[Graeme]

Power Satellite Progress

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his is a follow-up on my "Dollar a Gallon Gasoline” article from April 2. That article proposed power satellites as a way to solve energy, carbon, climate, water and even economic stagnation problems. The follow up is on an alternate transport system powered by microwaves rather than lasers.

Power satellites are a complicated subject. It involves economics, "rocket science," i.e., the rocket equation, orbital mechanics, radiators, thermodynamics, microwave and laser optics, geography, geometry, radio frequency interference with communications, Skylon (rocket plane), atmospheric damage effects (from NOx), chemistry, electrochemistry, military policy, international politics, and in-space operations and assembly. It's difficult to put enough detail in an article for it to be believable and little enough detail for it to be readable. But I will try.

The engineering has developed over the decades from 1968. It's unusual to need an update even once a year, much less one in a few months. However, progress has recently picked up. In May, there was an article about Japanese plans for power satellites in the IEEE Spectrum by Susumu Sasaki, a senior scientist with JAXA. JAXA is Japan's equivalent of NASA. The IEEE is the largest technical society in the world

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/sol ... solar-farm

More recently there was a CNN article on Skylon, one of the keys to making power satellites economical.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/08/tech/inno ... ?hpt=hp_c3

The current schedule for Skylon is for it to fly in 2021. That means that on an ambitious schedule the first power satellite could come on line in 2023. Rapid growth could lead to displacing fossil fuels by the mid 2030s.

[Graeme]

Japanese construction giant Obayashi announces plans to have a space elevator up and running by 2050

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')nce the realm of science fiction, a Japanese company has announced they will have a space elevator up and running by the year 2050.

If successful it would revolutionise space travel and potentially transform the global economy.

The Japanese construction giant Obayashi says they will build a space elevator that will reach 96,000 kilometres into space.

Robotic cars powered by magnetic linear motors will carry people and cargo to a newly-built space station, at a fraction of the cost of rockets. It will take seven days to get there.

The company said the fantasy can now become a reality because of the development of carbon nanotechnology.

"The tensile strength is almost a hundred times stronger than steel cable so it's possible," Mr Yoji Ishikawa, a research and development manager at Obayashi, said.

"Right now we can't make the cable long enough. We can only make 3-centimetre-long nanotubes but we need much more... we think by 2030 we'll be able to do it."

Universities all over Japan have been working on the problems and every year they hold competitions to share and learn from each other.

A team at Kanagawa University has been working on robotic cars or climbers.

Professor Tadashi Egami said tension on the cable will vary depending on height and gravity.

[lpetrich]

It will be necessary to get launch costs way down for orbiting solar panels to be feasible.

Consider the numbers of a well-known rocket company that brags about its prices: Capabilities & Services | SpaceX
$61.2 million to send 13150 kg into low earth orbit (LEO) or 4850 kg into geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). This turns out to be

• LEO: $4650/kg
• GTO: $12600/kg

To get an idea of the state of the art, I looked at the first solar panel that shopping.google.com returned: 300W Polycrystalline | Renogy Store

Output: 300 watts
Price: $275.99
Weight: 23 kg
Dimensions: 2 m * 1 m * 5 cm

So getting it up into outer space would cost $110 thousand. However, a single Falcon 9 launch could get 570 of these panels into LEO, and they would produce 170 kilowatts of electricity.


I haven't been able to find comparable numbers from the United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, or Roskosmos.

[Graeme]

“Radical Polymers” Could Fuel Next Solar Technology Spike

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')adical Polymers and Solar Technology

Radical polymers refers to a particular family of polymers (aka plastics) that can conduct electricity.

If you’re familiar with organic solar cells (here’s another example), you can already see the potential for radical polymers to yield low cost, flexible, transparent solar technology that could be applied to just about any surface, including windows.

That’s the goal set by a research team at Purdue University, which has just announced the results of their work on a radical polymer called PTMA.

For those of you keeping score at home, PTMA is short for poly(2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidinyloxy-4-yl meth-acrylate). Previous research has demonstrated that PTMA holds some promise, since it is about 10 times more conductive than other types of semiconducting polymers.


