<h2 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">FREE REPORT: Reducing Human Driver Error and Setting Realistic Expectations with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems</h2>Thousands die or are injured each year in automobile crashes. Bringing automated driving systems technologies into the advanced driver assist systems (ADAS) and connected vehicle space will help humans drive more safely and better prepare us for automated vehicles (AVs).Learn more about ADAS and ADS implementation with the goal of reaching zero deaths and serious injuries by downloading this FREE report from SAE International (valued at $50).&nbsp;<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzAwNzUzODIyNjYzLVJlZHVjaW5nIEh1bWFuIERyaXZlciBFcnJvciBhbmQgU2V0dGluZyBSZWFsaXN0aWMgRXhwZWN0YXRpb25zIHdpdGggQWR2YW5jZWQgRHJpdmVyIEFzc2lzdGFuY2UgU3lzdGVtcy5wbmciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><h2><iframe width="540" height="740" src="https://c8056756.sibforms.com/serve/MUIFAMdP0A_OGmbm1FBUdHG4Kch9Yvcfk0o7_Lq0Ywvq_bW5DACvNKJTxu581PWdSkLw1Lzm_3zXkKgpDQ0qa9wZF0aMleCF9Dht6uXrWjeRGuMlIbLAG00tAE1k1Zj9J3qZyOnF08P7PZYck76ldPDyWzCbrD6Tvrokkm59XTxP7P4hV7Gz2fXT6er4g7NK0E8nq6obPbX1dAqy" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" allowfullscreen="" style="display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;max-width: 100%;" class="fr-draggable"></iframe>Battery Recycling Inevitable</h2>The efficient and economical recycling of EV batteries is not just possible, but inevitable, said a panel of battery-recycling experts at the 2023 Battery Show North America in Novi, Mich.&nbsp;Panelists indicated that although the business model is evolving – and is likely to remain comparatively fluid for the near term – the sector’s broad directionals are firming and at least a few aspects of the business have become certain – one being that EV batteries ending up in landfills “absolutely will not happen,” asserted Renata Arsenault, Technical Expert for Advanced Battery Recycling at Ford.Equally important, established recycling companies and startups understand that the EV battery recycling environment will be diverse and require a variety of players at various points and places in the recycling process, said Mike O’Kronley, CEO of Ascend Elements, a startup with a proprietary process focused on recycling material specifically for lithium-ion battery cathodes. He said there will be numerous companies with various specialties needed at different points – geographically and within the recycling process. Localization of both materials supply and operations will be vital as recycling matures, added Ford’s Arsenault.Initiating EV battery recycling will take time to reach the scale and efficiency of recycling entire vehicles, for example, because batteries are more complicated, said Ryan Melsert, CEO at American Battery Technology Company (ABTC), which has a system to recover the individual minerals in lithium-ion batteries. Melsert said the comparative newness of automotive lithium-ion batteries also means recycling processes have yet to reach the efficiencies and scale of established recycling, such as that for lead-acid batteries.Moreover, Melsert said, EV battery recycling must be much more “holistic” in its approach because it will be a requirement to recover more than the “token elements” sought by some systems. “As batteries get higher-performance and more complex, so will the recycling process,” he said.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzAwNjQzNTIzNTI1LTIwMjMtYmF0dGVyeS1zaG93LXJlY3ljbGluZy1hcmdvbm5lLWxpZmVjeWNsZS1jaGFydF9nYWxsZXJ5LmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Progression of an end-of-life EV battery through various current recycling processes.<h2>Open- and closed-loop approaches</h2>How automakers and recyclers eventually collaborate remains a question as recycling progresses through early stages of startup, but most panelists agreed that that eventual result is likely to be a “closed loop” process in which automakers form close partnerships with recyclers in what becomes a model in which the automaker “controls materials almost indefinitely, said ABTC’s Melsert. He added that closed-loop arrangements also will help to provide “security of supply” to automakers and their closely-aligned battery-manufacturing partners.A closed-loop system also will be essential, panelists believed, because of eligibility requirements connected to incentives from the federal government’s Inflation Reduction Act. Retaining control of domestically produced materials, from mining through recycling and reuse, will ease the burden of complying with IRA dictates and also allow manufacturers to retain a steady flow of materials not necessarily subject to the economics of the commodities market.“If you’re an OEM, you don’t want to sell that [recycled] material to the highest bidder,” confirmed Ascend’s O’Kronley, saying the material is too important to release to an open market. He said that although the industry will see elements of both open- and closed-loop systems for some time, EV battery recycling is almost certain to evolve to a mostly closed-loop environment.Ford’s Arsenault agreed, saying, “In the early years, we’re going to be somewhat more transactional.” But “the Holy Grail for all of us is to have the fully-closed loop. It seems it would be much more efficient for our customers, too.”<h2>Not much life for second-life</h2>Meanwhile, the panelists had a dim view of the potential for so-called “second-life” use of entire EV batteries once those batteries become too depleted for effective use in a vehicles. Second-life applications – often cited as a viable competitor for recycling – just won’t be the best use of the valuable battery materials, most panelists asserted.Second-life usage “has a lot of barriers,” said Gerardo Ramos-Vivas, Battery Lifecycle senior manager, Toyota Motor North America. “Right now, we’re thinking that’s way out there [in the future].”Ascend’s O’Kronley agreed, adding, “I think the second-life market is going to be a lot smaller than we think about. I truly believe that batteries will be for the life of the vehicle,” and that once a battery has reached the end of its useful life, it will be more efficient and economical to recycle its elements rather than keep the entire battery for a secondary purpose.Second-life usage is “going to be a smaller market than a lot of people are thinking,” said ABTC’s Melsert. He said there’s been an overestimation, as one example, of the stationary-source market’s potential use of second-life automotive batteries. He said it is becoming clearer that stationary sources likely will converge on the desire to use premium-performance batteries rather than make use of repurposed batteries.

Battery recycling experts at the 2023 Battery Show North America indicate a sustainable recycling business model is coming into focus.

EV Battery recycling still being defined

Under the stewardship of Karen Scrivener, head of EPFL's <a href="https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lmc/" target="_blank">Laboratory of Construction Materials&nbsp;</a>at the School of Engineering, a team of researchers has been wrestling with the environmental implications of concrete, a material produced at an astonishing four tonnes annually for every human on Earth. The challenge? Cement, concrete's binding component, accounts for a significant 8% of worldwide emissions. And clinker, the key component in cement, is extremely carbon intensive, making up 90% of overall cement emissions in the fabrication of concrete. The solution? LC3, short for Limestone Calcined Clay Cement. Not just an alternative, LC3 offers the potential for enhanced durability, cost-efficiency, and a significant reduction in emissions. Finding a solution to reduce the climate impacts of concrete while providing for the needs of growing economies is vital.<h2>LC3: the innovation changing the cement industry</h2>LC3 addresses both sources of carbon emissions from making clinker. First, it replaces half of the clinker with calcined clay and ground limestone, neither of which release carbon when heated the way limestone does. Second, the clay is heated to a much lower temperature, which reduces the amount of fuel required and resulting emissions. With lower temperatures it is also more feasible to switch to cleaner energy sources such as electricity than it is for making clinker. LC3 can reduce CO2 emissions around 40% compared with conventional cement by replacing half of the clinker.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1700476042742-download.jfif" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">LC3 cuts the amount of carbon-intensive clinker required in cement, significantly reducing overall emissions. © 2023 Projet LC3 / Conception par Zoï Environment NetworkLC3 is functional, too. It is less pervious to water and salt, so it makes concrete roads and bridges more durable and longer lasting, reducing the cost and disruption of replacement. Since it requires less energy to make and uses widely available clay it can be produced at a lower cost, up to 25% lower.<h2>Cutting 500 million tons of CO2 by 2030</h2>LC3 is already growing rapidly and is currently being produced in a number of plants around the world. For each ton of calcined clay produced, we are saving 600 kilograms of CO2. By the end of 2023 LC3 will have already saved around 15 million tons of CO2. By 2025 it is expected that LC3 will have saved 45 million tons. If the cement industry widely adopts the use of LC3, it can help prevent up to 500 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2030.Many of the leading cement producers are in the process of adopting calcined clay cement. Holcim, for example, announced in January 2023 the launch of operations at a plant in France that will deliver up to 500,000 tons of low-carbon cement per year. Argos Cementos in Columbia produce 2.3 million tons of LC3 cement a year, which is already being used locally in the construction of roads, tunnels and buildings.<h2>The future of cement in the Global South</h2>In the coming years and decades, the majority of new construction worldwide will occur in the Global South — particularly in Africa, where the population is expected to increase by 1 billion by 2050. That means a lot of cement.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1700476068290-download+%281%29.jfif" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">The Global South, particularly Africa and Asia, will require huge quanitities of cement in the future. © 2023 Projet LC3 / Conception par Zoï EnvironmentAfrica has the world’s fastest-growing population, yet suitable limestone to manufacture clinker is scarcely available on the continent. Today, the costly import of clinker has a direct impact on costs. It causes affordability issues for housing and infrastructure. Fortunately, clays are the weathering products of common rock types. As a result, they are widely available in most geological settings. Clays containing kaolinite, the most suitable clay types for LC3, are abundantly available across Africa.By adopting LC3 technology and replacing a substantial part of clinker with local resources, African countries and those across the Global South can create world-class local industries and reap the economic and employment benefits. This will reduce the need to import clinker with foreign currency and allow the construction of housing and infrastructure at lower costs, all while limiting CO2 emissions.<h2>A reimagined concrete value chain</h2>Reducing the amount of clinker in cement reduces emissions in the production of cement, but there are many additional strategies if we look across the entire value chain of concrete. By improving the energy efficiency of plants and using alternative fuels such as waste fuels, we can further reduce CO2 from the production of clinker. By more carefully selecting the aggregate size gradations there is less void space for the cement paste to fill, saving on cement cost and emissions.We can also improve the design and efficiency of concrete used in structures and buildings. The Global Cement and Concrete Association estimates that this could save 22% of concrete while also cutting costs. Finally, adapting certain design elements and increasing efficiency as well as recycling materials will further reduce the impact of concrete on the climate. If all of these strategies are combined, we can achieve up to 80% reduction in the emissions from cement and concrete using today’s technologies.To reach this goal, stakeholders across the industry must work together, from the cement and concrete producers, contractors and trade partner, design team and owners. Changing existing practices and gaining momentum for an industry-wide shift requires diligence and perseverance. There needs to be strong willingness from both the private and public sectors to work together to facilitate a transition to net zero emissions in construction while providing solutions for sustainable growth. Now more than ever we need public-private cooperation to see real solutions scale.

A new material developed at EPFL could change how we make cement forever — and cut 500 million tons of emissions by 2030.

The future of construction with more sustainable cement

In this episode, we dive into how MIT researchers have found a new way of efficiently leveraging the abundant carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to create clean, stable fuel capable of addressing Hydrogen’s shortcomings while still offering its core benefits!

