Car Science #5: A Whiter Shade Of Pale
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It has certainly been another week of time hasn't it. Or well, less like a week. One of my favourite films (ok, one of the only 6 films I've seen and the only one that isn't Star Wars) is Atomic Blonde and it starts with this incredible interrogation scene where - and I can't find the quote or remember it perfectly but Charlize Theron's character says something along the lines of "You know in a movie theater, when the picture starts to blur and bleed and distort and everything melts together, that was Berlin." Talking about the nuclear brinkmanship-turned-fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall that was 1989 but it feels a lot like that these days doesn't it. No more precedented events on the horizon, everything is going to be new and extraordinary and a record no one wants to hold. All just blurring and bleeding into one another.
Today I don't have an optimistic ending to that. Shit just fucking sucks ass right now. Have some fucking science.
Boring time
A few years back I wrote a thing for The Drive about how cars are getting more boring. Not just because car design is becoming such a relentlessly homogenised, SUV-shaped language that you might as well give up trying to differentiate them* but because in 2020, 23% of new American cars were white. Boring. And one of those indicative things that the economy is going badly because people aren't buying things out of the sheer unadulterated heck of it but as an investment to hold value.
Anyway, brilliant news if you are one of the people ordering your car in white. It might take eons to reach you and cost nearly twice as much as it would have two years ago due to ongoing supply chain meltdown but now the world's whitest paint is absolutely perfect for vehicles, adhering in a layer thinner than ever.
The world's whitest paint actually has some practical uses on vehicles because it's so reflective it deflects and refracts 97.9% of light, which means it can keep a car interior much cooler. Passive cooling options are a huge energy saver, especially for EV range but also to burn less in combustion cars, so this is a meaningful thing as well as a weight-saving measure for stormtrooper-white SUVs (looking at you, Polestar) but I don't know. Maybe things getting marginally better in efficiency but significantly more boring would be good actually.
Research:
World's whitest paint is now thinner than ever, perfect for vehicles (Purdue)
Hot stuff
One of the many problems with hydrogen fuel cells is that they don't really work at high temperatures, which limits them in terms of power output. It's because water boils at 100C (213F) and fuel cells are surprisingly reliant on that to move electricity (well, protons) around. So if you could use something that boiled at a higher temperature, you can make a better fuel cell that'd extract more power, which'd be good because hydrogen isn't all that when it comes to output.
If I'm perfectly honest this is the level of science where my GCSE chemistry from 21 years ago really starts to not hold up but bear with me: this research is the announcement that scientists created a wholly new molecule out of a ruthenium III ion and some bits of imadazole-imadazolate molecules. This works much better as a proton conductor and can withstand higher temperatures, even though previous attempts to use imadazole in fuel cells have led to a lower conductivity than water, which was why it generally hasn't been considered. Busting the ruthenium ion in there really makes it go, though.
Is it practical to create loads of new molecules for carting protons around in fuel cells? I honestly cannot tell you. Fuel cells in general are not very practical; they're large, they're heavy, they use a lot of rare earth metals and they don't get a massive amount of power out of the hydrogen that we can't generate much of cleanly. And even if we do generate it cleanly and using perfectly optimised systems, you'd get at absolute, flattering best 80% of the power you used to create the hydrogen out of the fuel cell, whereas a knackered old Nissan Leaf probably operates at like 87% efficiency from battery electric. So this is all kind of a gigantic shoulder-shrug but I guess things that make an improvement to fuel cells are better than nothing.
Research:
Novel Multi-Proton Carrier Complex as Efficient Proton Conductor at High Temperatures
Hold the fucking press
Researchers are here to present some important news: fossil fuels are not a bridge technology away from fossil fuels.
Turns out the road to zero carbon emissions is not paved on emitting carbon. I know, you're shocked, I'm shocked - but this is actually something the world's governments need to hear because the massively powerful oil and gas lobby has been managing to tell them otherwise for decades. Natural gas, it turns out, is not better than coal or oil it's just a different thing - which emits massively more methane. Methane is going to be something we have to address if we're going to stop climate change so this is pretty goddamned damning and it's a bit embarrassing it's taken until 2022 for someone to say it.
Should probably stop the whole Baltic sea soda stream situation too.
Research:
Why natural gas is not a bridge technology
It's Alive
Remember before Bon Appetit shat the bed and absolutely totalled their audience for the sake of underpaying people of colour? It was probably during your first run of completing YouTube in lockdown. Back then we could all enjoy Brad fermenting things without wondering if the next one would be a duck-infused milkshake.
