Magnets aren’t US anymore

The permanent magnetic is a quiet, unobtrusive work horse in so many applications that it, like many things that are mechatronics related, is mind bogglingly (is that a word?) pervasive.  Magnets are the key material technology to enable high efficiency and power dense electric motors.  And electric motors are everywhere.

The particular magentic material that has enabled the CD, DVD, Hard Disk Drive, high performance speakers, magnetic resonance imaging and many other technical wonders, is Neodymium Iron Boron.  Based on General Motors research on magnet materials (in the 1980’s), scientists found a particular molecule of these materials which exhibited extremely high magnetic strength.  And, of course, one of the immediate benefits would be reducing the size of starter motors in cars by 30% and the weight of the motors by even more.  Great stuff!

But making the molecule wasn’t exactly a picnic.  Alloying was easy, but it turned out you had to cool the material down suddenly in order to get just the right molecule to form in a powder and then sinter and magnetize the result.  A whole new process had to be developed, called spin casting, to cool the material quickly enough to generate high quality raw material for NeFeB magnets.   I’m sure there are a lot more technical details, but I don’t remember much from my tour of the GM Magnequench facility in Indiana.  It’s been several years.

NeFeB alloy has been dramatically improved and as demand has increased, fortunately, the price has dropped from the extremely high levels during it’s introduction.  As prices have declined it is estimated that 16,571 tons of Neodymium were used in magnet making in 2009 and 24,635 tons will be used by the year 2014.  That’s an increase of 48% in five years.  That’s huge.

The reason for all the increase is the fact that NeFeB magnets make really efficient motors.  So the new generation of appliance motors and air conditioning compressort that include NeFeB magnetics to increase the flux of the rotor combined with electric and hybrid car motors are driving demand more more magnets.  And now some emerging technology in the wind power marketplace, direct drive generators, will require many tons of additional material.

But what about our friends at GM Magnequench?  They’re gone!  The great future, full of potential for a US manufacturing company, lost to the sale of the company and closing the manufacturing facility.  GM sold the company to New Materials Technology in Toronto which is owned by China.  But the new owners couldn’t run the US factory at a profit.  Even at $20/hour for labor.  All the manufacturing jobs, gone.

There is currently no NeFeB magnet manufacturing in the US.  Which is kind of crazy when you think of all the applications we have for the stuff.  Even worse is the fact that a lot of advanced military hardware is dependent upon the magnets for guidance motors on missiles and a host of other applications.  And according to one source China now owns 97% of the world’s Rare Earth Elements sources.    Which is why there are now hundreds of companies in China selling magnets.

On the positive side, this has lead to overall declining prices for these magnets.  But will that continue to be the case?  The Chinese government is expecting to decrease their exports of magnets by 34% next year.  This could spell trouble for many companies.

But there is hope. The USGS has reported that the Mountain Pass Mine in Southern California is one of the largest and richest deposits of Rare Earths, including Neodymium, in the world.  And Molycorp is ramping up to fill the gap with new mining and manufacturing capacity.  Go get ‘em guys! Free enterprise at work.

The Crisis of Leadership

I would like to take a slight detour from the generally technical and economic posts.  The underlying issue to many of the challenges that we face in energy and technology has to do with how we make decisions as individuals, companies and as a culture.

I submit that the current “energy crisis” is largely self inflicted.  Electric power utilities have not been permitted to build new capacity for 30 years.  Any surprise that we have shortages?  Most of the commentary has to do with environmental studies that prevent the permits to be authorized.

Gasoline prices? The same thing.  We have all the oil and gas we need, we just can’t get permission from the regulatory agencies to go after it.  And refineries are in the same situation.  The management of the oil and gas companies decided years ago that it would be cheaper to simply bring gasoline over from the Middle East instead of making it here.  Fine.  But that strategy can only be used temporarily, as we have found out.  Except now we can’t build any new capacity.

Nuclear energy has advanced substantially in the form of pebble bed reactors which are thermally stable even when the coolant is shut off and cannot go critical mass because the nuclear material is insulated in ceramic.  Wave reactors are being demonstrated whose cores make the nuclear fuel inert, no disposal problem.  But we’ve spent decades making atomic energy “unacceptable”.  So there it would seem unlikely that we’ll see and solutions without a major shift in the political system.

