As indicated in my management blog "This-Above-All" I am removing all Amazon publicity from my blogs

The reasons for this are given in my blog post, ref. below

The "Public Debt Issue_Who is in debt & to Whom? plus questions of probity concerning elected members of the French Assembly(Deputés) or Senate(Senateurs)

In a couple of words: Tax evasion, 
Unfair gov assistance compaired to the small librarian-bookshop 
Such ill practise is of course widespread which does not mean that it adhears to the notion of "good-will."
some term this as "Tax optimisation when the more exact term is Tax Minimisation.

Read my link above based upon a French TV Special Enquiry whoes essence I have translated to English
For bilingual readers the video on the enquiry by France 2 - Antenne 2 reporters is in French and is a good way to brush up ones foreign languages.

Add your voice and comments to correc, even in a small way, such ill-practise. The general public "the honest Joes are not paying Tax owed by others (Fraudulent Companies and their lobbied henchmen in politics in the enquiry refrence above. 

Adding Value to your Business through Materials Modelling - What's the Evidence for the Economic Impact of Molecular Modelling? - Event blog - Open Innovation

Adding Value to your Business through Materials Modelling - What's the Evidence for the Economic Impact of Molecular Modelling? - Event blog - Open Innovation

This conference abstract is a good summary of the many aspects to be considered in the process of innovation: from R & D to Market in a strategy based upon Molecular Modelling.

Looking forward to conference feed-back.

Fraunhofer UK launch from Materials World Blog

I have just added Materials World's blog to My list of blogs followed that may be found at the foot of my page following the leading blog posts.

I selected the article by Rachel Lawler from which I have taken the following:

"The UK branch of Fraunhofer, Europe’s biggest applied research organisation, at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. The not-for-profit company will partner with UK universities and industry to ensure that the best research makes the transition into commercial success.

The project is already underway with the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics open at the University of Strathclyde. Professor Martin Dawson, head of the new centre, was also in attendance and feeling optimistic about the future of his field thanks to the launch. Since the centre opened in October last year, the field seems to have gone from strength to strength – Dawson estimated that the project has so far secured contracts worth £1.5m. ‘Photonics is often described as the “electronics of the 21st Century”[…] the academic strength of the UK in this area is internationally recognised,’ he said. And while he though it was ‘fitting’ that the first Fraunhofer centre focused on this area of UK expertise, Dawson hoped not to be alone as a Head of Centre for very much longer, as Fraunhofer UK looks to open more centres in the near future."

"Hear, hear"! Perhaps there is a lesson here for other EU countries.
Comments most welcome such is the impact of industrial restructuring in the EU!

PV energy is 40 times more efficient than the best bio-fuels_"Let the sun shine"- on INNOVATIONS!

In his paper in the magazine bioplastics entitled "From the (agricultural) field to the (car) wheel"
Michael Carus, Managing Director of the nova-Institute Hürth Germany attempts to answer the following 
Millennium class questions: " What will be the future of mobility?" and "Which solution is both land-efficient
and sustainable?"

On the one hand Biofuel (photosynthesis based) candidates are biodiesel,bioethanol, BTL 
(biomass to liquid) and on the other is PV-photovoltaic which they call "e-mobility." 

In this work they compare land efficiency (average energy yield per hectare for different biofuels
with that of a solar driven electric car hence the title of their article 
"from the agricultural field to the car wheel"

Naturally German conditions are used but the author argues that there is little difference 
compared to other regions. He explains this in simple terms

The energy figures for both approaches are listed for easy comparison.

The full article may be found at the following link:

From the field to the wheel_Feb 17, 2012

PS "Is there any urgent need need for shale gas and oil via fracking?" Comments more than welcome.

End-of-Life Tyres (ELTs). update and review by B. Messenger Editor of Waste Management World magazine

This article was my first choice to introduce readers to the Waste Management World magazine. Indeed it was not so long ago that local authorities in my region of France-La Nièvre voiced their concern about the problems caused by used tyres and their ever increasing stock piles.

TACKLING TYRE WASTE

With the rapidly growing number of vehicles around the world, the disposal of end-of-life tyres is a growing issue. Often simply dumped by the million to pose a serious environmental, health and fire risk, the technology to recover higher value materials and energy from waste tyres is moving forward.