Podcast: Converting CO2 To Clean Fuel

Ammonia, a main component of many fertilizers, could play a key role in a carbon-free fuel system as a convenient way to transport and store clean hydrogen. The chemical, made of hydrogen and nitrogen (NH3), can also itself be burned as a zero-carbon fuel. However, new research led by Princeton University illustrates that even though it may not be a source of carbon pollution, ammonia’s widespread use in the energy sector could pose a grave risk to the nitrogen cycle and climate without proper engineering precautions.Publishing&nbsp;<a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2311728120" target="_blank">their findings</a> November 6 in&nbsp;PNAS, the interdisciplinary team of 12 researchers found that a well-engineered ammonia economy could help the world achieve its decarbonization goals and secure a sustainable energy future. A mismanaged ammonia economy, on the other hand, could ramp up emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a long-lived greenhouse gas around 300 times more potent than CO2&nbsp;and a major contributor to the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer. It could lead to substantial emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), a class of pollutants that contribute to the formation of smog and acid rain. And it could directly leak fugitive ammonia emissions into the environment, also forming air pollutants, impacting water quality, and stressing ecosystems by disturbing the global nitrogen cycle.Fortunately, the researchers found that the potential negative impacts of an ammonia economy can be minimized with proactive engineering practices. They argued that now is the time to start seriously preparing for an ammonia economy, tackling the potential sticking points of ammonia fuel before its widespread deployment.“We know an ammonia economy of some scale is likely coming,” said research leader&nbsp;<a href="https://engineering.princeton.edu/faculty/amilcare-porporato" target="_blank">Amilcare Porporato</a>, the Thomas J. Wu ’94 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the&nbsp;<a href="https://environment.princeton.edu/" target="_blank">High Meadows Environmental Institute</a>. “And if we are proactive and future-facing in our approach, an ammonia economy could be a great thing. But we cannot afford to take the risks of ammonia lightly. We cannot afford to be sloppy.”<h2>Translating ammonia from agriculture to energy</h2>As interest in hydrogen as a zero-carbon fuel has grown, so too has an inconvenient reality: it is notoriously difficult to store and transport over long distances. The tiny molecule must be stored at either temperatures below -253 degrees Celsius or at pressures as high as 700 times atmospheric pressure, conditions that are infeasible for widespread transport and prone to leakage.Ammonia, on the other hand, is much easier to liquify, transport, and store, capable of being moved around similarly to tanks of propane.Moreover, an established process for converting hydrogen into ammonia has existed since the early 20th century. Known as the Haber-Bosch process, the reaction combines atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen to form ammonia. While the process was originally developed as a cost-effective way to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia for use in fertilizers, cleaning products, and even explosives, the energy sector has looked to the Haber-Bosch process as a way to store and transport hydrogen fuel in the form of ammonia.Ammonia synthesis is inherently energy-intensive, and fossil fuels without CO2 capture are currently used to meet almost all of its feedstock and energy demands. But as the researchers pointed out in their article, if new, electricity-driven processes that are currently under development can replace conventional fossil-fuel-derived ammonia synthesis, then the Haber-Bosch process — or a different process altogether — could be widely used to convert clean hydrogen into ammonia, which can itself be burned as a zero-carbon fuel.“Ammonia is an easy way to transport hydrogen over long distances, and its widespread use in agriculture means there is already an established infrastructure for producing and moving ammonia,” said&nbsp;<a href="https://environment.princeton.edu/people/matteo-bertagni/" target="_blank">Matteo Bertagni</a>, postdoctoral researcher at the High Meadows Environmental Institute working on the&nbsp;<a href="https://cmi.princeton.edu/" target="_blank">Carbon Mitigation Initiative</a>. “You could therefore create hydrogen in a resource-rich area, transform it into ammonia, and then transport it anywhere it’s needed around the globe.”Ammonia’s transportability is especially attractive to industries reliant on long-distance transportation, such as maritime shipping, and countries with limited available space for renewable resources. Japan, for example, already has a national energy strategy in place that incorporates the use of ammonia as a clean fuel. Straightforward storage requirements mean that ammonia might also find use as a vessel for long-term energy storage, complementary to or even replacing batteries.“At first glance, ammonia seems like an ideal cure for the problem of decarbonization,” Porporato said. “But almost every medicine comes with a set of potential side effects.”<h2>‘Look before we leap’</h2>In theory, burning ammonia should yield only harmless nitrogen gas (N2) and water as products. But in practice,&nbsp;<a href="https://engineering.princeton.edu/faculty/michael-mueller" target="_blank">Michael E. Mueller</a>, associate chair and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, stated that ammonia combustion can release harmful NOx­&nbsp;and N2O pollutants.Most N2O emissions from ammonia combustion are the result of disruptions to the combustion process. “N2O is essentially an intermediate species in the combustion process,” Mueller said. “If the combustion process is allowed to finish, then there will be essentially no N2O emissions.”Yet Mueller said that under certain conditions, such as when a turbine is ramping up or down or if the hot combustion gases impinge upon cold walls, the ammonia combustion process can become disrupted and N2O emissions can quickly accumulate.For instance, the researchers found that if ammonia fuel achieves a market penetration equal to around 5% of the current global primary energy demand (which would require 1.6 billion metric tons of ammonia production, or ten times current production levels), and if 1% of the nitrogen in that ammonia is lost as N2O, then ammonia combustion could produce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 15% of today’s emissions from fossil fuels. The greenhouse gas intensity of such a loss rate would mean that burning ammonia fuel would be more polluting than coal.Like ammonia’s N2O emissions,&nbsp;<a href="https://mae.princeton.edu/people/faculty/socolow" target="_blank">Robert Socolow</a>, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, emeritus, and senior scholar at Princeton, said that widespread usage of ammonia in the energy sector will add to all the other impacts that fertilizer has already had on the global nitrogen cycle.In a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.96.11.6001" target="_blank">seminal paper</a> published in 1999, Socolow discussed the environmental impacts of the food system’s widespread use of nitrogen-enriched fertilizers to promote crop growth, writing that, “Excess fixed nitrogen, in various guises, augments the greenhouse effect…contaminates drinking water, acidifies rain…and stresses ecosystems.”As the energy sector looks toward ammonia as a fuel, Socolow said that it can learn from agriculture’s use of ammonia as a fertilizer. He urged those in the energy sector to consult the decades of work from ecologists and agricultural scientists to understand the role of excess nitrogen in disturbing natural systems.“Ammonia fuel can be done, but it cannot be done in any way we wish,” said Socolow, whose 2004 paper with&nbsp;<a href="https://eeb.princeton.edu/people/stephen-pacala" target="_blank">Stephen Pacala</a>, the Frederick D. Petrie Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, emeritus, on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1100103" target="_blank">stabilization wedges</a> has become a foundation of modern climate policy. “It’s important that we look before we leap.”<h2>A roadmap for a sustainable ammonia economy</h2>While the environmental consequences of an ammonia economy gone wrong are serious, the researchers emphasized that the potential stumbling blocks they identified are solvable through proactive engineering.“I interpret this paper as a handbook for engineers,” Mueller said. “By identifying the worst-case scenario for an ammonia economy, we’re really identifying what we need to be aware of as we develop, design, and optimize new ammonia-based energy systems.”For instance, Mueller said there are alternative combustion strategies that could help to minimize unwanted NOx and N2O emissions. While each strategy has its own set of pros and cons, he said that taking the time now to evaluate candidate systems with an eye toward mitigating emissions will ensure that combustion systems are poised to operate optimally for ammonia fuel.Another option for accessing the energy in ammonia involves partially or fully splitting ammonia back into hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen through a process known as cracking. Ammonia cracking, a line of research being actively pursued by&nbsp;<a href="https://engineering.princeton.edu/faculty/emily-carter" target="_blank">Emily A. Carter</a>, could help to make the fuel composition more favorable for combustion or even bypass the environmental concerns of ammonia burning by regenerating hydrogen fuel at the point of use. Carter is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Energy and the Environment and senior strategic advisor and associate laboratory director for applied materials and sustainability sciences at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.pppl.gov/" target="_blank">Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory</a> (PPPL).Furthermore, several technologies already exist at the industrial scale to convert unwanted NOx emissions from combustion back into N2 through a process known as selective catalytic reduction. These technologies could be straightforward to transfer to ammonia-based fuel applications. And as a convenient bonus, many of them rely on ammonia as a feedstock to remove NOx — something that there would already be plenty of in an ammonia-based system.Beyond the engineering practices that could be developed to minimize the environmental impacts of an ammonia economy, Porporato said future work will also look beyond engineering approaches to identify policies and regulatory strategies that would ensure the best-case scenario for ammonia fuel.“Imagine the problems we could have avoided if we knew the risks and environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels before the Industrial Revolution began,” Porporato said. “With the ammonia economy, we have the chance to learn from our carbon-emitting past. We have the opportunity to solve the challenges we’ve identified before they become an issue in the real world.”<hr>The paper, “<a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2311728120" target="_blank">Minimizing the Impacts of the Ammonia Economy on the Nitrogen Cycle and Climate</a>,” was published November 6 in PNAS. In addition to Porporato, Bertagni, Mueller, Socolow, and Carter, coauthors include J. Mark P. Martirez of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL); Chris Greig, Yiguang Ju, Sankaran Sundaresan, Mark Zondlo, and Rui Wang of Princeton University; and Tim Lieuwen of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the BP-funded Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University, and the Moore Foundation.

While interest in the use of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier and zero-carbon fuel grows, a Princeton-led team of researchers found that a mismanaged ammonia economy could have unwanted environmental consequences. (adobe.stock.com)

Ammonia, a main component of many fertilizers, could play a key role in a carbon-free fuel system as a convenient way to transport and store clean hydrogen. The chemical, made of hydrogen and nitrogen (NH3), can also itself be burned as a zero-carbon fuel.

