Fuel cell technology could be under your car bonnet by 2017

Engineerblogger
March 8, 2012

Credit: Carbon Trust

Carbon Trust has given a £1m boost to four UK fuel cell pioneers. Their cutting-edge technology could be used under the bonnet of mass-produced hydrogen-powered cars as early as 2017. Major manufacturers have already built hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars, but the real challenge is to bring down the costs and, in the global race to do this, UK technologies are now in pole position.

Having identified an opportunity to combine innovative technology from Runcorn-based ACAL Energy and Sheffield-based ITM Power, the Carbon Trust is providing £500k of funding to the companies to develop a new hybrid high-power, low-cost fuel cell design.

Carbon Trust is also backing a project based at Imperial College London (Imperial) and University College London (UCL) with £500k to develop a fuel cell that could offer significant cost savings by using existing high-volume manufacturing techniques employed in the production of printed circuit boards.

The funding comes from the Carbon Trust’s Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge (PFCC) which was launched in 2009 to support the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s objectives to develop lower cost fuel cells and coincides with the recent launch of the Government’s UKH2Mobility project to ensure the UK is well positioned for the commercial roll-out of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Dr Ben Graziano, Technology Commercialisation Manager at the Carbon Trust, said:

“The UK’s home-grown automotive industry hasn’t been the runaway success story many would have hoped for, but British technology is in pole position to be under the bonnet of a next generation of mass-produced hydrogen-powered cars. After a lot of hype, fuel cell technology is now a great growth opportunity for the UK. The funding that we have received from the Department for Energy and Climate Change has enabled us to support the development of some truly world-class British technologies that could slash the costs of fuel cells and transform how we all get about; by 2017 British fuel cell technologies could be powering your car.”

Simon Bourne, CTO, ITM Power Plc, said:

“The PFCC has afforded ITM the opportunity to build on its ground breaking laboratory results via a structured programme to de-risk its membrane technology. With the high level introductions the Carbon Trust has made with commercial end users and the continued success of subsequent material evaluation studies, ITM is in a very strong position to exploit this exciting new fuel cell technology.”

Amanda Lyne, VP of Strategic Business Development and Marketing, ACAL Energy Ltd said:

"It is excellent news that automotive OEMs are committed to the launch of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles in 2015 timescales, and that the UK will be among the early adopters. However it is clear that continuous efforts to reduce cost will be necessary to ensure that H2FC vehicles are affordable for mass markets. This funding from the Carbon Trust PFCC is perfectly targeted to ensure that British innovation can be at the forefront of the process to get the economics of the technology right."

Carbon Trust’s Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge aims to speed the UK towards world-beating fuel cell solutions that can grab a significant share of a market that the Carbon Trust has estimated to be worth $26bn in 2020. About the projects:

ACAL Energy/ITM Power

Carbon Trust, which has already supported ACAL Energy and ITM Power in de-risking their unique technologies, saw an opportunity to combine these innovations to demonstrate a fuel cell that could be far cheaper to manufacture, more efficient, produce the required power and be compact enough to fit under the bonnet of tomorrow’s cars. ACAL Energy brings a revolutionary new design of fuel cell inspired by the human lung and bloodstream that is highly durable, virtually platinum-free and also significantly cheaper to produce. ITM Power brings a unique membrane technology (which has been evaluated by several global companies), proven to produce world-beating power density (widely recognised as the single most important factor in reducing fuel cell costs), which could be in fuel cell cars by as early as 2017.

ITM’s current order book for delivery in the current financial year is £0.5m. The company has recruited seven staff in the last 12 months and is currently seeking to recruit ten more. ACAL Energy has raised £6.1m of investment since March 2010 and its staff is set to increase from 25 at that time to 35 by April 2012.

Imperial/UCL

The Imperial and UCL project is developing a fuel cell stack that could offer significant cost savings by using existing high-volume manufacturing techniques employed in the production of printed circuit boards. By simplifying the design and manufacture, this could reduce the costs of a fuel cell stack by more than 20%. Imperial Innovations and UCL Business are collaborating with the project to assist commercialisation of the technology.

Source:  Carbon Trust

Related Information:

• Fuel Cell

• Polymer Fuel Cells

NIST Measurements May Help Optimize Organic Solar Cells

Engineerblogger
March 8, 2012

Light that strikes this organic solar cell causes electrons to flow between its layers, creating an electric current. Measurements made by the NIST/NRL research team determined the best thickness for the layers, a finding that could help optimize the cells performance.  Credit: NIST

Organic solar cells may be a step closer to market because of measurements taken at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where a team of scientists has developed a better fundamental understanding of how to optimize the cells’ performance.

Prototype solar cells made of organic materials currently lag far behind conventional silicon-based photovoltaic cells in terms of electricity output. But if even reasonably efficient organic cells can be developed, they would have distinct advantages of their own: They would cost far less to produce than conventional cells, could cover larger areas, and conceivably could be recycled far more easily.

The cells the team studied are made by stacking up hundreds of thin layers that alternate between two different organic materials—zinc pthalocyanine and C60, the soccer-ball shaped carbon molecules sometimes called buckminsterfullerenes, or “buckyballs.” Light that strikes this multilayered film excites all its layers from top to bottom, causing them to give up electrons that flow between the buckyball and pthalocyanine layers, creating an electric current.

Each layer is only a few nanometers thick, and varying their thickness has a dramatic effect on how much electrical current the overall cell puts out. According to NIST chemist Ted Heilweil, determining the ideal thickness of the layers is crucial to making the best-performing cells.

“In essence, if the layers are too thin, they don’t generate enough electrons for a substantial current to flow, but if they are too thick, many of the electrons get trapped in the individual layers,” says Heilweil. “We wanted to find the sweet spot.”

Finding that “sweet spot” involved exploring the relationship between layer thickness and two different aspects of the material. When light strikes the film, the layers generate an initial “spike” in current that then decays fairly quickly; the ideal cell would generate electrons as steadily as possible. Changing the layer thickness affects the initial decay rate, but it also affects the overall capacity of the material to carry electrons, so the team wanted to find the optimum combination of these two factors.

Paul Lane of NRL grew a number of films that had layers of different thickness, and the team made measurements at both labs that took the two factors into account, finding that layers of roughly two nanometers thick give the best performance. Heilweil says the results encourage him to think prototype cells based on this geometry can be optimized, though one engineering hurdle remains: finding the best way to get the electricity out.

“It’s still unclear how to best incorporate such thin nanolayers in devices,” he says. “We hope to challenge engineers who can help us with that part.”

Source: NIST

Additional Information:

• P.A. Lane, P.D. Cunningham, J.S. Melinger, G.P. Kushto, O. Esenturk and E.J. Heilweil. Photoexcitation dynamics in films of C60 and Zn-Phthalocyanine with a layered nanostructure. Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.077402. Published 15 Feb 2012.

Engineering research and development spurring U.S. toward energy security

Engineerblogger
March 8, 2012

Breakthroughs in engineering research and development have helped launch the U.S. on the path toward elusive energy independence, NPR reports.

With gas prices continuing to spike throughout the U.S, Americans have increasingly called on the Obama Administration to support policies that would bolster the nation's fuel production. While President Obama has publicly championed an "all of the above" energy strategy – one that promotes domestic drilling, improves fuel efficiency and develops alternative energy technologies – energy experts contend the U.S. has made significant strides over the past decade in reducing its reliance on foreign countries for oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels.