The recovery of energy and materials from used tyres is big business. According to a report by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, in 2008 around one billion End-of-Life Tyres (ELTs) were being produced globally each year. A further four billion were estimated to be held in stockpiles and landfills. Around the world it is estimated that some 1.5 billion new tyres are produced annually.

Figures published by the U.S. Rubber Manufacturers Association estimate that the U.S. - the world's largest producer of ELTs - generated 291.8 million tyres in 2009. With an average weight of 33.4 pounds (15.1 kg) that equates to some 4.4 million tonnes. According to statistics published by the European Tyre & Rubber Manufacturers' Association (ETRMA), in 2010 Europe produced around 2.7 million tonnes of ELTs.

TRADITIONAL APPROACHES:
Using traditional recycling techniques, granulated rubber recovered from waste tyres can be used variously as an aggregate, in tiles, adhesives, asphalt, sports surfaces, and extruded rubber products, to name but a few of its uses. And in terms of energy recovery the natural rubber fraction of the tyre can be considered as a renewable energy source.



REASONS TO GET MORE TOP CHEMICAL ENGINEERS  MANAGERS INVOLVED. 

With so many ELTs being produced, as well as the huge stockpiles from the past, waste tyres pose many potential dangers. They can contaminate groundwater, harbour disease carrying mosquitoes in pooled water and they are not only flammable, but once ablaze, extremely difficult to extinguish.

Often the result of arson, fires at tyre dumps are not uncommon. In 1990 Hagersville, Ontario was the scene of one of the worst tyre fires in history. As a mechanised army of fire fighters struggled to gain control of the situation, for 17 days 14 million tyres packed onto the 11 acre site spewed toxic clouds of thick black smoke into the air.

According to the New York Times, in addition to the toxic fumes, around 158,000 gallons (600,000 litres) of oil was released by the melting rubber was collected from the site. Chemical pollutants, suspected to have been caused by the operation to extinguish the fire were also found in the aftermath of the blaze.

In a separate incident an underground dumpsite in Wales,[UK] thought to contain around 9 million tyres, burned for an astonishing 15 years following its ignition in 1989.

HOPE ON HAND-High Value Alternatives

While the recovery of rubber, steel and energy from a potentially hazardous waste stream is certainly a big improvement over the not too distant past, increasingly a number of projects around the world are looking to ELTs as a potential source of much higher value materials.

One example of this is Dynamic Energy Alliance Corporation (DEAC), which recently relocated its headquarters from Memphis Tennessee to Dallas, Texas. The company has initiated the prototype phase of a project to validate its patent pending technologies to extract high value organic compounds from waste tyres. DEAC's process involves using pyrolysis to process ELTs with the production not only of energy, but of five marketable products – recycled carbon black, pyrolysis oil, fuel and extracts, a high BTU gas and steel.

The process the company is developing melds two technologies that it recently acquired licenses for, the Terpen Kraftig (TKF) Fractionator and Pyrolytic Augmentation.

The Pyrolytic Augmentation technology includes a series of specialised chemical compounds, which when combined within a pyrolysis plant are intended to enable the decomposition of the tyres to occur at lower temperatures - which would be a critical energy-saving benefit.

According to DEAC, a reactor technology included in the license allows it to recover additional high value organic compounds during tyre processing by changing the chemical reaction that's part of the de-vulcanization process used to convert the tyres' rubber into valuable products.

"The intellectual property includes a class of catalysts new to this industry but with exciting potential to improve the economics of waste tyre processing," explains Dr. Earl Beaver, chief technology officer of DEAC.

"The lower temperature enabled through the catalysts should allow for lower energy costs, lower maintenance costs and higher outputs of the most valuable liquid products and carbon black from tyre pyrolysis," he continues.

The TKF Fractionator process will capture the friable materials in the pyrolysis oil and purify them into high value organic compounds used in the fragrance, cosmetic and solvent industries - without disturbing the oil's hydrocarbon market value.

According to the company, the TKF processes, as adapted to its specifications, would produce up to 20 individual components at purity levels that are in high demand.

The process would consist of a series of unit operations functioning at a narrow range of temperatures, pressures, and volumes – which DEAC anticipates to yield the separation needed to maintain the purity and value of the products. Some of the 20 materials would be made in high purity for use as feedstock for downstream products, while others would be synthetic versions of natural products such as flavours, extracts and essential oils.