Ammonia fuel offers great benefits but demands careful action

Concrete is the most widely used building material worldwide, providing the foundation of our modern society’s infrastructure. It is partially recyclable and can even absorb CO2 from the atmosphere during the curing process. However, the amount of CO2 released during the manufacturing process far exceeds the amount that can be reabsorbed later. This is why the concrete industry generates around eight percent of global CO2 emissions – more than the aviation and shipping industry combined. Franco Zunino, a senior scientist at the Institute for Building Materials at ETH Zurich, wants to alter the formulation of concrete by adopting an “ultra-green concrete” approach.<h2>The ideal concrete</h2>Concrete consists of a mixture of cement, aggregates and water. Traditional cement is composed of about 95 percent clinker and five percent gypsum. To produce cement, limestone and clay are burned into clinker in a kiln heated to 1,450°Celsius, which inevitably releases CO2 due to the chemical decomposition of limestone. The huge amount of energy required by the kiln further worsens cement’s carbon footprint.EPFL has already launched its Limestone Calcined Clay Cements (LC3) project, in which Zunino is actively involved and which has set a new standard in cement production. It has developed a cement formulation using 50 percent clinker and a combination of calcined clay and limestone that has cut CO2 emissions by around 40 percent. However, improving the formulation of concrete can bring about a significant increase in these environmental benefits. This is where Franco Zunino’s UGC project at the ETH-Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (D-BAUG) comes in.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1699804179857-image.imageformat.1286.1895314494.png" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Three LC3-based concretes with varying amounts of cement. As the cement content in the concrete mix decreases, the compressive strength increases. (Photograph: Franco Zunino)Franco Zunino pursues a two-fold strategy for the new green concrete: first, reducing the clinker content, i.e. the amount of clinker per unit of cement; second, lowering the ratio of cement in the concrete. This dual strategy offers flexibility in tailoring low-carbon concrete compositions to individual markets. “The ideal would be to implement both at the same time; but the individual components are independent of each other. In some markets, it may be difficult to implement both aspects of the dual strategy, as production capacity and infrastructure need to be put in place. However, it is possible to implement at least one of them and still save reduce CO2&nbsp;emissions,” Franco Zunino explains.Calculations by Zunino and his team have shown that the CO2 emissions of Ultra Green Concrete can be reduced from 300 kg per cubic metre to about 80–100 kg per cubic metre. Depending on the application, up to two-thirds of CO2 emissions could be consequently saved without compromising material performance. Although the researcher emphasises that there is no such thing as inherently climate-neutral or carbon-negative concrete, he believes there are no excuses for the industrialised world not to adopt this new and more sustainable building material right away.<h2>More cost-effective than traditional concrete</h2>One reason for the reluctance might be that the concrete industry is not particularly innovative. Concrete has proven to be highly successful due to being cost-effective, safe and user-friendly. According to Zunino, “green concrete” could be even cheaper than conventional concrete. The proportion of expensive components is lower, while the quality and thus price of the concrete remain the same. This creates financial incentives for using more environmentally friendly material.Safety aspects are also important, of course. Franco Zunino comments: “Anyone who builds a house wants to use a material that insures it will stand for a hundred years. But we have to ask ourselves whether this really makes sense in view of the enormous CO2 emissions involved. Could we instead use a material that meets the structure’s required life cycle but emits significantly less CO2? In a climate-crisis scenario, one tonne of CO2 saved today is more valuable than the same tonne saved in 50 years.”<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1699804212720-image.imageformat.1286.1672952278.jpg" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">From lab test to prototype: test cylinders of LC3 cement. (Photograph: Franco Zunino)<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1699804225507-image.imageformat.1286.1939789219.jpg" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><figure id="isPasted"><figcaption>Typically, calcined clay cements are characterised by their reddish colour, although this is not always the case, as there are also white and black clays. (Photograph: Franco Zunino) &nbsp;&nbsp;</figcaption></figure><h2 id="isPasted">LC3 production is already under way</h2>Zunino stresses that low-carbon cement is even more durable than conventional cement. There are currently about seven large-scale cement plants worldwide producing cement using the LC3 approach. Franco Zunino expects that number to exceed 40 in the coming years. “Demand for concrete will increase in the future. We can offer assistance by developing improved concrete mixtures with a lower cement content and thus still achieve our environmental goals,” Zunino adds. He is convinced that LC3 will be the most widely used type of cement worldwide ten years from now.<hr><h2 id="isPasted">Reference</h2>F. Zunino, A two-fold strategy towards low-carbon concrete, RILEM Technical Letters, 8 (2023), doi: <a href="https://doi.org/10.21809/rilemtechlett.2023.179" target="_blank">external page10.21809/rilemtechlett.2023.179</a>

ETH researchers are developing a low-​carbon cement with a significantly lower embodied CO2 content than traditional cement. The Ultra Green Concrete project aims to make low-​carbon, high-​performance concrete widely accessible.

Green change in a grey industry

Photovoltaic systems in combination with battery storage enable more independence in energy supply.&nbsp;Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and their partners have investigated how great the potential is for a completely self-sufficient energy supply for residential buildings.&nbsp;In the trade magazine&nbsp;Joule they show that 53 percent of single-family homes in Europe could already become technically energy self-sufficient.&nbsp;By 2050, more than two million buildings could leave the network through additional investments of 50 percent.&nbsp;(DOI:&nbsp;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.012" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.012</a> )Electricity prices in Europe have been rising for years - after Russia's attack on Ukraine, they have now reached a record level, according to Eurostat calculations.&nbsp;At the same time, photovoltaics and battery storage are making it increasingly easier to become less dependent on energy suppliers.&nbsp;“By investing in local energy supply systems, a large part of one's own electricity consumption can be covered by oneself and thus the dependence on high electricity prices can be reduced,” says lead author Max Kleinebrahm, group leader at the Institute for Industrial Management and Industrial Production (IIP) at KIT.&nbsp;In Europe, building owners are increasingly opting for more independence: “In addition to economic efficiency, non-monetary aspects such as a high proportion of renewable energies, the rejection of the use of nuclear and fossil energies and a high degree of self-sufficiency also play a role in the decision increasingly important role.” A team from KIT, together with researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich, ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute, calculated how big the step would be from partially self-sufficient to complete self-sufficiency with electricity and heat.<h2>How much does energy independence cost in your own home?</h2>The basis for their calculations is a database in which geographically high-resolution information on the European building stock and the households living in them was combined with local climatic and economic conditions.&nbsp;By using novel methods to reduce complexity on high-performance computers, cost-optimized, energy-autonomous supply systems were initially configured for 4,000 representative single-family homes.&nbsp;In a further step, neural networks were then used to transfer the results to the 41 million single-family homes examined.&nbsp;“Under today’s conditions, 53 percent of the 41 million buildings are technically capable of powering themselves through the use of local rooftop solar radiation alone, independent of external infrastructure, and this share could rise to 75 percent by 2050 due to improved technologies,” says Professor Russell McKenna from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and head of the Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.&nbsp;“If you now assume that building owners would be willing to invest up to 50 percent more than would be necessary for a comparable energy system with a grid connection, then up to two million single-family homes could leave the power grid by 2050.”The researchers see significant potential for energy self-sufficient residential buildings, especially in regions with low seasonal weather fluctuations, such as in Spain, or with high electricity prices, such as in Germany.&nbsp;The specific design of the cost-optimized energy systems has also been determined: “Our results show that a successful, cost-optimal and self-sufficient energy supply system for buildings in Central Europe will consist of photovoltaics to generate electricity as well as a combination of short-term battery storage and a long-term, seasonal hydrogen storage system,” says Dr.&nbsp;Jann Weinand, head of department at the Research Center Jülich.<h2>More stability for the energy system</h2>In further work, the researchers want to analyze in more detail what effects a possible large-scale spread of self-sufficient energy supply systems would have on the European energy system, but they suspect a positive effect.&nbsp;“Semi-autonomous residential buildings could help to stabilize the overall energy system in the future.&nbsp;A less pronounced demand profile from households could dampen demand for peak-load power plants,” says Elias Naber from KIT’s IIP.&nbsp;“However, it would then have to be prevented that building owners become completely disconnected from the grid – for example by rewarding them with special electricity tariffs for grid-friendly behavior.”Original publication Max Kleinebrahm, Jann Michael Weinand, Elias Naber, Russell McKenna, Armin Ardone, Wolf Fichtner: Two million European single-family homes could abandon the grid by 2050. (2023) <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.012" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule .2023.09.012</a>

Ahead with solar power: Over half of European single-family homes could become energy independent. (Photo: Markus Breig, KIT)

According to calculations by KIT researchers, more than half of European single-family homes could be completely self-sufficient in energy

Energy Turnaround: Energy Self-sufficiency in Single-Family Homes

This article was discussed in our <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Next Byte podcast</a>.&nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/1b7aa39d-b7fc-4b88-8961-8bb4db9d0f41?dark=false" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe>The full article will continue below.<hr>The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.The new process, developed by MIT doctoral students Zhen Zhang, Zhichu Ren, and Alexander H. Quinn; Harvard University doctoral student Dawei Xi; and MIT Professor Ju Li, is described this week in an <a href="https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(23)00485-X" target="_blank">open-access paper in Cell Reports Physical Science</a>. The whole process — including capture and electrochemical conversion of the gas to a solid formate powder, which is then used in a fuel cell to produce electricity — was demonstrated at a small, laboratory scale. However, the researchers expect it to be scalable so that it could provide emissions-free heat and power to individual homes and even be used in industrial or grid-scale applications.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk4NzM2MzM3MjQ3LU1JVC1GdWVsZnJvbS0wMS1wcmVzcy5qcGciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">A schematic shows the formate process. The top left shows a household powered by the direct formate fuel cell, with formate fuel stored in the underground tank. In the middle, the fuel cell that harnesses formate to supply electricity is shown. On the lower right is the electrolyzer that converts bicarbonate into formate. Image: Shuhan Miao, Harvard Graduate School of DesignOther approaches to converting carbon dioxide into fuel, Li explains, usually involve a two-stage process: First the gas is chemically captured and turned into a solid form as calcium carbonate, then later that material is heated to drive off the carbon dioxide and convert it to a fuel feedstock such as carbon monoxide. That second step has very low efficiency, typically converting less than 20 percent of the gaseous carbon dioxide into the desired product, Li says.By contrast, the new process achieves a conversion of well over 90 percent and eliminates the need for the inefficient heating step by first converting the carbon dioxide into an intermediate form, liquid metal bicarbonate. That liquid is then electrochemically converted into liquid potassium or sodium formate in an electrolyzer that uses low-carbon electricity, e.g. nuclear, wind, or solar power. The highly concentrated liquid potassium or sodium formate solution produced can then be dried, for example by solar evaporation, to produce a solid powder that is highly stable and can be stored in ordinary steel tanks for up to years or even decades, Li says.Several steps of optimization developed by the team made all the difference in changing an inefficient chemical-conversion process into a practical solution, says Li, who holds joint appointments in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering.The process of carbon capture and conversion involves first an alkaline solution-based capture that concentrates carbon dioxide, either from concentrated streams such as from power plant emissions or from very low-concentration sources, even open air, into the form of a liquid metal-bicarbonate solution. Then, through the use of a cation-exchange membrane electrolyzer, this bicarbonate is electrochemically converted into solid formate crystals with a carbon efficiency of greater than 96 percent, as confirmed in the team’s lab-scale experiments.These crystals have an indefinite shelf life, remaining so stable that they could be stored for years, or even decades, with little or no loss. By comparison, even the best available practical hydrogen storage tanks allow the gas to leak out at a rate of about 1 percent per day, precluding any uses that would require year-long storage, Li says. Methanol, another widely explored alternative for converting carbon dioxide into a fuel usable in fuel cells, is a toxic substance that cannot easily be adapted to use in situations where leakage could pose a health hazard. Formate, on the other hand, is widely used and considered benign, according to national safety standards.Several improvements account for the greatly improved efficiency of this process. First, a careful design of the membrane materials and their configuration overcomes a problem that previous attempts at such a system have encountered, where a buildup of certain chemical byproducts changes the pH, causing the system to steadily lose efficiency over time. “Traditionally, it is difficult to achieve long-term, stable, continuous conversion of the feedstocks,” Zhang says. “The key to our system is to achieve a pH balance for steady-state conversion.”To achieve that, the researchers carried out thermodynamic modeling to design the new process so that it is chemically balanced and the pH remains at a steady state with no shift in acidity over time. It can therefore continue operating efficiently over long periods. In their tests, the system ran for over 200 hours with no significant decrease in output. The whole process can be done at ambient temperatures and relatively low pressures (about five times atmospheric pressure).Another issue was that unwanted side reactions produced other chemical products that were not useful, but the team figured out a way to prevent these side reactions by the introduction of an extra “buffer” layer of bicarbonate-enriched fiberglass wool that blocked these reactions.The team also built a fuel cell specifically optimized for the use of this formate fuel to produce electricity. The stored formate particles are simply dissolved in water and pumped into the fuel cell as needed. Although the solid fuel is much heavier than pure hydrogen, when the weight and volume of the high-pressure gas tanks needed to store hydrogen is considered, the end result is an electricity output near parity for a given storage volume, Li says.The formate fuel can potentially be adapted for anything from home-sized units to large scale industrial uses or grid-scale storage systems, the researchers say. Initial household applications might involve an electrolyzer unit about the size of a refrigerator to capture and convert the carbon dioxide into formate, which could be stored in an underground or rooftop tank. Then, when needed, the powdered solid would be mixed with water and fed into a fuel cell to provide power and heat. “This is for community or household demonstrations,” Zhang says, “but we believe that also in the future it may be good for factories or the grid.”“The formate economy is an intriguing concept because metal formate salts are very benign and stable, and a compelling energy carrier,” says Ted Sargent, a professor of chemistry and of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, who was not associated with this work. “The authors have demonstrated enhanced efficiency in liquid-to-liquid conversion from bicarbonate feedstock to formate, and have demonstrated these fuels can be used later to produce electricity,” he says.