Don’t hold your breath for your local dollar store to stock superconducting Plexiglass solar cells that will bring virtually free energy to your doorstep any time soon, because the Purdue team is aiming for an increase in conductivity of about 100 to 1,000 times before commercial applications are viable.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the Purdue study, which was recently published in the journal Macromolecules.

For those of you new to the topic, radical polymers belong to a class of polymers that have small offshoots, called pendants, hanging from a long central chain of molecules.

[Graeme]

Superconducting circuits, simplified

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'm')puter chips with superconducting circuits -- circuits with zero electrical resistance -- would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today's chips, an attractive trait given the increasing power consumption of the massive data centers that power the Internet's most popular sites.

Superconducting chips also promise greater processing power: Superconducting circuits that use so-called Josephson junctions have been clocked at 770 gigahertz, or 500 times the speed of the chip in the iPhone 6.

But Josephson-junction chips are big and hard to make; most problematic of all, they use such minute currents that the results of their computations are difficult to detect. For the most part, they've been relegated to a few custom-engineered signal-detection applications.

In the latest issue of the journal Nano Letters, MIT researchers present a new circuit design that could make simple superconducting devices much cheaper to manufacture. And while the circuits' speed probably wouldn't top that of today's chips, they could solve the problem of reading out the results of calculations performed with Josephson junctions.

The MIT researchers -- Adam McCaughan, a graduate student in electrical engineering, and his advisor, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Karl Berggren -- call their device the nanocryotron, after the cryotron, an experimental computing circuit developed in the 1950s by MIT professor Dudley Buck. The cryotron was briefly the object of a great deal of interest -- and federal funding -- as the possible basis for a new generation of computers, but it was eclipsed by the integrated circuit.

"The superconducting-electronics community has seen a lot of devices come and go, without any real-world application," McCaughan says. "But in our paper, we have already applied our device to applications that will be highly relevant to future work in superconducting computing and quantum communications."

Superconducting circuits are used in light detectors that can register the arrival of a single light particle, or photon; that's one of the applications in which the researchers tested the nanocryotron. McCaughan also wired together several of the circuits to produce a fundamental digital-arithmetic component called a half-adder.

[Graeme]

Brace Yourself, Here Comes The Plasmonic Solar Cell Of The Future

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e’ve been keeping tabs on the plasmonics scene for a while and we just got wind of an interesting new development from the Netherlands in partnership with Caltech. If the Netherlands connection doesn’t exactly ring your bells, recall that Caltech is the institutional home of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is heavily invested in the related field of photonics.

As for the Netherlands angle, that would be FOM Institute AMOLF, which belongs to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. AMOLF has been partnering with Caltech on plasmonics for a number of years now, so let’s see what they’re up to in terms of influencing the next wave of low cost, high efficiency solar cells.

The Plasmonic Effect

For those of you new to the topic, plasmonics (aka the plasmo-electric effect) refers to the ability of certain metals to capture light and convert it to an electrical charge.

For more details you can check out an article on plasmonics at our sister site PlanetSave, but for now let’s just say that plasmonics refers to electrons that are in an excited state when exposed to light.

Today’s solar cell technology is based on silicon and other semiconductors, so introducing another class of materials into the mix could bust the solar field wide open in terms of cost, efficiency, and application.

Think of the new opportunities afforded by the emerging generation of flexible, lightweight thin film solar cells compared to conventional silicon solar cells and you can see what the future could bring.


Instead of creating rods or pillars, they engineered tiny circuits consisting of a film of gold only 20 nanometers thick, into which they “drilled” holes measuring only 100 nanometers in diameter (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, for those of you keeping score at home).

[Graeme]

Space-based solar power: the energy of the future?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n space there's no atmosphere, it's never cloudy, and in geosynchronous orbits it's never night: a perfect place for a solar power station to harvest uninterrupted power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The concept has been around since the 1940s when science fiction writer Isaac Asimov posited the idea of a robot-manned space station that delivered energy to Earth via microwaves.
Today, the idea is less science fiction than a steadily advancing reality.

