Technology

Engineering company LiftWerx has developed an up-tower lifting device designed to lower a fully assembled wind turbine rotor and main shaft, negating the use of a conventional crane on the ground.

The RotorHook, which has a lifting capacity of 75 tonnes, was developed in partnership with turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa.

LiftWerx, based in North America and a member of the Netherlands-based Meemaken Group, intends to launch the device in the second quarter of 2019.

According to the company, the RotorHook is the largest up-tower lifting device to be developed in the wind energy O&M industry and can be mobilised to site for major corrective turbine repairs in three standard ISO containers.

“The RotorHook will drive down O&M costs, improve turbine uptime, increase safety and reduce the reliance on larger, more expensive traditional cranes,” said LiftWerx.

The company’s president Glen Aitken added: “Operationally, this device will perform lifts from within the nacelle that were previously unachievable and we are looking forward to progressing with the project and executing the first lifts in Colorado, USA.”

Siemens Gamesa director of North America Operations said: “We are excited to partner with LiftWerx because their technology will set a new standard for main bearing and generator exchanges.”

“The most crucial result of this work is the correlation between form and function in supercapacitor materials” states first author Dina Ibrahim Abouelamaiem. She elaborates that “our research is driven by the need for a greener future and improved energy systems”, which is why their Sustainable Energy Fuels paper focuses on understanding how the 3D structure affects the supercapacitor properties of biocarbon-based materials derived from plant cellulose. These materials could provide an environmentally friendly alternative to precious metals and toxic chemicals currently used in top-performing supercapacitors.

Powering the future

Supercapacitors are devices full of potential, quite often literally, as they are charged to exhibit high power densities and long lifetimes. Due to these properties, supercapacitors are able to “bridge the gap” in device performance between batteries and fuel cells. Understanding the nanostructure in depth and over multiple length scales is paramount in order to optimize performance and design better devices. By combining an extensive set of complementary techniques, Ibrahim and her colleagues have shed light on the complex synergy between structure and performance and show that a hierarchical porous network is what electrode materials need to have in order to function best.

In their study, biocarbon electrodes activated using potassium hydroxide act as a model system, and the findings are also tested against commercial materials in order to demonstrate wider applicability. Characterization techniques such as SEM (scanning electron microscopy), BET (Brunauer-Emmett-Teller theory for nitrogen adsorption), XPS (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy), and X-ray CT (X-ray computed tomography) represent a portion of those utilized to form a complete picture of the materials. This long list of techniques (and associated large number of acronyms) covers a wide range of length scales, which means the researchers were able to anlayse nano-, micro-, meso- and macro-pores altogether.

According to Ibrahim, it was the large suite of techniques available from the Electrochemical Innovation Lab (EIL) located in UCL’s Department of Chemical Engineering that allowed the researchers to “plug the gap” in understanding structure-function relationships in supercapacitor devices.

Within the pores of a supercapacitor

Results show that an increase in performance of materials is seen with a mixture of pore sizes nestled within one another, forming a hierarchical structure. Measurements reveal direct correlation between high specific surface area and low cell resistance, which leads to a high specific capacitance. The team tested the performance of the supercapacitors using varied electrochemical set ups and over extended operating cycles to demonstrate the lifetime performance and stability of the materials. These findings set the scene for more efficient and higher performing energy storage devices in the near future.

Scientists are one step closer to building a carbon-recycling system that can harvest solar energy to efficiently convert CO2 and water into liquid fuels. By optimizing many parts of the system, the researchers say, they can now drive two-electron chemical reactions, a substantial advance over one-electron reactions, which are energy inefficient.

The research, reported in the journal Nature Chemistry, will aid those hoping to find a way to convert excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into useful energy sources, said University of Illinois chemistry professor Prashant Jain, who led the new research.

“Scientists often look to plants for insight into methods for turning sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into fuels,” he said.

When solar energy hits plant leaves, it excites the electrons in chlorophyll. Those excited electrons ultimately drive the chemistry that transforms carbon dioxide and water into glucose.

“Many of these chemical reactions are multiproton, multielectron reactions,” Jain said.

But instead of relying on biodegradable plant pigments to convert light energy into chemical energy, scientists are turning to something better: electron-rich metal catalysts like gold, which at specific light intensities and wavelengths can transfer photoexcited electrons and protons to reactants without being degraded or used up.

“In our study, we used spherical gold particles that are 13 to 14 nanometers in size,” Jain said. “The nanoparticles have unique optical properties, depending on their size and shape.”

When coated with a polymer and suspended in water, for example, the nanoparticles absorb green light and reflect a deep red color. Under light excitation, the nanoparticles transfer electrons to probe molecules, which then change color. This allows scientists to measure how efficiently the electron-transfer reactions are taking place.

