Car Science #3: poetic (climate) justice
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Ok so: my bad. I completely dropped the ball on this being weekly and when I remembered it was much too late: it was bound to happen sooner or later, so maybe good to get failing to get an edition (or three) published out of the way early on. It will, err, not happen again for a fortnight or so...
Anyway, welcome to the slightly upgraded (well, there's a header) third edition of Car Science. Which has a lot about synthetic fuel. And a surprising amount about poetry.
Floating artificial leaves producing a chemical for fuel
A long time ago before I became a full-time car boy and still harboured silly ideas of writing novels or some such (as may be obvious from this newsletter, creativity is not in fact my jam) I was briefly into poetry. I know, imagine how bad it was - anyway, drafts now fortunately buried by the mists of time I still have a few lines of other people's I think about and one of them's Pablo Neruda's I remember you as you were from 20 Love Poems And A Song Of Despair. Neruda was a hell of a weird guy but did have some banger lines like dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.
'What's that got to do with synthetic fuel, Hazel?' You rightly ask. Technically speaking nothing except it's always been an image I was fond of and sprang to mind when I was reading about Cambridge University inventing artificial leaves that can float on a river. Yes, artificial leaves that make synthetic fuel, what a time to be alive. They're not very like dry autumn leaves, which is poetically annoying but chemically interesting, in that they're very much still green and using a photosythesis-like process to produce syngas, which is a combustible mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen and sometimes other stuff like methane, depending on the process but basically means something a bit like natural gas but made via a chemical process.
It could be used as a bridge towards synthetic petrols or synthetic LPG for cars literally run from gas or, given how things are, we could all be desperately heating our homes with artificial leaves in a few winters. At the current volumes and the size of the experiment it's not really producing meaningful amounts and clearly, rivers and seas are not really places we want to be chucking any more of our garbo. However, the fact the technology is so slim and lightweight is very interesting and a little optimistic for there being some kind of good use for this.
Research:
Floating 'artificial leaves' ride the wave of clean fuel
Turning tyres into door handles at Mercedes
This is less laboratory and more literally something a car company is doing but it's interesting and innovative enough to be worth having in here, especially because it involves a synthetic fuel - but not the way these entries usually do. Over at Mercedes Benz they've been collaborating with chemical giant (and generally solidly evil company) BASF and a startup called Pyrum to make pyrolysis oil out of old tyres.
Pyrolysis oil is a sort of crude plastic reduction that can be refined into synthetic fuel. But since, as might as well be the name of this newsletter, literally everything that's a hydrocarbon is just bits of hydrogen and carbon in a different order, if you give it a bit of a shake up (technical term) then it can also be used to make resilient plastics, when its combined with biomethane from agricultural waste.
This has two good things going for it: plastics recycling (the real nightmare of the 21st century - or well, somewhere high up on the list of ways we're facing the apocalypse) and capturing methane, which is extremely important. Sequestering methane is a bit of a nightmare so although plastics are largely terrible, if we can trap it in them then that's good. And what's better is the plastics produced are actually useful; door handles might seem a bit mundane but, since you need them to get out of a car in case of a fire or failure they're actually very important features (write that down, Elon) they need to be strong and reliable, subject to crash testing. Merc's gonna use the methane/pyrolysis oil plastic in the door handles for the EQE SUV and S-Class, rather than making plastic from fossil sources and it'll also use it to make part of the front end crash structure for the S-Class.
It's a relatively small thing but every step taken to keep fossil carbon in the ground and to make what we have already extracted more circular is encouraging, even when it's not revelatory.
Research:
Mercedes' press release
Range anxiety, now with increased accuracy
This is properly laboratory-stage, to the point I nearly didn't include it but there's a weird thing about batteries which is, uhm, we don't always know how much energy is in them. As a result, most are built with wildly Victorian capacity margins and then software is used to hazard a (usually, extremely lowballed - again, write that down Elon) guess about how much charge and range it actually has because sensors basically aren't up to the job of handling the amount of current EV batteries do.
I don't know whether I absolutely believe the figure of 10% roughness that this paper suggests but it could well be right and well, they're the scientists. Obviously, being 10% off is a big chunk of efficiency that, if we could measure things more accurately, it'd be damned nice to get back. So scientists have developed a quantum diamond sensor to do just that.
Is it realistic that the average or even any cars would have quantum diamonds in? I seriously doubt it. However, this could be used to better understand battery cycling on a testing level and then to programme better management modes. And I could definitely see a sensor like this showing up in Formula 1, as the series moves to a much greater proportion of electrification.