"Energy self-sufficiency is now in sight," energy economist Phil Verleger told the news provider.

Verleger and other experts assert that engineering tools and breakthroughs in industrial engineering research have helped augment oil and gas supplies in the U.S. He and other scientists contend that hydraulic fracturing – more commonly known as fracking – and other advanced drilling techniques have allowed the U.S. to tap into previously unattainable natural gas and oil reserves throughout the U.S.

Though fracking remains exceedingly controversial, such drilling wells have fueled U.S. natural gas production over the past few years, as companies have increasingly exploited resources in states such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Dakota and Texas. Verleger said that the uptick in the nation's energy supplies results from the success of private research and development.

"This is really the classic success of American entrepreneurs," Verleger noted. "These were people who saw this coming, managed to assemble the capital and go ahead."

While the U.S. has historically relied upon other countries for the majority of its energy needs, it could become the world's largest producer of natural gas and oil by the end of the decade, according to PFC Energy chief executive Robin West.

"This shale gale, I describe it as the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down. This is a big deal," West said, referring to the widespread use of fracking and advanced drilling techniques. "We estimate that by 2020, the U.S. overall will be the largest hydrocarbon producer in the world; bigger than Russia or Saudi Arabia."

Though many experts caution against estimating when the U.S. will achieve the nebulous goal of energy independence, experts such as West and Verleger contend the uptick in domestic hydrocarbon production will ultimately increase energy security. If the U.S. continues on its current energy course, it would enable the country to reduce its reliance on unstable oil and natural gas producers in the Middle East, experts say.

Source: Knovel

The Future of Nuclear Energy

Engineerblogger
March 7, 2012

Aerial photograph of Vogtle nuclear power plant site, just outside Augusta, Georgia. The existing Vogtle 1 adn 2 operating units to the left and the Vogtle 3 and 4 construction site to the right. Courtesy: Southern Company 2011

Last March, the world watched closely as Japan struggled to contain a series of equipment failures, hydrogen explosions and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

The historic tsunami following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed the reactors’ connection to the power grid, causing them to overheat. Hundreds of people were exposed to increased levels of radiation. Thousands more were evacuated. Although Japanese officials have since declared the plant stable, the cleanup will be expensive and is expected to take decades.

A year later, however, the United States is moving forward with nuclear power. For the first time since 1978, the National Regulatory Commission has approved two new plants. The $14 billion facilities will be built just outside Augusta and operated by Atlanta-based Southern Company. They’re scheduled to be up and running by 2016 and 2017 and should produce about 10 percent of Georgia’s power.

“It’s smart to continue generating nuclear power in the United States,” said Marilyn Brown, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy. “It is a reliable, cost-competitive option that doesn’t contribute to air pollution or contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.” Brown helps shape the nation’s energy policies as a board member of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and chair of the company’s Nuclear Oversight Committee.

Brown said that nuclear power plants are expensive to build, compared to natural gas facilities.

“But they are clearly worth the investment,” she said. “A nuclear plant produces no carbon dioxide emissions and four times the power of a typical natural gas facility. Fourteen billion is a big number, but the plants should stay online for 50 to 70 years.”

Despite the benefits, critics will always point to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. These are the nation’s first approved nuclear facilities since Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Experts contend that modern plant designs are much safer than those built previously.

“The new plant designs are passively safe, so there are far fewer issues to worry about, like those that occurred with the older plants at Fukushima with the loss of off-site power,” said Glenn Sjoden, Georgia Tech professor of nuclear and radiological engineering. “With the new plants, you have a convection cooling loop that uses gravity and runs by itself for days in the event of lost power. There would be no active pumping required. . . . The more modern designs and precautions taken make nuclear the best option to satisfy our energy needs.”

Since last year’s incident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been reviewing existing U.S. plants to ensure that they can withstand earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters and making retrofit upgrades when necessary, Sjoden said.

Critics point to nuclear waste as another challenge with nuclear power. Each of the nation’s 104 plants store the radioactive waste on-site in steel casks protected by concrete and other safety systems. These are safe too, Brown said, because of careful construction and maintenance.

Nuclear waste would be a nonissue if the U.S. reprocessed its spent fuel like other nations such as France, Sjoden said.

“Like most nations, they recycle their used fuel, since 95 percent of the fuel can be recycled back into the reactor and used again, making nuclear power the most ‘green’ energy source out there,” Sjoden said. “Burying the waste, as we do in the United States, is completely wasteful.”

The United States generates almost 20 percent of its energy from nuclear plants, the same amount as natural gas. Coal supplies 50 percent. The remainder is generated from hydropower and other natural sources.

“We must develop more renewables sources, such as wind, solar and biopower,” says Brown. “Industry leaders, business and the general public must also become more energy efficient. That is the key to our future.”

Source:  Georgia Institute of Technology

Energy Squeeze: Squeezing polymers produces chemical energy

Engineerblogger
March 5, 2012

Bartosz A. Grzybowski

A polymer is a mesh of chains, which slowly break over time due to the pressure from ordinary wear and tear. When a polymer is squeezed, the pressure breaks chemical bonds and produces free radicals: ions with unpaired electrons, full of untapped energy. These molecules are responsible for aging, DNA damage and cancer in the human body.

In a new study, Northwestern University scientists turned to squeezed polymers and free radicals in a search for new energy sources. They found incredible promise but also some real problems. Their report is published by the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The researchers demonstrated that radicals from compressed polymers generate significant amounts of energy that can be used to power chemical reactions in water. This energy has typically been unused but now can be harnessed when polymers are under stress in ordinary circumstances -- as in shoe soles, car tires or when compacting plastic bags.

They also discovered during the study that a silicone polymer commonly used in implants for cosmetic procedures releases a large quantity of harmful free radicals when the polymer is under only a moderate amount of pressure. These findings suggest the safety of certain polymer-based medical implants should be looked at more closely.

“We have established that polymers under stress create free radicals with overall efficiencies of up to 30 percent and shoot the radicals out into the surrounding medium where they can drive chemical reactions,” said Bartosz A. Grzybowski, an author of the paper and the Kenneth Burgess Professor of Physical Chemistry and Chemical Systems Engineering. “These radicals can be useful or they can be harmful, depending on the situation.”

Grzybowski and his team are the first to use this energy to drive chemical reactions by simply surrounding the compressed polymer with water containing desired reagents.

The radicals created in the polymer migrate toward the polymer/water interface where they produce hydrogen peroxide, which then can drive chemical processes.

“You can get a surprisingly large amount of chemical energy from a polymer under compression,” Grzybowski said. “This energy is, in a sense, free for the taking. Under normal circumstances, the energy is virtually never retrieved from deformed polymers, which then age unproductively. But you could recharge a battery from the energy produced by walking or driving a car. And you could capture even more energy when compacting millions of plastic bags.”

Grzybowski is also director of Northwestern’s Non-Equilibrium Energy Research Center, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We are interested in new sources of chemical energy, and this energy from the simple breaking of polymers’ bonds is not being used,” he said. “By surrounding the polymer with a medium, such as water, we can produce environmentally friendly chemical energy. One direction we are pursuing is to use this energy to sanitize water in developing countries. This is possible because hydrogen peroxide produced by squeezed polymers kills bacteria.”

The researchers confirmed that mechanical deformation -- moderate squeezing -- created free radicals in the polymers. They also determined the number of radicals produced in a polymer under pressure is approximately 1016 (10 to the 16th) radicals per cubic centimeter of polymer -- a substantial amount.

