical despite government subsidies for the private companies that set them up.

Even in city centers, construction of such points has not kept pace with sales. At one station in Oslo, a Tesla driver cracks open his laptop while his car charges. Another, Ida Vihovde, drums her fingers as she waits for a charging station to free up.

“If the government put up more of these it would be OK,” she says beside her electric VW Golf. “Right now there are no more chargers so I have to sit and wait.”

Electronics are essential to everyday life. What would our lives be like without our cell phones or computers? From toys to laundry machines to electric cars, electronics continue to populate our daily routines. Many of these electronics are powered by high energy density lithium-ion batteries. But two factors in these batteries can lead to dangerous consequences.

First, the battery electrolyte, the material that conducts ions between the cathode and the anode, is typically a liquid, which is flammable. Second, as batteries are charged and discharged over time, uneven lithium deposition at the anode can lead to the growth of dendrites which can connect the cathode and anode. This can lead to fires and explosions because of the electrolyte’s flammability. Both Tesla cars and Boeing aircraft have suffered from dendrite battery problems, and sudden cell phone explosions can also be attributed to dendrites.

This is the problem that Zeeshan Ahmad and Tian Xie are trying to solve. Ahmad, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and Xie, a Ph.D. candidate in materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently published a paper about their research to find possible solutions to this dendrite problem. They turned to machine learning to generate and analyze massive amounts of data to find these solutions.

To suppress the growth of dendrites, Ahmad and his colleagues researched potential solid electrolytes, which unlike liquid electrolytes, are not flammable. Not only did they decipher what properties the solid electrolyte requires, they also needed to analyze thousands of possible solid materials, which would have taken years using traditional experimental methods.

“We had 13,000 inorganic crystalline materials to screen over for the solid electrolyte,” Ahmad said. “It was hard to just calculate the properties of each solid electrolyte separately because it’s very computationally expensive. We used machine learning because it can work on large data scales, to find out the properties of solid electrolytes.”

Due to the range of data availability, Ahmad and Xie used a variety of machine learning models. For cases with sufficient existing data that can be used for training the model, they used a graph convolutional neural network model to predict the properties of inorganic crystalline solid electrolytes. In cases where there wasn’t sufficient training data, they used linear regression with regularization, which is more suitable for low data problems.

“We tested all these materials for design criteria or solid electrolytes,” Ahmad said. “Our solid electrolytes should suppress dendrite growth at the lithium metal anode and be electronically insulating. They should be stable—they should not decompose spontaneously at room temperature. They should conduct ions very fast to achieve a high power density of the battery required for fast charging.”

After analyzing the solids, they found six possible materials that could be used as solid electrolytes, belonging to the sulfide, iodide, and borohydride classes.

“We are very excited to apply our machine learning framework to important materials problems, which is why the collaboration with the CMU team has been so rewarding,” Xie said. “Finding six potential solid electrolytes in such a short time shows the possibility of accelerating material discovery drastically with machine learning tools.”

Now, Ahmad is working on circumventing the fundamental tradeoff between solids and liquids: liquids generally have high ionic conductivity, and very few solids that have a comparable level of conductivity are also stable enough to be used as electrolytes. Ahmad is researching the potential of composite electrolytes, combining multiple solids with different desired properties.

“We are looking into composite electrolytes, but the problem is that generally we do not have sufficient data to use machine learning,” Ahmad said. “So we are trying to address this problem through first principles methods—we use density functional theory and molecular dynamics to predict the properties. Once we do it for, let’s say, five materials, we can find out certain design principles, and then we can try to use those design principles to help us screen through other composites.”

The paper, Machine Learning Enabled Computational Screening of Inorganic Solid Electrolytes for Suppression of Dendrite Formation in Lithium Metal Anodes, was published in the journal ACS Central Science, DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.8b00229. It was named a top ionizing paper in Research Interfaces. Additional authors were Venkat Viswanathan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, Jeffery C. Grossman, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, and Chinmay Maheshwari, a student at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, who was a summer research intern in Viswanathan’s lab.

A team of researchers based at The University of Manchester have found a low cost method for producing graphene printed electronics, which significantly speeds up and reduces the cost of conductive graphene inks.

Printed electronics offer a breakthrough in the penetration of information technology into everyday life. The possibility of printing electronic circuits will further promote the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The development of printed conductive inks for electronic applications has grown rapidly, widening applications in transistors, sensors, antennas RFID tags and wearable electronics.

Current conductive inks traditionally use metal nanoparticles for their high electrical conductivity. However, these materials can be expensive or easily oxidised, making them far from ideal for low cost IoT applications.

The team have found that using a material called dihydrolevogucosenone known as Cyrene is not only non-toxic but is environmentally- friendly and sustainable but can also provide higher concentrations and conductivity of graphene ink.

Professor Zhiurn Hu said: “This work demonstrates that printed graphene technology can be low cost, sustainable, and environmentally friendly for ubiquitous wireless connectivity in IoT era as well as provide RF energy harvesting for low power electronics”.

Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov said: “Graphene is swiftly moving from research to application domain. Development of production methods relevant to the end-user in terms of their flexibility, cost and compatibility with existing technologies are extremely important. This work will ensure that implementation of graphene into day-to-day products and technologies will be even faster”.

Kewen Pan, the lead author on the paper said: “This perhaps is a significant step towards commercialisation of printed graphene technology. I believe it would be an evolution in printed electronics industry because the material is such low cost, stable and environmental friendly”.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), who were involved in measurements for this work, have partnered with the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester to provide a materials characterisation service to provide the missing link for the industrialisation of graphene and 2-D materials. They have also published a joint NPL and NGI a good practice guide which aims to tackle the ambiguity surrounding how to measure graphene’s characteristics.

Professor Ling Hao said: “Materials characterisation is crucial to be able to ensure performance reproducibility and scale up for commercial applications of graphene and 2-D materials. The results of this collaboration between the University and NPL is mutually beneficial, as well as providing measurement training for Ph.D. students in a metrology institute environment.”

Graphene has the potential to create the next generation of electronics currently limited to science fiction: faster transistors, semiconductors, bendable phones and flexible wearable electronics.

 

Intel Architecture Day has come and gone but five hours of presentations have left lasting impressions that Intel is all fired up on innovation. “Intel covered a good amount of ground at the Architecture Day,” wrote AnandTech.

The report summed up the range of new beginnings: “Intel lifted the lid on the CPU core roadmaps through 2021, the next generation of integrated graphics, the future of Intel’s graphics business, new chips built on 3-D packaging technologies, and even parts of the microarchitecture for the 2019 consumer processors.”

Intel demonstrated 10nm-based systems in development for PCs, data centers and networking. Mark Intel’s words as roadsigns of the future: 10 nm chiplets, Foveros 3-D stacking and an enhanced microarchitecture codenamed Sunny Cove.

Can we please get inside Intel’s head and figure out what they mean by “chiplets”? The Verge’s Vlad Savov, senior editor, said this was about “fragmenting the various elements of a modern CPU into individual, stackable ‘chiplets.'”

“It’s readily apparent from today’s announcements that Intel has engaged in a major rethink and reorganization of its chip design strategy and philosophy,” Savov wrote.

Intel’s Foveros 3-D stacking approach is what grabbed Paul Lilly’s attention. Lilly in PC Gamer said “Arguably the most interesting thing Intel announced had nothing to do with Sunny Cove or new graphics that are in the pipeline, but a new 3-D chip packaging technology called Foveros.”

What Intel unveiled is the 3-D stacking of logic chips. This enables logic-on-logic integration. The 3-D stacking technique has been used before in memory products. In Intel’s design, it is especially interesting. (The Verge: “Intel is doing something similar with the CPU, allowing its designers to essentially drop in extra processing muscle atop an already assembled chip die.”)

“The technology provides tremendous flexibility as designers seek to ‘mix and match’ technology IP blocks with various memory and I/O elements in new device form factors,” said Intel. “It will allow products to be broken up into smaller ‘chiplets’, where I/O, SRAM and power delivery circuits can be fabricated in a base die and high-performance logic chiplets are stacked on top.” Intel expects to launch products using Foveros in the second half of next year.

As for Sunny Cove? If you ask Gordon Mah Ung, Executive Editor, PCWorld, he said, “Long criticized for reusing old cores in its recent CPUs, Intel on Wednesday showed off a new 10nm Sunny Cove core that will bring faster single-threaded and multi-threaded performance along with major speed bumps from new instructions.”

What’s so special: He wrote that Sunny Cove cores find greater opportunities for parallelism by increasing cache sizes. The new cores will execute more operations in parallel. Compared with the Skylake architecture, the chip goes from a 4-wide design to 5-wide.

So, Savov in The Verge sought to tie some threads here and he posed the question, “Will Foveros 3-D stacking be part of the Sunny Cove generation of chips, or will it be something entirely separate?” The query was posed to Intel’s representatives, “but the company would only say that everything ‘from mobile devices to the data center’ will feature Foveros processors over time, starting in the second half of next year.”

A cheap and effective new catalyst developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, can generate hydrogen fuel from water just as efficiently as platinum, currently the best—but also most expensive—water-splitting catalyst out there.

The catalyst, which is composed of nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide, is manufactured using a self-assembly process that relies on a surprising ingredient: gelatin, the material that gives Jell-O its jiggle.

“Platinum is expensive, so it would be desirable to find other alternative materials to replace it,” said senior author Liwei Lin, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “We are actually using something similar to the Jell-O that you can eat as the foundation, and mixing it with some of the abundant earth elements to create an inexpensive new material for important catalytic reactions.”

The work appears in the Dec. 13 print edition of the journal Advanced Materials.

A zap of electricity can break apart the strong bonds that tie water molecules together, creating oxygen and hydrogen gas, the latter of which is an extremely valuable source of energy for powering hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen gas can also be used to help store energy from renewable yet intermittent energy sources like solar and wind power, which produce excess electricity when the sun shines or when the wind blows, but which go dormant on rainy or calm days.

