Car Science #6: tentacles and rubber
Hello! You're reading Car Science; please consider subscribing, it's free and helps me.
Hey,
"I subscribe to this newsletter legitimately," you protest. "It's about cars, not being a total wrong'un." And it is. As always, since I send this on Mondays during the 21st century (sometimes, when I'm not having a neurotic meltdown that maybe I don't know anything or whatever) it is against a backdrop of chaos and depression that this email finds you.
There's probably a philosopher and it's almost certainly Nietzsche or some other syphilitic galaxy brain that said the only natural response to overwhelming horror is to become perverse. There's only so much incredibly not normal things you can accept as the status quo; like living in a haunted house, you eventually run out of way to justify the way that objects move around on their own that doesn't, somehow, come back to the ectoplasm.
None of that here, however, where we only deal in the strictly explicable. The reassuringly over-documented. The peer reviewed. The things I've forced myself to read a whole load of background about to check I understand them because I'm neurotic. Imagine doing anything without turning it into a convoluted rollercoaster that ends with a drop into a mental health crisis. Anyway-
Tenderness
This is a respectable newsletter and so I probably have to write like, two sentences here about how manufacturing uses grippers on robot arms to move complex objects around assembly lines. I think I probably included awhile back about some scientists that had worked out a way to make adaptive arms using 3D-printed grippers that would mean you could retool an assembly line much easier than currently; that's important because the world is broken so you have no idea, a lot of the time, what you're going to have the parts to make. If your assembly line can only make an F-150 but all your bits are for F-250s that ain't gonna go and redundancy on a production line or relocating parts to plants that can use them is obviously wastage (time, logistic capacity, money) - so the automotive industry is really interested in grippers.
Me? I'm a freak with a newsletter who saw 'Tentacle robot can gently grasp fragile objects' and thought dang, I gotta tell 'em about this one.
It combines two of my favourite things: weird stuff from the sea and soft robotics, science's most obviously shitposting field. The principle is that things are hard to pick up - that's not new, picking stuff up is one of the great difficulties of evolution and why humans are so good at all the incredibly stupid shit we do with our fabulous, fleshy technologies. Tentacles are a way around that because they can grip kind of senselessly; instead of having to precisely find their way around something they can wrap around it like earphones on your keys in a jacket pocket and grip it without having to apply hard pressure. Each tentacle is weak itself, so it won't smash an object but together they can pick up relatively heavy objects securely.
What would be good is if this sort of technology could be used to do complex things; if the tentacles worked independently, they seem well placed to do something like weaving a wiring harness. Maybe. Who knows! The important thing is: industrially useful tentacles can gently hold things and maybe we all need a little bit more of that.
Research: Tentacle robot can gently grasp fragile objects
Welcome to protection mode
As famed sexual politics commentator Meat Loaf once observed, sometimes the rubber meets the road. He was having a moan about needing to ask someone if you wanted to rawdog them but like most things in 2022 we are in the finding out era of him kinda having a point about tyres needing prophylactic methods of stopping them spewing microplastics.
Pretty sure I've talked about this before but one of the reasons the sea and rivers are fucked is, unfortunately, tyres. Tyres are made of several unsustainable materials, including rubber (which is a disastrous crop and almost all of it used in tyre production might as well be setting fire to a rainforest) and plastic. Plastic, as we are increasingly acutely aware, is bad news and we gotta stop it getting into the soil and oceans and air because that shit simply does not break down in a way that's compatible with life.
Well, bad news it might be even worse than we thought. Okanagan is a relatively low population (362k people) province of British Columbia, Canada. It's got a really big lake and that's basically what's going on there, so it may surprise you to know that University of British Columbia scientists have clocked that there's probably 50 tonnes of particulate pollution getting into the waterways there every year just from tyres.
If you're not choking on your microplastics already, that's a sobering amount if you consider a city. Tyres are the absolute time bomb of transport at the minute and the sooner we can get filters on them and mandate eg: regular wear updates (look, I'm as criminal as the rest of us for never having replaced the dogeared ones on the Twingo) and disposal, the better chance we have of not killing literally everything and then ourselves.
Sorry, the rest of this is slightly cheerier. If you need the tentacle robot to hold you for awhile, I am sure it will understand.
Research: Where the rubber hits the road
Priorities
Wireless charging roads for EVs don't exist yet (although Indiana is doing the fucking about on this one) so you might be thinking "there's no need to pay for them." Never let barriers stand in the way of progress, however, as scientists have legitimately devoted their time to coming up with a bidding process so that private energy firms could compete to provide the most (I guess) reasonably priced electricity for them.
Research: Bidding strategy for wireless charging roads with energy storage in real-time electricity markets
Prepare for trouble
You might think you don't necessarily need scientists to tell you this, due to the ability to look out the window and see whatever the hell is going on but maybe the confirmation is validating: most power grids could barely handle one disaster let alone back-to-back disruptions.
That's really bad news because if there's one thing the near-to-medium future is going to be ram-packed with it's fuckery. What's this got to do with cars? Well, it's interesting because GM are legitimately worried about this. Their Ultium package, which is the platform for their current EVs, includes home powerwalls and off-grid electricity storage. They looked at America's messed up infrastructure and decided to basically become an energy provider in order to try to make their products (electrified vehicles, generators, etc) more viable. It's 100% self-interested but there's going to be a lot more companies moving into that space as infrastructure crumbles around us. I guess like, semi-yay?
Research: Double trouble: when 2 disasters strike electrical transmission infrastructure
Hydrogen but less bad
People keep trying to make hydrogen happen, regardless of whether anyone really wants it to so unfortunately I have to keep talking about it. One of the bummers about hydrogen is that it's a pain in the ass to make cleanly; you need iridium, which is expensive, to catalyse water to split into oxygen and hydrogen under electrolysis and the supply of iridium is always going to limit both the amount of hydrogen you can make and the price of it.
Scientists at Rice University have found a way to use ruthenium instead. Ruthenium's still a precious metal but it costs eight times less than iridium, so the saving is obvious and might make electrolysis technologies more viable. The energy cost to split hydrogen like that is still more than you'd subsequently get out of the hydrogen but like. Hey. It's a thing.
Research: Rice lab advances water-splitting catalysts
What's going on inside batteries?
I'm pretty sure I've said this before but one of the slightly odd things about batteries is we've really got no idea what's going on in or with them. Like lithium-ion is not new technology but we understand an extraordinarily small amount about what's up with that, frankly and that's why there's still a lot of efficiencies to be gained in terms of the way we charge and use batteries and how we can prolong cell life, etc.
Generally, it's been assumed that lithium ions move around in batteries wasn't dependent on their state of charge and they just did what they do until they can't anymore. Which, to be honest, seems stupid now I write that down: anyway, turns out they get all weird and start congregating near the surface when the battery is close to a state of discharge, which might be why you see the percent drain seemingly faster the closer to 0 you get. Either way, useful and important to know that's what they're up to.
Staying alive
This is legit, proper, absolute car science. Rice University scientists did a study to try and work out what configuration of lights on a motorbike would make drivers perceive them better in the dark. Bikers get knocked off because cars don't realise how close they are and it's a killer problem, so this is a legitimate thing that needs solving. The research found not a lot changed how well drivers perceived bikers, except that making the full height of the motorbike clearer and increasing the size of the headlight did improve the chances. If this was applied it'd save lives and so that's good and worth doing. Well done, science.
That'll probably do for now. If you like Car Science, please share it with people or like, tell 'em to subscribe or whatever - it's not like I'm making money off this but it makes me look slightly like I know how to provide #content and who knows when the next media implosion will send me jobseeking etc.
Hazel
x