An electrolzyer configuration with a bicarbonate cathode, intermediate buffer layer, cation exchange membrane and a water anode. Image: Shuhan Miao, Harvard Graduate School of Design

The approach directly converts the greenhouse gas into formate, a solid fuel that can be stored indefinitely and could be used to heat homes or power industries.

Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide

E-textiles are worn close to and/or against the surface of the skin, with applications in healthcare, gaming, athletic training and environmental monitoring. Thanks to embedded electronic components, e-textiles can store and harvest energy, sense, display, actuate and compute.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1698479495630-resizedcamdrawing1.png" style="width: 768px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Illustration showing the 4R design concept: repair; recycle; replace; reduce. Credit: Dr Harvey ShiYet there are two major challenges to the future growth of e-textiles: firstly, high costs, therefore resulting in slower consumer adoption. Secondly, high environmental costs associated with mass production, in particular, <a href="https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2017-002-En.pdf" target="_blank" data-lf-fd-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">microplastic water pollution</a>. Fundamentally, we need new ways to prevent the scale-up of e-textiles from becoming the next electronic waste (e-waste) environmental fiasco.This is according to a team of engineers and scientists from the UK, Canada, the USA and China, led by the University of Cambridge, who warn that the e-textile supply chain and its potential for scalable commercialisation could be “further complicated” by the associated global environmental burden, and the growing use of nanomaterials in e-textiles. They say that some of these nanomaterials can pose environmental challenges and could also have adverse effects on human health (e.g. skin irritation and/or absorption of loose nanoparticles into the skin).<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01615-z" target="_blank">Writing in the journal</a> Nature Materials, the research team proposes the 4R e-textile design concept (repair; recycle; replace; reduce) alongside innovations in materials selection and biofabrication-inspired processing – a revolutionary approach that uses additive manufacturing processes to produce biomaterials, devices, cells and tissues. The aim is to reach sustainable growth and balance economic returns/scalable commercialisation with “environmental consciousness”, at a time when <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/survey-consumer-sentiment-on-sustainability-in-fashion" target="_blank">consumers are actively aligning their purchasing behaviours with sustainability goals</a>.The 4Rs for more affordable, versatile e-textiles products and enhanced supply chains have been defined as follows:<h3>Repair</h3>‘Fibre level’ repairs e.g. resewing, reweaving, reknitting and self-healing of electronic fibres, and bulk ‘fabric-level’ repairs e.g. recoating, reprinting and respraying of active materials.Eventually, the e-textile materials would adopt self-healing mechanisms, which would give them the capability of self-repair over time. Also, with a modular approach to future e-textile designs, it is also possible to switch out faulty components easily and rejuvenate the electronic functionalities of the system.<h3>Recycle</h3>In the near term, recycling can be encouraged by categorising and separating e-textiles components into the base textile and the electronic modules.The base textile can be recycled as regular clothing and the electronic components recycled as regular e-waste streams.However, e-textile recycling becomes more complex when the fabrics contain, for example, functionalised electronic fibres with electrical conductivity and sensing capabilities. Extraction in most cases would be time-consuming and costly, say the researchers, so reusing and repurposing used functional components might be a viable option.<h3>Replacement</h3>The research team also notes&nbsp;that while biomass fibres such as those extracted from wool, silk, cellulose, flax and hemp, could provide a renewable source for e-textile production, this is not often possible. This is due to the fact that nano- and microstructured active coatings and functionalised strategies need to be applied to enable electronic functions, that would otherwise be missing. Therefore, novel materials design that utilises earth-abundant elements can accelerate e-textile commercialisation and make them more cost-effective for the average consumer.Additionally, the research team also calls for alternative bioderived material options for electronic fibre encapsulation to create non-irritating and skin-compatible e-textile surfaces. Currently, material options are mostly synthetic and non-biodegradable.<h3>Reduction</h3>This, according to the researchers, can be interpreted in two ways:<ol><li>Reducing the total emissions and energy consumption during e-textile production and deployment.</li><li>Reducing the total amount of material used in e-textiles to achieve and maintain a specified function.</li></ol>“Currently, the scalable commercialisation of e-textiles products is limited by high pricing and lack of diversity, durability and washability,” said co-lead author <a href="http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/profiles/yysh2" target="_blank">Professor Shery Huang</a> from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “This is why materials considerations in the 4R realm (identified as repair; recycle; replace; reduce) need to be addressed in order to secure a sustainable future for e-textiles development.”“Machine washing of e-textiles has, to date, contributed to an increase in microplastic pollution in the water stream. The challenge here is to reinforce the functional longevity of e-textiles, while minimising the number of microparticles released. Strategies for this include the decoupling of transient/single-use components or designing ‘dry’ or ‘vapour-based’ cleaning protocols that consume less water,” said co-lead author Dr Harvey Shi from Western University, Canada.The research team has proposed various sustainable e-textile strategies. For example, an e-textile can be divided as “canvas” and “modules” components. The “canvas” is machine-washable and provides the bulk of the user’s sensory experience, while the “modules” are the interconnected components that carry electronic functionalities.The researchers&nbsp;say that the “canvas” should be designed to maintain reliability as an electrically insulating and chemically inert medium under persistent use and occasional reconfiguration. The “modules” meanwhile, can be designed with various formats to be easily removable and replaceable, so that their electronic functions can be maintained for long-term use.The “canvas” and “modules” can be sorted by three preliminary lifespan ratings: quasi-permanent, with a lifespan of approximately one year; multiple use, with a lifespan ranging from weeks to months; and single-use.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1698479511172-CENTRE_CamDrawing2.png" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Illustration showing the marriage of 4R concepts with functional fibre production/digital additive manufacturing and biofabrication techniques. Credit: Dr Harvey Shi.According to the researchers, the timeline for 4R-integrated e-textiles development can be broken down into the following:In the near term – standardising e-textiles platforms to integrate a variety of electronic modules, leading to innovative processing technologies and industrial standardisation that will bring affordable e-textiles to a broader consumer base.Further developments include: automated assembly processes; a database of functional ink formations for e-textiles developers to use; and establishing standardisation in component decoupling based on longevity ratings – a move that also effectively minimises the release of electronic micro- or nanoparticles into the water stream.<a href="https://www.graphene.cam.ac.uk/people/yifei-pan" target="_blank">Yifei Pan</a>, PhD student in the&nbsp;<a href="https://biointerface.eng.cam.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Biointerface Research Group</a> at Cambridge, said: “Adopting this standardisation approach in the near term can enable developers to create a customised array of cross-compatible functional components; reinforce user safety and public interests in the personalised healthcare and customised non-invasive therapeutics market (i.e. product certification); and can lead to designated cleaning protocols.”In the mid-term – employing user-centric design strategies and innovative processing technologies to offer a broader range of e-textiles to the public, ones that are comfortable to wear and which can be personalised to the user.“This is the point at which self-healing/self-repairing fibres can be achieved through molecular design and without the need for human intervention,” said Dr Shi. “This would effectively create a repairable e-textile ecosystem, in which the product can be readily disassembled and refurbished without adding to the environmental burden.”In the long term – sustainable and ‘living’ e-textiles can be realised, such as engineered robotic skin. Biohybrids, fibre-on-demand and biofabrication technologies will enable these e-textiles to self-clean (thus minimising the requirements for machine washing or solvent-based cleaning), self-repair and be capable of self-regeneration in the future.“In summary, the road towards ‘green’, biohybrid and circular fabrication calls for the marriage of our 4R concepts with functional fibre production/digital additive manufacturing and biofabrication to produce highly customisable e-textile designs,” said <a href="http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/profiles/th270" target="_blank">Professor Tawfique Hasan</a> from the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.graphene.cam.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Cambridge Graphene Centre</a>.Professor Huang added: “As we drive towards future sustainable e-textile manufacturing, there could be a paradigm shift from a centralised mass production strategy with one principal facility to a more widespread additive manufacturing/3D printing platform – ultimately creating and repairing e-textiles on-site.”Reference: HaoTian Harvey Shi; Yifei Pan; Lin Xu; Xueming Feng; Wenyu Wang; Prasad Potluri; Liangbing Hu; Tawfique Hasan; Yan Yan Shery Huang. ‘<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01615-z" target="_blank">Sustainable electronic textiles towards&nbsp;scalable commercialization</a>’. Nature Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-023-01615-z

If electronic textiles (e-textiles) are to have a sustainable future and at scale, then a transition is needed to unlock innovative wearable e-textiles that fit a sustainable circular economy – adopting what has been termed as the 4R design concept: repair; recycle; replace; reduce.

