Public needs persuading if HS2 uncertainty is to be banished

There was always going to be some disappointment with the report into how to improve the High Speed Two, given how controversial the project has proven. But giving the document a name like “HS2 Plus” raises expectations of major additions to the planned network. The reality of Sir David Higgins’ recommendations – scrapping the network’s link with Europe and building a new station at Crewe – makes that title seem like something of a joke.

No cost savings (the purpose for commissioning the report in the first place), no plans to start the second, northern half of the scheme earlier (although it may now finish three years before the original schedule), no extension to Liverpool (let alone Scotland), but London gets yet another major station redevelopment. HS2.1 might have been a better name for the proposals, particularly for those who live north of Milton Keynes.

By stressing that HS2 will only deliver its full benefits to the North of England (and indeed most of the rest of Britain) if it is part of a more ntegrated infrastructure plan, Higgins has in one sense admitted what many critics of the scheme have long argued: that the scheme as it stands fails to deliver the necessary connectivity that the North so needs.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing. Sure, there are plenty of things the infrastructure planners and politicians “should have” done. Not delaying preparations for the northern phase of the network until so long after the London-to-Birmingham line is probably one. Looking at the wider picture of connectivity in the North earlier in the process is another. And sorting out the country’s airport problem sooner in order to produce a properly integrated transport strategy would have been very welcome.

On this basis, HS2 is, as Higgins described the now almost certainly scrapped connection with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (HS1), ‘an imperfect compromise’. But what proposal wouldn’t be: A maglev system at tremendous financial cost? Yet more upgrades leading to years of disruption with even less benefit? Britain’s original Victorian network was hardly a triumph of efficient planning, built at inflated cost due to speculation and leading to much duplication of routes, while benefiting from a country that was much less densely populated – and democratic – than it is today. With a 21st century railway, there was never going to be an easy answer.

HS2 does at least provide a solution to some key problems with the current network: capacity and north-south connectivity. Scrapping it now and going back to the drawing board would only lead to yet more wrangling and years of uncertainty as our existing infrastructure creaks ever louder, constraining economic growth and condemning millions of us to even more cramped, unpleasant and slow journeys.

We also need to be careful of a “what about me?” attitude. Manchester might benefit more from HS2 but that doesn’t mean Liverpool will necessarily suffer. Government-commissioned figures (only released after a freedom of information request) found that HS2 could make more than 50 places around the country worse off, depending on circumstances. However, over three-quarters of the counties and cities of the UK will likely be better off. This is an argument not for scrapping HS2 but for asking what else can we do to ensure the whole UK benefits - precisely what Higgins has proposed. In this vein, the North needs to come together to demand investment for the region as a whole, not squabble over scraps while a united South East happily binges.

And there are already plans for huge additional investment in the rest of the railways. Network rail has just been awarded £38bn for the next five years – almost as much as HS2 will cost over the next 20. The precise spending plan has yet to be agreed but the organisation’s business plan says £4bn a year will go on upgrades. By 2019 there will be an estimated 30 per cent more freight on the rails than today, while the £600m Northern Hub project improving links across the North of England is set to provide space for 44 million extra passengers a year within the same timeframe. Yet several surveys have revealed the public still thinks it’s an either-or situation, with upgrades favoured over HS2.

This highlights what remains the project’s biggest problem. The only way to bring about the political certainty that Higgins says will speed HS2 along and bring down costs is to persuade the public of its necessity and its benefits. In perhaps the biggest “should have” of them all, the government and HS2 Ltd itself have so far failed to win the argument that there even is a capacity problem on the railways, never mind that HS2 is the best way to deal with it, or that reduced journey times really will make a difference. It’s an issue The Engineer has been banging on about for far too long now.

Higgins is focused on delivering HS2 as efficiently and cheaply as possible. In the foreword to Network Rail’s strategy document, he says: ‘The question is not “why build High Speed 2?” but “how quickly can we build it?”’ But without answering that first question he won’t be able to address the second. When The Engineer asked him how he intended to overcome this problem, he said the public need to understand the consequences of failing to invest adequately in infrastructure. What he and the politicians need to understand is that it is up to them to demonstrate this - and at the moment they are failing.

This article was first published on The Engineer. 

Tackling the oil and gas industry's image problem

Think student project and the images that might spring to mind are of rickety looking models, dull flow charts and overly complex solutions to issues you aren’t really sure are problems in the first place. But if I ever held such an unfair stereotype, it was well and truly shattered by the final of BP’s Ultimate Field Trip competition on Monday night, when students from four UK universities put forward some incredibly impressive, innovative and imaginative ideas for reducing the oil and gas industry’s energy footprint.

Four teams of young men, barely out of braces, stood in the same place as Michael Faraday and all those Christmas Lecturers to address the audience of a packed theatre in the Royal Institution, including an intimidating panel of judges, eloquently explaining their compelling visions for how BP could make its operations less wasteful and energy-intensive. Their ideas ranged from the bold to the sensible and some seemed more viable than others, but all were as commercially well considered as they were creative.

First up were Strathclyde University’s “Team ECOneering”, a group of third year civil engineering students who proposed reducing the energy used by refineries to heat oil to the necessary high temperatures using solar thermal concentrators. With established technologies, the system would use an array of concave mirrors to reflect and intensify the sun’s rays onto a molten salt storage tank. The captured thermal energy could then be used to continuously heat the oil, even after the sun had gone down. The technology would be best suited to desert-based refineries in the Middle East, Africa and the USA but could also reduce the energy needs of plants in cooler climates such as the Mediterranean.