They next filled polymer tubes with water, squeezed the tubes and measured the total number of radicals that migrated into the surrounding solution. They found that nearly 80 percent of the radicals made the trip.

Grzybowski and his team demonstrated they can squeeze a polymer, such as what might be found in a shoe, tire or plastic bag, and get a mechanical-to-chemical energy conversion of up to 30 percent -- approaching the energy efficiency of a car engine.

The hydrogen peroxide produced when a polymer surrounded by water is squeezed can power a variety of chemical reactions, including fluorescence, nanoparticle synthesis and dye bleaching, the researchers showed.

To illustrate the process, they converted a Nike Air LeBron shoe into a “lightning shoe,” where the air pockets in the polymeric sole are filled with a solution of a compound that lights up in the presence of radicals. After a person walked in the shoe for 30 minutes or more, enough radicals were created to generate a blue glow visible to the naked eye.

The researchers studied seven different polymers, including a number of particular public interest. Poly(dimethylsiloxane), a silicon-based material commonly used in medical implants, was one of them. In the lab experiments, the medium surrounding the polymer and the amount of pressure exerted on the material were similar to what would be found in the human body, Grzybowski pointed out.

“Our findings are somewhat worrisome since every polymeric implant in the human body experiences mechanical stresses and, as we now know, can produce harmful free radicals and liberate them into surrounding tissues, which may contribute to diseases such as cancer, stroke, myocardial infarction, diabetes and other major disorders,” Grzybowski said. “With this knowledge, I am quite happy to have a metal implant in my knee, rather than a polymer implant.

“From a scientific perspective, our work proves yet again that a phenomenon can be useful or harmful depending on how we implement it,” he said. “The same polymer can be a useful source of energy when outside of a human body, yet a potential risk hazard when implanted into it.”

The U.S. Department of Energy funded the research.

Source: Northwestern University

Additional Information:

• The title of the paper is “Mechanoradicals Created in ‘Polymeric Sponges’ Drive Reactions in Aqueous Media.” In addition to Grzybowski, other authors of the paper are H. Tarik Baytekin and Bilge Baytekin.
  

Generating electricity from vibrations in road surface works

Engineerblogger
March 1, 2012

Credit: University of Twente

A pilot research project into vibration energy on the N34 provincial motorway near Hardenberg in the eastern Netherlands has shown that vibration energy as a local energy source is a sustainable alternative for the batteries of roadside sensors and other applications. The trial project has provided valuable insights into this innovative form of energy production.

In the autumn of 2011, a piezoelectric material that converts vibrations from passing vehicles into energy was applied to the surface of the N34 motorway. The piezoelectric material was applied to the road surface in a rural area where the speed limit is 100 km per hour. The aim of the pilot project was to investigate the feasibility of piezo technology in road construction. The research was carried out by the Tauw advice and engineering agency and the University of Twente in partnership with the Dutch province of Overijssel.

The aim of the pilot project was to establish whether electrical energy can be generated from traffic vibrations using piezoelectric material and, if so, how much energy can be generated. The trial system was tested in various weather conditions between October and December 2011. A measurement device was used to continually monitor the system and collect data.

Results
Tauw and the University of Twente have concluded that energy can indeed be generated using piezoelectric material in the road surface. The amount of energy generated depends on the number of passing vehicles and the number of piezo elements in the road. Vehicles that are moving more slowly appear to generate slightly more energy than faster-moving vehicles, but further research is needed to confirm this.

The amount of energy generated during the pilot project was too small to be used for traffic lights or street lighting, but it was enough for devices that need less energy, such as wireless motion sensors, which detect vehicles and send a signal to, for example, traffic lights. Currently these are mainly powered by batteries or solar panels. Vibration energy is a sustainable alternative for these power sources.

The project partners also concluded that integrating piezo elements in an existing road surface is problematic. For the pilot research, a narrow groove was cut into the road and a steel housing containing the piezo elements was fitted into it. Ultimately it turned out that the housing was not strong enough to withstand the forces of the passing traffic, and it came loose in December. This did not cause a traffic hazard, but it did mean that the research ended a few weeks earlier than planned.

Applications
The project partners are hopeful about other applications. Project leader Simon Bos says: “The application of vibration energy in existing roads did turn out to be difficult, but we do see possibilities for existing and new bridges and viaducts, for example at expansion joints. Of course further research into a good, strong design has to be carried out before this can be applied on a large scale.”

Next steps
Following the pilot project, various interested parties have contacted Tauw and the University of Twente to carry out further research into vibration energy. Piezo elements can not only be fitted under bridges and viaducts, but also under concrete road slabs and speed bumps, or alongside railway lines or water drainage channels. The application of piezo elements beneath concrete slabs is at an advanced stage, while the other possible applications are still in the research phase.

Source: University of Twente

National Grid, Advanced Plasma Power and Progressive Energy announce new project to transform waste into Bio Substitute Natural Gas

Engineerblogger
March 1, 2012

Project will deliver an end-to-end process for converting waste to Bio-SNG, using Gasplasma® technology

The first pilot project that demonstrates the use of waste to produce bio-substitute natural gas (Bio-SNG) has today been announced by National Grid, Advanced Plasma Power and Progressive Energy.

The project, which uses waste as a feedstock to produce Bio-SNG, will be based at the Advanced Plasma Power Gasplasma® facility in Swindon, UK. It will demonstrate the technical feasibility and commercial viability of the waste to Bio-SNG process. The three partners will work together to design, install and test the operation of a demonstration plant.

The plant will take the waste-derived and energy rich synthesis gas from the existing Gasplasma® process, and convert it to meet the specification for injecting it into the gas network. Bio-SNG could play a crucial role in the decarbonisation of heating and help reach the UK's binding carbon reduction targets. As part of its work on future energy scenarios, National Grid has forecast that renewable gas could be a vital part of the energy mix in the coming decades.

APP’s process converts commercial waste into high-quality syngas, which can then be converted into methane. Credit: APP

Marcus Stewart, Future Distribution Networks Manager at National Grid said, “This project is a great opportunity to look at the potential of Bio-SNG from both a technical and commercial perspective. The project underlines our commitment to seeking economic and innovative ways to decarbonise energy, while making the best use of the existing network. ”

It is estimated that renewable gas, of which Bio-SNG may be a major source, could account for as much as one fifth of the UK’s heat requirement by 2050.

Rolf Stein, Chief Executive, Advanced Plasma Power said, “The development and implementation of a process to derive Bio-SNG from waste using our unique Gasplasma® process has significant global implications for sustainable waste management and low carbon energy solutions. We look forward to demonstrating the process on our plant in Swindon.”

Phillip Cozens, Progressive Energy said, “"This project is a significant step towards greater resource efficiency in our economy, exploiting the capacity of the existing gas infrastructure and demonstrating the potential to deliver renewable heat at a cost that is competitive with other renewable heat options. The partnership has put together a strong project execution team to deliver a practical demonstration of Bio-SNG production from residual wastes. Successful demonstration would provide a blue-print for general deployment.”

National Grid:
National Grid is an electricity and gas company that connects consumers to energy sources through its networks. The company is at the heart of one of the greatest challenges facing our society - to create new, sustainable energy solutions for the future and developing an energy system that underpins economic prosperity in the 21st century. National Grid holds a vital position at the centre of the energy system and we ‘join everything up’. In Britain, we run the gas and electricity systems that our society is built on, delivering gas and electricity across the country. In the North Eastern US, we connect more than seven million gas and electric customers to vital energy sources, essential for our modern lifestyles.

