Chevrolet purchasing and retiring up to $5M in carbon credits to help 11 colleges pay for efficiency projects

18 November 2014

Chevrolet is purchasing carbon credits worth up to $5 million to help 11 colleges in the US pay for energy efficiency-based carbon reductions. The GM brand will retire the carbon credits to benefit the climate instead of using them to offset the emissions of Chevrolet vehicles or operations.

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As part of its voluntary initiative to reduce 8 million metric tons of carbon from being emitted, Chevrolet during the last four years has supported US communities in aggressively and ingeniously reducing their carbon footprint.

Campuses for the first time can access funding from the US carbon market to fuel their large-scale energy efficiency efforts toward even greater progress, effectively using carbon performance methodologies Chevrolet developed to make money via their greenhouse gas reductions that result from energy efficiency.

As we kept inching closer to our carbon-reduction goal, we wanted to support colleges going above and beyond to help combat climate change, and open the door for other companies to contribute to such campus clean energy projects. This helps ensure campuses can continue to receive funding from companies’ carbon purchases long after Chevrolet completes its carbon-reduction initiative next year.

For the last two years, Chevrolet has been the largest US corporate buyer of voluntary carbon credits by volume, according to nonprofit Forest Trends Ecosystem Marketplace. Of the nearly 8.2 million tons contracted from 36 projects, 69% have been retired. The balance is scheduled to be retired summer of 2015.

Chevrolet partnered with these colleges for their clean-energy performance: Ball State University; Valencia College; Portland State University; Spelman College; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point; Boston University; Rochester Institute of Technology; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Grand Valley State University; and Southern Oregon University.

Interim assessment finds Volkswagen’s “Think Blue. Factory.” environmental program tracking to meet 2018 goals of 25% improvement vs. 2010

18 November 2014

The Volkswagen brand’s “Think Blue. Factory.” environmental program remains on track to meet its 2018 goals of reducing energy and water consumption as well as the share in waste, CO₂ and solvent emissions at all Volkswagen plants throughout the world by 25% compared with 2010 levels by 2018. This was the http://goo.gl/AudFww of an interim assessment made by more than 250 environmental experts from 27 plants of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand, the Components business area and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles at a “Think Blue. Factory.” day in Wolfsburg.

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Under the program, some 5,000 individual measures are to be taken by 2018. Volkswagen has already successfully implemented more than 2,700 projects and made its production processes 17% more environmentally compatible over the past three years.

Think Blue. Factory. is and remains the approach we have adopted to achieve the sustainability targets we have set ourselves for production and logistics at the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand by 2018. I am very pleased to see how effectively the methods and processes we have developed together are now being put into practice at our locations.

Attendees presented innovative ideas and successful measures to reduce resource use from around the globe. For example:

• Water used to test the firefighting system at the Curitiba plant in Brazil is recycled as cooling water following the tests.

• The Zwickau and Pamplona plants have significantly reduced water consumption for vehicle tightness tests. (In vehicle production, this is the stage that requires most water following the paintshop.)

• The Chemnitz engine plant is saving water, energy and lubricants by filtering cooling emulsion after use in an innovative process.

This year, Volkswagen also honored employees who had demonstrated special commitment in connection with the program. The award-winners are Jörg Kessler from the Hanover plant, Peter Solárik from Bratislava (Slovakia), and Peter Splitt, Udo Guenther and Karsten Folchmann from the Salzgitter plant. Awards for saving water at the plant level went to the Pamplona (Spain), Curitiba (Brazil), Zwickau and Chemnitz plants.

Honda opens Developer Studio for automotive apps

18 November 2014

Honda unveiled Honda Developer Studio, an online portal and open innovation workspace in Silicon Valley. The portal and garage will enable developers to work directly with Honda engineers to create apps that are road-ready more quickly. The announcement comes on the heels of Google’s debut release of the Android Auto software developer kit (SDK), which allows Android developers to extend their apps to the in-vehicle environment.

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Starting in December, Honda Developer Studio will enable app developers to test their Android Auto apps in a prototype vehicle environment and collaborate with Honda RD teams. The goal is to help developers refine their ideas and accelerate the learning curve for newcomers to the automotive industry by encouraging them to consider “automotive grade” engineering principles, as well as driver safety and privacy from the start.