Next were Oxford University’s “I Challenge You to a Joule”, who proposed a modular aluminium smelting system powered with electricity generated from gas from onshore wells that would otherwise be flared. Given the doubling of demand from aluminium in the last decade, the students claimed that using “free” waste energy would produce the most profitable aluminium-making operation in the world.

The power generation and electrolysis technology would be small enough to be transported between wells within a field, allowing operators to drive it to wherever gas was being flared and eliminating the need for extra infrastructure. But the modular smelter would also be the same size as the individual units in permanent facilities, which the team claimed would maintain standard efficiencies. The students found that Texas oilwells flare around half a billion cubic feet of gas a year and the state has an established aluminium industry, leading to the conclusion that it would be the best starting point for use of the technology, which they estimated would have a payback time of seven years.

Following that came “Team Ignite” from Birmingham University, who proposed a thermopile device for converting the heat from gas flares into electricity. The second-year chemical engineering students admitted to the judges that the technology converted just 15 per cent of the energy were made using expensive titanium. But because they designed the device as a hexagonal tube that could be made from flat, off-the-shelf thermopile components and easily fitted around a flare chimney, they claimed it would take just three and a half years for a well operator to earn back the capital costs through energy savings.

Finally, Durham University’s “Team Palatinate”, formed by a group of geologists and geophysicists, suggested capturing the waste heat from gas turbines used to provide the large amounts of electricity needed at an oil well site. This heat would be fed into an Organic Rankine cycle (ORC) that uses hot production fluids from the well (a technology already being pursued by the oil and gas industry) to convert relatively low temperature heat into electricity. The students claimed adding the gas turbine element could increase power output of the ORC by anything from 23 per cent to 120 per cent, giving a potential payback time of just one to two years.

As you can tell, the suggestions range from the somewhat outlandish (what could go wrong with firing a hugely powerful beam of energy at an oil refinery?) to something so straightforward one of the judges asked why BP wasn’t doing it already (I presume it’s a coincidence that the most staid and sensible idea came from a team of geologists). The winners, Oxford’s mobile aluminium smelters, seemed to hit the sweet spot between creativity and practicality. But what struck me about all the entries was the degree to which the students had thought about the commercial realities of implementing their designs, presumably encouraged to do so by the competition’s entry criteria.

BP’s aim with the competition was, after all, to attract the next generation of oil and gas engineers to work in the company – not to develop ground-breaking renewable and energy-saving systems that will form part of the firm’s future plans. As the company’s head of graduate resources, Suzy Style, admitted to me, the numbers of students choosing a career in the sector has been declining in recent years. The Ultimate Field Trip competition is designed to tackle that by getting students to think about and understand the full range of careers open to them in oil and gas – the prize is the eponymous trip to BP sites around the world.

‘We don’t want to just preach to the converted,’ said Style. ‘We know there’s lots of people studying STEM subjects who don’t understand the variety of roles at BP and the sorts of work they could do … This competition highlights how focused BP are on the very challenge of trying to reduce the amount of energy consumption that we use. So how great for us to get some of the best and brightest students to get engaged with us on that challenge.’

Great in theory, but does it work in practice, given the sector’s image problem? BP and the oil and gas industry is taking steps to reduce energy consumption, but it’s more through incremental efficiency improvements and upgrades rather than implementing the kind of ground-breaking technologies the students were proposing. BP spent a short while trying to rebrand itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’. But having now abandoned that strategy, the firm is probably better known to a generation more concerned about the environment than any other as the company responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. 

A competition that makes students aware of the full range of opportunities open to them in the oil and gas sector is a great idea. How much more effective would the competition be if those students saw the industry taking steps as bold as the ones they are proposing?

This article was first published on The Engineer. 

The danger of the reshoring 'trend'

Manufacturing is coming back to the UK. Or so we are led to believe by some interpretations of new research released this week. Coinciding with its annual conference held yesterday in London, the manufacturers’ organisation EEF has conducted a survey that found one in six UK-based manufacturers have brought production back in house in the past three years – up from one in seven five years ago – and a similar proportion have switched to a UK supplier from a low-cost country.

Keen to regain control over their supply chains, UK companies – we are told – are eschewing low-cost countries like China and helping to rebuild the UK as a manufacturing centre based on quality and delivery times. Certainly there are plenty of anecdotes to support this idea, from firms that have realised the difficulties of manufacturing in the Far East – from logistics costs to protecting IP – and moved some of their production lines back to the UK.

Interestingly, the manufacturers on yesterday’s EEF conference panel discussion on reshoring make chocolate and cushions, two relatively low-value products that don’t require the kind of high-technology and precision engineering that are among the UK’s manufacturing strengths and that help keep sectors such as aerospace based here.

But there’s a real danger of getting carried away by these kind of stories. As EEF’s chief economist, Lee Hopley, admitted, the survey isn’t clear evidence that reshoring is leading to net growth in the UK’s manufacturing base: it doesn’t show that manufacturers are moving production back to Britain faster than others are moving it away.

A change from one in seven to one in six sounds less impressive when represented as an increase from 14 per cent to 17 per cent. And the survey also found the number of UK companies with some production overseas and the proportion of manufacturing they do there have both risen slightly since 2004. On top of this, it’s worth noting that the increase jobs that reshoring activity has created is minor – typically between 1 and 5 per cent of a company’s workforce.

It is true that Chinese wages aren’t what they used to be – they’re much higher. Between 2006 and 2010 the average minimum wage in China grew by 12.5 per cent a year. And probably of equal importance is the exchange rate: £1 bought you 15 Renminbi before the financial crash; last year it was at a low of nine. Tony Caldeira, boss of the aforementioned cushion manufacturer admitted this was the biggest factor in his firm’s decision to move some production back to the UK.