Advanced Plasma Power:
Advanced Plasma Power Limited (APP) is a leading technology provider for advanced waste to energy plants, showcasing its globally patented Gasplasma® technology. After the removal of valuable recyclates, the Gasplasma® process treats a wide range of feedstocks including residual municipal solid waste and commercial/industrial waste converting it all into two high value outputs: a clean, high quality, energy rich synthesis gas (syngas) and a solid, vitrified product each with multiple applications. The syngas can be used to generate electricity directly in gas engines, gas turbines and fuel cells or it can be converted to Bio-SNG or liquid fuels. The solid product, Plasmarok®, has a variety of valuable end uses, for instance, as a building material. The process is clean, modular and scalable, delivering high efficiency and maximising landfill diversion whilst minimising visual and environmental impact.

Progressive Energy:
Progressive Energy is a market leading project development company, specialising in clean energy and carbon abatement in the energy sector through the deployment of carbon capture and storage and renewable energy technologies. 

Source: National Grid

Battery to Take On Diesel and Natural Gas

Technology Review
Feb 29, 2012

Battery building: Aquion Energy recently announced plans to retrofit this factory—which used to make Sony televisions—to make large batteries for use with solar power plants. Credit: RIDC Westmoreland

Aquion Energy, a company that's making low-cost batteries for large-scale electricity storage, has selected a site for its first factory and says it's lined up the financing it needs to build it.

The company hopes its novel battery technology could allow some of the world's 1.4 billion people without electricity to get power without having to hook up to the grid.

The site for Aquion's factory is a sprawling former Sony television factory near Pittsburgh. The initial production capacity will be "hundreds" of megawatt-hours of batteries per year—the company doesn't want to be specific yet. It also isn't saying how much funding it's raised or where the money comes from, except to mention that some of it comes from the state of Pennsylvania, and that $5 million, in the form of an R&D grant, comes from the federal government.

The first applications are expected to be in countries like India, where hundreds of millions of people in communities outside major cities don't have a connection to the electrical grid or any other reliable source of electricity. Most of these communities use diesel generators for power, but high prices for oil and low prices for solar panels are making it cheaper to install solar in some cases.

To store power generated during the day for use at night, these communities need battery systems that can handle anything from tens of kilowatt-hours to a few megawatt-hours, says Scott Pearson, Aquion's CEO. Such a system could make long-distance transmission lines unnecessary, in much the same way that cell-phone towers have allowed such communities access to cellular service before they had land lines.

Eventually Aquion plans to sell stacks of batteries in countries that have electrical grids. They could provide power during times of peak demand and make up for fluctuations in power that big wind farms and solar power plants contribute to the grid. Those applications require tens to hundreds of gigawatt-hours' worth of storage, so to supply them, Aquion needs to increase its manufacturing capacity. Competing with natural-gas power plants—especially in the United States, where natural gas is so cheap—will mean waiting until economies of scale bring costs down.

The company has said that it initially hopes to make batteries for under $300 per kilowatt-hour, far cheaper than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Lead-acid batteries can be cheaper than Aquion's, but they last only two or three years. Aquion's batteries, which can be recharged 5,000 times, could last for over a decade in situations in which they're charged once a day (the company has tested the batteries for a couple of years so far).
To read more click here...

Experimental smart outlet brings flexibility, resiliency to grid architecture

Engineerblogger
Feb 28, 2012

Anthony Lentine with the smart outlet. Photo by Randy Montoya

Sandia National Laboratories has developed an experimental “smart outlet” that autonomously measures, monitors and controls electrical loads with no connection to a centralized computer or system. The goal of the smart outlet and similar innovations is to make the power grid more distributed and intelligent, capable of reconfiguring itself as conditions change.

Decentralizing power generation and controls would allow the grid to evolve into a more collaborative and responsive collection of microgrids, which could function individually as an island or collectively as part of a hierarchy or other organized system.

“A more distributed architecture can also be more reliable because it reduces the possibility of a single-point failure. Problems with parts of the system can be routed around or dropped on and off the larger grid system as the need arises,” said smart outlet co-inventor Anthony Lentine.

Such flexibility could make more use of variable output energy resources such as wind and solar because devices such as the smart outlet can vary their load demand to compensate for variations in energy production.

“This new distributed, sensor-aware, intelligent control architecture, of which the smart outlet is a key component, could also identify malicious control actions and prevent their propagation throughout the grid, enhancing the grid’s cyber security profile,” Lentine said.

Anatomy of a smart outlet

The outlet includes four receptacles, each with voltage/current sensing; actuation (switching); a computer for implementing the controls; and an Ethernet bridge for communicating with other outlets and sending data to a collection computer.

The outlet measures power usage and the direction of power flow, which is normally one-way, but could be bi-directional if something like a photovoltaic system is connected to send power onto the grid. Bi-directional monitoring and control could allow each location with its own energy production, such as photovoltaic or wind, to become an “island” when the main power grid goes down. Currently, that rarely occurs due to the lack of equipment to prevent power from flowing back toward the grid.

The outlet also measures real power and reactive power, which provides a more accurate measurement of the power potentially available to drive the loads, allowing the outlets to better adapt to changing energy needs and production.

Similar technology could be built into energy-intensive appliances and connected to a home monitoring system, allowing the homeowner greater control of energy use. What is different about the smart outlet is that distributed autonomous control allows a homeowner with little technical expertise to manage loads and the utility to manage loads with less hands-on, and costly, human intervention.

Utilities currently use mostly fossil fuels and nuclear reactors to generate baseload electric power, the amount needed to meet the minimum requirements of power users. Utilities know how much power they need based on decades of usage data, so they can predict demand under normal conditions.

“With the increased use of variable renewable resources, such as wind and solar, we need to develop new ways to manage the grid in the presence of a significant generation that can no longer supply arbitrary power on demand,” Lentine said. “The smart outlet is a small, localized approach to solving that problem.”

Source: Sandia National Laboratories

Reduction in U.S. carbon emissions attributed to cheaper natural gas

Harvard University
Feb 27, 2012

Changes in carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector in the nine census regions of the contiguous United States, 2008-2009. Image courtesy of Xi Lu.

In 2009, when the United States fell into economic recession, greenhouse gas emissions also fell, by 6.59 percent relative to 2008.

In the power sector, however, the recession was not the main cause.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have shown that the primary explanation for the reduction in CO2 emissions from power generation that year was that a decrease in the price of natural gas reduced the industry's reliance on coal.

According to their econometric model, emissions could be cut further by the introduction of a carbon tax, with negligible impact on the price of electricity for consumers.

A regional analysis, assessing the long-term implications for energy investment and policy, appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

In the United States, the power sector is responsible for 40 percent of all carbon emissions. In 2009, CO2 emissions from power generation dropped by 8.76 percent. The researchers attribute that change to the new abundance of cheap natural gas.

"Generating 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity from coal releases twice as much CO2 to the atmosphere as generating the same amount from natural gas, so a slight shift in the relative prices of coal and natural gas can result in a sharp drop in carbon emissions," explains Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies at SEAS, who led the study.

"That's what we saw in 2009," he says, "and we may well see it again."

