WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

500 miles is the sweet spot for trucking because truckers have to stop every 8 hours, and this is a major achievement.

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Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla Semi has completed its first 500-mile trip with a full load – quite a feat for a battery-electric truck. Tesla Semi is an all-electric class 8 commercial truck that Tesla first unveiled in 2017, and it was supposed to be in production in 2019. However, it was delayed several times.

At the time, it was quite revolutionary to have a purely battery-powered truck with a full 80,000-lb. class 8 capacity capable of traveling between 300 and 500 miles, depending on the model.

Since then, several other companies have managed to beat Tesla to market with class 8 electric semi-trucks, such as Volvo, Freightliner, and Nikola, but they have only managed to come close to the lower end of the range.

Now Tesla is finally bringing its electric truck to market with deliveries expected to start this week, and it’s a 500-mile version of the electric truck. Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that a Tesla Semi has now completed a 500-mile trip with a full load.

It seems a bit last minute to complete the first 500-mile drive, considering Tesla is expected to deliver production versions of the truck to customers this week, but Tesla has presumably previously completed many shorter trips that confirmed the full range could reach 500 miles on a single charge.

Five hundred miles with a full load between charges is the sweet spot for a commercial long-haul semi-truck, because after about eight hours of driving, a break for the driver is mandatory.

With that capacity and a much lower cost of operation per mile than diesel trucks, Tesla Semi is expected to have a major impact on the trucking industry, and if the price point is good, which could be confirmed at the event this week, it could truly be a game changer.

The 500-mile range on a full charge is going to be good to convince people that battery-electric trucks can take over the whole Class-8 market. However, I think the best use cases at first are going to be for companies, like Tesla, that often need to move a lot of cargo between two locations that they control, like a factory and delivery centers.

That way, it can have charging stations at each location that charges the trucks while they are loaded, and then you get an all-electric and emission-free trip between the locations while massively reducing your fuel costs.

What company will not want that? When it’s going to be time to update their fleets, companies will fight to get those trucks as production ramps up.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Hydrogen has more than ten times the energy density of lithium Ion batteries, zero emissions, and nothing to recycle, but distributing it has been an issue until now.

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With over 1 trillion watts of installed renewable energy generation renewables have finally become the world’s cheapest form of energy so it should come as any surprise that using fossil fuels as a means to generate energy is under threat. While renewables like solar and wind power are rising to prominence other forms of green energy production like Hydrogen have been languishing in the slow lane in part because in order to switch the global economy to hydrogen fuel companies would have to make huge investments in building out the infrastructure, from production plants to distribution centers and so on, to support it.

One of the key issues making hydrogen a less attractive energy source than Lithium Ion batteries, for example, for use in electric vehicles is the fact that it needs to be kept cold and pressurised in special tanks, like the ones in this superyacht, which makes the logistics of trucking it around considerably tougher than that of gasoline.

See the idea for yourself

But now a new hydrogen blending technology offers a potential solution – by injecting hydrogen directly into the existing natural gas grid it could be piped quickly and efficiently across an entire city, and gas stations could simply separate it out and suck it back out of the gas pipelines to fill their tanks. The distribution problem would then disappear, enabling hydrogen pumps to quickly pop up all over town – all of which means fuelling your hydrogen powered drone, supercar, or truck is no longer an issue.

To test the concept, SoCalGas is setting up a hydrogen blending demonstration program that will see surplus renewable energy electrolysed into hydrogen gas, which will be blended into the natural gas supply. An isolated segment of the grid will be chosen early this year – one that uses mainly polyethylene piping – and hydrogen will be blended in at an initial proportion of around 1 percent, potentially rising as high as 20 percent during testing.

A hydrogen-natural gas blend at these proportions behaves almost identically to a regular compressed natural gas feed when it’s burned to power kitchen stoves, boilers, hot water services and other such appliances. The main difference is a reduction in CO2 emissions at the burn site. Only once blends reach the 30 to 40 percent level does it really need to be treated much differently to a normal gas line.