“Researchers have managed in the past to use photochemistry and these light-absorbing materials to transfer one electron at a time,” Jain said. “But in the new study, we’ve identified the principles and rules and conditions under which a metal nanoparticle catalyst can transfer two electrons at a time.”

By varying the intensity of laser light used in the experiments, Jain and his colleagues discovered that at four to five times the intensity of solar energy, the gold nanoparticles in the system could transfer up to two electrons at a time from ethanol to an electron-hungry probe.

Two-electron reactions are far preferable to one-electron reactions, Jain said.

“You need a pair of electrons to make a bond between atoms,” he said. “When you don’t provide a pair of electrons — and a pair of protons to neutralize the loss of electrons — you end up making free radicals, which are highly reactive and can back-react, wasting the energy you used to create them. They also can react with other chemicals or destroy your catalyst.”

Jain also concluded that recent experiments his lab conducted using the same system also entailed multielectron, multiproton transfers. In those experiments, his lab converted CO2 to ethane, a two-carbon compound that is more energy-rich than methane, which contains only one carbon. Jain and his colleagues are hoping to eventually generate propane, which has a three-carbon backbone, and butane, which has four.

“From the point of view of chemistry, it’s interesting to understand the rules for stringing carbon atoms together,” Jain said. “Transferring more than one electron at a time, activating more than one carbon dioxide molecule at a time at the surface of the nanoparticle catalyst can get us access to higher hydrocarbons.”

While the new findings represent an important step forward, much more work must be done before this technology is ready to be employed and scaled up to meet current challenges, Jain said.

“There’s still a long way to go. I think we’ll need at least a decade to find practical CO2-sequestration, CO2-fixation, fuel-formation technologies that are economically feasible,” he said. “But every insight into the process improves the pace at which the research community can move.”

As old-school industries like oil and gas increasingly network entities like oil platforms, they become more vulnerable to hacking attacks that were impossible when they were stand-alone. That requires a new approach to security and Xage (pronounced Zage), a security startup that launched last year thinks it has the answer with a concept called ‘fingerprinting’ combined with the blockchain.

“Each individual fingerprint tries to reflect as much information as possible about a device or controller,” Duncan Greatwood, Xage’s CEO explained. They do this by storing configuration data from each device and controller on the network. That includes the hardware type, the software that’s installed on it, the CPU ID, the storage ID and so forth.

If someone were to try to inject malware into one of these controllers, the fingerprint identification would notice a change and shut it down until human technicians could figure out if it’s a legitimate change or not.

Whither blockchain?

You may be wondering where the blockchain comes into this, but imagine a honey pot of these fingerprints were stored in a conventional database. If that database were compromised, it would mean hackers could have access to a company’s entire store of fingerprints, completely neutering that idea. That’s where the blockchain comes in.

Greatwood says it serves multiple purposes to prevent such a scenario from happening. For starters, it takes away that centralized honey pot. It also provides a means of authentication making it impossible to insert a fake fingerprint without explicit permission to do so.

But he says that Xage takes one more precaution unrelated to the blockchain to allow for legitimate updates to the controller. “We have a digital replica (twin) of the system we keep in the cloud, so if someone is changing the software or plans to change it on a device or controller, we will pre-calculate what the new fingerprint will be before we update the controller,” he said. That will allow them to understand when there is a sanctioned update happening and not an external threat agent trying to mimic one.

Checks and balances

In this way they check the validity of every fingerprint and have checks and balances every step of the way. If the updated fingerprint matches the cloud replica, they can be reasonably assured that it’s authentic. If it doesn’t, he says they assume the fingerprint might have been hacked and shut it down for further investigation by the customer.

While this sounds like a complex way of protecting this infrastructure, Greatwood points out that these devices and controllers tend to be fairly simple in terms of their configuration, not like the complexities involved in managing security on a network of workstations with many possible access points for hackers.

The irony here is that these companies are networking their devices to simplify maintenance, but in doing so they have created a new set of issues. “It’s a very interesting problem. They are adopting IoT, so they don’t have to do [so many] truck rolls. They want that network capability, but then the risk of hacking is greater because it only takes one hack to get access to thousands of controllers,” he explained.

In case you are thinking they may be overstating the actual problem of oil rigs and other industrial targets getting hacked, a Department of Homeland Security report released in March suggests that the energy sector has been an area of interest for nation-state hackers in recent years.

Australia’s Internet of Things at home market grew 55 percent in 2017 to reach AU$583 million, according to Telsyte, driven by a rapid uptake of smart speakers and increasing internet connectivity for appliances such as air conditioners and security cameras.