Honda Developer Studio is the product of Honda Silicon Valley Lab (HSVL), Honda’s open innovation laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area. HSVL was founded to help accelerate Honda’s global information technology research and development efforts, and forge new strategic partnerships with technology companies.

Developers interested in working with Honda should visit the Honda Developer Studio portal online, where they will be able to begin a dialogue with Honda engineers and schedule time to meet the team at a newly built workspace in Mountain View.

Honda operates 16 major research and development centers in the US, including the Honda Silicon Valley Lab, with the capacity to fully design, develop and engineer many of the products Honda produces in North America.

Akio Toyoda announces name of Toyota’s new fuel cell sedan in web video: Mirai

16 November 2014

Akio Toyoda, President and Member of the Board of Toyota Motor, used a web video to announce the name of the company’s new fuel cell sedan (earlier post), to be launched officially on the eve of the Los Angeles Auto Show: “Mirai”. In Japanese, Mirai means “future”, Toyoda said, while expounding on the virtues of the car.

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Vanderbilt/ORNL team discovers new form of crystalline order that could be attractive for thermoelectric applications

17 November 2014

A team of researchers from Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has discovered an entirely new form of crystalline order that simultaneously exhibits both crystal and polycrystalline properties, which they describe as “interlaced crystals.”

The interlaced crystal arrangement has properties that could make it ideal for thermoelectric applications. The discovery of materials with improved thermoelectric efficiency could increase the efficiency of electrical power generation, improve automobile mileage and reduce the cost of air conditioning. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers reported finding this unusual arrangement of atoms while studying nanoparticles made from the semiconductor copper-indium sulfide (CIS), which is being actively studied for use in solar cells.

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The search for optimal thermoelectric materials aims for structures in which the crystalline order is disrupted to lower the thermal conductivity without degradation of the electron conductivity. Here we report the synthesis and characterization of ternary nanoparticles (two cations and one anion) that exhibit a new form of crystalline order: an uninterrupted, perfect, global Bravais lattice, in which the two cations exhibit a wide array of distinct ordering patterns within the cation sublattice, forming interlaced domains and phases.

Partitioning into domains and phases is not unique; the corresponding boundaries have no structural defects or strain and entail no energy cost. We call this form of crystalline order ‘interlaced crystals’ and present the example of hexagonal ​CuInS₂. Interlacing is possible in multi-cation tetrahedrally bonded compound with an average of two electrons per bond. Interlacing has minimal effect on electronic properties, but should strongly reduce phonon transport, making interlaced crystals attractive for thermoelectric applications.

Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope image showing the interlaced crystalline structure. (Wu Zhou/ORNL) Click to enlarge.

In crystalline materials, atoms are arranged in periodic arrays of points, a mathematical abstraction called a Bravais lattice. There are 14 different known types of Bravais lattices in three dimensions. The same atom or group of atoms sits at each lattice point. The simplest and most symmetric is the “simple cubic” lattice. Square floor tiles provide a two-dimensional example. The corners of the tiles create a regular, repeating lattice pattern. A three-dimensional version is the face centered cubic (FCC), which has points both on the corners and at the centers of the faces of a cube.

A number of minerals have an FCC lattice. Imagine shrinking an FCC lattice, down to the atomic scale and placing different atoms at each lattice point. When you have more than one atom at each point, each type of atom forms its own sub-lattice. For example, if you put a pair of carbon atoms at each point (forming two FCC sub-lattices), you get diamond. If you put a pair of sodium and chlorine atoms at each lattice point, they form sodium and chlorine sub-lattices and you get salt.

CIS is a bit more complicated. You can think of the sulfur atoms occupying one FCC sub-lattice while the copper and indium atoms share a second sub-lattice. Each copper or indium atom is surrounded by four nearest-neighbor sulfur atoms while each sulfur is surrounded by two copper and two indium nearest-neighbors.

Bulk CIS generally has a cubic structure. However, when Vanderbilt Assistant Professor of Chemistry Janet Macdonald and her post-doctoral student Emil Hernandez-Pagan grew nanocrystals of CIS to explore their properties for solar light harvesting, they found that the tiny crystals had a hexagonal lattice structure, with the sulfur atoms occupying one sub-lattice and the copper and indium atoms sharing another.