But as the UK economy continues to pick up, seemingly on the back of yet another boom fuelled by house prices, borrowing and domestic consumption, it appears likely that currency advantage is only likely to shrink, as it has already begun to do over the last year. And while Chinese wages are higher, there are plenty of other low-cost countries to which British firms can send their production. For some, Eastern Europe already provides a compromise between labour costs, delivery times and supply chain supervision.

The most compelling talk at EEF’s conference came from Nigel Stein, CEO of the aerospace and automotive components manufacturer GKN. He warned that British businesses would only succeed if they weren’t complacent about global competition. This applies as much to any nascent trend in reshoring as it does to sectors where we currently occupy a world-leading spot (like aerospace). GKN wants to do more manufacturing in the UK, he said, but this will only be possible if we make the best products in the best way.

How do we achieve this? Lower energy costs, less government red tape and greater focus on quality were all mentioned yesterday. Surprisingly little was said about innovation: a question about 3D printing was barely recognised by the reshoring panel, suggesting there’s still much work to be done in explaining advanced manufacturing technologies. But an audience survey showed that the biggest concern for manufacturers was access to the right workforce, finding employees with the right skills but also, crucially, who want to work in manufacturing.

In the long-term the UK can’t compete on cost and, while reshoring makes for a nice narrative, we can’t rely on manufacturers deciding they don’t want to fly to China every week to check up on their factories to grow the industry. But fluctuations in the global economy give us an opportunity to show off what our other strengths are or could be. Let’s seize it.

This article first appeared on The Engineer. 

Will the costs of carbon capture justify its benefits?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) often appears to be one of those technologies that is perpetually 10 years away. It doesn’t help that in the UK we’ve had several false starts thanks to the collapse of the first government funding competition to build a demonstration plant and an attempt to add CCS to the controversial idea of building the country’s first new coal plant in decades.

But now things are starting to look more promising. This week, the next tranche of funds was confirmed for the second of the government’s two preferred bidders in its revamped CCS competition, Peterhead gas power station in the north east of Scotland. Work will now begin on a £100m programme of engineering studies before the final go ahead is given to the Peterhead project and its coal counterpart, the White Rose project at the Drax power station in North Yorkshire.

Once completed, Peterhead will capture up to 1m tonnes a year of carbon dioxide from the exhaust of its 385MW combined cycle gas turbines using amine solvents, and pipe it offshore to the Goldeneye gas reservoir, 2km below the North Sea bed. White Rose, meanwhile, will see the creation of a new 426MW oxy-fuel combustion plant, where coal is burnt in oxygen instead of air to produce a pure stream of CO2 (2m tonnes a year) that will then be piped into saline aquifers off the coast. This will include the building of a new pipeline system with a capacity of 17m tonnes a year, paving the way for a cluster of CCS plants around the Humber. 

These projects are important not because they will demonstrate that it’s possible to capture CO2 from power stations (several plants in countries including Germany and the US have already done this), but because they will join up the three elements of capture, transport and storage and highlight the UK’s strong potential to become CCS world leader.

Unlike Germany, where CCS has been hampered by public opposition to onshore underground CO2 storage, the UK has access to vast amounts of offshore storage in both aquifers and empty gas fields. There’s also the chance to use the captured CO2 to improve North Sea drilling operations and tap otherwise uneconomic reservoirs by using it for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), helping make CCS more commercially viable. We also have a strong research base and a financial mechanism to support low-carbon power generation (the bit of our energy bills that will subsidise new nuclear, renewables and, eventually, CCS).

The argument for CCS is pretty persuasive from a decarbonisation point of view. It might be an untested system with initially high costs that will still produce some CO2 emissions (around 10 per cent of a fossil fuel power station’s total with current technologies) and still requires a constant supply of difficult to produce fuel, whose cost is volatile at best. However, it also produces a flexible, dependable source of energy that could even help remove CO2 from the atmosphere (if we attach CCS technology to biomass plants).

None of our other options – nuclear or renewables ­– can be easily turned on or off to meet our fluctuating power demands. Without a cheap form of mass energy storage, which we’re not particular close to developing, CCS looks like our best bet for a cost-effective, low-carbon way to meet the gap between our energy supply and demand.

Current estimates suggest CCS could become cost-competitive with offshore wind by the 2020s, and with the price coming down faster. Research by the Energy Technologies Institute indicates that using CCS rather than continuing to rely on CO2-emitting gas plants for flexible power supply will reduce the need to decarbonise transport, heating and industry, with overall savings of up to £32bn by 2050.

What will it mean for UK engineering? We should probably tone down our ideas of a new manufacturing sector exporting UK-grown technology to the world. The major companies developing CCS systems are based elsewhere and the Far East is likely to offer a more attractive home to much of the manufacturing. However, the crossover between CCS and the chemical and offshore gas industries does create an opportunity for UK firms to get in on the action with some supply chain production and expertise in services.

In that sense, these demonstration plants could really be the start of a new world-leading UK industry. One estimate suggests 13GW of CCS-equipped low-carbon generation could be up and running by 2030, generating £3bn-£6.5bn annually for the UK economy and supporting 70,000-100,000 jobs.

To get there, however, we will to provide major financial support to a raft of projects following the initial £1bn given to the current competition. The idea is that the second generation of UK plants will raise their building costs from the private sector but still rely on subsidies for operational costs. And these subsidies could be much greater than the prices we’re currently agreeing to pay for nuclear (around £90/MWh) or offshore wind (£155/MWh). We’ll also need to support research into other CCS technologies, for both power station and industrial emissions. And continue to develop the transport and storage infrastructure. Then finally we’ll get to the third generation of plants that are cost-competitive with renewables but will probably still need subsidies.