Innovative wearable e-textiles fit for a sustainable circular economy

Early this year, Nordic Semiconductor, in partnership with Mouser Electronics, Soracom, and Crowd Supply, introduced the "Connect for Good: Low Power Sustainability Challenge." This initiative invited engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and developers from all corners of the world to design solutions that address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically focusing on goals related to cities and sustainability.The challenge garnered a whopping 116 entries, a testament to the global community's unwavering commitment to sustainable solutions. From this impressive pool, ten projects have emerged as finalists, exemplifying a blend of technological ingenuity and a dedication to a greener future. Here's a deep dive into these pioneering projects:<h3 dir="ltr">Seismic Sensor Nodes Network by Aleksei Bokov</h3>Aiming to mitigate the devastating consequences of unexpected earthquakes, Aleksei Bokov proposes a network of seismic sensor nodes. These nodes are strategically placed in earthquake-prone areas, ensuring rapid alerts and potentially saving countless lives. Designed to protect public services and the general population, this project stands as a testament to technology's potential in disaster risk reduction.<h3 dir="ltr">Carbonbox Bioreactor by Aris Maaniq</h3>At the intersection of biology and technology lies the Carbonbox bioreactor. This system captures carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust while producing oxygen, thanks to the photosynthetic abilities of microorganisms like cyanobacteria. The real-time monitoring and cloud connectivity make it a robust solution for industries aiming for net-zero emissions.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk4MTQwODIyMDI4LUFyaXMgTWFhbmlxLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">The Carbonbox bioreactor. Image credit: Aris Maaniq<h3 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">Sustainable Logistics Infrastructure by Ivan Araquistain</h3>Redefining the logistics of perishable goods transport, Ivan Araquistain introduces a sustainable transport mechanism. By eliminating the need for refrigerated cargo trailers and integrating AI-driven anomaly detection, this solution not only preserves the cold chain but also curtails operational costs significantly.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk4MTQwODUzMzE4LUl2YW4gQXJhcXVpc3RhaW4uanBnIiwiZWRpdHMiOnsicmVzaXplIjp7IndpZHRoIjo5NTAsImZpdCI6ImNvdmVyIn19fQ==" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Sustainable refrigerated transport. Image credit: Ivan Araquistan<h3 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">SouldNat: The Forest Ears by Marcelo Vieira</h3>Brazil's forests are under constant threat from illegal deforestation and mining activities. Marcelo Vieira's SouldNat leverages AI-powered sound detection to identify potential threats, such as chainsaw noises and unauthorized conversations, enabling timely intervention and preservation of these critical ecosystems.<h3 dir="ltr">Mountain Road Monitoring System by Mayukh Shubhra Saha</h3>Avalanches and landslides in mountainous terrains often lead to prolonged road blockages, stranding travelers. Mayukh Shubhra Saha’s solution employs motion sensors overlooking major mountain roads, allowing real-time detection of landslides and facilitating quick response by authorities.<h3 dir="ltr">ForestGuard by Muhammed Ali Ornek</h3>Forest fires pose a dual threat – both to the environment and to the communities that live close by. ForestGuard, developed by Muhammed Ali Ornek, is a mesh network of IoT devices that monitor atmospheric conditions in forests, providing early detection and risk assessment capabilities for forest fires.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk4MTQwOTA1OTgzLU11aGFtbWVkIEFsaSBPcm5lay5wbmciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">ForestGuard. Image credit: Muhammed Ali Ornek<h3 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">Landslide Alert System by Omkar Khair</h3>With a rise in landslides in regions like Maharashtra, India, Omkar Khair’s Landslide Alert System stands out as a beacon of hope. The system is designed to provide early warnings against extreme weather conditions in landslide-prone zones, potentially saving lives and infrastructure.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk4MTQwOTM2NjYzLU9ta2FyIEtoYWlyLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">A prototype of the Landslide Alert System. Image credit: Omkar Khair<h3 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">Ai Honey Bee Swarm Detector by Patrick Whetman</h3>Bee conservation is crucial for our ecosystems, and Patrick Whetman's project aims to conserve the native bee species, Apis Mellifera Mellifera. His solution ensures minimal energy consumption while optimizing communication, ensuring the safety of these essential pollinators.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1698141608336-Patrick+Whetman.JPG" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Ai Honey Bee Swarm Detector. Image credit: Patrick Whetman<h3 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">Mikoko by Ryan Kiprotich Cheruiyot</h3>Ryan's AI-driven solution, Mikoko, stands at the forefront of mangrove conservation. Recognizing the vital role of mangroves in coastal protection and carbon sequestration, this project employs sensors to monitor the mangrove ecosystem's environmental parameters, ensuring their protection and sustainable management.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1698141646525-Ryan+Kiprotich.jpg" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Render of Mikoko. Image credit: Kiprotich Cheruiyot<h3 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">Range Based Deforestation Monitoring by Vybhav Nag</h3>In a unique approach to forest conservation, Vybhav Nag’'s project uses sound and vibration data to detect potential deforestation activities. This real-time monitoring solution offers an efficient alternative to traditional methods, proving instrumental in the conservation of forests and their inhabitants.<hr>These ten finalists represent the zenith of engineering innovation, driven by a shared commitment to sustainable change. Their projects are more than just technological marvels—they are beacons of hope in our collective journey towards a sustainable future. We commend all participants for their outstanding contributions and look forward with great anticipation to the announcement of the winners on November 8th, 2023. To the finalists, best of luck, and to our vast community of engineers and innovators, let's continue to connect for good!Follow the <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/nordic.semiconductor" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nordic Semiconductor</a> profile to get alerts when new content about the challenge is published.&nbsp;

From seismic sensors to bioreactors, the top ten finalists of the Connect for Good Challenge showcase the power of low-power wireless technology in addressing global sustainability challenges.


Connect for Good: Top 10 Finalists of the Low Power Wireless Sustainability Challenge

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2023/04/boeing-nasa-united-airlines-and-dlr-to-test-saf-benefits-with-air-to-air-flights" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">DLR</a> and has been republished with permission.<hr>In a collaboration to strengthen sustainability in aviation, Boeing [NYSE: BA] is partnering with NASA and United Airlines for in-flight testing to measure how sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) affects contrails and non-carbon emissions, in addition to reducing the fuel's life cycle climate impact.Boeing's second <a href="https://investors.boeing.com/investors/news/press-release-details/2023/Boeing-Expands-ecoDemonstrator-Flight-Testing-with-Explorer-Airplanes-Announces-2023-Plan/default.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ecoDemonstrator Explorer</a>, a 737-10 destined for United Airlines, will fly with 100% SAF and conventional jet fuel in separate tanks and alternate fuels during testing. NASA's DC-8 Airborne Science Lab will fly behind the commercial jet and measure emissions produced by each type of fuel and contrail ice particles. NASA satellites will capture images of contrail formation as part of the testing.The researchers aim to understand how advanced fuels, engine combustor designs and other technologies may reduce atmospheric warming. For example, tests will assess how SAF affects the characteristics of contrails, the persistent condensation trails produced when airplanes fly through cold, humid air. While their full impact is not yet understood, <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2020/03/20200903_global-air-transport-contributes-3-5-percent-to-global-warming" target="_blank">some research has suggested certain contrails can trap heat in the atmosphere</a>.World Energy is supplying SAF for the tests from its Paramount, Calif., facility. Additional support includes:<ul><li>U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is providing funding through the ASCENT Center of Excellence</li><li>GE Aerospace is providing technical expertise and project funding</li><li>German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt or DLR) is providing experts and instrumentation</li></ul><img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1697556949654-image-2000-c615e0211234b4ee06b06a3e82d811b0.jpeg" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">During flight tests, NASA's DC-8 Airborne Science Lab will fly behind the Boeing ecoDemonstrator Explorer to measure emissions and ice particles in contrails. Credit: DLR/NASA/FrizThe project is the latest phase in a multi-year partnership between Boeing and NASA to analyze how SAF can reduce emissions and enable other environmental benefits. Compared to conventional jet fuel, SAF – made from a range of sustainably produced feedstocks – can reduce emissions by up to 85% over the fuel's life cycle and offers the greatest potential to reduce aviation CO2 over the next 30 years. SAF also produces less soot which can improve air quality near airports."We are honored to collaborate with NASA, United Airlines, and other valued partners on research that will strengthen the industry's understanding of the benefits of SAF beyond reducing carbon emissions," said Boeing Chief Sustainability Officer Chris Raymond. "We've solved hard problems before, and if we continue to take meaningful actions, I'm confident we'll achieve a more sustainable aerospace future, together.""Flight testing is complex and resource-intensive, yet it's the gold standard for understanding how sustainable aerospace innovations affect changes in contrails and climate," says Rich Wahls, NASA mission integration manager for the Sustainable Flight National Partnership. "This is why we're bringing NASA's DC-8 to bear on this collaboration, where the valuable flight data will improve our predictive models.""There's no question that contrail formations contribute to global warming, but we don't know the extent of their impact or the benefit of using SAF to combat these formations," said United Chief Sustainability Officer Lauren Riley. "This collaboration between Boeing, NASA and United has the potential to not only help us better understand contrails but to provide the full scope of what our transition to SAF can provide beyond greenhouse-gas reductions.""We at GE Aerospace proudly support this groundbreaking research collaboration that will deepen our scientific understanding of the impact of SAF on emissions for a more sustainable future of flight," said GE Aerospace Vice President of Engineering Mohamed Ali."To achieve climate-compatible aviation, we need close international cooperation. The German Aerospace Center has decades of experience in research on the climate impact of the entire aviation system by advancing measurement technology and simulations," says Markus Fischer, DLR Divisional Board Member for Aeronautics. "The continuation of transatlantic cooperation now finds a new summit and underlines the international commitment to reduce the climate impact from aviation's CO2 and non-CO2 effects."The Boeing <a href="https://www.boeing.com/principles/environment/ecodemonstrator" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ecoDemonstrator</a> program was expanded this year to include <a href="https://investors.boeing.com/investors/news/press-release-details/2023/Boeing-Expands-ecoDemonstrator-Flight-Testing-with-Explorer-Airplanes-Announces-2023-Plan/default.aspx?_gl=1*hdip01*_ga*MTE5NTM3MTU0OS4xNjUyMzAyNTQ3*_ga_3N2PEGZ4HD*MTY5MjA0ODc2MC4yMTguMS4xNjkyMDQ4Nzg0LjAuMC4w" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Explorer</a> airplanes focused on short-term, specific test projects. Boeing and NASA conducted SAF emissions ground testing on an Alaska Airlines 737-9 in <a href="https://aviationweek.com/special-topics/sustainability/nasa-boeing-probe-saf-emissions-777-ecodemonstrator" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2021</a> and ecoDemonstrator 777-200ER and 787-10 flight-test jets in <a href="https://onfirstup.com/boeing/BNN/articles/boeing-nasa-measure-sustainable-aviation-fuel-emissions-1?bypass_deeplink=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2022</a>. Boeing has committed to deliver commercial airplanes compatible with 100% SAF by 2030. The 737-10 is the largest airplane in Boeing's single-aisle 737 MAX family, which reduces fuel use and emissions by 20% compared to airplanes it replaces.<h2>Previous DLR flight tests with sustainable fuels</h2>In 2015, DLR conducted the <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2015/20151009_a-journey-through-an-exhaust-plume-dlr-flight-tests-for-alternative-fuels_15388" target="_blank">ECLIF1 campaign</a>, which examined alternative fuels using two research aircraft, the Falcon 20E and A320 ATRA. These flight tests were continued in 2018 with the <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2018/1/20180124_dlr-nasa-research-flights-over-northern-germany_25776" target="_blank">ECLIF2 campaign</a>, in which the <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/research-and-transfer/research-infrastructure/research-aircraft-fleet/airbus-a320-232-d-atra" target="_blank">A320 ATRA</a> flew with a mixture of kerosene and up to 50 percent Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA). This research demonstrated the beneficial emissions performance of fuel blends with up to 50 percent sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). During the <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2021/02/20210617_significantly-lower-climate-impact-when-using-sustainable-fuels" target="_blank">joint DLR-NASA flight tests in 2018</a>, the <a href="https://www.dlr.de/en/pa" target="_blank">DLR Institute for Atmospheric Physics</a> was able to clearly demonstrate that the fewer soot particles in the exhaust produced by sustainable fuels result in fewer ice crystals in contrails and thus a lower climate impact.