So who’s fault it is anyway?  I don’t know.  There’s enough blame to go around.

Is there any scenario where decision making doesn’t turn into a political process?  In a democracy, a group of people can vote on something, be in agreement and be factually incorrect.  If we all vote that there is no gravity, does it make any difference?  It doesn’t matter how much factual information is presented, if the group controlling the decision making process chooses to ignore it.

Similarly the automobile industry has chosen for many years not to make high mileage cars.  This has been going on for years and Americans have had enough.    It can be part of a decision making process that has been corrupted or a conscious decision to ignore the market information that exists.

So the mis-management of major corporations can follow a similar path.  If senior management chooses to ignore market data, or use it’s authority for personal gain, you can get some very ugly results.  Like Enrom amd others.  Is this a failure of Capitalism as the Michael Moore types would have us believe.  I don’t think so.

It’s a failure of human beings.  It’s an ethical failure in some cases.  And it’s also a failure of the decision making processes.  So many times we get caught in eliminating choices that we fail to apply the most important premise; that a solution has to be found.  We have to have more electricity, for example, so let’s explore a bunch of options and what their impact will be.  And let’s try to make the best decision that insures that the goal of increased electricity at the best cost.

This changes the outcome so that goals can be met instead of paralyzing us with inaction that stalls our economy and short  changes everyone.

Batteries of the Future

Battery technology has been getting a lot of focus in the last couple of years.  After all, you can’t have a decent electric car (or hybrid for that matter) without having the right kind of battery.  And, just one more time, battery technology is what prevented the marketing of the electric car after the oil embargo of the seventies, at least as far as the necessary technology goes.

So it isn’t surprising that almost $2B in cash is being invested to start 4 new manufacturing plants in Michigan to make lithium ion batteries.  The State of Michigan is giving tax incentives totalling over $500 million.  The DOE has put grants and development contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of some of the same companies.  So it looks like we have picked the winner, and we are taking steps to make sure that there is capacity available to make the product.  Or at least assemble it.  Some of the battery supply is supposed to be coming in from Asia.  No surprise there.

There are two major issues in any battery.  The basic chemistry and materials that go into it, and the manufacturing processes that go into making it.  The basic chemistry sets the boundaries for what is possible.  The materials side is important in terms of raw materials cost.  You don’t want to build something that is dependent on strategic metals.  And making sure that the primary materials are readily available.  Recent reports indicate that the lithium needed for the emerging battery market is available in the US, but there is even more in South America.

On the manufacturing side, it’s all over the place.  Mechatronics everywhere.  From manufacture of the primary cell in either a cyclindrical cell or a prismatic shape to the assembly of the final package.  Temperature sensors, fans for air cooling, voltage or current sensors for monitoring charge and output, non-conductive housings, high power density connector terminals.  It’s pretty busy getting it packaged right.

I was involved in the manufacturing processes for the Optima sprial wound lead acid cell.  Great piece of technology.  Really difficult to get the mechatronics right.  Winding multiple 4 foot long layers of lead mesh, separater membranes and stuff that looks like toothpaste into a perfect roll the size of a can of soda isn’t a process that gets worked out overnight.  So there’s probably quite a bit of work to do to get the volume up where it needs to be.

Battery technology, regardless of chemistry, depends on the amount of surface area available.  Same issue for fuel cells, or even combustion of gasoline.  In a sense, when fuel is atomized, the surface area of the fuel is increased.  So it’s not surprising that most of the improvements forecast in battery technology are a result of research in nanoparticles and other unique physical arrangments of the constituent parts.

And unlike the decades that it took to manage lead acid battery recycling, there is already a major effort to manage recycling and disposal of lithium.  The DOE is currently providing funding to a private company to expand it’s disposal capability to include lithium technology.

Car Wars?

For seventy years what was good for Detroit was good for America.  The major auto makers could sell as many cars as they could make.  And Americans were enthusiastic about the freedom offered by relatively inexpensive personal transportation.  Since Henry Ford’s introduction of the mass produced Model T and John D. Rockefeller’s agreement to provide gasoline at cheap prices, the gasoline powered automobile has dominated the landscape. Great fortunes were made.  And lost.