If CCS is really our cheapest option for meeting our CO2 targets, then it puts the debate about shale gas into a whole new light. Fracking might produce a reliable new low-carbon energy source but it certainly won’t bring electricity prices down.

This article first appeared on The Engineer. 

Educating the public is key to reclaiming our nuclear heritage

It probably says something about me that I used a day off from my job at The Engineer earlier this week to visit a nuclear power station. But it’s to my shame that this was also the first time I had ever made such a visit.

It was a fascinating trip and one I would urge anyone with an interest in engineering, infrastructure or the environment to take themselves. Seeing first-hand the scale of the reactor, feeling the heat it generates and studying the intricacies of the technology that controls it reminds you what British engineering is capable of. And learning about the safety systems and culture in place and about how much electricity can be produced from so relatively little fuel certainly makes you re-evaluate the role nuclear power has to play in our energy mix.

I made the visit as a member of the public, not as a journalist, so I won’t give too many details about what I saw. In fact, before I began the tour I was made to sign a contract stating I wouldn’t pass on information to third parties without the agreement of EDF Energy, which operates the UK’s nuclear plants. Which seems rather strange given that the point of allowing public tours of the power station is surely to help spread information.

Presumably it’s a hangover from the last decade, when Britain’s remaining nuclear industry effectively closed its doors and reinitiated a culture of secrecy in response to the perceived terrorist threat following 9/11. There is, of course, a vital need to guard the proprietary and potentially catastrophically dangerous technology contained with nuclear power stations. But my visit also made me realise there’s also a very strong case for doing more to educate the public about nuclear power.

Few people really understand what went wrong during the disasters at Chernobyl or Fukushima, or how other power stations have learnt from those events. My tour guide made several references to how visitors typically imagined a nuclear plant as something similar to the one in The Simpsons, but in reality there are no glowing green rods being handled or contaminated water flows into rivers of three-eyed fish. She also told the story of one visitor from Nigeria who was terrified of receiving a dose of radiation until it was explained she was in greater danger from the cosmic rays in the atmosphere she had been exposed to on the flight over.

Unless the public has a sound knowledge of how nuclear energy is produced, how can they be expected to make sensible decisions about its future use in this country? I grew up just 20 miles from a nuclear power station and yet new nothing of how they operated until I started working at The Engineer. If British industry wants a new nuclear future then it needs to do more – in partnership with government – to educate people about its advantages and safeguards.

There’s another reason for doing this besides our need for new low-carbon sources of energy. Like most in the UK, the nuclear plant I visited was in an area with little other industry and where jobs were scarce. And when those power stations were built they not only needed workers to run them but also created demand for the rest of UK industry. But the decision to end nuclear development in favour of North Sea oil and the subsequent decline of British nuclear manufacturing means that most of the components for the next generation of power stations will be built abroad.

Chancellor George Osborne yesterday said nuclear power could help the UK tackle climate change in ‘as cheap a possible way’. I’m not sure how the price of £92.50/MWh agreed for the first new power station (double the expected market rate and greater than that of onshore wind) is cheap. As long as foreign (often state-owned or backed) companies are the ones building and supplying nuclear power, it’s hard to see how the overall costs to Britain can come down substantially.

However, there is hope that the new-build programme could be a springboard to a nuclear manufacturing renaissance. Hitachi is planning to build a module construction facility here to support its involvement in two new power stations. The Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC) in Sheffield is helping firms used to working to the precision standards of aerospace transfer their capabilities to the nuclear sector. Sheffield Forgemasters has just been approved to fabricate safety-critical cast components for the nuclear industry. In Rolls-Royce, we even have a major company that builds nuclear reactors (for submarines) already.

With the right aspiration and conditions, these firms could lead the UK back into a high-value manufacturing sector that couldn’t be easily displaced by cheap foreign factories. This should help bring down the costs of an energy source that it’s becoming increasingly clear will be a vital component of our fight against climate change.

But it requires a long-term commitment to nuclear power with full public backing. Nuclear manufacturing is arguably one of the most difficult industries for a country to break into, requiring a deep knowledge and skills base, unique physical capabilities and a strong supply chain. Having squandered our pioneering first foray into this sector, let’s make sure our second attempt isn’t a false start.

This article first appeared on The Engineer.

Body-builders: developing cyborg organs

Scientists are combining biological tissue with synthetic materials to create a new class of “cyborgans”.

When Barney Clark went into hospital, he didn’t expect to survive more than a few days. But after receiving the world’s first permanent artificial heart transplant in December 1982, the Seattle dentist went on to live for almost four more months. The second patient to receive the Jarvik-7, developed by US doctor and engineer Robert Jarvik, astounded his doctors even further by living for more than a year and a half after his operation.

Of the more than 10,000 people in the UK who are currently waiting for an organ transplant, three die every day because of a lack of donors. The development of the artificial heart means that those on the six-month NHS waiting list have an option if their situation deteriorates while they are holding out for a transplant.

Technology has improved hugely since the Jarvik-7, which was powered by a large console that made it impossible for patients to leave the hospital. Earlier this year, a TV documentary even brought together the latest developments across the spectrum of artificial organs to create a ‘bionic man’, which was until recently on display at the Science Museum in London.