While the technology is still in the prototype phase, Charles R. Cronin, Jr., DEAC's chairman, is confident: "We believe these combined processes have the potential to produce more energy than the sum of the energy used to make the original tyre plus the energy expended to recover the products. These technologies may have the ability to transform the waste tyre industry from a landfill or rubber products business into a specialty chemical business."

Cronin added that the additional value will soon be validated in a life cycle analysis.(LCA)

The Tygre Project

is an EU project and consortium involving a number of commercial and academic European organisations

PYReco

Based in Redcar in the North East of England, PYReco is planning a facility which will use pyrolysis to breakdown tyres into high tensile steel, carbon black, diesel oil and syngas without producing any waste.

Conclusions

Ben Messenger, Managing Editor of WMW Magazine concludes: 

"While there are still some concerns surrounding illegal dumping or exporting of ELTs, the high recovery rates both in the U.S. and Europe are encouraging. However, in common with other waste streams, the greatest environmental and economic benefits from the treatment of ELTs lie furthest up the waste hierarchy.

Given the expanding global vehicle base, and the consumable nature of tyres, prevention is probably unattainable. Indeed, for the foreseeable future the number of waste tyres being generated globally will continue to grow. And for passenger car tyres, reuse options, such as retreading, are limited.

While the use of tyres as TDF is certainly better than landfilling or stockpiling, there are many interesting projects on the horizon which offer the potential of recovering not only energy or low value materials, but a wide range of high value materials and energy.

Around the world such projects are numerous. Not all will be commercially successful, but there are simply too many to think that none will make it. The date may not yet have been set, but the way in which waste tyres are treated looks set for a revolution."

READ the full article of 22 April 2013 by Ben Messenger Managing Editor of Waste Management World magazine in WMW magazine (LINK)

Stainless steel optimization from quantum mechanical calculations_No getting away from a great material "Steel, nor from a great journal_Nature Materials

No getting away from Nature Materials -Hope to come back to this theme.

Stainless steel optimization from quantum mechanical calculations

Levente Vitos^1,2, Pavel A. Korzhavyi¹ & Börje Johansson^1,3

Abstract

Alloy steel design has always faced a central problem: designing for a specific property very rarely produces a simultaneous significant improvement in other properties^1, 2. For instance, it is difficult to design a material that combines high values of two of the most important mechanical characteristics of metals, hardness and ductility. Here we use the most recent quantum theories of random alloys³ to address a similar problem in the design of austenitic stainless steels, namely, to combine high mechanical characteristics with good resistance against localized corrosion. We show that an optimal combination of these basic properties can be achieved in alloys within the compositional range of commercial stainless steels. We predict, first, that Fe₅₈Cr₁₈Ni₂₄alloys possess an intermediate hardness combined with improved ductility and excellent corrosion resistance, and, second, that osmium and iridium alloying additions will further improve the basic properties of this outstanding class of alloy steels.

REFERENCE: Nature Materials 2, 25 - 28 (2003) 

Published online: 15 December 2002 | doi:10.1038/nmat790

Subject Categories (in Nature Materials nmat for short): Metals and alloys | Computation, modelling and theory

Batteries and superchargers explained. 'Battery' that Charges 100 Times Faster-due to a material crafted by engineers from UCLA for use as a high-performance 'supercapacitor'

I have blogged this article for educational purposes as much as for the high quality of the research behind it. If UCLA is a reference in itself the work was done and published by an international team not highlighted by some news.   
Co-authors of the study included Dunn; Sarah Tolbert, a UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor; Augustyn and fellow UCLA Engineering graduate student Jong Woung Kim; Cornell University professor Héctor Abruña; Cornell postgraduate researcher Michael Lowe; Patrice Simon, a professor at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France; and graduate student Jérémy Come and researcher Pierre-Louis Taberna of the Université Paul Sabatier.  
cf. Peer reviewed publication, Nature Materials-Letters in end references. 

If I may venture a comment in the face of such distinguished researchers and journalist it is that this work is one more excellent example of  Richard Feynman's lecture title "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" incidently given at Caltech on December 29, 1959 's 

Batteries and supercapacitors differ in the way they store electrical power. 