The steam and electric cars of the early 20th century were swept away by the low cost gasoline powered Model T.  The true cost of technology in action.

Since the first oil embargo in the 1970’s (under the Carter administration) energy costs have been fluctuating.  And how have the automaker’s responded?  With the same vehicles they have been making for decades.  American car makers have had problems with low cost, high mileage cars for a long time.

As people have progressively become more environmentally aware, the by-products of combustion have become an attribute that people would like to change in large measure.  This could come about by increased efficiency or alternative technology.  In the last few years, all the hybrid vehicles sold in the US have been imports.  The current sales rate puts imported hybrids at 300,000 vehicles a year in the US.  That’s a lot of cars we didn’t build.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to get American automakers to improve vehicle efficiency for 30 years or more.  The response from Detroit has always been reluctant.  Change will be costly and take a long time.  And even when mileage target agreements were made, they never seem to be met.

In most businesses, when you stop meeting the customer’s needs, you stop selling product.   That’s exactly what has happened.  American car buying has dropped from 13 million units/year to 8 million units a year.  Big change.  Regardless if you blame it on the car companies or economic conditions, or both.  And a lot of harmful consequences to the economy since cars consume more steel, glass, carpet and just about anything you can think of, than any other sector of the economy.

Foreign manufacturers have settled into the US market and established themselves taking a share of market away from Detroit.  I didn’t hear anyone calling for reorganization of the industry during the last two decades while Japan set up shop on our soil.

So it seems a little strange to have government, which doesn’t actually know how to produce anything, dictating how the automakers need to produce cars.  One aspect that concerns me about the current plan from Washington is that it is based on projections of sales volumes ‘returning to normal’.  At sales volumes of 12 to 13 million the current plan will restore the automakers to financial health.   Does anyone believe that the American car makers can sell that many cars per year any time soon?

Energy Density and the Real Cost of Driving

Energy density by itself is not a sufficient measure of anything.  It is only useful in a specific context.  For example, one can refer to the energy density of battery technology.  And that is an extremely useful comparison because the weight of the battery in an electric car is critical to its success.  The General Motors EV1 was abandoned because the battery technology was too heavy.

Context is very important.  Comparing the energy density of the battery to the energy density of a fuel is completely useless.  And this is an argument that some people use, incorrectly, to defend fuel based vehicles.  Gasoline may be 80 times more energy dense than a lead acid battery, but what does that really mean?  Of course, gasoline has far greater energy density than a lead acid battery.  That’s an absurd comparison if not taken in its full context.

What is the efficiency of the energy conversion process?  Internal combustion systems generate a lot of heat which is loss and highly inefficient.  Taken with its frictional losses and parasitic loads like the alternator, water pump, etc., input to output efficiency for internal combustion vehicle systems is estimated at 40% or less.  The same comparison for an electric car can result in measured efficiency of 90%.   So the comparison of system efficiency for internal combustion engine passenger cars and pure electric passenger cars is that the electric system is more than twice as efficient.  Lithium batteries are 4 times as energy dense as lead acid and will reduce the required payload of 1800 to 2200 pounds of batteries to a much more reasonably 450 to 600  pounds.

What is the absolute value of the technology?  That’s the really important question.

One basis for comparison would be cost per transportation mile.  In both cases, the system efficiency is directly affected by the cost of input energy.   When gasoline is $2.50 a gallon, a 20 mile per gallon car costs 12.5 cents a mile.  When gasoline is $4. a gallon, a 20 mpg car costs 20 cents a mile.  Pure electric cars are impacted by the cost per kilowatt hour, but generally are documented as costing about 3 cents a mile.

A more complete comparison would incorporate the maintenance cost in addition to the energy cost per mile.  Again the electric vehicle has significant advantages.  There are no annual maintenance costs, although some value might be assigned to amortize the cost of the battery pack.

Further, one can include the purchase price of the vehicle.  A $20,000 gasoline powered car will cost about $15,000 to operate over 5 years at 12,000 miles per year.  An electric car will cost about $1800 to operate over the same period.  So if a comparable electric car cost $33,000 the total cost of ownership over 5 years would be the same.  Not surprising when you think about it.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of Detroit over the next two years.