Source: Science Museum

The Bionic Man project showcased the latest in artificial organs

But doctors have yet to develop a true replacement for the real thing. And with the worldwide number of patients in need of a transplant far exceeding the small number of available donors, the need for a longer-lasting alternative certainly hasn’t gone away.

One of the key problems with artificial organs is ensuring biocompatibility, the ability of materials to provide a good environment for living cells to grow and function around them. Artificial hearts, for example, need to be haemocompatible otherwise they can destroy red blood cells or create life-threatening clots.

As scientists have become better at growing human cells in a lab, the idea has taken hold that we might be able to produce entire biological organs based on a patients’ own cells. This could not only bypass the problem of biocompatibility but also reduce the likelihood of the body rejecting the organ as a foreign body, as can happen with transplants, and of causing an infection by providing a welcome surface for bacteria. However, growing an organ for use in a patient has not proven simple.

‘In the late 1990s, people started working on developing organs using a tissue-engineering approach, and everybody thought in the next 10 years we would be growing all organs,’ said Dr Alex Seifalian, professor of nanotechnology and regenerative medicine at University College London (UCL), who was the scientific lead on the bionic man project.

‘They were trying to simulate what nature is; trying to grow, for example, a nose or ear; trying to make exactly the same cartilage and grow cells on some bio-absorbable material that disappears to leave the cartilage, and that will be placed in the patient.’

‘Everybody thought in the next 10 years we would be growing all organs’

But scientists, including Seifalian, have encountered problems with this approach. ‘In 1997 we had a grant to develop artificial arteries with tissue engineering,’ he said. ‘In animals it worked very well and then when we went to humans it just didn’t work very well because the people who needed arteries were over 50 years old, their cells weren’t growing, they’d get infections.’ The other problem was making the technology commercially viable: growing organs in a lab is a costly, time-consuming process and Seifalian’s collaborator company pulled out.

Proponents of biological organ replacements have recently been encouraged by the development of 3D tissue printing, which offers the tantalising possibility that we might build organs mechanically, layer by layer — a much faster process than growing them in the lab. But printing complex internal organs like the liver or heart is still some way off, and the technology will face similar issues to traditional tissue engineering when it comes to implanting.

In the meantime, some scientists are pursuing a different approach, combining biological tissue with synthetic materials and/or mechanical and electronic components to create what could be called hybrid or even cyborg organs (cyborgans, if you will), which are more easily manufactured, longer lasting and more successful once implanted into the body.

On one level this means incorporating some biological material into a largely man-made device. French firm Carmat, which is owned by aerospace and defence company EADS, has begun animal trials on one of the world’s most advanced designs for an artificial heart, which includes some biological elements.

Source: Carmat

The Carmat artificial heart includes a biomembrane

The two chambers inside the Carmat heart are each divided by a biomembrane that separates blood on side from hydraulic fluid on the other. Tiny motors controlled by an electronic sensor system pump the hydraulic fluid in and out of the chambers, in turn causing the membrane to pump the blood.

To increase haemocompatiblity, the membrane is made from animal tissue that helps move the blood without damaging cells. Microporous biological and synthetic biomaterials also cover every other surface that comes in contact with the blood, in order to prevent material from sticking to them. If trials are successful, Carmat hopes its heart could achieve a lifespan of at least five years, and potentially up to the nine years of extra life reached by 50 per cent of transplant patients.

But scientists are also combining biological and synthetic materials in a more fundamental way, creating permanent artificial structures or scaffolds and then growing living cells around them. Seifalian is already preparing to clinically trial blood vessels and tracheae (windpipes) made in this way, and is also developing urethrae, bladders and cardiac patches for healing hearts.

Although Seifalian’s organs are grown along similar lines to those based on temporary moulds and scaffolds that gradually disappear, providing the same increased biocompatibility and reduced the risk of infection, he argues that permanent internal structures provide several additional advantages.

‘The nondegradable material is more reliable,’ he said. ‘If you make a tube you can make it mechanically similar and sometimes better than a real trachea, so if you squash it, it goes back to its original shape [etc.] Also the surgeon knows the material is going to be there forever. If you put in an artery and the polymer disappears after three months, if the body doesn’t take over then the patient will die. But if you know the artery is going to be there forever then you will feel much better.’

Source: UCL

Prof Seifalian’s material has been used to produce part-biological, part-synthetic windpipes.

The material is a nanocomposite polymer that goes by the name polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane-poly (carbonate-urea) urethane, or the much more manageable POSS-PCU for short. It’s strong, relatively cheap to synthesise and easy to manipulate into a range of complex structures. The silicon in it helps make it biocompatible, although scientists aren’t exactly sure why. And the material’s nanostructure, which was inspired by butterfly wings Seifalian studied at the Natural History Museum in London, also makes it hydrophobic, meaning it repels water and therefore prevents bacteria from growing and causing infections.

The other benefit is commercial, he added: having a physical product to sell is a more attractive proposition for manufacturers. ‘If you have a material scaffold it can be tailored to patients or just made in different sizes and you can sell it. You can then add cells and put it into the patient.’

This biological tissue can be grown either in a lab or, in some cases, after the artificial structure is implanted into the body. Seifalian’s blood vessels, for example, contain molecules that take stem cells from the blood and convert them into the endothelial cells that line the body’s own vessels. As well as reducing the risk of rejection, this also means the structure can be implanted as soon as it is needed, rather than having to wait several months for the cells to be grown in the lab.

The next big challenge is to build one of the body’s more complex organs such as a liver, by creating a synthetic scaffold and culturing stem cells around it that then turn into hepatic (liver) tissue. This could prove even more difficult than building an entire working heart, said Seifalian. ‘A liver stores vitamins, takes poisons out of the blood and so on, so a liver virtually is factory. To make the whole organ to become functional is quite complex.’