On the other end, SoCalGas has also announced it’s working with Dutch company HyET Hydrogen to deploy HyET’s Electrochemical Hydrogen Purification and Compression (EHPC) technology to get the H2 out of the gas pipes and into a compressed storage tank. The EHPC system uses an electrically-actuated, hydrogen-selective membrane to suck the small hydrogen molecules through without allowing the methane and other natural gas molecules through.

The initial deployment is expected to extract and compress about 10 kg, or 22 lb, of hydrogen per day, but within two years that figure will rise tenfold. As 100 kg, or 220 lb, of compressed hydrogen would be enough to fill up about 20 fuel-cell cars, so it’s not far from that point to a commercially workable solution for gas stations.

If gas stations can easily hook themselves up to a reliable and fuss-free hydrogen source, then a lack of H2 pumps could quickly cease to be a barrier for fuel-cell vehicles which would then no doubt help accelerate their roll out. The same infrastructure could also feed larger trucking depots or airports where hydrogen-fuelled aircraft, like Airbus’ latest E-Zero hydrogen concept aircraft, could stop to refuel.

Source: SoCalGas

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Future electric vehicles will be wirelessly charged, and this is the technology that will help underpin.

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Plugging your electric vehicle in at night to charge it is a hassle, so too is finding a charging point, but thankfully we are already seeing the emergence of wireless charging systems for electric cars, and we’re already seeing the first batteryless electric cars coming through in the form of new commercial solar powered cars, from Hyundai, Light Year and Toyota, and that’s before I show you Lamborghini’s Terzo Millenio – a fully batteryless hypercar that they want to see in production by 2030.

A little while ago I wrote about what most people probably thought of as a boring technology innovation, but the exponential future is full of such seemingly “small and boring innovations” – a big fat new 20-kilowatt bi-directional wireless charging system wireless charging system from the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). But seemingly boring as it might seem I don’t think people will complain when they no longer have to plug their electric vehicles in at night. Furthermore, as we accelerate out the implications of this technology it also provides us with a pathway to completely eliminate today’s Lithium Ion battery packs from future EV’s and eliminate their rather horrific environmental footprint.

The first of a kind demonstration

Now the team at ORNL have installed their new system on a UPS medium-duty, plug-in hybrid electric delivery truck. The project is the first of its kind to achieve power transfer at this rate across an 11-inch air gap, advancing the technology to a new class of larger vehicles with higher ground clearance.

ORNL’s wireless charging technology transferred power between the truck and a charging pad across the 11-inch gap using two electromagnetic coupling coils at the demonstration. The system transferred electricity from the power grid to the vehicle battery terminals at more than 92% efficiency.

At a 20-kilowatt level, it would take about three hours to charge the vehicle’s 60-kilowatt-hour battery packs. Conventional wired charging typically takes between five to six hours using the existing onboard charging system, but this will get faster in time.

With its bi-directional design, the system also supports use of the vehicle’s batteries for energy storage meaning that when it’s not being used the van could feed any excess electricity in its battery packs back to the grid – or your house. ORNL’s bidirectional technology is fully compliant with grid power quality standards.

“Scaling the technology to a fleet of 50 trucks gives you megawatt-scale energy storage,” noted ORNL’s Omer Onar, who led the technical team’s effort at the lab – energy storage that as a customer you could sell back to the electricity grid in order to make some extra cash. Nice!

The technology takes energy from the grid and converts it to direct current (DC) voltage. Then a high-frequency inverter generates alternating current (AC), which in turn creates a magnetic field that transfers power across the air gap. Once the energy is transferred to the secondary coil across the air gap it is converted back to DC, charging the vehicle’s battery pack.

The system incorporates ORNL’s custom electromagnetic coil design and controls system, as well as wide bandgap power conversion systems, and the technology was tested using grid and battery emulators before it was integrated into the vehicle.

“There’s no off-the-shelf solution that can deliver 20 kilowatts across an 11-inch air gap with these efficiencies,” said Omer Onar, one of the researchers involved in the project, before adding, “The technology represents an integrated, holistic solution for vehicle electrification that also advances the next-generation smart grid, and it expands the possibilities for fleets who want convenient, efficient EV charging as well as electricity storage solutions.”

