Car Science #2: Garbage juice
Hello! You're reading Car Science; please consider subscribing, it's free and helps me.
Hey,
Time for another full edition of Car Science, the newsletter about research I can somehow connect to cars. I'm kind of amazed so many people have already signed up and super grateful for it; at the risk of sounding like one of those people with a newsletter to promote, if you like Car Science then like, absolutely forward it on or share it with people. I'm never going to charge a subscription or whatever, this is a project basically because my friends are bored of me telling them about this stuff in the pub.
So, with that in mind, crack open a cold one while there's still capacity for refrigeration on this boiling planet and enjoy some science kinda related to cars. This edition, for various reasons, has a bit more sociological stuff in than the last - sometimes the cycle of what gets published is like that.
Rearranging hydrocarbons on the deck of the Titanic II: actually this is good
Something fun for everyone who diligently washes out our hummus pots every week is that plastic recycling is a total lie. Before you throw yourself into the welcoming cold of space off this forsaken earth, though, there is some better news.
Scientists have been working on ways to take all that plastic that’s making everything a nightmare in the air and sea and soil and do something remotely useful with it. Which brings me to: turning Playmobil (and stuff) into fuel.
Plastic is made of oil and oil’s just a hydrocarbon and hydrocarbons are just strings of hydrogen and carbon, which generally are fairly easy to break apart and rearrange. It’s why oil is so great to turn into other things like plastics and synthetic fabrics.
I giffed on about sustainable fuels and how they'e a bit of a catch-all concept in Edition 1.5 so I'm not gonna get into all of that again here but basically at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, scientists have found a way to make plastics rearrange themselves into petrol while using way less ruthenium (a precious metal not really practical to use loads of) than had previously worked. They're now trying to see if they can overcome chlorine getting into the process (because a lot of recycling is washed in it) but for now it's looking promising.
Petrol isn't great for the world and arguably carbon captured in plastics might be better off staying there. But plastics themselves are also a nightmare time bomb we'e poisoning the planet with. So: swings and roundabouts as the ice berg looms ahead and we're revving a motor powered by garbage juice.
Plastic upcycling: from waste to fuel for less
The cost of living: grocery carbon edition
Obviously, everything is terrible. If you're somehow living somewhere there isn't already a cost of living crisis then: congratulations, you've probably got that to look forward to. But there's also a carbon cost to our rotten existence and grocery shopping is part of that. Most of the time if it gets talked about it tends to be over the things we buy or food waste, which is a genuinely big problem on a domestic level.
But this study looks at the carbon impacts of how food gets from store to home. Unsurprisingly, just about the least efficient way possible is individuals driving their own combustion cars to a shop and delivery options are better. Drones and weird little sidewalk delivery robots turn out to be the best way (hmm) but failing that, an EV or hybrid delivery vehicle is a lot better.
So: supermarket car parks, your time will come.
Also in cost-of-living news, we know that the ultra-rich 1% of people use energy equivalent to 1.7 billion more normal ones but that massive inequality also creates bigger energy demands for everyone. If the world had more equal standards of living, we could use only 40% of the energy we do now but any degree of inequality increases those demands.
I don't agree with the conclusion in this paper that, nevertheless, population size is important in combating excessive energy demands to address climate change but the overall conclusions about how inequality increases consumption are interesting.
Inequality can double the energy required to secure universal decent living
Battery bits
Just gonna blast through some assorted stuff that’s gonna make batteries better but isn’t really at automotive grade yet.
The, uh, chemical stalactites that form around the electrodes of lithium-ion batteries and are part of what a) makes them lose charging capacity (both in terms of speed and usable energy) and b) makes them critically fail if one of the stalactite things pierces a cell, can be stopped with this one simple trick. Scientists at Rice university brushed electrodes with powder of sulphur and phosphorous and it formed a protective film that prevented dendrite growth. Rad.
Brushing thin films onto electrodes preserves batteries
Also in chemical stalactite news, they basically build up because ions do not move around correctly in the electrolyte of a battery. Once they start bumping into things and getting blocked, there’s an inevitable acceleration of that and then you get the ol razzle-dazzle where that involves Tesla batteries yeeting fireball cells and other such bad times.
One way to stop that happening is basically to tailor the way charge is delivered to give the electrons better pathways. If you can fluctuate it enough to not make them all crash into each other and make a hideous mess then you can coax the battery to accept more charge more safely, with an ultra-intelligent charger.
Super fast electric car charging with a tailor-made touch
One of the issues with batteries is that we uh, don't really understand them all that well. Materials like lithium are incredibly important now but weren't so much during most of the 20th century, so although this might seem a bit late to be doing it scientists have done some new research into what causes lithium to decompose during battery charging and what happens when it does decompose. The answer is that electrochemical reactions cause it to make (very small amounts of) CO2 in decomposition and now we know that, we can try and stop it.
No good news, everything bad
Sometimes the science just sucks.
Nano plastics are in the air as well as the sea and soil. Not really surprising, given the amount of plastics there are; I know I mentioned this last edition but a lot of this has a decent chance of being tyre-related. Not all of it, by any means but tyres are a source of plastic that’s subject to friction breakdown on millions of vehicles around the world and they’re very polluting so. Get ready for that one.
Also in 'irredeemably bad stuff' it turns out we've hugely overestimated the temperatures that humans can live at. Most of us actually can't control our body temperatures at 31C, not the 35C that had been thought. In terms of the lethal heatwaves that we will continue to see more of, that's incredibly important. A lot of things are going to forcibly stop, logistically during a decade that will be marked by energy shortages and reduced mobility. Civilisations die in hot planets, etc.
Some weird stuff
This is the section where I put interesting things that aren't necessarily obviously connected to cars but are interesting.
There's not necessarily an obvious automotive use for this, other than maybe your keys but there are now microbial films that generate electricity from you sweating - at last, an upside to being boiled alive. They could be really good for wearable medical tech.
Microbial biofilms for electricity generation from water evaporation and power to wearables
As anyone who's a jangling ball of trauma can tell you (shout out to my people) what doesn't kill you is far less likely to make you stronger than just a lot weirder and less able to act normal. Science has now actually confirmed that the psychological idea of "post traumatic growth" was in fact fantasy horse shit and there isn't any upside to trauma in the long run.
The idea that many people grow following trauma may be a myth
Plastics are very important materials; for hygiene, for the way they can be fashioned into stuff, we need them but we need to stop making them out of petrol. So the possibility of making fumarate for biodegradable plastics out of a photosynthesis-style process using a biocatalyst and no oil is pretty cool. Especially because it's capturing and converting CO2
Lessons from natural photosynthesis: conversion of CO2 to raw materials for plastic
So at least that's less of a bummer note to end on. Everything is, very much, incredibly messed up but maybe there are still some chances to science our way out of this.
See you next week
Hazel
x