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Category: sustainability

And it’s a hybrid mix of hydrogen and electric power.

Global mining company Anglo American is experimenting with hydrogen to power the giant mining trucks.

Mining trucks consume 35.3 gallons (134 liters) of diesel per hour with their enormous weight of around 220 metric tonnes and therefore emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In order to reduce the mining industry’s carbon footprint, Anglo American is focused on mining trucks.

The company is collaborating with several partners, such as Engie, NPROXX, First Mode, Williams Advanced Engineering, Ballard, ABB, Nel, and Plug Power, to develop a hybrid mining vehicle, fueled with hydrogen and electricity.

The truck will be hybrid, with a hydrogen fuel cell providing roughly half of the power and the other half by a battery pack.

The truck can also harvest regenerative energy created when driving downhill and braking, which is stored in the battery and extends the range of the vehicle.

Instead of using diesel as a source of power for the motor, hydrogen enters the fuel cell and mixes with oxygen to create water in a chemical reaction catalyzed by platinum, which generates the necessary electricity to power the motors that drive the wheels.

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As the electric car revolution ramps up, so does the need for critical minerals used in batteries, such as graphite. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, there will be a global graphite deficit starting in 2022, and demand from the battery sector is expected to rise 30% annually until 2030. The US has no manufacturing plants that can supply automotive-grade graphite at scale. Meanwhile, China controls 84% of the global supply. Electrek spoke with Don Baxter, CEO of Ceylon Graphite, about how graphite is used in EVs, the supply chain issue, and how EV battery manufacturers can successfully source the vital mineral.

Electrek: How is graphite used in battery electric vehicles?

Don Baxter: Processed graphite comprises 95% of the anode (negative electrode) of lithium-ion batteries that power EVs, whereas the cathode (positive electrode) is made up of various materials such as nickel and cobalt.

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An international team of experts has collected data on metal halide perovskite solar cells from more than 15,000 publications and developed a database with visualization options and analysis tools. The database is open source and provides an overview of the rapidly growing knowledge as well as the open questions in this exciting class of materials. The study was initiated by HZB scientist Dr. Eva Unger and implemented and coordinated by her postdoc Jesper Jacobsson.

Halide perovskites have huge potential for and other optoelectronic applications. Solar cells based on metal-organic perovskites achieve efficiencies of more than 25 percent, they can be produced cheaply and with minimal energy consumption, but still require improvements in terms of stability and reliability. In recent years, research on this class of materials has boomed, producing a flood of results that is almost impossible to keep track of by traditional means. Under the keyword “ solar,” more than 19,000 publications had already been entered in the Web of Science (spring 2021).

Now, 95 experts from more than 30 international research institutions have designed a to systematically record findings on perovskite semiconductors. The are prepared according to the FAIR principles, i.e. they are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. By reading the existing literature, the experts have collected more than 42,000 individual data sets, in which the data can be filtered and displayed according to various criteria such as material compositions or component type. Researchers from several teams at HZB were involved in this Herculean task.

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Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. The battery could enable a wide variety of wearable electronic devices, and might even be used to make 3D-printed batteries in virtually any shape.

The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts.

In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world’s longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described today in the journal Materials Today. MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev (now an assistant professor at National University of Singapore), former MIT postdoc Jung Tae Lee (now a professor at Kyung Hee University), and Benjamin Grena SM ‘13, Ph.D. ‘17 (currently at Apple) are the lead authors on the paper. Other co-authors are MIT professors Yoel Fink, Ju Li, and John Joannopoulos, and seven others at MIT and elsewhere.

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The James Dyson Award recently recognized a team of Malaysian designers for their sustainable desalination pod concept called WaterPod that works on solar distillation to convert seawater into drinkable water. Developed by Bennie Beh Hue May, Yap Chun Yoon, and Loo Xin Yang, the WaterPod is designed to be floated at sea, and therefore accessible to sea nomads.

WaterPod is a low-cost yet environmentally-friendly desalination method to generate drinkable water.

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More precise, faster, cheaper: Researchers all over the world have been working for years on producing electrical circuits using additive processes such as robotic 3D-printing (so-called robocasting) with great success, but this is now becoming a problem. The metal particles that make such 3D substrates electrically conductive are exacerbating the problem of electronic waste, especially since the waste generated is likely to increase in the future in view of new types of disposable sensors, some of which are only used for a few days.

This constitutes unnecessary waste, according to Gustav Nyström, head of Empa’s Cellulose & Wood Materials lab: “There is an urgent need for materials that balance electronic performance, cost and sustainability.” To develop an environmentally friendly ink, Nyström’s team therefore set ambitious goals: metal-free, non-toxic, biodegradable. And with in mind: easily formable and stable to moisture and moderate heat.

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SAIC-GM-Wuling uses cheap parts but makes them easy to replace.

TOKYO — At 28,800 yuan ($4,500), the Hongguang Mini EV has become a big seller in certain Chinese cities and villages. In Japan, a Nagoya University professor disassembled the electric vehicle to discover what kind of alchemy the manufacturer used to set such a low price.

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Researchers from ETH Zurich and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developed a new 3D printing technique capable of producing nanoscale metal parts.

Based on an electrochemical approach, the process can be used to fabricate copper objects as small as 25 nanometers in diameter. For reference, an average human hair is around 3000x thicker at 75 microns.

According to the research team led by Dr Dmitry Momotenko, the new 3D printing technique has potential applications in microelectronics, sensor technology, and battery technology.

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