Top Ten Challenges – Energy Storage

Thinking about the top challenges we face in mechatronics there is one that’s connected and not really obvious.  It’s energy storage.   Our tendency is think in terms of batteries because that’s the form of energy storage that we are most familiar with.  Cell phones, laptop computers and many other portable gadgets of the Internet Age are very dependent on energy storage systems for their size, weight and hours of service.  But of course, these are all battery applications.

So  our first reaction to energy storage as a mechatronic challenge  might be that it’s really just a chemistry problem and not mechatronic at all.  But energy storage comes in many forms and applications.  Energy storage is a requirement of almost every form of energy and control systems.  Hydraulic and Pneumatic systems require accumulators to store energy so that short term loads don’t use up enough power to make the system unable to respond to demands placed on them.  Energy rate over time is a governing principle in all these systems.

The initial linkage in my thinking was the electric car.  As someone who worked in the electric car field many years ago, it was that the battery that killed the electric car.  Carrying 2200 pounds of lead acid batteries to make a car go from here to there simply didn’t make sense.

There has been a lot of debate on that subject and a LOT of incomplete information offered which clouds our understanding of the social or political problem.  But the cost and energy density of the battery pack is making sufficient progress to insure that quite a few new vehicle options will be available in 2010 and 2011.

In normal batteries energy densities of 30 Watt hours per kilogram of weight are common.  Nickel metal hydride doubled the energy density to about 80Wh/kg.  But the real improvements are coming from the lithium chemistries at 130+Wh/kg.  There are more dense chemistries around, but they are typically very high temperature or otherwise very expensive, and so not practical for widespread use.

But the energy storage problem is not limited to chemistry.  The flywheel energy storage system has been a topic of engineering development for decades.  Energy density in these systems is in the range of 100 to 130 Kilowatt hours per kilogram, a thousand times more power.

So why aren’t we working on that for cars?  It’s been done several times and never quite works out.  Chrysler had a prototype K type car with a Garrett flywheel system.  Couldn’t make it small enough to be cost effective.  And there were issues of life expectancy and failure modes due to the fact that flywheel was operating on magnetic bearings in a vacuum housing.

The national power grid has exactly the same problem at orders of magnitude more power.  If there is to be any hope of an intelligent national power grid, storage systems of this kind are needed to act as a buffer between demand and supply..   Solar power is only available when it is daylight and there are no clouds.  Wind power only happens when the wind is blowing.  This means that supply is intermittent over time.  So if there are big fleets of electric cars charging overnight, there have to be storage systems that can manage the energy storage requirement.

So mechtronic challenge #4 – Energy storage. Large and small, high efficiency and long term.

Super Size my Motor?

There is an interesting problem with applying electric motors that is a constant source of difficulty, the nature of peak power versus continuous power.  The problem is that few systems operate at a statistical average power demand.  Frequently, this causes equipment designers to oversize the motor for the application.  At the same time, however, this can put the motor in a very low efficiency operating range.

So what’s the right solution?  Right sizing.  Yes, just like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, not too big, not too small, but just right.

There are some great DOE publications on motor sixing that can be very helpful on the AC motor side, so make sure to give those a look.  But the implications of how to deal with varying loads are complex, each requirement having its own unique conditions that need to be considered.  Is an underpowered application actually safer?  Sometimes, yes.  I recently noticed that a particular orbital sander had been designed so that if the unit became momentarily overloaded, it stalled.  Perfectly safe.  In fact, this design is to be preferred because it prevents accidentally damaging a work piece by burying the sander in the wood and removing too much material.  Who’d have thought of it?  Certainly not Tool Time Tim.  More Power!

In fact, most of us view more as better.  More power means more production.  Or does it.  In an increasingly energy conscious community, more power means more cost.  And that’s really what its all about.  The value of the motor is not just in the purchase price, but also in the operating cost.  Especially if the motor is expected to run for 8 years, 24/7.  (That’s what the life expectancy of large AC motors is)

There’s another trick to the power requirement problem.  How much time is spent at full load and how much time is spent at average power, or, what is the duty cycle?  If the system is starting and stopping frequently it puts different constraints on the motor.  If the system is typically starting only once an hour, then we can consider the thermal duty cycle of the motor.  The momentary peak power requirement is insignificant and the vendor can usually tell from their modeling and testing of their products how much impact the peak current will have on the motor’s average temperature.