Patterns of electricity generation, use, and pricing vary widely across the United States. In parts of the Midwest, for instance, almost half of the available power plants (by capacity) were built to process coal. Electricity production can only switch over to natural gas to the extent that gas-fired plants are available to meet the demand. By contrast, the Pacific states and New England barely rely on coal, so price differences there might make less of an impact.

To account for the many variables, McElroy and his colleagues at SEAS developed a model that considers nine regions separately.
To read more click here...

SPIDERS microgrid project secures military installations

Engineerblogger
Feb 23, 2012

Bill Waugaman is the SPIDERS operational lead at Sandia National Laboratories. Credit: Randy Montoya

When the lights go out, most of us find flashlights, dig out board games and wait for the power to come back. But that’s not an option for hospitals and military installations, where lives are on the line. Power outages can have disastrous consequences for such critical organizations, and it’s especially unsettling that they rely on the nation’s aging, fragile and fossil-fuel dependent grid.

A three-phase, $30 million, multi-agency project known as SPIDERS, or the Smart Power Infrastructure Demonstration for Energy Reliability and Security, is focused on lessening those risks by building smarter, more secure and robust microgrids that incorporate renewable energy sources.

Sandia was selected as the lead designer for SPIDERS, the first major project under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense (DoD) to accelerate joint innovations in clean energy and national energy security. The effort builds on Sandia’s decade of experience with microgrids – localized, closed-circuit grids that both generate and consume power – that can be run connected to or independent of the larger utility grid.

The goal for SPIDERS microgrid technology is to provide secure control of on-base generation.

“If there is a disruption to the commercial utility power grid, a secure microgrid can isolate from the grid and provide backup power to ensure continuity of mission-critical loads. The microgrid can allow time for the commercial utility to restore service and coordinate reconnection when service is stabilized,” said Col. Nancy Grandy, oversight executive of the SPIDERS Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD). “This capability provides much-needed energy security for our vital military missions.”

SPIDERS is addressing the challenge of tying intermittent clean energy sources such as solar and wind to a grid. “People run single diesel generators all the time to support buildings, but they don’t run interconnected diesels with solar, hydrogen fuel cells and so on, as a significant energy source. It’s not completely unheard of, but it’s a real integration challenge,” said Jason Stamp, Sandia’s lead project engineer for SPIDERS.

Currently, when power is disrupted at a military base, individual buildings switch to backup diesel generators, but that approach has several limitations. Generators might fail to start, and if a building’s backup power system doesn’t start, there is no way to use power from another building’s generator. Most generators are oversized for the load and run at less-than-optimal capacity, and excess fuel is consumed. Furthermore, safety requirements state that all renewable energy sources on base must disconnect when off-site power is lost.

A smart, cybersecure microgrid addresses these issues by allowing renewable energy sources to stay connected and run in coordination with diesel generators, which can all be brought online as needed. Such a system would dramatically help the military increase power reliability, lessen its need for diesel fuel and reduce its “carbon bootprint.”

“The military has indicated it wants to be protected against disruptions, to integrate renewable energy sources and to reduce petroleum demand,” Stamp said. “SPIDERS is focused on accomplishing those tasks, and the end result is having better energy delivery for critical mission support, and that is important for every American.”

SPIDERS uses existing, commercially available technologies for implementation, so the individual technologies are not novel. “What’s novel is the system integration of the various technologies, and demonstrating them in an operational field environment. Microgrid concepts are still fairly new, and that’s where Sandia’s microgrid design expertise is coming into play,” said Sandia researcher Bill Waugaman, SPIDERS operational lead.

It is common practice to connect diesel generators to buildings, but integrating significant amounts of energy from intermittent clean sources such as solar and wind to that system is unique, and it is a challenge that Sandia and SPIDERS are working to address.

Such integration requires data to determine the most efficient and effective way to operate, but that can open system vulnerabilities, so cybersecurity is paramount. SPIDERS addresses that issue by incorporating an unprecedented level of cybersecurity into the system from the outset.

“Any perturbation of information flow by an adversary would possibly cause an interruption to electrical service, which can have significant consequences,” Stamp said. “It’s important that if we build a microgrid system that depends explicitly on greater information flow, that it operate as intended: reliably and securely.”

SPIDERS is funded and managed through the DoD’s JCTD, which joins the efforts of other government organizations and companies to rapidly develop, assess and transition needed capabilities to support DoD missions. With the DOE’s support, the SPIDERS transition plan includes civilian facilities.

“The SPIDERS approach has many applications beyond military uses. Our interest in SPIDERS extends to organizations, like hospitals, that are critical to our nation’s functionality, especially in times of emergency,” said Merrill Smith, DOE program manager.

Sandia’s microgrid expertise spans the past decade, beginning when Sandia designed microgrids for the DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) and the DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE). The DOE initially asked Sandia to develop a conceptual design for a microgrid at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colo., and another for Camp H.M. Smith in Hawaii.

After Sandia conducted a feasibility analysis and modeling and simulation work for the two bases, U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) asked Sandia to prove the concept through field work under a JCTD. The two commands pulled together a team of national labs and defense organizations, and selected Sandia to lead the development of the initial designs for three separate microgrids, each more complex than the previous.

The Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory will use the Sandia designs as a basis for developing contracts with potential system integrators, who will construct the actual microgrids. Other partners in the SPIDERS JCTD include National Renewable Energy Laboratory for renewable energy and electrical vehicle expertise, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for testing and transition, Oak Ridge National Laboratory to assist with control system development and Idaho National Laboratory for cybersecurity.

The first SPIDERS microgrid will be implemented at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam in Honolulu, and will take advantage of several existing generation assets, including a 146-kW photovoltaic solar power system, and up to 50 kW of wind power. The integrator for the project has been selected and the final design and construction process is underway.

The second installation, at Fort Carson, is much larger and more complex and will integrate an existing 2 MW of solar power, several large diesel generators and electric vehicles. Large-scale electrical energy storage will also be implemented to ensure microgrid stability and to reduce the effects of PV variability on the system. Camp H.M. Smith, the most ambitious project, will rely on solar and diesel generators to power the entire base, which will be its own self-sufficient 5 MW microgrid when the national grid is unavailable.

Integration and implementation are scheduled through 2014. The goal is to install the circuit level demonstration at Pearl Hickam and Fort Carson next year, with Camp Smith installed in 2013.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories

Testing a fuel cell on a ship

Engineerblogger
Feb 21, 2012

Viking Lady

The financial crisis is not putting a stop to the world’s first ship with a fuel cell. The testing of this technology, which may halve the climate emissions from shipping, starts in a couple of months.

A rather unusual offshore supply ship is being built at the Westcon shipyard in Norway. The gas-driven supply ship, which belongs to the Eidesvik shipping company, will be the test centre for the world’s first fuel cell on board a merchant vessel.

The Viking Lady will be this pioneering shipowner’s third supply ship to be run on LNG. This gas will also be the fuel for the 320 kW fuel cell. This is in principle sufficient to act as an auxiliary engine to ensure a power supply on board, but not enough for propulsion.

The first step Fuel cells in ships may lead to an environmental revolution in shipping. The Norwegian-German Fellowship project is, however, just the beginning. Following the hopefully successful demonstration will be more developments on reducing cost and physical volume and increasing lifetime and reliability. The fuel cell on the Viking Lady is being built in addition to a normal auxiliary engine, but will be connected to the systems on board so that it can provide a small contribution to the operations.

However, the most important thing will be to conduct research and gain experience so that fuel cells have a future in shipping.