Boeing is working with NASA, DLR and United Airlines to test how sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) affects contrails and non-carbon-dioxide emissions and reduces the fuel's impact on the climate throughout its lifecycle. Boeing's second ecoDemonstrator Explorer, shown here, a 737-10 built for United Airlines, will fly on 100 percent SAF and conventional jet fuel in separate tanks and alternate fuels during the tests. Credit: Boeing

In a collaboration to strengthen sustainability in aviation, Boeing [NYSE: BA] is partnering with NASA and United Airlines for in-flight testing to measure how sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) affects contrails and non-carbon emissions, in addition to reducing the fuel's life cycle climate impact.

Boeing, NASA, United Airlines and DLR to test SAF benefits with air-to-air flights

This article originally appeared in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.kit.edu/kit/pi_2023_079_nachhaltigere-landwirtschaft-durch-globale-umverteilung-von-stickstoffduenger.php" target="_blank" id="isPasted" rel="noopener noreferrer">Karlsruhe Institute of Technology</a> and has been republished with permission.<hr>A growing world population needs sufficient food. Their production leads to increased nitrogen pollution in agriculture due to over-fertilization, which has a negative impact on people, the climate and ecosystems. Models from researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) show that current grain production could be maintained with significantly lower global fertilization if the use of nitrogen fertilizer were distributed evenly across cultivated areas worldwide. They report their results in Communications Earth &amp; Environment (DOI: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00970-8" target="_blank">10.1038/s43247-023-00970-8</a> ).Around 60 percent of the world's nitrogen fertilizer use currently occurs in grain crops such as corn, wheat and rice.&nbsp;These need nitrogen fertilizer to grow and increase their yields.&nbsp;However, large amounts of the fertilizer end up in the soil and groundwater or are released into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide.&nbsp;They pollute the environment and contribute to the loss of biological diversity, climate change and the depletion of the ozone layer.&nbsp;This is particularly problematic in the large growing areas in North America, Europe and East Asia, where comparatively large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are used.&nbsp;KIT researchers have now modeled what effects a global redistribution of nitrogen fertilizer use would have.&nbsp;To do this, they simulated different amounts of fertilizer at different locations and used the LandscapeDNDC biogeochemical model to calculate the total production of corn, wheat and rice between 2015 and 2030. “The background to our investigations was the question of how we can produce enough food without exceeding ecological limits.” says Dr.&nbsp;Andrew Smerald from the Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research - Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), KIT's Alpine Campus in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.<h2>Grain production levels could be maintained with significantly lower global fertilizer use</h2>“Our models show that global total nitrogen fertilizer consumption could be reduced by 32 percent through more even distribution without affecting current levels of grain production,” said Smerald. “This works by redistributing nitrogen fertilizer from traditional growing areas such as China, North America and Europe to less used areas such as sub-Saharan Africa.” The increase in production in these regions then offsets the decline in production in other regions. With this approach, wheat and corn production could use 45 percent and 33 percent less nitrogen fertilizer, respectively, without affecting global production levels. At the same time, nitrate leaching could be reduced by 71 percent in wheat and by 63 percent in corn.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1697111546455-2023_079_Nachhaltigere+Landwirtschaft+durch+globale+Umverteilung+von+Stickstoffduenger_2_72+dpi.jpg" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Models show that a global redistribution of nitrogen fertilizer use would have a positive impact on nitrous oxide emissions. (Photo: Andrew Smerald, KIT)“Our study shows that a more even distribution of nitrogen fertilizer across global cropland would reduce dependence on current breadbaskets and reduce nitrogen pollution in East Asia and other heavily fertilized regions,” says Smerald. Another advantage would be that crops could often be grown closer to where they are needed. For example, an increase in crop yields in Africa would bring the continent closer to self-sufficiency.<hr>Original publicationAndrew Smerald, David Kraus, Jaber Rahimi, Kathrin Fuchs, Ralf Kiese, Klaus Butterbach-Bahl &amp; Clemens Scheer: A redistribution of nitrogen fertilizer across global croplands can help achieve food security within environmental boundaries. Communications Earth &amp; Environment, 2023. DOI 10.1038/s43247-023-00970-8. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00970-8" target="_blank">https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00970-8</a>

Growing grain worldwide requires a high level of nitrogen fertilizer use. KIT researchers show that global redistribution would have a positive impact on the environment. (Photo: Markus Breig, KIT)

Models show that an even global distribution of nitrogen fertilizer could significantly reduce total global fertilization and the resulting environmental impact

More sustainable agriculture through global redistribution of nitrogen fertilizer

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2023/new-tools-available-reduce-energy-that-ai-models-devour-1005" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MIT News</a> and has been republished with permission.<hr>When searching for flights on Google, you may have noticed that each flight's carbon-emission estimate is now presented next to its cost. It's a way to inform customers about their environmental impact, and to let them factor this information into their decision-making.A similar kind of transparency doesn't yet exist for the computing industry, despite its carbon emissions <a href="https://www.climatiq.io/blog/measure-greenhouse-gas-emissions-carbon-data-centres-cloud-computing" target="_blank">exceeding</a> those of the entire airline industry. Escalating this energy demand are artificial intelligence models. Huge, popular models like ChatGPT signal a trend of large-scale artificial intelligence, boosting forecasts that predict data centers will draw up to 21 percent of the world's electricity supply by 2030.The MIT <a href="https://www.ll.mit.edu/r-d/cyber-security-and-information-sciences/lincoln-laboratory-supercomputing-center" target="_blank">Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center</a> (LLSC) is developing techniques to help data centers reel in energy use. Their techniques range from simple but effective changes, like power-capping hardware, to adopting novel tools that can stop AI training early on. Crucially, they have found that these techniques have a minimal impact on model performance.In the wider picture, their work is mobilizing green-computing research and promoting a culture of transparency. "Energy-aware computing is not really a research area, because everyone's been holding on to their data," says Vijay Gadepally, senior staff in the LLSC who leads energy-aware research efforts. "Somebody has to start, and we're hoping others will follow."<h2>Curbing power and cooling down</h2>Like many data centers, the LLSC has seen a significant uptick in the number of AI jobs running on its hardware. Noticing an increase in energy usage, computer scientists at the LLSC were curious about ways to run jobs more efficiently. Green computing is a principle of the center, which is powered entirely by carbon-free energy.Training an AI model — the process by which it learns patterns from huge datasets — requires using graphics processing units (GPUs), which are power-hungry hardware. As one example, the GPUs that trained GPT-3 (the precursor to ChatGPT) are estimated to have consumed 1,300 megawatt-hours of electricity, roughly equal to that used by <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3" target="_blank">1,450 average</a> U.S. households per month.While most people seek out GPUs because of their computational power, manufacturers offer ways to limit the amount of power a GPU is allowed to draw. "We studied the effects of capping power and found that we could reduce energy consumption by about <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09646" target="_blank">12 percent to 15 percent</a>, depending on the model," Siddharth Samsi, a researcher within the LLSC, says.The trade-off for capping power is increasing task time — GPUs will take about 3 percent longer to complete a task, an increase Gadepally says is "barely noticeable" considering that models are often trained over days or even months. In one of their experiments in which they trained the popular BERT language model, limiting GPU power to 150 watts saw a two-hour increase in training time (from 80 to 82 hours) but saved the equivalent of a U.S. household's week of energy.The team then built software that plugs this power-capping capability into the widely used scheduler system, Slurm. The software lets data center owners set limits across their system or on a job-by-job basis."We can deploy this intervention today, and we've done so across all our systems," Gadepally says.Side benefits have arisen, too. Since putting power constraints in place, the GPUs on LLSC supercomputers have been running about 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler and at a more consistent temperature, reducing stress on the cooling system. Running the hardware cooler can potentially also increase reliability and service lifetime. They can now consider delaying the purchase of new hardware — reducing the center's "embodied carbon," or the emissions created through the manufacturing of equipment — until the efficiencies gained by using new hardware offset this aspect of the carbon footprint. They're also finding ways to cut down on cooling needs by strategically scheduling jobs to run at night and during the winter months."Data centers can use these easy-to-implement approaches today to increase efficiencies, without requiring modifications to code or infrastructure," Gadepally says.Taking this holistic look at a data center's operations to find opportunities to cut down can be time-intensive. To make this process easier for others, the team — in collaboration with Professor Devesh Tiwari and Baolin Li at Northeastern University — recently developed and <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13177" target="_blank">published a comprehensive</a> framework for analyzing the carbon footprint of high-performance computing systems. System practitioners can use this analysis framework to gain a better understanding of how sustainable their current system is and consider changes for next-generation systems. &nbsp;<h2>Adjusting how models are trained and used</h2>On top of making adjustments to data center operations, the team is devising ways to make AI-model development more efficient.When training models, AI developers often focus on improving accuracy, and they build upon previous models as a starting point. To achieve the desired output, they have to figure out what parameters to use, and getting it right can take testing thousands of configurations. This process, called hyperparameter optimization, is one area LLSC researchers have found ripe for cutting down energy waste.&nbsp;"We've developed a model that basically looks at the rate at which a given configuration is learning," Gadepally says. Given that rate, their model predicts the likely performance. Underperforming models are stopped early. "We can give you a very accurate estimate early on that the best model will be in this top 10 of 100 models running," he says.In their studies, this early stopping led to dramatic savings: an <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362498394_Energy-aware_neural_architecture_selection_and_hyperparameter_optimization" target="_blank">80 percent reduction</a> in the energy used for model training. They've applied this technique to models developed for computer vision, natural language processing, and material design applications."In my opinion, this technique has the biggest potential for advancing the way AI models are trained," Gadepally says.Training is just one part of an AI model's emissions. The largest contributor to emissions over time is model inference, or the process of running the model live, like when a user chats with ChatGPT. To respond quickly, these models use redundant hardware, running all the time, waiting for a user to ask a question.One way to improve inference efficiency is to use the most appropriate hardware. Also with Northeastern University, the team <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.09781.pdf" target="_blank" data-lf-fd-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">created an optimizer</a> that matches a model with the most carbon-efficient mix of hardware, such as high-power GPUs for the computationally intense parts of inference and low-power central processing units (CPUs) for the less-demanding aspects. This work recently won the best paper award at the International ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing.Using this optimizer can decrease energy use by 10-20 percent while still meeting the same "quality-of-service target" (how quickly the model can respond).This tool is especially helpful for cloud customers, who lease systems from data centers and must select hardware from among thousands of options. "Most customers overestimate what they need; they choose over-capable hardware just because they don't know any better," Gadepally says.<h2>Growing green-computing awareness</h2>The energy saved by implementing these interventions also reduces the associated costs of developing AI, often by a one-to-one ratio. In fact, cost is usually used as a proxy for energy consumption. Given these savings, why aren't more data centers investing in green techniques?"I think it's a bit of an incentive-misalignment problem," Samsi says. "There's been such a race to build bigger and better models that almost every secondary consideration has been put aside."They point out that while some data centers buy renewable-energy credits, these renewables aren't enough to cover the growing energy demands. The majority of electricity powering data centers comes from fossil fuels, and water used for cooling is contributing to stressed watersheds.&nbsp;Hesitancy may also exist because systematic studies on energy-saving techniques haven't been conducted. That's why the team has been pushing their research in peer-reviewed venues in addition to open-source repositories. Some big industry players, like Google DeepMind, have applied machine learning to increase data center efficiency but have not made their work available for others to deploy or replicate.&nbsp;Top AI conferences are now pushing for ethics statements that consider how AI could be misused. The team sees the climate aspect as an AI ethics topic that has not yet been given much attention, but this also appears to be slowly changing. Some researchers are now disclosing the carbon footprint of training the latest models, and industry is showing a shift in energy transparency too, as in this <a href="https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/scaling-autoregressive-multi-modal-models-pretraining-and-instruction-tuning/" target="_blank">recent report</a> from Meta AI.They also acknowledge that transparency is difficult without tools that can show AI developers their consumption. Reporting is on the LLSC roadmap for this year. They want to be able to show every LLSC user, for every job, how much energy they consume and how this amount compares to others, similar to home energy reports.Part of this effort requires working more closely with hardware manufacturers to make getting these data off hardware easier and more accurate. If manufacturers can standardize the way the data are read out, then energy-saving and reporting tools can be applied across different hardware platforms. A collaboration is underway between the LLSC researchers and Intel to work on this very problem.Even for AI developers who are aware of the intense energy needs of AI, they can't do much on their own to curb this energy use. The LLSC team wants to help other data centers apply these interventions and provide users with energy-aware options. Their first partnership is with the U.S. Air Force, a sponsor of this research, which operates thousands of data centers. Applying these techniques can make a significant dent in their energy consumption and cost."We're putting control into the hands of AI developers who want to lessen their footprint," Gadepally says. "Do I really need to gratuitously train unpromising models? Am I willing to run my GPUs slower to save energy? To our knowledge, no other supercomputing center is letting you consider these options. Using our tools, today, you get to decide."Visit <a href="https://vijayg.mit.edu/datacenter-ai-energy-reduction" target="_blank" id="isPasted">this webpage</a> to see the group's publications related to energy-aware computing and findings described in this article.