-Batteries store power in the form of chemical energy, and while that's a very efficient way to store a considerable amount of power, it makes charging and power delivery relatively slow: electrons (or other charged particles, lithium ions being one common example) must work their way through a solid substance in both directions, which takes time. 

-Supercapacitors, on the other hand, essentially just "hang" those charged particles on a matrix without forcing them to migrate though a solid material, meaning that charging can take place as fast as the electrons can move. But the technology is limited by the fact that storage takes place only along the capacitor material's surface area, which means that once the material gets larger than wafer-thin, its storage capacity per unit of weight drops.

Plenty of room at the bottom and below is an Illustration of the form of nobium oxide synthesized by UCLA researchers (UCLA/Nature Materials)

Illustration of form of nobium oxide synthesized by UCLA researchers (UCLA/Nature Materials)

The team at  UCLA reports that it has made a significant step in addressing this persistent problem with supercapacitors, namely, the limitations on their effective size.

The researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have found a way to use niobium oxide as a matrix to allow the fabrication of supercapacitors the size of batteries, but which could conceivably charge and deliver power hundreds of times as quickly as typical batteries can.

Their synthesized a material that shows high capability for both the rapid storage and release of energy.

Scope of Applications:

Improvement in the power delivery of systems ranging from urban electrical grids to regenerative braking in hybrid vehicles through this new synthesized a material that shows high capability for both the rapid storage and release of energy. The UCLA researchers claim that the development could lead to extremely rapid charging of devices, ranging in applications from mobile electronics to industrial equipment. For example, supercapacitors are currently used in energy-capture systems that help power loading cranes at ports, reducing the use of hydrocarbon fuels such as diesel.

The paper, published in the April 14 issue of the journal Nature Materials, a team led by professor of materials science and engineering Bruce Dunn defines the characteristics of a synthesized form of niobium oxide with a great facility for storing energy. The material would be used in a "supercapacitor," a device that combines the high storage capacity of lithium ion batteries and the rapid energy-delivery ability of common capacitors.

UCLA researchers said the development could lead to extremely rapid charging of devices, ranging in applications from mobile electronics to industrial equipment. For example, supercapacitors are currently used in energy-capture systems that help power loading cranes at ports, reducing the use of hydrocarbon fuels such as diesel.

"Blurring the lines between what is a battery and what is a supercapacitor," according to Veronica Augustyn, a graduate student in materials science at UCLA and lead author of the paper. "The discovery takes the disadvantages of capacitors and the disadvantages of batteries and does away with them."

Batteries effectively store energy but do not deliver power efficiently because the charged carriers, or ions, move slowly through the solid battery material. Capacitors, which store energy at the surface of a material, generally have low storage capabilities.

Researchers on Dunn's team synthesized a type of niobium oxide that demonstrates substantial storage capacity through "intercalation pseudocapacitance," in which ions are deposited into the bulk of the niobium oxide in the same way grains of sand can be deposited between pebbles.

As a result, electrodes as much as 40 microns thick — about the same width as many commercial battery components — can quickly store and deliver energy on the same time scales as electrodes more than 100 times thinner.

Dunn emphasizes that although the electrodes are an important first step, "further engineering at the nanoscale and beyond will be necessary to achieve practical devices with high energy density that can charge in under a minute."

REFERENCES:

People & Universities involved: Co-authors of the study included Dunn; Sarah Tolbert, a UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor; Augustyn and fellow UCLA Engineering graduate student Jong Woung Kim; Cornell University professor Héctor Abruña; Cornell postgraduate researcher Michael Lowe; Patrice Simon, a professor at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France; and graduate student Jérémy Come and researcher Pierre-Louis Taberna of the Université Paul Sabatier

.

Material & Financial Support:

The research from the Energy Frontier Research Centers, UCLA-based Molecularly Engineered Energy Materials and Cornell–based Energy Materials Center, was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy; a European Research Council grant supported research from Université Paul Sabatier.

The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, established in 1945,Ranked among the top 10 engineering schools at public universities nationwide, 

MORE REFERENCES & LINKS:
Imagine a 'Battery' that Charges 100 Times Faster | Science | ReWire | KCET

REFERENCE: UCLA_Engineers craft material for high-performance 'supercapacitor'

Reference: Nature Materials-Letter 14 April 2013.    Supplimentary Material