In CIS, the sulfur atoms make these perfectly packed layers and the copper and Indium ions lie in between, like jam in a sandwich. Emil was making nanoparticles of this material in the lab, but we didn’t know if the copper and indium were ordered or just randomly distributed in the ‘jam’ layers. This was important because disordered structures generally have poor electrical properties.

Because of the small size of nanoparticles, X-ray diffraction, the normal method for determining crystal structure, could not tell whether the copper and indium atoms were ordered in some fashion.

Vanderbilt Research Assistant Professor Xiao Shen in Pantelides’ group performed theoretical calculations to determine whether an ordered or disordered distribution of the copper and indium atoms was preferred and concluded that several different ordered structures were preferred over a disordered structure and all the ordered structures had an equal likelihood of occurring.

The scientists didn’t have a clear idea about how these different ordered structures could coexist until Wigner Fellow Wu Zhou at ORNL successfully obtained detailed atomic-scale images of the nanoparticles. His images clearly showed that, while all atoms occupy the points of a perfect hexagonal Bravais lattice, the copper and indium atoms form a series of distinct domains where the copper and indium atoms are arranged differently. The boundaries between distinct copper-indium arrangements are similar to grain boundaries in polycrystalline solids, but both Shen’s calculations and the images revealed that the underlying hexagonal lattice is totally undisturbed.

We discovered it was really hard to decide exactly where the edges were between the areas of different ordering. Usually it is really clear because normally when you have polycrystalline samples, there is strain at the edges between the different areas. So it was very strange that there seemed to be no strain or breaks at the edges. The underlying lattice was completely unperturbed by these different regions of copper/indium ordering. It was really quite amazing that despite all these little crystallites, the whole crystal lattice is completely happy and doesn’t need to shift or twist or break to accommodate them.

Three atomic-resolution images of a copper-indium-sulfur nanoparticle: (a) Only the copper and indium atoms are shown in blue and yellow; (b) Copper and indium atoms shown in same color demonstrating that they form a perfect hexagonal lattice; (c) Same as (a) with the boundaries between regions of distinct copper-indium order outlined. (Xiao Shen / Vanderbilt) Click to enlarge.

According to the researchers, the interlaced crystal structure may be just what is needed to optimize thermoelectric applications for power generation or cooling. Thermoelectric devices need a material that is an excellent electrical conductor and a poor conductor of heat. The problem is that materials like metals that are good electrical conductors also tend to be good heat conductors and vice versa. Defects and grain boundaries that retard heat flow also reduce electrical conductivity.

Illustration that shows the different atomic patterns in the domains outlined in image (c) above. (Xiao Shen / Vanderbilt) Click to enlarge.

In addition to CuInS₂, there is a large class of materials that should have similar interlaced structures. When made into thin films, they should be excellent thermoelectric materials, the researchers predict.

We haven’t tested this yet, but we are confident that these materials have high electrical conductivity and low thermal conductivity…just what you need for thermoelectrics. The field is now wide open for scientists who can fabricate thin films and make thermoelectric measurements.

Vanderbilt Research Assistant Professor Yevgeniy Puzyrev, ORNL microscopist Juan-Carlos Idrobo, and Stephen Pennycook at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville also contributed to the research, which was funded by National Science Foundation grants DMR-0938330, EPS-1004083 and CHE-1253105 and US Department of Energy grant DE-FG02-0946554 and Office of Science contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 and by ORNL’s Basic Energy Sciences/Materials Science and Engineering Directorate and Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, sponsored by US DOE.

Resources

• Xiao Shen, Emil A. Hernández-Pagan, Wu Zhou, Yevgeniy S. Puzyrev, Juan-Carlos Idrobo, Janet E. Macdonald, Stephen J. Pennycook Sokrates T. Pantelides (2014) “Interlaced crystals having a perfect Bravais lattice and complex chemical order revealed by real-space crystallography” Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5431 doi: 10.1038/ncomms6431

DOE reports progress on development of hydrogen storage technologies

17 November 2014

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Fuel Cell Technologies Office’ (FCTO) 2014 Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program Annual Progress Report (earlier post)—an annual summary of results from projects funded by DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program—described a number of advances in the field of hydrogen storage.

The DOE Hydrogen Storage sub-program has developed a dual strategy. For the near-term, the focus is on improving performance and lowering the cost of high-pressure compressed hydrogen storage systems. For the long-term, the effort is on developing advanced cold/cryo-compressed and materials-based hydrogen storage system technologies.

