Interest

978 Articles

Don’t Be Salty: How To Make Desalination Work In Tomorrow’s World

September 8, 2022 by 60 Comments

Although water is often scarce for human consumption and agriculture, this planet is three-quarters covered by the stuff. The problem is getting the salt out, and this is normally done by the Earth’s water cycle, which produces rain and similar phenomena that replenish the amount of fresh water. Roughly 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water, of which a fraction is potable water.

Over the past decades, the use of desalination has increased year over year, particularly in nations like Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but parched United States states such as California are increasingly looking into desalination technologies. The obvious obstacles that desalination faces – regardless of the exact technology used – involve the energy required to run these systems, and the final cost of the produced potable water relative to importing it from elsewhere.

Other issues that crop up with desalination include the environmental impact, especially from the brine waste and conceivably marine life sucked into the intake pipes. As the need for desalination increases, what are the available options to reduce the power needs and environmental impact?

Continue reading “Don’t Be Salty: How To Make Desalination Work In Tomorrow’s World” →

Agrivoltaics Is A Land Usage Hack For Maximum Productivity

September 7, 2022 by 53 Comments

Land tends to be a valuable thing. Outside of some weird projects in Dubai, by and large, they aren’t making any more of it. That means as we try to feed and power the ever-growing population of humanity, we need to think carefully about how we use the land we have.

The field of agrivoltaics concerns itself with the dual-use of land for both food production and power generation. It’s all about getting the most out of the the available land and available sunlight we have.

Continue reading “Agrivoltaics Is A Land Usage Hack For Maximum Productivity” →

Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements

September 1, 2022 by 41 Comments

Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny objects has led to technological leaps that weren’t possible before they came along, like the vibration motors in cell phones, or the tiny speakers in earbuds and hearing aids. And that’s not to mention the motors in electric vehicles and the generators in wind turbines, along with countless medical, military, and scientific uses.

These advances come at a cost, though, as the rare earth elements needed to make them are getting harder to come by. It’s not that rare earth elements like neodymium are all that rare geologically; rather, deposits are unevenly distributed, making it easy for the metals to become pawns in a neverending geopolitical chess game. What’s more, extracting them from their ores is a tricky business in an era of increased sensitivity to environmental considerations.

Luckily, there’s more than one way to make a magnet, and it may soon be possible to build permanent magnets as strong as neodymium magnets, but without any rare earth metals. In fact, the only thing needed to make them is iron and nitrogen, plus an understanding of crystal structure and some engineering ingenuity.

Continue reading “Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements” →

We Can’t Switch To Electric Cars Until We Get More Copper

August 31, 2022 by 205 Comments

Reducing emissions from human activity requires a great deal of effort in many different sectors. When it comes to land transport, the idea is generally to eliminate vehicles powered by combustion engines and replace them with electric vehicles instead. At a glance, the job is simple enough. We know how to build EVs, and the technology is getting to the point where they’re capable of replacing traditional vehicles in many applications.

Of course, the reality is not so simple. To understand the problem of converting transportation to electric drive en masse, you have to take a look at the big numbers. Focus in on the metrics of copper, and you’ll find the story is a concerning one. 

Continue reading “We Can’t Switch To Electric Cars Until We Get More Copper” →

I3C — No Typo — Wants To Be Your Serial Bus

August 25, 2022 by 71 Comments

Remember old hard drives with their giant ribbon cables? They went serial and now the power cables are way thicker than the data cables. We’ve seen the same thing in embedded devices. Talking between chips these days tends to use I2C or SPI or some variation of these to send and receive data over a handful of pins. But now there is I3C, a relatively new industry standard that is getting a bit of traction.

I2C and SPI are mature but they do have problems. I2C can be relatively slow and SPI usually requires extra pins for each device. Besides that, there is poor support for adding and removing devices dynamically or discovering devices automatically.

I3C, created by the MIPI Alliance, aims to fix these problems. It does use the usual two wires, SCL for the clock and SDA for data.  One device acts as a controller. Other devices can be targets or secondary controllers. It is also backward compatible with I2C target devices. Depending on how you implement it, speeds can be quite fast with a raw speed of 12.5 Mbps and using line coding techniques can go to around 33 Mbps.

Continue reading “I3C — No Typo — Wants To Be Your Serial Bus” →

How Resilient Is The Natural Gas Grid?

August 24, 2022 by 83 Comments

A few years ago, I managed to get myself on a mailing list from a fellow who fancied himself an expert on energy. Actually, it seemed that no area was beyond his expertise, and the fact that EVERY EMAIL FROM HIM CAME WITH A SUBJECT LINE IN CAPS WITH A LOT OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!! really sealed the deal on his bona fides. One of the facts he liked to tout was that natural gas was the perfect fuel. Not only is it clean-burning and relatively cheap, it’s also delivered directly to consumers using a completely self-powered grid. Even under “zombie apocalypse” conditions, he claimed that natural gas would continue to flow.

At the time, it seemed a bit overstated, but I figured that there was at least a nugget of truth to it — enough so that I converted from an electric range and water heater to gas-powered appliances a couple of years ago, and added gas fireplaces for supplemental heat. I just sort of took it for granted that the gas would flow, at least until the recent kerfuffle over the Nordstream pipeline. That’s when I got a look at pictures of the immense turbine compressors needed to run that pipeline, the size and complexity of which seem to put the lie to claims about the self-powered nature of natural gas grids.

Surely a system dependent on such equipment could not be entirely self-powered, right? This question and others swirled doubt in my mind, and so I did what I always do in these cases: I decided to write an article so I could look into the details. Here’s what I found out about how natural gas distribution works, at least in North America.

Continue reading “How Resilient Is The Natural Gas Grid?” →

Optimizing The Mining Of Uranium From Coal Ash And Seawater

August 23, 2022 by 55 Comments

Of all the elements that make up the Earth’s crust, uranium is reasonably abundant, coming in at 49th place, ahead of elements such as tin, tungsten and silver. Ever since humankind began to exploit uranium for its fissile properties in energy production, this abundance has also translated into widespread availability for mining. As of 2019, Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia formed the world’s main producers, accounting for about 68% of output.

Considering the enormous energy density of uranium when used as fuel in a nuclear fission reactor, the demand for uranium is relatively low, especially combined with the long (two years on average) refueling cycles of commercial reactors. The effect is that even with the very inefficient once-through fuel cycle – which only uses a fraction of the uranium fuel’s potential energy – uranium market prices have remained relatively low and stable even amidst geopolitical crises.

Despite this, the gradual rise in uranium market prices ($10/lb in 2003, $49/lb in 2022), as well as the rapid construction of new reactors is driving new exploration. Here recent innovations may make uranium fuel even more accessible to all nations, by unlocking the billions of tons of uranium found in plain seawater as well as the many tons of fly ash produced by coal plants every single day.

Continue reading “Optimizing The Mining Of Uranium From Coal Ash And Seawater” →