Clean energy from above

The United States, China, India and Japan all have projects at various stages of development that would see robots assemble solar arrays that could provide the Earth with massive amounts of clean and renewable energy delivered wirelessly.

Some variants of the idea could even see as much as 1GW of energy beamed to receivers on Earth -- enough to power a large city.

According to Dr Paul Jaffe, spacecraft engineer at the US Naval Research Laboratory, the concept is scientifically sound.

"NASA and the US Department of Energy did a study in the late 70s that cost $20 million at the time and looked at it in pretty great depth," Dr Jaffe told CNN. "The conclusion at that time was that there was nothing wrong with the physics but the real question is the economics."
The cost lies in the number of space launches required to build the power-transmitting satellite. With costs as high as $40,000 per kilogram for some space launches, the final price-tag for the first space-based solar power station could be as high as $20 billion.

Private contractors

While the recent entry of private space companies stands significantly to cut costs, basic physics dictates that getting payloads into space is still an expensive undertaking.
"The subject is revisited every 10 years when the technology changes and some of the factors affecting the economics change."

[lpetrich]

Polymer solar cells look interesting, though they still have a way to go. Semiconducting polymers seem like they could also be useful as electrodes in electrolytic cells and fuel cells. If they could replace platinum, or at least drastically reduce the amount of platinum necessary, then that would be a big step forward for both technologies. I've found various articles about research into polymer electrodes for both technologies.

Superconductivity? There's a certain problem. Superconductivity requires supercold temperatures. Like liquid-helium temperatures for most practical applications of it. Helium boils at about 4 K -- that's 4 Centigrade degrees above absolute zero. 0 C, the melting point of water, is about 273.15 K. That's why superconductivity has mostly been used to make superstrong magnetic fields. One needs a liquid-helium refrigerator to make the effect happen, and it's easiest to afford one when it's for a big magnet.

Outer space? From the numbers I'd cited earlier, the cost to send a common solar panel into orbit is about 400 times its retail price, and that assumes a rocket that's fully loaded with that kind of panel.

I checked on that great fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, and I found several articles: Launch service provider, Comparison of orbital launch systems, List of orbital launch systems, List of private spaceflight companies, List of government space agencies There are now several companies offering launch services, companies based in the US, Europe, Russia, China, and India.

The downside for rocket development comes from the nature of the beast: orbit-capable rockets are expensive and complicated, there aren't many individual ones used, they have to work right the first time, and that time is the only one that nearly all of them get used. Part of the expense comes from using liquid propellants, and often cryogenic ones, something that is a necessity for getting high exhaust velocities. One can get as much as 3 km/s from a solid rocket, but about 3.5 km/s for kerosene and liquid oxygen, and 4.6 km/s for liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (Solid-fuel rocket - Wikipedia).

So it's not surprising that rocket design has tended to be rather conservative. The Russians have been using variants of the Soyuz design for about 50 years now. The ULA's Delta II rockets have been in use for some 26 years. Even SpaceX has been somewhat conservative, using its Merlin rocket engine in all its rockets. Its first one, Falcon 1, used 1 of them, and its current one, Falcon 9, uses 10 of them, 9 in its first stage and 1 in its second stage. Its upcoming Falcon Heavy rocket will be essentially a Falcon 9 with two strap-on boosters that are essentially two Falcon 9 first stages, thus giving a grand total of 28 Merlin engines.

So I don't see much prospect of lowering launch costs by a factor of 400 or so, what would be necessary to make orbiting solar power stations economically feasible.

[Keith_McClary]

boingboing

[dolanbaker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', '[')img]http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/burnwater.jpg[/img]
boingboing

[lpetrich]

I've discovered Launch Costs - United Launch Alliance
Its price for one Atlas V launch is $165 million, with $100 million for additional launches in a series. A low-end Atlas V can launch 9.8 metric tons into LEO (Atlas V - United Launch Alliance). So that's about $10,000/kg, twice as much as SpaceX's quote.

