After 6 months ...
The war in Ukraine has now been going on for six months and there is no end in sight. We in Europe are feeling the effects both privately and economically. Many of our companies have lost their markets in Russia. There are warnings of gas shortages in the coming winter months. Inflation is causing us problems, especially for the less well-off. For these reasons, there are now calls for some kind of peace agreement with Russia, such as from Herbert Diess, until recently VW's CEO.
But our problems are nothing compared to the suffering of Ukraine, where Russian missiles continue to destroy hospitals, schools, train stations and homes. Russian troops are looting and stealing millions of tons of grain, they have stolen agricultural machinery, especially combine harvesters. They are looting private homes. In recent weeks they have stolen huge coils of sheet steel. Any "peace agreement" would be a victory for Putin. After taking Crimea in 2014, he would perhaps also gain the Donbass region - Donetsk and Luhansk and perhaps even areas on the southern coast of Ukraine. Ukraine would then be weakened, perhaps even landlocked. And after a certain time, Vladimir Putin would then be tempted to conquer another part of Ukraine. In my opinion, only a clear defeat of the Russian invaders would send a clear signal.
A major discovery
Galvanotechnik readers know that rare earths (RE) are an important component of modern technology. They probably also know that China dominates the global SE market. China not only mines these rare earths, but also refines REEs mined in other countries, such as Australia. But now we learn of a newly discovered very large SE deposit in Turkey. The reservoir of newly discovered rare earths is said to be the second largest in the world, after China. The new deposits are located near the city of Eskisehir in the central Anatolian plain of Turkey (Fig. 1) and are situated on NATO territory, which is of increasing importance to Western industry. The Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources estimates that the 694 million tons believed to be there contain enough rare earths to supply the world for a millennium (by comparison, China's SE reserves are estimated at 800 million tons). "Our goal is to process 570,000 tons of ore annually when the plant reaches its full capacity," said Turkish President Erdogan. This would be a solution to a major problem that is delaying the world's efforts to green development and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, skeptics have pointed out that the details are vague and the amounts quoted relate to the amount of ore found; the actual amount of rare earths produced will, as always in mining, depend on the purity of the ore. The European Commission found last year that 98% of rare earths in the EU are imported from China, while the figure for the US is around 80%. Last year, China's exports amounted to just under 49,000 tons, which makes Turkey's figures look attractive. It is estimated that the purity of the rare earths found in Turkey is 2%, which would provide enough processed ore to supply the world market for 40 to 50 years - but only at current demand levels. In order to convert the new Turkish discoveries into usable exports, the necessary processing plants must also be built, an extremely complex undertaking. Rare earths are not really rare, but the minerals known as rare earths are extremely difficult to separate from the deposits in which they occur and from each other. The Turkish deposit, while large, is comparable to others recently discovered in the US, Canada and Australia, not to mention longer-standing deposits in Brazil, Russia and Vietnam. While this is very good news, some questions remain. Will the SE processing plants be located in Turkey or in the EU? Secondly, it must be remembered that Erdogan has been a very difficult "partner" for a long time. He wants Turkey to join the EU - but he also seems to be close to Russia. The EU is not sure it wants Turkey as a member - I think Erdogan could use this new discovery as a "bargaining chip".
Nothing at all
Fig. 2: Front and back of the new Nothing 1 cell phone, with (left) the new Glyph interface"Garnichts" - in English "Nothing" is the somewhat strange name of a new smartphone that was introduced a few weeks ago. Readers might ask themselves - aren't there already enough cell phones on the market? From iPhones that can cost up to 1500 euros to those that cost little more than 30 euros in the supermarkets. The new Nothing 1 is an Android phone in the 400 to 600 euro price range. So how does it differ from others on the market? Unlike many of its competitors, which have three or even four cameras, it only has two. The company claims that it is pointless to have so many cameras - that this is just a marketing tactic and that these extra cameras are usually of very low quality. But in one respect it is unique in the market. The back of the Nothing phone is transparent, and there are 900 LEDs underneath. This is called the "Glyph" interface. Figure 2 shows the front and back of the Nothing 1 and gives an impression of the quality of the display. These 900 LEDs can be used to convey "silent messages". In a meeting, for example, the user can place the cell phone upside down on the table and receive "silent messages". In poor lighting conditions, the 900 LEDs can also be used as a flash unit. Otherwise, according to experts, the new cell phone is no better and no worse than others in the same price category. Will it catch on? Is the new Glyph surface a really useful innovation? Or is it just a gimmick? The Nothing 1 is manufactured in China (no surprise!) and also in India. We can only wait and see how it sells in a highly competitive market.