"A huge amount of work remains to be done. But owing to high efficiency and clean emissions, I am convinced that fuel cells are the way of the future; onshore, offshore and onboard ships," says DNV’s project manager Tomas H. Tronstad.

Challenges at sea 
The fuel cell being tested on the Viking Lady has been developed by Germany’s MTU Onsite Energy.

More than 50 fuel cells of the same type are used as back-up power generators on shore, for instance in hospitals and universities. But it is one thing to stand firmly and quietly on land and quite another to place the sensitive technology on a ship that rolls and pitches in the waves and in a tough, salty climate.

"One of the biggest challenges is to ‘marinefy’ the technology and to integrate the fuel cell with the traditional machinery-, control- and electro systems," says Mr Tronstad.

In the German-Norwegian project, the fuel cell, all the equipment and the ship will be adapted and modified. Many companies and partners are providing technology and equipment.

Ship-design company Vik-Sandvik is designing and adapting the ship and equipment location, while Wärtsilä Norway has put together a package of electrical and control systems that are being built in a separate container. DNV has examined the safety and risk aspects and prepared classification rules.

In such a pioneering project, the importance of class is highlighted when it comes to safeguarding the interfaces between the various machinery disciplines.

Tests on shore 
The next milestone is testing parts of the equipment on shore at Wärtsilä’s facility at Stord in Norway. The fuel cell itself will be in another, larger container, which is almost finished.

The actual heart of the engine, its core, has not arrived in Norway yet, but it will do so in a few months.

"The timetable is being kept. The first equipment testing started on shore in April," states Mr Tronstad.

Eidesvik took delivery of the ship in March and will start to lift components on board later this summer.

"The goal is to start testing in the sea in September. Everything is on schedule," says project developer Kjell Sandaker of Eidesvik.

Monetary challenges This has not been the case all the time. Project manager Mr Tronstad had to go around ministries and government bodies many times to obtain the public grants for this development project in 2006.

Following a cautious start in 2003, there was a need for almost NOK 100 million to get to the next phase. That meant that around NOK 50 million was required from public funds. Not an easy amount to obtain from those sources.

In total the project budget is NOK 115 million over six years, with roughly 45% funding from the Research Council of Norway, Innovation Norway and German state funding. The remaining 55% is covered by the private partners .

Source: Research institute Det Norske Veritas

Related Information:

• FellowSHIP: Fuel cells on the brink for commercialization
• Viking Lady show the way

To make better fuel cells, study the defects

Engineerblogger
Feb 21, 2012

When Amplex Red connects with a gold catalyst the structure is changed to make a fluorescent molecule that immediately emits a flash of light, showing where the catalytic event took place. Right, electron microphoto of a single gold nanorod, encased in a poirus silica shell. The shell keeps rods from clumping together and allows experimenters to use heat to clean away a coating that forms when the rods are created.  Credit: Peng Chen

Engineers trying to improve fuel-cell catalysts may be looking in the wrong place, according to new research at Cornell.

There is growing interest in forming the catalysts that break down fuel to generate electricity into nanoparticles. Nanoparticles provide a larger surface area to speed reactions, and in some cases, materials that are not catalytic in bulk become so at the nanoscale.

These nanoparticles, typically just a few tens of nanometers (nm) wide, are not neat little spheres, but rather jagged chunks, like microscale gravel, and researchers have found that they can correlate catalytic activity with information about the number and type of their surface facets. But they may be looking at the forest and ignoring the trees.

"People measure the activity of a sample and then try to understand by using facet information," said Peng Chen, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology. "The message we want to deliver is that surface defects [on the facets] dominate the catalysis."

Chen's research is reported Feb. 19 in the online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Instead of particles, Chen's research group studied catalytic events on gold "nanorods" up to 700 nm long, effectively letting them see how activity varies over a single facet. Gold acts as a catalyst to convert a chemical called Amplex Red into resorufin, which is fluorescent.

Each time a catalytic event occurs, the newly created molecule of resorufin emits a flash of light that is detected by a digital camera looking through a microscope. A flash typically appears as several pixels, and additional computer processing averages their brightness to pinpoint the actual event to within a few nanometers. The researchers call the technique "super-resolution microscopy." After flooding a field of nanorods with a solution of Amplex Red, they made a "movie" with one frame every 25 milliseconds.

The researchers found more catalytic events near the middle of a rod, tapering off toward the ends and a jump back up at the ends. They also found variation in the amount of activity from one rod to another, even though all the rods have the same types of facets.

To explain the results, they proposed that activity is higher in areas where there are more surface defects. The nanorods are made by growing gold crystals from a small "seed" crystal, growing outward from the center to the ends, Chen explained, and more defects form at the beginning of the process.

"Knowledge of the surface facets ... is insufficient to predict reactivity," the researchers said in their paper. "Surface defects … can also play a dominant role."

The findings with a gold catalyst and fluorescent molecules should be equally applicable to other catalysts, including those used in fuel cells and for pollution remediation, Chen said.

The research was supported in part by the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Part of the work was carried out at the Cornell Center for Materials Research and the Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility, both supported by NSF.

Source: Cornell University

Gas2 to build next generation plant for liquid hydrocarbon conversion

Engineerblogger
Feb 16, 2012

Scottish gas reforming company Gas2 has secured £5.5 million of funding to further the development of the next generation of gas-to-liquids (GTL) technology including the construction of a pilot reactor plant.

Gas2’s proprietary technology enables the conversion of natural gas to liquid hydrocarbon more economically and cleanly than has previously been possible with conventional large scale GTL technologies.

The company has developed a catalytic ceramic based porous membrane (pMRTM) that is used in its gas reforming (Syngas) reactors and fluid forming (Fischer Tropsch) reactors to create liquid hydrocarbons. This is an alternative technical solution to other developers of small to medium GTL who are using micro-channel technology.

The Gas2 approach is expected to result in considerably lower capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) expenditure and a smaller environmental footprint compared to conventional GTL technologies.

Simmons & Company International Ltd were corporate finance advisors to the fundraising from existing shareholders including Lime Rock Partners LLP, Robert Gordon University and a group of private investors with substantial interests in the oil, gas and hydrocarbons processing industries

The investment will leverage further funding that will enable the construction of a pilot reactor plant to further test and demonstrate the technology on a 0.4 acre site at the specialist petrochemical research Wilton Centre in Cleveland in the North-east of England, and further laboratory work and computerised modelling in Aberdeen.

The company has recently increased its employee numbers to 16 people in Aberdeen. A further four operative jobs will be created in Wilton as the plant is commissioned. Existing Gas2 staff will work between the pilot plant and the operations in Aberdeen.

Mike Fleming, co founder & managing director of Gas2 said: “We are entering a new and exciting phase with the build of the pilot plant which will validate on a larger scale the commercial viability of the Gas2 process. We have a unique technology and process, and the commercial prize is great for a successful outcome.”

Applications for the Gas2 GTL technology include:

• stranded gas: transforming the economic viability of smaller, more remote gas reserves as well as shale and unconventional reservoirs;

• offshore ‘associated’ gas: offering a ‘gas disposal’ solution for unwanted associated gas thereby preventing flaring and enabling the development of remote oilfields where flaring is prohibited and /or gas reinjection wells are expensive or detrimental to reservoir performance;

• gas conversion to alternative end products including gasoline, diesel, waxes, ammonia, methanol, hydrogen and ethylene for industrial use.