The ULA has what looks like some FUD about competitors like SpaceX:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')There is a reason customers rely on ULA for mission assurance – you cannot risk a multi-billion dollar satellite that may have taken 10 years to build. It’s not just the cost of a replacement satellite. It is the essential capability that our troops and national security depend on. It would be risky to bet on a potential new entrant who is not yet certified, has a history of launch delays, and an overcommitted manifest that they may not be able to deliver on.

[Graeme]

Please watch this 13-minute video.

10 Energy Sources That Will Power Our Future

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hen we run out of fossil fuels, how are we going to power our planet?

You've probably heard quite a bit about solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear energy, but there are quite a few sources of power that could revolutionize the way we do things. From a recent geothermal discovery in Iceland, to the development of windows that can harness the power of the sun, some of these might sound crazy, but in reality, they're just around the corner.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')
Toyota will build the first megawatt-scale hydrogen fuel and renewable generation plant, setting a new energy benchmark that experts hope with pave the way for Australia's hydrogen industry. Toyota North America will build the plant to support its operations at the Port of Long Beach, in the US, using agricultural waste to generate electricity, water and hydrogen. By 2030, between 10 million and 15 million cars and half a million trucks will be hydrogen-powered globally. Photo: Peter DaSilva Dubbed the Tri-Gen facility, the plant will generate around 2.35 megawatts of electricity and close to one tonne of hydrogen per day, providing enough daily power for more than 2300 homes and 1500 hydrogen-powered cars. It will come online in 2020, and be used as proof of concept for large-scale hydrogen generation and renewable energy plants. "Tri-Gen is a major step forward for sustainable mobility and a

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AdamB', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')
Toyota will build the first megawatt-scale hydrogen fuel and renewable generation plant, setting a new energy benchmark that experts hope with pave the way for Australia's hydrogen industry.

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', '[')b]Citi: These 10 Technologies Will Utterly Transform The World
Electric Vehicles
Description: Citi’s interesting suggestion, from analyst Itay Michaeli, for wider market goes like this: “The consumer purchases a new EV at a much lower price ($11-13k depending on size/ cost) and does so worry free of any residual value risk tied to future battery technology advancements. The operator would own the batteries, bill customers and operate battery switching stations that allow consumers to quickly (and robotically) switch batteries when desired or when taking very long drives.”

Insane stat: Tesla plans to offer a Gen-3 model priced at $US35,000. “A $US35k price point is historically what’s required...

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', '
')Ahhh yes, those predictions were so full of hope and unicorns, now they are starting to look like the pinwheel space-stations that were sold to the public in the 1950's. Gotta love sci-fi.

From orbiting solar panels to massive Green hydrogen plants it has all been discussed on this thread. So where are we?

The End of Science as a Useful Tool https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/ ... seful-tool

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')espite the rapid roll-out of seemingly newer and shinier than ever technologies, something seems to be amiss with science. The symptoms however — like a radical fall in new discoveries, the rise of flat earth theories, burgeoning bureaucracies, the politicization of results — are just that: indicators, not the root cause. But why is that so? What is really going on?

Before we delve into the matter, let me make a very important distinction right at the start. Technology is not science. It is the application of scientific discoveries. Science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. So when your colleague at work, your uncle or your drinking buddy waves their newest smartphone as a sign of “unstoppable progress”, what he or she is actually demonstrating is the lack of scientific discoveries, and the industrial scale refinement of technologies based on a set of already established principles. Let me explain.

As most of you already know, I have been working for large, multinational industrial companies for the last eighteen years of my life. I have first hand experience with how products (especially electronic ones) are developed, tested, sourced then manufactured. I took classes (both in the University and as part of my training curricula at work) on innovation management, procurement, manufacturing technologies and so on. All throughout these classes, though, there was one sure warning sign for the lack of progress highlighted by my teachers. Burgeoning version numbers.