Several other research teams are studying the use of scaffolds to build organs, but one group in particular has managed to produce tissues that most closely fit the label ‘cyborgan’. The team, which comprised researchers based at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was able to add electronic sensors to a tissue scaffold that could be used to monitor electrical activity or other changes in the cells around it.

Source: MIT

A 3D fluorescent image of an electronic tissue scaffold

Previous work had led to flat layers of cells grown on electrodes or transistors, but the MIT/Harvard researchers were able to build a porous epoxy scaffold embedded with silicon nanowires that carry electrical signals to and from the tissue grown around it, and detect activity of less than one-thousandth of a watt — about the level of electricity that might bee seen in a cell. They demonstrated the sensors could detect electrical activity related to cell contraction and changes in pH.

One of the researchers, Dr Tal Dvir, is now based at Tel Aviv University in Israel and working on making the sensors operate wirelessly without being attached to a semiconductor base so they can be incorporated into a cardiac patch. The idea is that the patch would help regenerate the heart after an attack, while the sensors monitor its progress by detecting electrical activity as the heart contracts to ensure the cells were acting synchronously. Eventually it could also operate as a pacemaker by using the nanowires to emit electrical signals or control a drug-delivery system.

‘In cardiac tissue engineering you want to see that the tissue you engineer is doing what you want it to do,’ said Dvir. ‘We put sensors within the scaffold and were able to record from each of these spots. It was like having a map of the contractions or the beating of the cells in three dimensions.’

The researchers also demonstrated the technology with blood-vessel cells and neurons, and Dvir believes arteries that monitor blood flow or patches that could help heal or stimulate the brain could also be possible, and perhaps one day even cyborg eyes or muscles.

The development of hybrid organs raises the question of whether they’re merely a stopgap until we can produce better biological replacements, perhaps with 3D printers as the enabling technology, or whether synthetic materials and electronics will allow us to enhance what nature has given us.

Source: Tal Dvir

Researchers at Tel Aviv University are developing tiny sensors to implant in lab-grown organs.

Dvir thinks additive manufacturing could actually be what delivers the full possibility of cyborgans, rather than making them redundant. ‘When I think about 3D printers I immediately think about the opportunity to combine electronics with engineered tissue,’ he said. ‘So in my opinion, I think there is great potential for these cyborg tissues. If it works with patches it will work with fully engineered organs.’

Seifalian goes a step further. He sees the future as fully synthesised organs that work even better than the real thing, based on biocompatible, functional materials, perhaps with embedded electronics. ‘With growing organs we will move forward but I don’t think that’s the future. Why can’t we make a heart from functionalised material that works very well and doesn’t break, doesn’t get calcification and so on?’

‘There is great potential for these cyborg tissues. If it works with patches it will work with fully engineered organs.’

We’re actually already seeing similar ideas become reality, for example De Montfort University has developed an artificial pancreas that releases insulin via a glucose-sensitive material (see below). And Seifalian is playing around with the idea of a synthetic heart made from ionic polymers that contract when an electrical signal is applied.

‘Unfortunately it’s not as strong, it’s not fast enough to replace the heart muscle so we’re still working on it,’ he said, adding: ‘I don’t think we’re very far away from it. I think in 10 years’ time somebody will come up with such a thing.’ If that’s the case we could find ourselves going full circle and jettisoning biological replacements altogether. Perhaps the future isn’t cyborg organs but android ones.

Artificial pancreas

The need to more carefully regulate type 1 diabetcs’ insulin intake has led to several attempts to create an artificial pancreas that removes the need for sufferers to perform their own injections. Most designs include an implanted insulin pump and electronic glucose sensor regulated by an external device, but researchers led by Prof Joan Taylor at De Montfort University in Leicester have developed a self-contained implant that manages insulin release automatically and more precisely. Insulin is stored behind a polymer gel that softens in the presence of glucose molecules, releasing insulin to the liver in the right amount until the glucose drops.

Although the researchers have yet to incorporate living tissue to improve the device’s biocompatibility, the design represents how functional materials performing a more natural process can operate better than mechanical and electronic components alone. ‘It has dose-related activity just by virtue of the fact that it works on a molecular level,’ said Taylor. ‘So you don’t have to build this in digitally; it responds naturally as an absolute function of glucose content.’

This article first appeared on The Engineer.

Come together: towards machines that build themselves

Self-assembly is finding applications in areas from space to medical implants.

If humanity is going to fulfil its dreams about space — exploring it, mining it, colonising it — then we need to learn how to build in it. The kinds of large structures required for launching deep-space missions could be made much simpler if we could construct them in orbit rather than packaging them up for launch from Earth. And to build in one of the most extreme environments we know, we’ll have to take human involvement out of the picture. Automated construction equipment is one solution. But there may be another possibility: self-assembly.

‘Solar power is a huge problem for communication satellites,’ says Kim Ward, head of space engineering and technology at Harwell-based research centre RAL Space. ‘The traditional way of doing solar panels is they all have to be joined together and have a fancy deployment. But if you could have 30 or 40 free-flying solar panels that joined together then you could assemble huge panels. And if they’re really smart, they could get hit by a bit of space debris but then reconfigure and regenerate.’

Source: Magna Parva

RAL Space is developing hexagonal craft that autonomously join-up to form a larger structure once in space.

RAL Space is working with Qinetiq Space and technology firm Magna Parva on a proposal for the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop what it calls a “hex swarm”, a fleet of seven dinner plate-sized hexagonal spacecraft that could be launched into space in a stack and then autonomously join together to form a larger structure. To convince ESA it will work, Ward’s team is building a test rig to that can demonstrate how the craft will use locate and then dock with each other.