At the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, researchers are making changes to cut down on energy use. One of their techniques can reduce the energy of training AI models by 80 percent. Photo: Glen Cooper

Amid the race to make AI bigger and better, Lincoln Laboratory is developing ways to reduce power, train efficiently, and make energy use transparent.

New tools are available to help reduce the energy that AI models devour

<h2>Towards a sustainable future</h2>Kunststoffenbeurs 2023, <a href="https://kunststoffenbeurs.nl/news/future-of-plastics-and-rubber-at-the-kunststoffenbeurs-2023-sustainable-smart-and-innovative/" target="_blank">The Plastics And Rubber Trade Fair</a>, took place on September 20th and 21st at the Brabanthallen in &#39;s-Hertogenbosch, marking a significant stride towards sustainable, smart, and innovative practices in the plastics and rubber industry. This event, held annually since 1999, &nbsp;creates a platform for experts, companies, and enthusiasts to explore the future of plastics and rubber.The central theme of this year&#39;s fair was &#39;Future of Plastics,&#39; which encapsulated the ongoing advancements, initiatives, and novel production techniques within the industry. Over 210 industry experts congregated to discuss and showcase the endless opportunities that plastics and rubber present for sustainable product development and production. The unique properties of these materials, such as versatility in color, shape, and weight, along with their compatibility with various production techniques like injection molding, thermoforming, and 3D printing, were highlighted.<h3 dir="ltr">Addressing CO2 emissions</h3>The exhibition floor was bustling with over 210 specialized companies, educational institutions, research projects, startups, and student teams. They delved into various facets of the industry, ranging from plastic processing and shaping, product design and development, to sustainability and machinery construction. One of the notable areas was the Machineplein by Equip-Plast, where 20 exhibitors demonstrated state-of-the-art technology aimed at reducing CO2 emissions and energy consumption in the plastics and rubber industry.A significant part of the event was dedicated to addressing the stigma often associated with plastics. Exhibitors and speakers emphasized the ingenious ability of plastics to optimize resource usage and contribute to sustainability. The EU&#39;s Green Deal&#39;s impact was also discussed, shedding light on the emerging requirement for manufacturing companies to provide CO2 emission data for their products.Prominent industry figures like Merijn Tinga, the Plastic Soup Surfer, and Dirk Groot, the Zwerfinator, took the stage as keynote speakers, sharing their crusade against plastic pollution and exploring the potential of plastic recycling. Their insights were part of a broader congress program aligning with the event&#39;s theme of making the future of plastics sustainable, smart, and innovative.The Rethink Plastics Awards presented by the Federation NRK were a highlight of Kunststoffenbeurs 2023, alongside an expo showcasing sustainably produced products. These segments of the event underscored the industry&#39;s commitment to rethinking traditional practices and steering towards a more sustainable and innovative path.Kunststoffenbeurs 2023 served not just as a trade fair but as a collaborative platform for the entire Benelux plastics and rubber industry, fostering discussions, partnerships, and a shared vision for a sustainable future in plastics. Check the highlights of the event in the video above.&nbsp;

Wevolver attended the recent plastics innovation event. We bring you the highlights. 

Reflecting on the Evolution of Plastics at Kunststoffenbeurs 2023: A Leap Towards Sustainable Innovation

Many companies in the manufacturing industry around the world are striving to improve business value and raise operational efficiency through digital transformation (DX). On the other hand, there is now a strong demand for decarbonization efforts, which curb greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted in production activities to achieve carbon neutrality. The response to these two megatrends of DX and decarbonization has become an important issue in encouraging each company in the manufacturing industry sustainable.The purpose of decarbonization for the manufacturing industry since 2021 onward has changed from social contribution to achieving profits by observing conditions in transactions with customers and enhancing cost competitiveness. Some leading electronic equipment manufacturers have already stated that they will not procure parts or materials from suppliers that are not striving to reduce GHG emissions. An increasing number of investors are also making proactive decarbonization efforts a condition for investment. Moreover, at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) held in November 2021, the so-called 1.5&deg;C target*1 was raised to a stricter mandatory target. It is increasingly likely that policies with strong binding force will be implemented in the future. Those policies include strengthening environment-related regulations and introducing carbon pricing*2 such as carbon taxes. As a result, decarbonization efforts have become directly linked to companies&rsquo; earnings in the manufacturing industry. That means they are starting to have the same meaning as productivity improvements.*1: This is the target to keep the rise in the global average temperature within 1.5&deg;C compared to before the Industrial Revolution.&nbsp;*2: This is the general term for the mechanism to pass on a company&#39;s CO2 emissions to costs. It includes a tax called a carbon tax imposed on the use of fossil fuels and emissions trading to buy and sell CO2 emission allowances to clear environmental regulations. According to the World Bank, carbon pricing has already been introduced in 46 countries and 35 regions as of April 10, 2021.The two megatrends surrounding the manufacturing industry of DX and decarbonization appear to be separate trends at first glance. However, in reality, DX leads to more efficient production activities, energy saving, and decarbonization. Therefore, they have an inseparable relationship. We introduce here how to use DX initiatives as a means to promote decarbonization. In particular, we look at the latest trends in the utilization of information processing technologies such as IoT, AI, and digital twins. We then explain decarbonization in smart factories.<h2>Two Approaches to Promoting Decarbonization in Factories</h2>Many machine tools, industrial robots, motor-driven devices and equipment like compressors, electric heaters, control devices, and other devices and equipment operated by electric power are used in factories. The decarbonization of these devices and equipment operated by electric power has become a major issue in the manufacturing industry.The approaches to decarbonization of devices and equipment that use electric power are broadly divided into two (Fig. 1). One is a method of switching to using sources of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases. Specifically, this includes the utilization of solar power, wind power, and other forms of renewable energy. The other is a method to completely cut out unnecessary power consumption. This is so-called power-saving. Promoting DX is an important condition for pushing ahead with these two approaches.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk1NjUwNzA5Mzg4LXNtYXJ0ZmFjdG9yeV8wOS0xZW4ucG5nIiwiZWRpdHMiOnsicmVzaXplIjp7IndpZHRoIjo5NTAsImZpdCI6ImNvdmVyIn19fQ==" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Fig. 1: Two approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions / Source: Agency of Natural Resources and Energy, Ministry of Economy, Trade and IndustryIn general, the amount of electric power obtained from renewable energy is unstable. It depends on the sun and the wind, for example. However, electric power systems must satisfy the principle of electric power supply called the &quot;same amount at the same time&quot; in which the amount of electric power supplied and consumed is constantly kept the same. The reason for this is that if there is&nbsp;a significant difference in the amount of electric power consumed and supplied, an abnormal load may be applied to power generators, power distribution equipment, electrical equipment, and other devices, causing them to fail, or the electric power quality may become unstable. That may cause malfunctions or power outages. In other words, it is necessary to cover only the electric power that corresponds to the amount consumed in the factory with electric power generated at that time, electric power stored in storage batteries, or other sources of electric power.<h2>Aiming for Compliance with RE100 by Utilizing IoT</h2>In recent years, there has been an increasing number of companies in the manufacturing industry joining the RE100 international environmental initiative. This is an initiative aiming to cover the electric power used in business activities with 100% renewable energy. It is important to introduce an electric power system capable of appropriately managing and controlling the electric power supply and demand balance without lowering productivity or quality and a mechanism to cover the shortfall from countermeasures to realize the ideals of RE100 in factories (Fig. 2).<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNjk1NjUwNzI1NTQ1LXNtYXJ0ZmFjdG9yeV8wOS0yZW4ucG5nIiwiZWRpdHMiOnsicmVzaXplIjp7IndpZHRoIjo5NTAsImZpdCI6ImNvdmVyIn19fQ==" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Fig. 2: Electric power system and mechanism for the realization of RE100-compliant factoriesTo ensure a factory is compliant with RE100, it is first necessary to build a&nbsp;renewable energy utilization infrastructure by introducing power generation and storage equipment for solar power and other forms of renewable energy. It is also important to have a mechanism to store surplus electric power in storage batteries and to cover the shortfall in electric power by visualizing the amount of electric power generated, which changes moment by moment due to changes in the weather, and the amount of electric power consumed in the factory, which increases or decreases depending on the production activity situation.There are more and more examples of companies introducing an electric power management system called the Factory Energy Management System (FEMS) in advanced factories. This is a system that utilizes IoT to monitor the amount of electric power consumed. It then adjusts peak electric power, controls the operation of air conditioners, lighting equipment, and production lines according to the situation, and performs other similar operations. The system visualizes the electric power consumption situation across the entire factory. It then curbs the nonessential and nonurgent operation of equipment and minimizes unnecessary electric power consumption without a drop in productivity. The range of equipment managed by the FEMS has now expanded to include power generation and storage equipment. It has evolved to being capable of maintaining the supply and demand balance in RE100-compliant factories.<h2>Highly Accurate Prediction and Management of the Electric Power Supply and Demand Balance with AI and Digital Twins</h2>Attempts are also underway to further raise the accuracy of management and control with the FEMS by utilizing the latest information processing technologies such as AI and digital twins*3.*3: A digital twin is a digital model that reproduces the same conditions and properties as in the real world by inputting data that reflects the current situation collected by IoT in the design data of real things.For example, technologies are being developed that estimate the amount of electric power obtained from solar power generation. To achieve this, those technologies analyze weather forecast and past track record data using AI to accurately predict the amount of power generated, which can be obtained from the equipment owned by a company. If it is possible to accurately predict the amount of power generated, it becomes possible to more effectively utilize the electric power generated in a company by shifting the peak of electric power consumption through the adjustment of production plans.Moreover, digital twins, which reproduce the conditions and movements over an entire factory using a computer, are being built, and technologies that increase the effect of power-saving measures are also being developed. It is becoming possible to take measures that allow the maximum effect to be obtained without risk by verifying on a digital twin the power-saving effect and the impact on productivity and product quality from&nbsp;the changes in the control and operation conditions of devices and equipment and alterations to production plans.Decarbonization efforts in the manufacturing industry are inseparably related to DX initiatives in factories. Regarding DX-related efforts, it seems important to keep in mind not only productivity and quality improvements, but also decarbonization.<hr id="isPasted"><img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1695650770461-1695650770461.png" class="fr-fic fr-dii">If you have any questions based on this article that you would like to discuss with an expert at Murata, don&#39;t hesitate to reach out. There&#39;s an entire team ready to support you with your question.<a href="https://www.murata.com/en-eu/contactform?&Detail=Wevolver%20request" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" class="button-main-action">GET IN TOUCH</a>