Generally, it’s OK to have generation two or three from a product, offering incremental (or even radical) performance improvement over the original version, but by the time you roll out version four or five you should be definitely working on the next big thing. And not just theorizing about it, but actually designing, testing, and preparing to industrialize it. If you reach version ten, with still no new idea what to do next… well, that means that your company has turned into a mausoleum, and no longer functions as an innovative institution. And when the entire industry you’re in keeps hitting the repeat button with every product release, then you know that you are in trouble. A big one.

Let’s take cell phones for example. In essence they’re all based on the scientific discovery of radio waves, semiconducting materials and electrochemical processes needed to build batteries. Phones are applied science, or as we like to call it: technology. The existence of radio waves, for example, were proved by Heinrich Hertz in the late 1880s already. The technology of building ever smaller radios has developed ever further since then, until they got small enough to be slid into a pocket. So when next time someone waves a smartphone as a sign of scientific progress, kindly remind them that they are holding the results of a 140-year old discovery in their hands.

This is the point where the topic of burgeoning version numbers comes into the picture. What is the latest iPhone model? Number fifteen? Oh, and that’s not even counting that the first smartphone was not even designed by Apple. Actually, this title goes to the IBM Simon; dating back to 1994. That means, if you celebrate your thirtieth birthday this year, than you are as old as the smartphone. Now, do you know when was the first lithium ion battery developed, and by whom? Well, not as recently as you would expect:

In the early 1970s, Exxon scientists predicted that global oil production would peak in the year 2000 and then fall into a steady decline. Company researchers were encouraged to look for oil substitutes, pursuing any manner of energy that didn’t involve petroleum. Whittingham, a young British chemist, joined the quest at Exxon Research and Engineering in New Jersey in the fall of 1972. By Christmas, he had developed a battery with a titanium-disulfide cathode and a liquid electrolyte that used lithium ions.

Yes, if you are 52 this year, you are as old as the Li-ion battery. Sure, many refinements were made since then. These products got lighter, faster, cheaper and more widely available. But the very fact that we haven’t started to roll out anything new but version 234 of these technologies should be at least concerning. And it doesn’t stop with smartphones: Modern looking jet planes roam the skies since the sixties, and they didn’t get much faster or more comfier since then, only somewhat cheaper to operate. In fact, the Concorde had managed to reach 2179 km (1354 miles) per hour in 1969 already, the same year the US sent people on the Moon, and just 22 years after the very first supersonic flight was made by man. With the retirement of supersonic passenger flights, one could say, we are actually progressing backwards.

If you had been knocked unconscious during the first battles of WWI in 1914, and awoke 55 years later in 1969 you could’ve rightly say that the world has completely changed. Steam locomotives were replaced by diesel, then fully electric trains, while flimsy wood and textile planes powered by a loud and weak combustion engine were superseded by all metal sub- and supersonic airplanes of all kinds. Nuclear reactors, supercomputers, new surgical techniques, antibiotics etc. — things no one had the idea in 1914 that could even exist — have by then all become a practical reality.

Now, should something similar happened to your head in the year of the Moon landing, and you were awaken today… Well, you would see roughly the same looking airplanes, and even the same muscle cars from the very same brands. You would be eating at the very same fast food restaurants, drive on the very same highways and through the very same bridges as you did in 1969 before your accident. ‘OK, we’ve got smartphones, e-mails, GMO corn, and now AI, but aren’t these all just incremental steps over already existing technologies? Apart from gene sequencing have we made any new scientific discoveries, like splitting the atom…?’— you might ask. And rightly so.

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', '
')
Yes, more or less something I have been pointing out for two decades since I arrived here in April 2004. Each tech innovation goes through an S curve of development. The first rough ideas slowly evolve until a truly useful product results, then the technology explodes in complexity over a 50is year period, then things stagnate and change slows to an incremental crawl.

This is true of medicine, aircraft, spacecraft, ships, cell phones, you name it. Look at the Bell Telephone system. It started in the 1890's and went through rapid changes until the 1920's. Then it stagnated until the 1950's when the Solid State Transistor set off a new round of improvements, but the basic home phone in 1990 was little changed other than appearance from the home phone of 1930.

[mousepad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', ' ')Progress?

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mousepad', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('theluckycountry', ' ')Progress?