Saad Bagach, managing director of Lime Rock said: “Gas2 has a new technology that has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the gas-to-liquids market. The global demand for new solutions is vast and the ability of Gas2 to secure this level of funding in today’s economic climate is a powerful indicator of confidence in the company and the potential of its technology.”

The pilot plant will be constructed in 2012 with testing underway by the end of the year. The commercialisation phase will commence in 2013. The technology will be commercialised as an integrated GTL system and as standalone Syngas and Fischer Tropsch reactors available on the market.

Source: Gas2

European project investment in nuclear waste recycling

Engineerblogger
Feb 16, 2012

Christian Ekberg Credit:Chalmers University of Technology

With a 9,4 million euro budget, a group of European researchers are collaborating to investigate nuclear fuel manufacturing and recycling for the fourth generation nuclear power systems. The aim is to produce safe fuel that can be 80 per cent recycled, compared to the current 1 per cent. Chalmers University of Technology is in charge of the initiative.

Fourth generation nuclear power systems can lead to a reduction of the amount of high-level, long-lived nuclear waste to a tenth of what it is today, while energy output can increase hundredfold. Many researchers believe the new technology will have a commercial breakthrough within 20 years. Germany is at present the only European country that has decided to phase out nuclear power.

"The technology needed for the fourth generation already exists," says Christian Ekberg, professor and nuclear chemistry research team leader at Chalmers. "What is needed now is for the different parts to be connected. One important aspect involves integrating nuclear waste recycling into the cycle so that nuclear power plants can be built with facilities to recycle waste and produce new nuclear fuel on site."
Christian Ekberg is also the inaugural holder of Stena Metall’s professorship in Industrial Materials Recycling, and is the coordinator of the new research project called Asgard, which has received 5,5 million euro in EU grants. Around 50 European researchers will take part in the project over four years.

"Traditionally, three different groups have worked separately on the fourth generation nuclear power systems: reactor physicists, fuel chemists and separation chemists. The groups will cooperate within the Asgard project to tie their previous findings together. We will also perform research on entirely new reactor fuels that are safer, use resources more effectively and that enable a more comprehensive approach to the waste issue."

Oxides currently dominate among the nuclear fuels that are produced from recycled nuclear waste. One example is MOX fuel. During the course of the Asgard project, researchers will examine other types of chemical compounds with uranium or plutonium. Examples include nitrides and carbides. These chemical compounds are safer to use in reactors, amongst other things because their high melting point and thermal conductivity offer a higher safety margin in terms of a nuclear meltdown.

Researchers will now investigate whether the new fuels' qualities are as positive in terms of recycling and production. At Chalmers – the European university best equipped to perform research on the entire nuclear fuel cycle – researchers will primarily concentrate on nitrides.

"If it is possible to recycle as much as we think, at least 80 per cent of nuclear waste will be possible to recycle," says Christian Ekberg. "This would also mean that eight times as much of the remaining waste could be included in the final repository, since heat generation is reduced. In addition, the amount of long-lived nuclides in residual waste is reduced, which results in a significantly shorter storage period. However, it is important to remember that the final repository is still an important part of the fuel cycle."


Information about the Asgard project
Asgard is a four-year EU project that is addressing new and innovative fuels for nuclear reactors. Of the budgeted 9,4 million euro, 5,5 million euro is being provided by EU grants. The project got started in January and comprises 16 organisations in 10 countries across Europe. In addition to Chalmers, other Swedish participants include the Royal Institute of Technology and Westinghouse.

From an overall financial perspective, the Asgard project is the biggest project ever at Chalmers' largest department, the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Christian Ekberg (professor and Asgard coordinator), Gunnar Skarnemark (professor), Teodora Retegan (PhD) and Emma Aneheim and Marcus Hedberg (doctoral students) are the Chalmers researchers taking part in the project.

Information about the Genius project
The nuclear chemistry research team at Chalmers is also involved in the Swedish Genius cooperation project with the Royal Institute of Technology and Uppsala University. They are working on developing advanced nuclear fuel, performing research on materials for lead cooled reactors and performing safety analyses. The project aims to develop fourth generation nuclear power systems.
Read more about Genius

Source: Chalmers University of Technology

Small modular reactor design could be a 'SUPERSTAR'

Argonne National Laboratory
Feb 9, 2012

Credit: ANL

Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor cooled by sodium. Reactors cooled by liquid metals such as sodium or lead have a unique set of abilities that may again make them significant players in the nuclear industry.

At the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, a team led by senior nuclear engineer James Sienicki has designed a new small reactor cooled by lead—the Sustainable Proliferation-resistance Enhanced Refined Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor, or SUPERSTAR for short.

Small modular reactors, or SMRs, are small-scale nuclear plants that are designed to be factory-manufactured and shipped as modules to be assembled at a site. They can be designed to operate without refueling for 15 to 30 years. The concept offers promising answers to many questions about nuclear power—including proliferation, waste, safety and start-up costs.

SUPERSTAR is an example of a so-called "fast reactor," a type fundamentally different from the light-water reactors common today. Light-water reactors use water both as a coolant and as a moderator to slow down neutrons created in the fuel as it fissions. Instead, fast reactors use materials that don't slow down neutrons—often a liquid metal, such as sodium or lead.

Like all new generations of reactors, SUPERSTAR has "passive" safety systems—backup safety measures that kick in automatically, without human intervention, in case of accidents. For example, all reactors have control rods incorporating substances that absorb neutrons and stop nuclear chain reactions. SUPERSTAR's rods can be suspended above the reactor core held in place by electricity. If the plant loses power, the control rods will automatically drop into the core and stop the reaction.

In addition, SUPERSTAR's lead coolant is circulated around the core by a process called natural circulation. While existing plants use electrically-driven pumps to keep the water moving, SUPERSTAR exploits a law of physics to move the coolant.

"In any closed loop, with heat at the bottom and cooling on top, a flow will develop, with the heated stream rising to the top and cooled stream going down," explained Anton Moisseytsev, an Argonne nuclear engineer also working on the reactor design. "The SUPERSTAR design takes advantage of this feature—its lead coolant is circulated solely by natural circulation, with no pumps needed. And of course, having no pumps means no pump failures." This means that if the plant loses power, as happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, the reactor does not need electricity to cool the core after shutdown.
To read more click here...

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Salt Heat Transfer Fluids in concentrated solar power(CSP)

Engineerblogger
Feb 10, 2012

Solucar solar power plant in Sanlucar la Mayor, near Seville, Spain. Image: Abengoa Solar.

With photovoltaic energy prices dropping and concentrated solar power (CSP) towers operating at higher temperatures, the use of salts in CSP trough plants is being investigated to lower operating costs, improve plant efficiencies, and enable operation at higher temperatures. Most trough plants with synthetic or organic oil heat transfer fluids (HTFs) are limited to less than 400 °C.

Using salts can raise that temperature up to 550 °C, allowing steam turbines to operate at greater efficiency, among other advantages. Even though there are no commercial trough CSP plants using salt yet, new industrial-sized plants designed to incorporate their many advantages are currently entering the demonstration phase.

Favorable Comparisons

Liquid salts used for heat transfer in power plants are called molten salts because normally they are solids at standard temperature and pressure. Conventional mixtures of sodium nitrates and potassium nitrates are already proven as energy storage media in trough and tower configurations. The new concept is to use those nitrate salts as the HTF as well as for storage, which can lead to a more efficient trough plant design.