A dirty little secret
The pandemic has been bad news for most of us. But there have also been some winners, particularly manufacturers of exercise bikes, including those of Peloton's models. However, as the Financial Times now reports, there were serious rust problems on the steel frames of the bikes. Apparently, the company started a program called "Project Tinman" to treat the rust under the paint layer and form a conversion coating - allegedly to form a black iron oxide. The extent to which this rust was successfully hidden from customers is still unknown. But how amazing that in the 21st century a major American company was apparently unable to properly paint a steel surface.
Graphene foam - a new material
Fig. 3: Contact angle instrumentAnewly established company in Scotland, Integrated Graphene Foam(www.integratedgraphene.com), is now producing high purity 3D graphene foam, a new material with many exciting applications. The foam is produced at room temperature and is usually applied to a film or foil. Initial applications include medical electrodes that can be used as biosensors for real-time cardiac monitoring and other medical applications. On a much larger scale, the material can be used as a supercapacitor for energy storage. As part of the so-called Lighthouse Project, the company is testing off-road electric vehicles with lithium batteries supplemented by supercapacitors. The patented process is intended to produce cost-effective, stable graphene foams with good electrical conductivity. Other possible applications include tests in the food industry. The company has a store (on the website) where samples are sold for evaluation and - unusually - also an instrument for contact angle measurement with sessile (lying) drops and advancing and receding drops - a recognized method for measuring surface energy and thus surface purity. The method is frequently used in surface technology (Fig. 3). I know of only one other company that offers such a device.
The future of self-driving cars - optimists and pessimists
Late one evening in May, a car came to a halt at an intersection in downtown San Francisco. No one was behind the wheel. It was soon joined by another driverless vehicle, then another, so that up to 20 vehicles gathered in the heart of the city and came to a halt (Fig. 4).
It took more than an hour for a team of human workers to manually move them out of the way. In Silicon Valley, where big tech giants and established automotive industry heavyweights are struggling to realize a dream that industry giants have been promising for a decade, such problems are commonplace. Earlier this year, it was reported that a slow-moving Apple test vehicle almost hit a jogger. "I really think autonomous driving is a solved problem," said Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, eight years ago.
Fig. 4: Around 20 self-driving "cruise" cars blocked an intersection in San Francisco due to a technical problemDespitethe innovation that new robo-taxis have brought to the streets of California and Arizona, this technology is still in development. The question is how long it will be before driverless vehicles can universally navigate complex roadways - and safely interact with the people on and around them. Rodney Brooks, a leading Australian robotics expert and entrepreneur, predicts that it could be 10 years before we see truly autonomous cars in our cities. Some of the world's biggest tech companies - from Google to Amazon, which bought start-up Zoox two years ago for an estimated $1.2 billion - have collectively invested billions of dollars in accelerating these ambitions. Tesla, which has launched semi-autonomous tools such as its Autopilot system, is one of these companies.
Few contenders have been scrutinized as closely as Apple, which has been quietly trying to develop its own car since 2014. But even with this company, progress has been slow. The secretive automotive project, known internally as Project Titan, has undergone a series of management changes and shifts in focus. The company is known to have suffered several serious incidents. One of the company's test vehicles narrowly missed hitting a jogger in the first quarter of this year, according to tech news website The Information, which later noted that the car would likely have hit the person had a human backup driver not braked at the last moment. Apple declined to comment. Even companies that focus on building fleets of autonomous cabs, rather than selling them, have faced significant teething problems. Last month, Cruise, a company controlled by US carmaker General Motors, offered driverless rides to paying customers in a major city for the first time - but only between 10pm and 6am.
A few days later, however, the company apologized "to anyone who was inconvenienced" after the San Francisco Examiner learned that more than 20 of the vehicles had been standing motionless in the city for around two hours instead of transporting customers.
Waymo, which was launched as a Google project in 2009, offers a similar service in Phoenix, Arizona. Although the company is based in Silicon Valley, three years ago it bought Latent Logic, a spin-off from Oxford University, and now has a team of researchers, scientists and engineers from the UK developing simulations of the behavior of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.
This issue is one of the key challenges for autonomous vehicles. "It's one thing to measure the space around the car with radar, cameras and light detection lasers," said Michael Dunne of ZoZo Go, an automotive engineering consultancy. But activities that are handled intuitively by human drivers, such as adjusting speed when another car changes lanes, are still "very difficult" for autonomous vehicles to master. It becomes difficult when it comes to predicting what will happen next.
To drive safely on the road, these cutting-edge vehicles must learn to monitor, navigate and respond to older vehicles that don't have the same sophisticated technology. "How do cars that are 'extremely smart' interact with cars that are less smart or 'dumb' and don't have sensors?" asks Dunne. Brooks, co-founder of robotics start-up Robust AI, suggested that premature predictions of an imminent driverless revolution have slowed progress. For all the talk about the introduction of such vehicles, Brooks said it will not become ubiquitous until there is an infrastructure where these vehicles can operate in dedicated autonomous systems.