But simply sticking an electrode in a glass of water is an extremely inefficient method of generating hydrogen gas. For the past 20 years, scientists have been searching for catalysts that can speed up this reaction, making it practical for large-scale use.

“The traditional way of using water gas to generate hydrogen still dominates in industry. However, this method produces carbon dioxide as byproduct,” said first author Xining Zang, who conducted the research as a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “Electrocatalytic hydrogen generation is growing in the past decade, following the global demand to lower emissions. Developing a highly efficient and low-cost catalyst for electrohydrolysis will bring profound technical, economical and societal benefit.”

To create the catalyst, the researchers followed a recipe nearly as simple as making Jell-O from a box. They mixed gelatin and a metal ion—either molybdenum, tungsten or cobalt—with water, and then let the mixture dry.

“We believe that as gelatin dries, it self-assembles layer by layer,” Lin said. “The metal ion is carried by the gelatin, so when the gelatin self-assembles, your metal ion is also arranged into these flat layers, and these flat sheets are what give Jell-O its characteristic mirror-like surface.”

Heating the mixture to 600 degrees Celsius triggers the metal ion to react with the carbon atoms in the gelatin, forming large, nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide. The unreacted gelatin burns away.

The researchers tested the efficiency of the catalysts by placing them in water and running an electric current through them. When stacked up against each other, molybdenum carbide split water the most efficiently, followed by tungsten carbide and then cobalt carbide, which didn’t form thin layers as well as the other two. Mixing molybdenum ions with a small amount of cobalt boosted the performance even more.

“It is possible that other forms of carbide may provide even better performance,” Lin said.

The two-dimensional shape of the catalyst is one of the reasons why it is so successful. That is because the water has to be in contact with the surface of the catalyst in order to do its job, and the large surface area of the sheets mean that the metal carbides are extremely efficient for their weight.

Because the recipe is so simple, it could easily be scaled up to produce large quantities of the catalyst, the researchers say.

“We found that the performance is very close to the best catalyst made of platinum and carbon, which is the gold standard in this area,” Lin said. “This means that we can replace the very expensive platinum with our material, which is made in a very scalable manufacturing process.”

Researchers have developed a new device that can measure and control a nanoparticle trapped in a laser beam with unprecedented sensitivity. The new technology could help scientists study a macroscopic particle’s motion with subatomic resolution, a scale governed by the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics.

The researchers from the University of Vienna in Austria and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands report their new device in Optica, The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research. Although the approach has been used with trapped atoms, the team is the first to use it to precisely measure the motion of an optically trapped nanoparticle made of billions of atoms.

“In the long term, this type of device could help us understand nanoscale materials and their interactions with the environment on a fundamental level,” said research team leader Markus Aspelmeyer from the University of Vienna. “This could lead to new ways of tailoring materials by exploiting their nanoscale features.

“We are working to improve the device to increase our current sensitivity by four orders of magnitude,” Aspelmeyer continued. “This would allow us to use the interaction of the cavity with the particle to probe or even control the quantum state of the particle, which is our ultimate goal.”

Making tiny measurements

The new method uses a light-guiding nanoscale device called a photonic crystal cavity to monitor the position of a nanoparticle levitating in a traditional optical trap. Optical trapping uses a focused laser beam to exert a force on an object to hold it in place. The technique was recognized by the award of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics to pioneer, Arthur Ashkin.

“We know that the laws of quantum physics apply on the scale of atoms and the scale of molecules, but we don’t know how large an object can be and still exhibit quantum physics phenomena,” said Aspelmeyer. “By trapping a nanoparticle and coupling it to a photonic crystal cavity, we can isolate an object that is larger than atoms or molecules and study its quantum behaviors.”

The new device accomplishes a high level of sensitivity by using a long photonic crystal cavity that is narrower than the wavelength of the light. This means that when light enters and travels down the nanoscale cavity, some of it leaks out and forms what is called an evanescent field. The evanescent field changes when an object is placed close to the photonic crystal, which in turn changes how the light propagates through the photonic crystal in a measurable way.

“By examining how light in the photonic crystal changes in response to the nanoparticle, we can deduce the position of the nanoparticle over time with very high resolution,” said Lorenzo Magrini, first author of the paper.

Collecting every photon

The new device detects almost every photon that interacts with the trapped nanoparticle. This not only helps it achieve extremely high sensitivity but also means that the new approach uses much less optical power compared to other methods in which most of the photons are lost.

Under vacuum conditions, the researchers demonstrated, for each detected photon, a sensitivity two orders of magnitude higher than conventional methods for measuring nanoparticle displacement in an optical trap. They also report that the strength of the interaction between the particle and evanescent field of the cavity was three orders of magnitude higher than what has been reported previously. Stronger interaction means that the photonic cavity can detect more information about the particle’s movement.

Similar to several other research groups around the world, the researchers are working toward achieving quantum measurements. They are now improving their setup and working to substantially boost the device’s sensitivity. This would allow measurements to be performed under stronger vacuum conditions that increase a particle’s isolation from the environment. In addition to studying quantum mechanics, the new device could be used to precisely measure acceleration and other forces that might arise in microscopic length scales.