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The objective is to develop technologies that provide sufficient onboard hydrogen storage to allow fuel cell devices to provide the performance and run-time demanded by the application. For light-duty vehicles this means providing a driving range of more than 300 miles (500 km), while meeting packaging, cost, safety, and performance requirements to be competitive with current vehicles.

While some fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) already have been demonstrated to travel more than 300 miles on a single fill using high-pressure tanks, DOE wants this driving range to be achievable across the full range of vehicle models without compromising space, performance, or cost.

By 2020, the sub-program has the following targets for automotive hydrogen systems:

• 1.8 kWh/kg system (5.5 wt%)
• 1.3 kWh/L system (0.040 kg H₂/L)
• $10/kWh ($333/kg H_{2 stored})

Related to this, DOE seeks by 2020 to develop novel precursors and conversion processes capable of reducing the high-volume cost of high-strength carbon fiber by 25% from $13 per pound to ~$9 per pound.

To achieve the ultimate wide-spread commercialization of hydrogen FCEVs across the full range of light-duty vehicle platforms, the sub-program has established the following onboard hydrogen storage targets to meet the needs for full-fleet adoption:

• 2.5 kWh/kg system (7.5 wt%)
• 2.3 kWh/L system (0.070 kg H₂/L)
• $8/kWh ($266/kg H_{2 stored})

Reducing the cost of high-pressure compressed hydrogen. Lightweight compressed gas storage vessels requiring a composite overwrap to contain hydrogen gas are considered the most likely near-term hydrogen storage solution for the initial commercialization of FCEVs, as well as for other early market applications. In 2013, Strategic Analysis Inc., working with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) completed a thorough cost analysis for baseline Type IV 350- and 700-bar compressed hydrogen storage systems, for both single- and multi-tank configurations.

While the cost for the carbon fiber composite must be reduced to meet the ultimate cost targets, at lower manufacturing volumes, the cost of the balance-of-plant (BOP) components was shown to be the largest cost contributor. The piping/fittings, integrated in-tank valve, and pressure regulator were found to be the largest three cost contributors. These results will be used to develop strategies to reduce BOP costs.

Projected costs, in 2013$, for BOP components for 700-bar compressed hydrogen storage systems produced at 500,000 systems per year. Source: DOE. Click to enlarge.

In FY 2014, one area of focus was low-cost, high-strength carbon fiber precursors and advanced tank designs. Carbon fiber composite overwraps can currently contribute as much as 75% or more to the overall cost of advanced Type IV tanks. The Hydrogen Storage sub-program supported efforts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to reduce the cost of polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based fibers used as precursors to produce high-strength carbon fibers. ORNL efforts focused on advanced precursor materials and processing since precursors have been shown to contribute over 50% of the total cost of high-strength carbon fibers.

The ORNL team investigated the use of low-cost textile-grade fibers made from PAN blended with a methyl acrylate comonomer (PAN-MA) as lower-cost precursors and continued to improve on the development of melt-spinnable PAN precursors and processing techniques to replace the current more costly wet processing methods.

The ORNL team reported increased tensile strength from 405 KSI to 649 KSI and tensile modulus from 33 MSI to 38 MSI for carbon fibers produced from PAN-MA precursor fibers manufactured on high-volume textile lines.

A team led by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) focused on reducing the cost of a Type IV tank system by developing novel alternative resins and resin matrix modification, modifying the carbon fiber surface to improve composite translational efficiency, developing methods for alternative fiber placement and enhanced operating conditions that demonstrated routes to increase carbon fiber usage efficiency.

The PNNL team projected a 52% mass reduction and 30% cost reduction in compressed hydrogen storage systems with 5.6 kg hydrogen usable capacity, at 500 bar and cold (approximately 200 K) operating conditions, compared to baseline 700-bar ambient systems.

One new Small Business Innovation Research Phase II award was made that focuses on a graded construction approach of using a lower-cost, lower-performance carbon fiber in the outer layers where fibers are exposed to lower stress due to the thick wall effect with 700-bar Type IV tanks.

The program also made three new awards:

• Materia Inc. will investigate use of a low-viscosity resin and a vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding process as alternatives to the traditional epoxy resin and wet-wind manufacturing process for Type IV tanks.