Even though the technology is becoming more advanced, self-driving cars still face high financial and legal hurdles. There is also the question of how many people will be willing to pay for it. "It's great, but do we really need it? It's cool, but is it useful?" asked one expert. "I just can't think of any real justification why we need autonomous vehicles for a commercial purpose." The prospect of being driven from A to B by a robot still triggers fears today. "We've never done this as a society," said Eshed Ohn-Bar, assistant professor at Boston University. "We've never let [artificial intelligence] take the wheel, so to speak, and make life and death decisions." Sometimes digital assistants like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa - which are among the most obvious applications of AI in daily life so far - "do things wrong," he noted. "You're basically not going to want to let Siri take the wheel, are you? Maybe she'll call your mom instead of the pizza place; something like that. It's not a bad thing, but when you're on the road, it's a life or death decision." Governments around the world will face a difficult decision on whether or not to allow these new vehicles on public roads. Or whether, as has happened in the US, they will restrict the use of autonomous vehicles to certain times and roads.
A new record for pilotless aircraft
Fig. 5: The Airbus Zephyr The Airbus "Zephyr" (Fig. 5) has broken its own record for the longest flight duration of a pilotless aircraft. The solar-powered aircraft remained in the air for 26 days. In contrast to some previous flights, it flew thousands of kilometers. It has still been in the air since mid-July, and who knows how much longer it will fly. Now that Airbus has successfully demonstrated the concept, the question arises as to what it can be used for. Again, military applications are conceivable, even though Zephyr flies relatively slowly and could probably be easily shot down. Although this aircraft is something completely different from a space satellite, it can perform many of the same tasks - observing the Earth's surface, acting as a radio transmitter or for other telecommunications purposes. The Zephyr is - currently - much cheaper to build and launch than a satellite, and it has another special feature: it can land very easily on solid ground. I understand that Zephyrs are now being produced in Farnborough in the UK, and Airbus is promoting them on its website for a range of applications.
Not so green either
Millions of solar panels in California are at risk of ending up in landfills at the end of their lifespan. Over the past two decades, more than 1.3 million homeowners and builders have taken advantage of state incentives to install solar panels on their roofs. However, they only have a lifespan of 25-30 years, and the disused panels are gradually piling up in landfills, raising fears that they are contaminating groundwater with toxic metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium. Sam Vanderhoof, a solar industry expert and CEO of Recycle PV Solar, told the Los Angeles Times that it is estimated that only one in ten panels are recycled because the process is expensive and time-consuming. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it costs about $20 to $30 to recycle a panel, while it only costs $1 to $2 if it ends up in a landfill. "The industry is supposed to be green," Vanderhoof said. "But it's really all about the money."
California, which has abundant sunshine year-round, has been a pioneer in adopting solar energy. In 2006, it introduced the California Solar Initiative, which provided $3.3 billion in subsidies for the installation of rooftop solar panels. While the program was considered a success, officials are now wrestling with how to safely dispose of the panels. Serasu Duran, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary's Haskayne School of Business in Canada, warned in an academic paper last year that the industry was "probably not prepared for the (...) flood of waste". The problem is not limited to California - according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar panel was installed every 60 seconds in the US last year. Duran told the LA Times, "While there's been a focus on building this renewable capacity, there hasn't been much consideration of the end of life of these technologies." California has a problem now - but will we in Europe face it in due course?
Only in Japan!
Fig. 6: The upright sleeping pod will allow Japanese office workers to take a napAtthe end of this month's letter, some news from Japan. In Japan, employees will soon be able to take a short nap in the office while standing up in vertical sleep pods. The "nap boxes" support the user's head, back and knees and prevent them from falling over. Saeko Kawashima of Itoki, the furniture company behind this innovation, told Bloomberg: "In Japan, there are many people who lock themselves in the bathroom to sleep for a while, which I don't think is healthy. It's better to sleep in a comfortable place." And so his company has launched the "sleep box" (Fig. 6). Japanese workers are known for working long hours and rarely taking a day off - despite official efforts to change the work culture. To combat the long working hours in many companies and organizations - and the resulting deaths from overwork, known as "karoshi" - the government passed the Work Style Reform Act in 2018. The new regulations allow overtime of up to 45 hours per month, but up to 100 hours during peak periods. Fatalities are defined as "karoshi" if the employee has worked more than 80 hours of overtime in a month. There are also exceptions to the overtime limits for highly qualified, well-paid professionals. Falling asleep in meetings is not uncommon in Japanese companies. Some workers have perfected the art of sleeping standing up on evening commuter trains. "Many Japanese people tend to work continuously without breaks," Kawashima said. "We hope that companies can use the Sleep Box as a more flexible approach to their breaks. And my verdict? Madness - a symptom of a sick society! Or as they say in English: "Sweet Dreams!"