Anyway, turns out making pickles isn't the only use for that stuff. Which laboriously brings me to this week's synthetic fuel news. Ready the fermentation station because this time we're going to be making sustainable fuels synthetically but via the alcohol production process that we'd use for biofuels.
So as we know, there's basically two types of sustainable fuels: stuff made from turning organic material into methanol and stuff made by rearranging hydrocarbons on a molecular level. The first one is relatively easy to do but has a potentially bad environmental toll, unless you're making the methanol out of genuine garbo (which might not be hugely efficient as a consequence) and the second one is harder to do and has a potential huge energy cost to doing it, none of which is ideal. But wait: there is a third way.
Scientists have been creating molecular fuels by rearranging hydrocarbons in order to then ferment them. As the paper succinctly puts it "The basic idea is to use renewable power to convert CO2 and H2O into a suitable energy-rich H2/CO/CO2 feedstock gas and then use gas fermentation to convert this feedstock into ethanol." Sounds so simple when you put it like that. Gas fermentation is a thing, though and at volume so this isn't totally up-in-the-air and this specific research is about using a relatively low energy reverse water-gas shift (just one of the many ways of funkily rearranging hydrocarbons) to get the gas.
Is this good? I... don't know. I feel like this negates one problem (the use of bio-matter to make booze) by making it massively more complicated and not fixing the other problems (the need for hydrogen from somewhere, high energy cost) but it is new and we are all about that here.
Mixology
But wait, not content with combining ethanol with hydrogen to make synthetic petrol we can now combine ethanol with water to make hydrogen! It really is just wall to wall rearranging stuff in the fuel technology community.
Why would anyone want to do that? Well, we can make ethanol relatively easily and as a source of hydrogen, it's a lot better overall than using say, natural gas (see above) or other fossil fuels. The best thing about this, however, is that the caustic aqueous phase ethanol reforming process is given the acronym CAPER.
If you're one of the people determined to believe hydrogen will be a thing, then the advantage CAPER has is that it's relatively low energy and quick enough it could be done at the pump on-demand, basically, producing pressurised hydrogen suitable to load up a car. Reducing the amount of energy used in producing hydrogen naturally makes it more efficient but because ethanol is a step, we do have to include the energy that goes into that process - I can't imagine this is a huge advance, overall, on hydrogen from the usual electrolysis method. And making ethanol generally involves water, so that doesn't help the shortage of freshwater either. But on to the next topic.
Research:
Hydrogen production method opens up clean fuel possibilities
Moisture farming
Speaking of films I like, ever wanted to live in the Star Wars universe? All the cool ships and places to go and Jedi and stuff? Well, you kind of can but not really on any of the aspirational levels because that's right we're going to all have to make like Owen and Beru and become moisture farmers. You know, that thing Luke Skywalker was trying to join the imperial flight academy to get out of. (We don't talk enough about Luke Skywalker being an amoral piece of shit tbh)
Cancelling Luke Skywalker aside, water harvesting already happens in some countries. Morocco harvests it from sea mist that rolls over the Sahara, using huge mesh structures that cause the water to condense. As this paper cheerily presents, basically everywhere is going to have to start worrying about it, though, as megadroughts (their word) become routine for at least the next decade.
Before you shave your head and ready the war rig, though, this is some good news in research terms. Instead of vast meshes, it uses devices so small they could be portable to generate the water, using rapid condensation. The difference here is that the devices can be small because instead of the water sitting on the condensing surface it's wicked away by 'mushroom like' channels so that more can then condense. So basically you could have a water bottle in the cupholder of your car that refills itself and keeps the humidity down inside.
There's an incredible quote in this where one of the researchers says how excited he is "as a huge Star Wars fan" if you like that sort of thing
Research:
Researchers' flow platform advances water harvesting technology
Anyway, there we are at nearly 2000 words so that's probably enough of me wittering on for the week. You'll be glad to know I've held back an extended section on how aggravating I find ammonia for next week and also that I skipped the bit where I went on about a maritime conference for three paragraphs so y'know, small mercies.
Hazel
x
*Fun story, when I was at IAA (a big, international autoshow) last year I took so many photos of electric SUVs that Google Photos thought they were all the same car. And that I had bought this car, because that was the only possible explanation. Literally the next day it presents me with one of those weird, bespoke albums called "your new ride" and I wish I'd saved it or screenshot it or something - turns out you can't quite replace auto journalists with AI yet, although it did make a completely fair point.