• PPG Industries Inc. will investigate the production scale-up of an ultra-high-strength glass fiber (≥5,500 MPa) and evaluate its performance in composites and a low-cost alternative to carbon fiber in Type III and IV tanks.

• Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) will screen alternative metal alloys for use in place of 316/316L stainless steel for materials of construction in balance of plant and other hydrogen applications, leading to lower costs and lower mass.

FY 2014 analysis also projected a 52% mass reduction and 30% cost reduction in compressed hydrogen storage systems with 5.6 kg hydrogen usable capacity, at 500 bar and ~200 K, operating conditions, compared to baseline 700-bar ambient systems.

Advanced materials. The advanced materials initiatives span a range of hydrogen storage technologies:

• For metal hydrides, efforts emphasized material discovery coupled with reducing desorption temperatures and improving kinetics.

• For chemical hydrogen storage materials, much of the focus was on developing reversible or regenerable liquid-phase materials, and also increasing efficiency of regeneration routes for solid-phase materials.

• For hydrogen sorbents, efforts were focused on increasing the isosteric heat of adsorption, mainly through inclusion of open metal centers or boron doping, to increase the adsorbed capacity at higher temperatures and improving standard measurement practices for hydrogen capacity.

Also in FY 2014, the Hydrogen Storage sub-program maintained efforts to collect and disseminate materials data on advanced hydrogen storage materials through the hydrogen storage materials database.

The program made three new awards in FY 2014:

• HRL Laboratories, with partners SNL and University of Missouri-St. Louis, is investigating two material systems, mixed metal borohydrides and lithiated boranes, with potential to offer high gravimetric capacity with fast kinetics at temperatures and pressures relevant to automotive applications.

• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), with partners SNL, Georgia Tech, and University of Michigan, will use a combined multi-scale computational and experimental approach to develop and validate strategies to improve the performance of Mg(BH₄)₂, a material with potential for 14 wt% reversible hydrogen storage.

• Ardica Technologies, with partner SRI, will transition and scale up a version of the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL)-developed electrochemical method of alane (AlH₃) production/regeneration from the laboratory to production to significantly lower the cost of alane compared to conventional solution synthesis methods.

Specific accomplishments for the year include:

• Hydrogen desorption and decomposition pathways were studied for 2 LiBH₄ + 5 Mg(BH₄)₂ using nuclear magnetic resonance; experimentally observed reaction products were consistent with theoretically predicted B₂H₆ anion. Using a combination of experiments and density functional theory, all but one reaction product was able to be assigned. (Northwestern University)

• Developed the M₂(4,6- dioxido benzene 1,3-dicarboxylate) (known as m-dobdc) (M = Mg, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni) series of metal organic frameworks via a new structural isomer that shows a significantly improved hydrogen binding enthalpy as compared to the regular M₂(dobdc) for the Mn, Fe, Co, and Ni analogues. The open metal coordination sites are shown to have a greater positive charge in M₂(m-dobdc) than in M₂(dobdc), leading to the experimentally determined higher isosteric heats of H₂ adsorption (~1.0 kJ/mol higher on average) and up to 40% increase in adsorption enthalpy. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL)

• Demonstrated a volumetric capacity for Ni₂(m-dobdc) at room temperature and 100 bar of 12.1 g/L, which is the highest demonstrated to date and 50% greater than H₂ gas. (LBNL)

• Developed recommended volumetric capacity definitions and measurement protocols to help the research community better report and understand their volumetric capacity material results. (NREL)

Hydrogen Storage Engineering Center of Excellence (HSECoE). In FY 2014, the HSECoE developed prototype designs and evaluation plans for each of the hexcell and MATI sorbent systems using a 2-L Type I (all metal) aluminum pressure vessel.

Of particular note, said Dr. Sunita Satyapal, Director, FCTO, the FCTO-supported engineering efforts delivered more than 9 kg of MOF-5 to HSECoE partners for Phase III testing, with scaled-up batch material achieving performance within 10% of lab-scale batch material, and demonstrated 20x improvement in MOF-5 thermal conductivity using an enhanced natural graphite layering approach compared to random loading.

The Hydrogen Storage sub-program also established the HSECoE model website page and posted the metal hydride (MH) acceptability envelope, MH finite element model, hydrogen tank mass and cost estimator, and hydrogen vehicle simulation framework models for public availability.