The Telsyte Australian IoT@Home Market Study 2018 revealed that the average Australian household now has 17.1 connected devices in 2018, up from 13.7 in 2017. Telsyte said an “internet-connected device explosion” will drive this number to 37, or 381 million devices nationally, by 2022.

“Building connectivity into consumer products will allow manufacturers to develop new business models and provide intelligent services that not only change consumers’ lifestyles, but disrupt a number of traditional industries,” said Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi.

Growth is expected to be seen in the categories of smart energy, smart security, smart lifestyle, and smart hub devices. Smart speakers, which fall into the latter category, are particularly seeing a sales boom; half a million Australian households own a smart speaker, up from less than 10,000 in 2016, and the firm estimates this figure to hit 3 million by 2022.

Google Home and Google Home mini were the market leaders, Telsyte said, predicting Apple and Amazon’s smart speaker offerings to catch up with Google’s “as their products become more widely available” in 2018.

Telsyte also said it believes Apple’s loyal user base presents opportunities for third-party manufacturers.

“Lock-in and ripple effects of Apple’s ecosystem amongst Australian families are too big for IoT@Home manufacturers to ignore,” Telsyte senior analyst Alvin Lee said.

Telsyte also predicts smart speaker adoption to “lay the foundation” for consumer demand for other smart home devices.

However, privacy and security concerns are impacting consumer decisions to purchase IoT devices. 41 percent of Australians are more concerned about cybersecurity than last year, Telsyte said, and 61 percent are concerned about their private information being exposed online.

The most important factor for consumers when purchasing an IoT device for the home, however, is ease of use, which includes being easy to set up and not requiring human monitoring.

Last year, Telsyte said that IoT adoption in the enterprise is gaining momentum in Australia, with nearly a quarter of Aussie organisations in the test, development, or production phase of IoT.

According to the Telsyte Australian Emerging Enterprise Technology Study 2017, 59 percent of early adopters claimed cost savings from using IoT, while 30 percent claimed increased customer satisfaction.

The firm previously predicted there will be 300 million connected devices in Australian homes by 2021.

Gartner had predicted that globally there would be 8.4 billion connected devices by the end of 2017, outnumbering the world’s population.

Global IoT spending will reach nearly $1.4 trillion, according to IDC, led by enterprise investments IoT hardware, software, services, and connectivity.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry warned Monday that the electric grid is easier to attack than ever as he issued a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

“The frequency, scale and sophistication of cyber threats have increased, and attacks have become easier to launch,” the department’s plan says. “Nation-states, criminals, and terrorists regularly probe energy systems to actively exploit cyber vulnerabilities in order to compromise, disrupt, or destroy energy systems.”

The cybersecurity plan was released as federal and industry experts say Iran could target U.S. infrastructure in response to Trump’s scuttling of the nuclear deal.

The Pentagon’s cyberwarfare unit has been closely monitoring Internet traffic in Iran since Trump announced his decision to leave the Obama-era agreement last week, the New York Times reported Friday.

The sophistication of the electric grid creates a situation of “growing interdependence among the nation’s energy systems,” which “increases the risk” of energy disruptions cascading from one state to the next, according to the Energy Department plan.

“Reliable energy and power is the cornerstone of our advanced digital economy and is essential for critical operations in transportation, water, communications, finance, food and agriculture, emergency services, and more,” the plan points out. “As nation-states and criminals increasingly target energy networks, the federal government must help reduce cyber risks that could trigger a large-scale or prolonged energy disruption.”

The plan outlines steps the agency plans to take in line with the creation of an already announced cybersecurity office that will centralize federal activities to protect the grid from attack.

The efforts to protect the grid will be implemented in “close partnership” with the energy industry, other federal agencies, and non-federal partners, the plan said. It calls for “game changing” strategies, while saying a strategy of “anticipating and reacting” to cyber threats is a futile exercise that “is not efficient, effective, nor sustainable in light of escalating cyber threat capabilities.”

Resources are too limited, and the cyber threats are outpacing even the best defenses, the agency says.

“To gain the upper hand, we need to pursue disruptive changes in cyber risk management practices,” it says.

But some experts say the plan is lacking in details on how to implement the strategies, while the problems it highlights are spot on.

Coordinating with other agencies and seeking game-changing systems are wise, said Scott Sklar, president of the Stella Group, who consults on renewable energy and the risks posed by cyberattacks. Sklar has advised clients, which include the military, that the best system of defense is to disconnect critical energy facilities from Internet access as much as possible.

But he says the plan lacks an explanation on how the Energy Department would prioritize key vulnerabilities in forming a strategy against attacks.

“Are there strategies to basically detach our critical functions from the Internet altogether, so as to be islanded off and thus not possible to have any cyber control or threat?” Sklar asked in an email responding to the report. “If so, what are they and what is the approach to implement?”