Many companies in the manufacturing industry around the world are striving to improve business value and raise operational efficiency through digital transformation (DX). On the other hand, there is now a strong demand for decarbonization efforts, which curb greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted in production activities to achieve carbon neutrality.

The Inseparable Relationship Between Digital Transformation and Decarbonization and Technologies Essential for a Sustainable Manufacturing Industry

The Norwegian start-up Renasys has made it its mission to transform water filtration and wastewater treatment. A newly developed, innovative filtration system removes 99% of dirt particles and suspended matter over 5 microns in size from the water.80% of the world&rsquo;s wastewater is released into the environment untreated, polluting our rivers, seas and oceans (source: <a href="https://www.unesco.org/en/wwap/wwdr#2017" target="_blank">UN WWDR 2017</a>). One consequence of this is that some 4.5 billion people around the world use contaminated, unclean water (source: <a href="https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-energy-sector-should-care-about-wastewater" target="_blank">IEA</a>). This significantly increases the risk of serious health problems. For example, diseases such as dysentery, typhus, cholera and polio are far more common in countries with poor drinking water quality than in those with clean drinking water. It would cost 8.2 trillion US dollars to modernise and sustainably restructure the global water infrastructure (source: <a href="https://www.oecd.org/env/cc/g20-climate/Technical-note-estimates-of-infrastructure-investment-needs.pdf" target="_blank" data-lf-fd-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">OECD&nbsp;</a>).<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1695018966303-1695018966303.png" style="width: 707px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">With the global population continually growing, industrial expansion progressing and laws becoming ever tighter, wastewater treatment plants and their operators are compelled to improve their water treatment systems. The start-up&nbsp;<a href="https://www.renasys.com/" target="_blank">Renasys</a> is based in Norway, where it also focuses its work: after all, Norway&rsquo;s plan alone of further developing and modernising the existing water infrastructure between 2021 and 2040 will require some 17.6 million US dollars of investment. The country currently has around 2,000 wastewater treatment plants (source:&nbsp;<a href="https://295965-www.web.tornado-node.net/wp-content/uploads/Rapport259.pdf" target="_blank" data-lf-fd-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">Norsk Vann</a>), 93% of which are purely municipal treatment systems, i.e. systems that are only used locally in one place and are not connected to the central water supply systems. In addition, 55% of Norwegian wastewater treatment plants no longer meet the more stringent legal regulations and requirements (source:&nbsp;<a href="https://295965-www.web.tornado-node.net/wp-content/uploads/Rapport259.pdf" target="_blank" data-lf-fd-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">Norsk Vann</a>).Renasys&rsquo;s mission is to preserve, protect and defend the world&rsquo;s most valuable resource. As part of their joint &lsquo;Mission Zero&rsquo;, Renasys and Haver &amp; Boecker have come together as strategic partners and developed a filtration system that removes 99% of wastewater particles over 5 microns in size. This system enables the start-up to achieve a far higher filtration and separation level than legally required in Norway. As a result, the solution is more than promising and can also be transferred to other sectors and areas of use. For example, even today, the innovative Renasys system is not only successfully used in wastewater treatment plants but also in aqua farms. It could also potentially help transform wastewater treatment in the agricultural and shipping sectors as well as in the textile industry and industrial consumer goods production.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1695018981341-1695018981341.png" style="width: 747px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Renasys&rsquo;s work is helping achieve a sustainable circular economy in the water industry and preparing current infrastructures for the future. Furthermore, existing wastewater treatment plants could act as energy suppliers as the filtered particles could be converted into energy and heat through the use of biogas systems, for example. As the primary energy required to do this is already found in the wastewater, no additional energy input would be needed. The amount of energy potentially generated would more than cover the wastewater treatment plants&rsquo; needs and the excess energy could be used elsewhere. The CO2 equivalent emissions would therefore be zero, making the wastewater treatment plants climate neutral or even climate positive. At present, Europe&rsquo;s wastewater treatment plants alone use the same amount of energy as 55 million people, equating to around 12.3% of the continent&rsquo;s population (source:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Basistabelle/Bevoelkerung.html" target="_blank">German Statistical Office</a>). The CO2e savings therefore play an important role in decarbonising the water and wastewater sector. Energy-producing wastewater treatment plants also reduce the dependency on fossil fuels.But how exactly does the Renasys system work and how can it filter so many more particles from the water?&nbsp;At the heart of the filtration system is a very special metal filter mesh. Here at Haver &amp; Boecker, we have been working with Renasys on new technologies for water and liquid filtration since 2018 within the scope of our strategic partnership. The technical solution centres on our patented <a href="https://www.haverboecker.com/en/product-solutions/filter-mesh/rpd-hiflo-s/" target="_blank">MINIMESH&reg; RPD HIFLO-S</a> filter weave. This special filter weave has an innovative three-dimensional mesh structure and pore geometry, which significantly increases the porosity within the same area and enables double the flow rate of standard weaves with the same pore size. In cooperation with Renasys, an innovative, closed-loop wastewater filtration solution was therefore developed that is both efficient and scalable.&nbsp;<img border="0" width="517" src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1695018990309-1695018990309.jpeg" alt="[Translate to English:] MINIMESH® RPD HIFLO-S-Tressen " class="fr-fic fr-dii">In addition to the aforementioned properties, the three-dimensional, high-performance metal filter mesh is also characterised by higher stability and durability. This is where the MINIMESH&reg; RPD HIFLO-S weave&rsquo;s outstanding separation performance and dirt absorption capacity come in as these promote longer filter service lives and usage intervals. As the filter mesh&rsquo;s underlying structure prevents it from becoming blocked as quickly, longer and more efficient filtration phases are possible between the cleaning and backwashing intervals.In addition, the RPD HIFLO-S filter weaves can be made from comparatively thick wires despite being fine pored. This not only has a positive impact on the costs with regard to the standard stainless steel alloys but also makes it possible to use highly corrosion and temperature-resistant special materials, such as duplex/super duplex, Alloy 310 S, Inconel 600, Hasteloy C22 or titanium, which would otherwise not be suitable for use for creating such fine pores.As a further benefit, the pore sizes of the MINIMESH&reg; RPD-HIFLO-S filter weaves can be precisely varied between 5 and 40 microns depending on the application. This enables the desired filtration processes to occur reliably, efficiently and precisely every time. The filter elements used also impress with excellent long-term stability and a long service life.In cooperation with Renasys...&nbsp;we&rsquo;ve taken the first step towards sustainable, closed-loop water treatment. Our advanced Renasys water treatment systems not only enable us to make an important contribution to global climate and water protection, but also show that, as a global community, we can use knowledge, technical innovation and passion to face the greatest challenges of the upcoming climate transformation.At Haver &amp; Boecker, we are proud to work with partners like Renasys to actively shape the road to a more sustainable future with our innovative wire mesh and filter solutions.We invite youOn our website, in addition to an overview of clever solutions in water management, you will find comprehensive technical articles on selected areas of application:&nbsp;<ul><li>Microplastics filtration</li><li>Wastewater filtration and treatment</li><li>Ballast water treatment</li></ul>Click <a href="https://www.haverboecker.com/en/industries/energy-and-the-environment/#c5717?lso=wevolver-wasserfiltration-beitrag&utm_campaign=wasserfiltration&utm_source=wevolver&utm_medium=beitrag&utm_content=_092023" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a> to visit our website and read our professional articles. We look forward to your visit and invite you to contact us directly if you have any questions about our product solutions or your specific requirements - even beyond the areas mentioned.

The Norwegian start-up Renasys has made it its mission to transform water filtration and wastewater treatment. A newly developed, innovative filtration system removes 99% of dirt particles and suspended matter over 5 microns in size from the water.

sustainability

Profiles