UPS meanwhile said they “appreciate the Department of Energy’s support on this effort,” and that “the project demonstrates innovative ways to utilize vehicle battery storage at fleet scale to power the vehicle, add resiliency to our facilities and support the grid,” said  Mike Whitlatch, vice president of Global Energy and Procurement for UPS.

The technology is now undergoing further testing and analysis as part of the project, and will likely be commercialised in the next two years.

Source: ORNL

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Hydrogen powered and Lithium Ion battery powered electric vehicles have been battling for dominance for years, and now fuel cell technology is starting to hit the roads for real.

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It’s been two years since Toyota and truck manufacturer Kenworth showed off a proof of concept for a semi-trailer truck powered purely by Hydrogen fuel cell technology, and recently they showed off the first of 10 planned trucks that later this year will start transporting cargo across the Los Angeles basin and to various inland cities, with the only emission being water.

In the first phase, the trucks, operated by Toyota, UPS and other transport firms, will haul goods from the LA and Long Beach ports throughout the LA area, the Inland Empire, the Port of Hueneme, and eventually to Merced.

In a second phase, Shell has announced it will build hydrogen filling stations in Wilmington and Ontario, California, to provide more opportunities for the trucks to refuel. Initially, the trucks will rely on three existing stations at Toyota’s Long Beach Logistics Services and Gardena R&D facilities.

Courtesy: Toyota

The Fuel Cell Electric Truck (FCET) is based on Kenworth’s T680 truck, but instead of the class 8 truck’s diesel inline-6 there is a pair of Toyota Mirai fuel cell stacks and an electric drive system good for 670 horsepower and 1,325 pound-feet of torque. The range on a fill of hydrogen is estimated at 300 miles, and that range is twice that of a typical drayage trucks’ average daily duty cycle, according to Toyota and Kenworth.

In fuel cell-electric powertrains, a fuel cell stack combines hydrogen with oxygen from the air to form electricity in a process known as electrolysis. In Toyota and Kenworth’s fuel cell truck, power management systems can apportion the electricity from the fuel cells to the motors, batteries, and other components, such as electrified power steering and brake air compressors, in order to maximize efficiency.

Most commercial quantities of hydrogen are sourced via steam-methane reforming, a process that produces a lot of CO2 emissions. But there’s also the ability to generate hydrogen in a reverse-electrolysis process, where electricity created by renewable energy such as wind and solar power can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

There are currently more than 16,000 semi-trailer trucks serving the LA and Long Beach port complexes, and this number is expected to double by 2030, so there’s potential for serious sales if even a fraction of truck companies switch over to zero-emission options. However, other firms including Daimler and Tesla are offering or plan to offer battery based. electric trucks in direct competition to Toyota’s fuel cell trucks, so as the world’s vehicles wean themselves off their fossil fuel addictions it’s likely that the EV versus Hydrogen Vehicle (HV) battle will heat up, however, that said, personally I, along with many others, wouldn’t be too surprised if EV’s win out in the long term. It’s like watching the Betamax versus VHS wars all over again.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

There are multiple uses for incredibly strong cables and materials, from defence to space elevators, and even helping electric cars travel 16,000km on one charge.

Recently I’ve discussed advances across a wide variety of materials, including the development of a wonder material that lasts for over 500 million years, and breakthroughs that will power the first generation of Terahertz computers, but now a research team from Tsinghua University in China has developed a fibre they say is so strong it could even be used to build an elevator to space, something that must be music to the ears of the Japanese scientists who just launched the world’s first space elevator prototype into space.

The scientists behind the new wonder fibre say it’s so strong that just 1 cubic centimetre of the fibre, which is made from Carbon Nanotubes, a wonder material that’s also helping reverse paralysis while at the same time helping create the world’s tiniest house, the first batteryless Lamborghini electric hypercar, and 1nm transistors, “would not break under the weight of 160 elephants,” or more than 800 tonnes. And that tiny piece of cable would weigh just 1.6 grams.

“This is a breakthrough,” said Wang Changqing, a scientist at a key space elevator research centre at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian who was not involved in the Tsinghua study.

The team has developed a new “ultralong” fibre from carbon nanotubes that they say is stronger than anything ever seen before, and patented and published their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology earlier this year.