Salts are cheaper, denser, and can retain more energy per volume than oil-based HTFs. They can be directly stored and accessed at near-ambient pressure, not at oil-based HTFs’ considerably higher vapor pressure. A larger tank can be used for both expansion and short-term storage when the fluid is hot, minimizing the need for additional tanks and heat exchangers, and making it easier to incorporate heat storage.

In addition to offering favorable storage conditions, as an HTF, molten salts also:

• pollute less

• are nonflammable

• are more abundant

• have lower vapor pressures

• offer cost savings due to smaller thermal tanks and piping.

Where leaking synthetic oil HTFs pose spill and fire hazards, leaking molten salt will solidify and can be cleaned by scooping with a shovel.

Salts do not degrade over time, do not need to be replaced, and do not exhibit the hydrogen permeation problem that oil-based HTFs exhibited. Craig Turchi from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Concentrating Solar Power Program, Washington, DC, believes the lifetime of molten salts will easily match the lifetime of the trough plant.

Molten salts are solids at standard temperature and pressure

CSP Salt Challenges–Freeze Protection

Both oil and salt trough plants are designed to continuously circulate HTF through loops, even at night. If molten salt cools below its melting point for a few days or weeks due to loss of circulation, pipe insulation, or a power blackout to the plant, the salts can freeze and contract. Turchi explains that contraction itself is not a problem, but when the salts melt, they expand. If a pipe containing frozen salt is filled solid, it may rupture upon melting, but it is possible to re-melt the salts over the course of days or weeks.

Recent freeze-thaw tests at Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM, showed heat collection elements (absorber or receiver tubes) could also be permanently damaged if they were completely filled with salt when it froze. They noticed that in a sloping solar field, only the receivers at the low ends of the collector assembly were completely full, implying there could be opportunities to minimize damage risk with the solar field design.

Trough salt plants contain electric heat tracing to keep the circulating system warm during cold nights, and reduce risk of freezing. Operating these heaters uses power and adds significant cost, but some oil-based CSP plants already have these heat tracers installed in their loops, Turchi explains.

Most research efforts have been focused on creating or locating compatible salts with lower melting points so they don’t freeze. By adding additional ingredients such as lithium nitrate, some researchers have been able to reduce melting points to as low as 80 °C by creating more complex ternary, quaternary, or higher salt blends. This is still higher than ambient temperature in CSP trough power plants, but far lower than the melting point of conventional nitrate salt mixtures at 220 °C. Despite this finding, lithium nitrate is a costly additive, so the search continues.

The use of salts in CSP trough plants is being investigated to lower operating costs. Image: Siemens.

Approaching Industrial-Scale Use

Solar Millennium, Erlangen, Germany, and Abengoa Solar, Seville, Spain, are exploring salt HTF options under funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, and testing and development is continuing several experimental CSP test facilities such as Sandia’s Sunlab.

New CSP test facilities are being designed and built to test more sophisticated salt blends with lower melting points, such as the ENEA’s industrial scale salt trough test plant Archimede in Sicily, Italy, and Siemens’ Portuguese plant being built in the second quarter of 2011.

At this point, the switch to salt is considered an operational risk, but is beyond most of the technological barriers to implementation. It is hoped that the tradeoffs made at these new plants will enable cost savings and improved efficiency due to salt’s favorable thermal properties.

Source: ASME

New battery could lead to cheaper, more efficient solar energy

Engineerblogger
Feb 10, 2012


A joint research project between the University of Southampton and lithium battery technology company REAPsystems has found that a new type of battery has the potential to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of solar power.

The research project, sponsored by REAPsystems, was led by MSc Sustainable Energy Technologies student, Yue Wu and his supervisors Dr Carlos Ponce de Leon, Professor Tom Markvart and Dr John Low (currently working at the University’s Research Institute for Industry, RIfI). The study looked specifically into the use of lithium batteries as an energy storage device in photovoltaic systems.

Student Yue Wu says, “Lead acid batteries are traditionally the energy storage device used for most photovoltaic systems. However, as an energy storage device, lithium batteries, especially the LiFePO4 batteries we used, have more favourable characteristics.”

Data was collected by connecting a lithium iron phosphate battery to a photovoltaic system attached to one of the University’s buildings, using a specifically designed battery management system supplied by REAPsystems.

Yue adds, “the research showed that the lithium battery has an energy efficiency of 95 per cent whereas the lead-acid batteries commonly used today only have around 80 per cent. The weight of the lithium batteries is lower and they have a longer life span than the lead-acid batteries reaching up to 1,600 charge/discharge cycles, meaning they would need to be replaced less frequently.”

Although the battery will require further testing before being put into commercial photovoltaic systems the research has shown that the LiFePO4 battery has the potential to improve the efficiency of solar power systems and help to reduce the costs of both their installation and upkeep. Dr Carlos Ponce de Leon and Dr. John Low now plan to take this project further with a new cohort of Masters students.

Dr Dennis Doerffel, founder of REAPsystems and former researcher at the University of Southampton, says; "For all kinds of energy source (renewable or non-renewable), the energy storage device - such as a battery – plays an important role in determining the energy utilisation. Compared with traditional lead acid batteries, LiFePO4 batteries are more efficient, have a longer lifetime, are lighter and cost less per unit. We can see the potential of this battery being used widely in photovoltaic application, and other renewable energy systems.”

Source:  University of Southampton

Revealing how a battery material works: Why the hottest new material for rechargeable batteries works

MIT News
Feb 8, 2012

The molecular structure of lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO₄)Credit: MIT

Since its discovery 15 years ago, lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) has become one of the most promising materials for rechargeable batteries because of its stability, durability, safety and ability to deliver a lot of power at once. It has been the focus of major research projects around the world, and a leading technology used in everything from power tools to electric vehicles. But despite this widespread interest, the reasons for lithium iron phosphate’s unusual charging and discharging characteristics have remained unclear.

Now, research by MIT associate professor of chemical engineering and mathematics Martin Z. Bazant has provided surprising new results showing that the material behaves quite differently than had been thought, helping to explain its performance and possibly opening the door to the discovery of even more effective battery materials.

The new insights into lithium iron phosphate’s behavior are detailed in a paper appearing this week in the journal ACS Nano, written by Bazant and postdoc Daniel Cogswell. The paper is an extension of research they reported late last year in the journal Nano Letters.

When it was first discovered, lithium iron phosphate was considered useful only for low-power applications. Then, later developments — by researchers including MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics — showed that its power capacity could be improved dramatically by using it in nanoparticle form, an approach that made it one of the best materials known for high-power applications.

But the reasons why nanoparticles of LiFePO4 worked so well remained elusive. It was widely believed that while being charged or discharged, the bulk material separated into different phases with very different concentrations of lithium; this phase separation, it was thought, limited the material’s power capacity. But the new research shows that, under many real-world conditions, this separation never happens.

Bazant’s theory predicts that above a critical current, the reaction is so fast that the material loses its tendency for the phase separation that happens at lower power levels. Just below the critical current, the material passes through a new “quasi-solid solution” state, where it “doesn’t have time to complete the phase separation,” he says. These characteristics help explain why this material is so good for rechargeable batteries, he says.

The findings resulted from a combination of theoretical analysis, computer modeling and laboratory experiments, Bazant explains — a cross-disciplinary approach that reflects his own joint appointments in MIT’s departments of chemical engineering and mathematics. 
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