At last, this newsletter gives you a new meme format
Ok I can't really pretend that this is especially new research (it's a new paper but it's been tested before, including by Jaguar Land Rover) but god, every single time someone sticks googly eyes on a car it gets me so good and don't we all need a bit of levity.
Basically, it's the age-old question of: why do we like it when it has a face? Or more specifically: do we react better to autonomous vehicles if they look as though they are aware? Pedestrians follow where a driver is looking, to see if they can see them, so giving the autonomous car eyes gives the pedestrian information about what it's aware of.
It's sensible, if shitpost-y but also sort of untrue. Because autonomous vehicles would need so many sensors that they'd of course be looking kind of everywhere so without getting into some sort of biblically accurate angel scenario, which definitely would not be reassuring to see pelting down the road at you, it would always be gestural.
In this research, though, the eyes were used as cues for the pedestrian. Not to show where the car was looking but to show where it was intending to go; it created a sense of reassurance for pedestrians and reduced potential accidents. So it's less silly than it looks but oh god please, please say that vehicles in semi-autonomous modes have to have googly eyes on. Come on. Make Elon write it down.
Research:
Can eyes on a car reduce traffic accidents?
Making good use of the things that we find pt. III
Paper always seems like a fairly harmless substance, as things go but making it on an industrial scale has this horrible side effect of producing lignin. Which is actually just a naturally occurring substance but by the time you've extracted it from wood it becomes a concentrated mess that has to be contained and dealt with and that costs money, so paper making companies are keen to use it for something that will, instead, make money.
There's been two papers recently that have suggested ways of turning it into fuel. One from Michigan State University uses an electrocatalytic approach to break down lignin and turn it into component parts (which is to say, hydrogen and carbon) for synthetic fuels. Another, from MIT, uses hydrodeoxygenation (both these words are fancy ways of saying doing stuff with water and electricity tbh) to render lignin into a potential jet fuel alternative.
Sustainable fuels, as I feel like I say 22 times a week in this, are not zero emissions and they're at best carbon neutral but that is better than fossil fuels and making them from waste products is definitely the way to go.
Lignin is actually really interesting stuff and could be used for a lot of battery applications, as well, especially in silicone anodes for lithium-ion batteries, where the processes are a good way along.
Research:
Breaking down plant materials for earth-friendly energy
Catalytic process with lignin could enable 100% sustainable aviation fuel
Alchemy meet chemistry
I think I've mentioned before that the process by which methanol actually becomes a synthetic fuel is sort of a bit. Uh. Well, there's definitely more science involved than 'handwavey' but it's not as exact as would be ideal for say, actually optimising the process so that minimal amounts of energy are used or reliably making a lot of it. So it's good that the Paul Scherrer Institute has published a framework that looks at how to optimise the catalytic process.
It doesn't make the process sustainable, with there still ultimately being an energy deficit (to a pretty major amount) in what you get out vs what you put in to make fuels this way. But it does offer some transparency to that process and the more we can understand about how or if we can optimise this kind of fuel generation, the better positioned we should be to make decisions.
It worries me a lot that the lack of understanding about sustainable and specifically synthetic fuels means that people are often left without the tools to challenge claims made by companies about them. I know more than a smattering about the topic, obviously but something like this framework gives me a lot more information to work out if a method sounds like it's got radical new properties or is just the same, fairly poorly understood and inevitably inefficient process.
Idk. We're far enough down this newsletter I can probably say I get not exactly narked but concerned by the number of journalists writing about sustainable fuels who ask me about what they are. As I try and emphasise: I'm not a scientist and all my understanding of this is self-taught, I don't think it's actually that deep and I'm definitely certain anyone could understand it as much as I do real fast if they put in the same 10 minutes of effort. Like, I'm not a super genius or something - I'm probably above-average stupid. Just kinda worries me.,
Some bits to tie all this up
Turns out electrical circuits can run at absolute zero. That's not immediately useful for cars, which would have a lot of other problems at that point but I dunno, it's something.
As anyone who's been playing around with Dall-E will know, AI is no match for the human eye yet even with static images. Another one for Elon's notebook, under 'why machine vision really is not a thing you should be relying on for safety.'
I kind of like that fuel gases and hydrocarbons are called aromatic. Feels like it could be in an American youtube cooking show - oh you gotta get your hydrogen, your carbon and your aromatics. Anyway, there's potentially a quicker way to get syngas to turn aromatic using spicy iron. Which is good because iron is a fairly widely occurring element, as catalysts go.
Right, that's probably enough of that for this week. Back to regularly scheduled Posting next week.
Hazel
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