“It is evident that the tensile strength of carbon nanotube bundles is at least 9 to 45 times that of other materials,” the team said in the paper, who also said that the material would be “in great demand in many high-end fields such as sports equipment, ballistic armour, aeronautics, astronautics and even space elevators.”

The idea of building a lift that could travel from the Earth into space may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it has been around for more than a century, and scientists have come up with various designs in recent decades.

One of them involves sending a large satellite into geostationary orbit that would lower a cable to the ground, where it would be anchored, and send another cable in the opposite direction, attached to a counterweight.

The theory is that the lift would be suspended between two cables – pulled taut by gravity and centrifugal force, and rotating with the Earth, like a weight on a piece of string being swung around in circles. But so far, the space elevator idea has remained in the realm of physical and mathematical models because there has been no material strong enough to make the super-light, ultra-strong cables needed. Until, perhaps, now.

Those cables would need to have tensile strength, to withstand the stretching forces, of no less than 7 Gigapascals, according to NASA. In fact, the US space agency launched a global competition in 2005 to develop such a material, with a $2 million prize attached, but no one claimed the prize.

Now, the Tsinghua team, led by Wei Fei, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, says their latest carbon nanotube fibre has tensile strength of a whopping 80 Gigapascals.

Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical molecules made up of carbon atoms that are linked in hexagonal shapes with diameters as small as 1 nanometre, and they have the highest known tensile strength of any material, theoretically up to 300 Gigapascals. But for practical purposes, these carbon nanotubes must be bonded together in cable form, a process which is difficult and can affect the overall strength of the final product.

According to Wang, the space lift researcher, the transport system would need more than 30,000km of cable, and it would also need other structures such as a rail and a shield to protect against space debris and other environmental hazards.

“If the cable is not strong enough, it would not even be able to support its own weight. Until now, there has been no material tough enough to do the job,” said Wang, deputy executive director of the China-Russia International Space Tether System Research Centre.

Requirements for cable strength vary according to the space lift design. Wang said the carbon nanotube fibre appeared to be the most promising candidate for now, but more calculations and simulation were needed to evaluate how it would perform.

“The tether is one big problem, but it is not the only problem,” he added.

Chinese and Russian space scientists, for instance, are working together to find a safe, effective way to lower a fine, feather-light cable from a high-altitude orbit to the ground. Re-entry to the atmosphere can produce a lot of heat that could burn the cable, while the counterweight may need to be as large as an asteroid to keep the line straight.

“The scale and complexity of such a project would dwarf the International Space Station,” said Wang. But countries including China, the US, Russia and Japan continue to support the research.

So called space tether technology also has the potential to be used for military purposes, including capturing “non-cooperative targets” including enemy satellites. Japan launched two satellites last month in an experiment to study elevator movement in space – the first time this has been done – involving a mini-lift travelling along a cable from one satellite to another. It has yet to report the results of the experiment.

While a lift to space could still be many years, and probably decades, away, Wei said his team was trying to get the carbon nanotube fibre into mass production for use in defence or other areas.

“This could be a game changer in many sectors,” he said.

Wei gave the example of superfast flywheels in a mechanical battery – where the flywheel stores energy in a rotating mass, lifted by magnetic levitation in a vacuum chamber. The lighter and stronger the material, the faster it spins.

Using carbon nanotube flywheels, the mechanical battery would have 40 times the energy density of a traditional Lithium Ion (LiOn) battery, according to Wei. That would mean a car like a Tesla Model S could travel for 16,000km in one charge, or the distance from London to Sydney. But the technology is likely to be used for military purposes first, Wei said.

“Many new weapon systems such as railguns and laser cannons require high performance power storage and supply systems, and our technology offers a possible solution,” he said.

The researchers also made the longest carbon nanotube in the world in 2013, measuring half a metre, and recently beat that record by manufacturing a 70cm one.

Song Liwei, who studies mechanical batteries at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, said if the carbon nanotube fibre could be mass-produced and if it significantly increased the energy density of mechanical batteries, adding it “would kill fossil fuel engines”.

“But the flywheels can be as big as a barrel, and the fibre would need to be several kilometres long to make a battery,” he said. “There is still a long way to go.”

Source: SCMP

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