Ward calls the hexagonal craft “worker bees”, referring to their fairly limited capabilities: they would align using the Sun as a reference point, find each other using infrared signals and rendezvous with one of two techniques RAL Space is testing (and not yet revealing). But they would be overseen by a “queen bee” that could communicate with them and with mission control.

As well as forming the basis of large structures like solar panels or communication dishes, the craft could share power or computing resources. ‘The whole idea of assembling structures on the Moon or Mars is equally relevant,’ says Ward. ‘In a sense it’s easier because you’re doing it in two dimensions, but you still have the same problem of things moving around that join together to make potentially very large structures.’

Source: Magna Parva

The hexagonal craft would be stackable for easy launch.

Several studies over the last few years have proposed similar self-assembling or reconfigurable spacecraft concepts, although Ward claims RAL Space is the first group to run a demonstration project. Another recent idea put forward by Skylar Tibbits, founder of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, is to build components made from specially designed materials that can change their shape and purpose in space, for example from a solar panel to a parabolic antenna.

‘If you can reconfigure from one state to another and make extremely functional systems in between then you have more robust scenarios,’ he says. ‘Right now, a lot of the technologies are one-off and so you ship up a lot of equipment, you need human space walks and construction up there.’

Tibbits points out that this idea is different from that of true self-assembly — there’s no coming together of constituent parts. And RAL Space’s vision of robotic components that link up is far from the principle of natural molecular self-assembly used to build nanostructures. But what they all share is the notion that adding an aspect of autonomy to a structure or material and removing human intervention can increase its functionality. And this concept is increasingly being employed across several other areas of manufacturing.

‘If you can reconfigure from one state to another and make extremely functional systems in between then you have more robust scenarios’

Skylar TIbbits, MIT Self-Assembly Lab

Scientists have long looked enviously at the efficiency with which nature manufactures things. The processes by which proteins in living cells are formed, folded and combined don’t require external energy or direction and are instead driven by the natural movement of molecules and the various forces between them. The other advantage of this molecular self-assembly is the complexity of the structures that can be formed at the nanolevel, something that traditional “top-down” manufacturing techniques cannot replicate.

For this reason, molecular self-assembly has become a popular technique for scientists experimenting with adding special functions to material surfaces or creating tiny structures with incredible properties. For example, a team at the University of Sheffield is using it to develop self-propelled nano-devices that can deliver drugs to a tumour within the body.

Chasing tumours

Drug delivery has already become pretty sophisticated. Using magnetic fields or other stimuli, doctors can guide tiny packets of cancer drugs through the body to the site of a tumour, meaning other organs aren’t exposed to their toxic effects. But scientists at Sheffield University want to go a step further and create self-assembling autonomous nano-devices that guide themselves to the tumour by following the trail of chemical signals it releases into the bloodstream.

The devices are based on spherical polymer molecules each with a catalyst patch to drive a reaction that creates thrust. These particles naturally self-assemble into groups that form the structure of the drug delivery device. ‘The neat thing about it is depending on how they join together you get different types of motion,’ says research leader Dr Stephen Ebbens. ‘So if they join with the catalysts perfectly aligned they’ll move in a straight line. If you have an offset you’ll get devices that spin around. And this all emerges from this natural self-assembly process.’

If Ebbens’ team can control the self-assembly process by changing the molecules’ design in a certain they will be able to tailor the devices to move in the desired way. ‘One of our ideas is to grow a long chain where the individual units are flexibly linked to make a snake-like structure,’ he says. Alternatively, making larger round devices that spin could be used to mix substances in microfluidic devices more precisely.

But this kind of self-assembly isn’t quite yet an option for commercial mass production. That’s why microchip companies are hoping to instead use the concept to make manufacturing tools that could produce the next generation of electronic components at much tinier scales than is currently possible — thereby helping to maintain the “Moore’s Law” development of ever-faster processors.

This method of “directed self-assembly” (DSA) relies on materials known as block copolymers, chains of at least two types of monomer molecules that are grouped into sections. The different monomer groups are linked but naturally want to separate, causing the molecules to arrange themselves into specific shapes — spheres or cylinders for example — depending on their structure. These copolymers can be used to create lithographic masks with features smaller than the wavelength of light, which in turn could mass-produce chips with much finer detail than those made by traditional photolithography.

Source: MIT

Self-assembly can help make microchips with far smaller features than conventional methods.

Until last year, researchers had only been able to create two-dimensional masks, but a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a way to build several layers of self-assembled structures to produce more complex 3D configurations. The technique involves dissolving the polymer and spin-coating it onto a silicon substrate covered with tiny posts that repel the polymer and so guide the self-assembly process.

‘We can put a set of cylinders going in one direction and above it a layer of cylinders going in the other direction and have junctions in between the two,’ says Prof Caroline Ross, who has been working on DSA since 1997. ‘So you can imagine making a three-dimensional structure in one go rather than building it up layer by layer.’ Ross’s team have also been able to use DSA to produce square shapes typical of existing electronics design, rather than the hexagonal shapes the self-assembled molecules naturally want to form.

Molecular manufacturing

For DSA to be used in commercial manufacturing, companies need to find ways to scale and speed up the technique and reduce the number of defects that occur. But over a decade of research like that at MIT has reportedly helped push the concept onto the R&D agenda at major firm such as Intel. And molecular self-assembly has also started to work its way into other areas of manufacturing research, not just in the creation of tiny devices but also in the production of materials themselves. A team at Manchester University, for example, is using the principles of natural self-assembly to mimicking the DNA building process in order to create a more efficient chemical manufacturing process.