After all, its Thermodynamics 101 in the final analysis.  Every energy transformation produces heat as a byproduct.  How much heat a given system can tolerate is the key to its operating life.  In electric motors, the key values are the insulation system’s temperature rating, usually in the range of 150 to 180 C and in the case of steppers, brushless dc and permanent magnet dc motors, the magnet’s ability to resist high temperature and high coercive magnetic fields that can be generated in the motor.  Both sets of limits are generally well considered by suppliers when electrically controller motors are shipped as motor/drive combinations.  This can get a little tricky when pairing motors from one vendor with controls from another vendor.

Beshear Unveils Energy Plan Proposal

Steve Beshear rolled out what he is calling the “”first-ever comprehensive energy plan”" for Kentucky on Thursday that concentrates on alternative energy sources, coal conversion technology and reducing greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2025.

“Energy and the production of energy is going to be one of the top priorities in the world over the next few years,” Beshear said Thursday afternoon during an interview with the Messenger-Inquirer. “Kentucky is uniquely positioned to take a leadership role in that.”

The plan includes an exploration of how to promote the development of nuclear power in Kentucky and significant emphasis on building up to eight plants capable of converting coal into transportation fuel.

Beshear predicts that implementing the plan, which was created with little input from those outside his administration, will also provide economic development jolt for the state and produce up to 40,000 jobs in the state by 2025.

Source: Your Nuclear News

Advancing Energy Efficiency in Data Centers

Xiotech Corporation today announced that it has joined The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. As a General Member, Xiotech will work to develop industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies to help organizations improve energy efficiency in data centers and increase energy cost savings.

By joining The Green Grid, Xiotech is helping influence both developers and end users of data center technology. Xiotech will work with The Green Grid to establish practices and processes to help organizations more easily measure and predict the energy consumption of their specific storage systems, based on their performance and capacity requirements.

“In our experience, most organizations select a storage platform for a combination of capacity and performance, so their goal should be to find a solution that delivers these attributes with the least power, the least cooling and the smallest footprint,” said Xiotech(R) Vice President of Marketing Mike Hoch. “Developing consistent energy measurement standards for storage systems, and helping implement and interpret them, will make it much easier for organizations to select storage platforms that meet their needs while minimizing both carbon footprints and unnecessary energy and cooling expenses. It’s a win-win situation: We can help storage users realize cost savings and preserve the environment at the same time.”

Source: The Energy Daily

Ford to Consolidate Parts Across Car Platforms

Endeca Technologies,a search and information access software company, announced that Ford Motor Company, has selected and deployed Endeca’s Spend Analysis solution, built on the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP). Launched in late summer 2008, the solution supports a corporate initiative to reduce direct material costs and identify opportunities for parts consolidation and efficiencies for existing and new vehicle programs. The Endeca solution integrates data from more than seven different source systems. These include purchasing, finance, supplier, engineering, and part catalog applications, offering sourcing professionals 360-degree visibility of part and supplier related data. The solution will also serve to improve collaboration between engineering and sourcing professionals by offering first-of-their-kind tools to evaluate the complex tradeoffs that occur during the new product design process. As a result, key decision makers have immediate access to information that had previously taken weeks or even months to gather and analyze.

The new Endeca application – which combines search, business intelligence and Guided Navigation capabilities into a single experience – powers Ford’s Global Commodity Hub, a portal which offers one-stop access to parts, program, supplier, technical attribute, and cost target data. 

“Ford offers a great example of how information visibility can be used to create new operational efficiencies and competitive advantage in the face of shifting consumer demand and new economic realities,” said Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca. “Manufacturers are among the most information rich of all enterprises, but the ultimate value of this information remains limited by legacy systems that were never architected for such integration, exploration and discovery. We are now witnessing the beginning of a shift to a whole new class of information architecture that will unlock this latent value.”

Source: Endeca Technologies

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