Proteins and other molecules in living cells don’t form spontaneously but rather are constructed by tiny “molecular machines” that grab small molecules and join them together in specifically ordered chains. Researchers at Manchester University led by Prof David Leigh hope that by replicating this concept with their own molecular machines, they can produce a new, more efficient way of synthesising chemicals that doesn’t rely on multi-step batch processing that uses up lots of energy.

Their first machine is based on the ribosome that links amino acids into proteins according to the code laid out in DNA. The machine’s movements are driven by the random motion of molecules and its structure means that each stage of the process occurs in the right order. In this way, molecular manufacturing is another example of taking the human intervention out of the process and instead using a form of self-assembly. But the complexity offered by such a precise and programmable manufacturing method means the obvious application for it might be in creating new materials rather than replacing current techniques for making existing chemicals.

Self-assembly is even being used to create substances that mimic some of the properties of biological tissue but without the difficulties created by it actually being alive. Scientists have been able to coat water droplets with a membrane of fatty molecules known as lipids to approximate cells and, because the lipids have both water-loving and water-repelling parts, when the droplets are surrounded by oil they self-assemble into a specific structure. Inserting other biological molecules into the membranes gives these “cells” useful and controllable properties, for example conducting ionic currents or transducing light into electricity. Unlike living tissue, however, these droplet structures don’t need a supply of oxygen or food and they can’t die or grow uncontrollably.

A team from Oxford University recently developed a means to manufacture these structures on a larger scale by building their own version of a 3D printer that injected the water droplets into a bath of oil and lipids in a pre-detemined pattern. Gabriel Villar, one of the researchers and now an employee of technology transfer firm Cambridge Consultants, says the technique could be used to print functional structures for biocompatible medical implants, without the hassle of printing and maintaining fully living tissue.

Source: Oxford University

Oxford University researchers have created tissue-like structures from self-assembling water and fat droplets.

‘By including the right kinds of biomolecules and chemicals you might be able to get these droplets to talk to a living tissue in a very well defined way,’ he says. ‘With living cells it’s very difficult to tell exactly what they’re going to do. One big problem is to stop cells from becoming carcinogenic, from creating tumours in a printed structure, or differentiating into the wrong kind of cell.’

Again, the advantage of these bio-inspired, self-assembled structures over simple electrical machines is their complexity, he adds. ‘The power in using biological processes is you can really manipulate matter much more generally. You can use them to control the flow of matter or to construct new molecules in a controlled way or to analyse or detect a presence of a specific molecule in a solution or in the air.’

The development of 3D printing could be important in scaling up production of self-assembling materials and structures but also in applying the principles to much larger objects. Skylar Tibbits of MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab has actually coined the term “4D printing” to describe the use of 3D printers to make objects that can change shape or function after they’ve been printed, although again he stresses that these items are transformational rather than truly self-assembled.

Using a Stratasys Connex printer that can make structures from two different polymers and experimental Autodesk design software known as Project Cyborg, Tibbits has been able to create a plastic string that very slowly folds up into a pre-programmed shape when placed in water. Its joints are made from a polymer that expands by 150 per cent when wet, and combining that with sections of a rigid, non-absorbing plastic creates an object that can change its shape without the need for motors and actuators — just the ambient energy input of submerging it.

Source: MIT

Combining different materials with additive manufacturing can produce

You can imagine how this idea might be used to produce bigger strings or flat sheets that can fold themselves into large objects such as furniture without the need for human assembly, just as protein molecules fold themselves into shapes that give them functionality. But Tibbits has more unusual concepts in mind, not just the transforming space structures but also pipes that change their shape to reduce water flow or even that grow and constrict rapidly to pump water along — an idea he is working on with Boston-based engineering firm Geosyntec.

However, it’s not entirely clear how much of a role 3D printers and additive manufacturing will play in spreading self-assembly. For example, Tibbits questions whether 4D printing will actually be the technique he uses to produce the transforming pipes because of its size limitations.

‘Right now you can print up to a few feet in all dimensions on the biggest of the Connex machines and a lot of people are looking at how we can scale up printing,’ he says. ‘In the future we might be able to use a process like that for the pipes but it’s more about the mindset that you can program these materials in elegant ways to transform.’

‘The multi-functionality and the self-assembly comes out of the freedom of design that you can only get from an additive approach.’

Richard Hague, Centre for Additive Manufacturing

At the other end of the scale, 3D printing isn’t yet precise enough to manipulate molecules, for example to set up self-assembly for electronics manufacturing. ‘With 3D printers you’re looking at tens of microns and it’s a different magnitude,’ says Caroline Ross. On the other hand, the researchers at Oxford University overcame several issues to use 3D printing technology to build their water-droplet networks. They used an extruded glass tube the width of a human hair to place the droplets precisely and developed control software to compensate for the way this print head would drag the droplets after it had printed them.

Richard Hague, director of the EPSRC Centre for Additive Manufacturing at Nottingham University, argues that self-assembly essentially is a form of additive manufacturing. ‘Most additive manufacturing is at the micro scale really, so moving to the nanoscale throws up a whole bunch of different problems and you’re looking at a different bunch of physics.’

But, he adds, there is immense possibility for the technology as it progresses. ‘With the additive approach the most important thing is the design freedoms you get, the ability to make these complicated parts. The multi-functionality and the self-assembly comes out of the freedom of design that you can only get from an additive approach.’

This article first appeared on The Engineer.