Radio appearance: brain-controlled prostheses, cancer blood testers, aircraft weather forecasts

I discuss brain-controlled prosthetic arms, cancer blood test kits and improved weather forecasting for aircraft, on Monocle 24.

Radio panel debate: civilian drones on Voice of Russia

I took part in a panel discussion on Voice of Russia radio on the topic of using drones for civilian purposes.

Radio appearance: electronic tissue, virtual prostheses and 'coralbots'

My latest appearance on Monocle 24's The Briefing, discussing electronic tissue implants, virtual reality prostheses and underwater 'coralbots'.

Will the Olympics change the public's perception of engineering?

Credit: London 2012

The Olympics has been a brilliant chance for Britain to shine, not just in sport but also in culture, media, hospitality and, perhaps in some ways best of all, in engineering.

From the strikingly impressive venues at the Olympic Park, to the transport system that has (so far) coped so well in transporting record numbers of people around the capital, to the ingenious technology used to train our athletes with never-seen-before precision, Britain’s engineers have responded to this once-in-a-lifetime challenge in a way we can all be proud of.

Even Danny Boyle’s spellbinding opening ceremony managed to celebrate the vital role of Britain’s engineers from Brunel to Berners-Lee in shaping the world in which we live (even if some might have objected to the emphasis on dark Satanic mills).

But for all the successes of engineering in the Games, I wonder how many of the public will make the link and perhaps have their perceptions and preconceptions challenged.

Certainly the stadium, velodrome and aquatics centre are obvious examples and the most visible symbol of engineering achievement. A recent survey by the Institution of Civil Engineers found that more than a third of respondents thought the Olympic Park had helped them appreciate the importance of civil engineering to society.

The media have also given plenty of coverage to the technology behind the games, especially as Britain tends to excel in sports that use highly engineered equipment such as cycling and rowing. So much has been made of Team GB’s attention to detail in these areas that questions have been raised about whether this creates an unfair advantage, with some competitors going so far as to effectively accuse us of cheating.

But as those involved with the Park’s construction note in a great short film produced by the ICE (see below), much of the most impressive engineering – underground power cables, wireless communication systems etc ­– is invisible from the outside. Out of sight, out of mind. Other elements such as transport suffer from the problem that people only notice them if they go wrong.

Also there are the promotional restrictions placed on those engineering companies involved with the Olympics but who are not sponsors, an issue The Engineer has written about before and has been noted by the chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) Sir John Armitt.

Once the Games come to a close and life returns to normal, engineers must seize the opportunity and continue to promote their achievements, highlighting the crucial importance of their role in pulling off perhaps the greatest advertisement for British skills and business in the last 50 if not 100 years. That would be truly worthwhile legacy for London 2012.

This article first appeared on The Engineer.

Automating the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Radio appearance: GPS backup, wearable cancer scanners and swimming sensors

I talk to Monocle editor Andrew Tuck about a backup to GPS, wearable cancer scanners and the swimming sensors helping Team GB prepare for the Olympics.

I'm on at 34.20.

http://monocle.dl.groovygecko.com/m24/10800178.mp3?web-download

Selected news from the latest edition of The Engineer

Physicists seek to determine the origin of cosmic X-rays

The NuSTAR satellite will include an extendable telescope to look for cosmic X-rays

UK researchers are hoping to determine the origin of cosmic X-rays using new satellite technology launched by NASA earlier this month.

Physicists from Durham University want to use the first space telescope that can focus high-energy X-rays using specially coated mirrors — part of the $170m (£110m) NuSTAR satellite — to confirm whether background radiation in space comes from black holes.

These X-rays aren’t detectable on Earth and were first discovered in space in 1962, but scientists have so far been unable to focus the radiation sufficiently to pinpoint its origin.

‘Black holes can pull in gas off nearby stars, and this gas gets very hot and emits strong X-rays,’ Prof David Alexander, the research project’s co-ordinator at Durham, told The Engineer.

‘We’ve known from telescopes that look at lower-energy X-rays that this is likely to be the case, but you don’t know [for sure] until you’ve looked [at higher energy levels] and you don’t know what the exact properties of the objects will be.’

High-energy X-rays can penetrate the gas and dust surrounding black holes so the scientists should be able to track them to their source, but this high penetration rate also makes them very difficult to reflect with focusing mirrors.

Conventional X-ray mirrors are made from high-density materials and are placed almost parallel to the beam’s direction of travel so the X-ray just grazes the surface, increasing the amount of reflection.

But these materials are not so good for reflecting high-energy X-rays, so NuSTAR will use mirrors that alternate the high-density platinum and tungsten with low-density silicon and siliconcarbite in hundreds of layers to form a ‘depth-graded multilayer’.

As the waves hit the different material layers, they produce slightly different patterns that interfere with one another and enhance the beam as it is reflected.

‘When previously we’d have an out-of-focus image, we’ll see things clearly for the first time at these energies,’ said Alexander.

‘We’ll be able to pinpoint where this X-ray emission is coming from and at the same time we can go about 100 times deeper than we’ve been before in the sense that we can see fainter objects.’

Several teams of academics from across the US and Europe helped to develop the telescope, which consists of 130 concentric mirror shells made by depositing the multilayer coating on a flexible glass substrate heated to give it the desired curvature.

The telescope is due to be deployed using a mast that folds out from the satellite once it is in orbit, extending up to 10m in order to position the optics at the right distance from the X-ray detectors to achieve the desired focus.

After a one-month calibration period, the satellite will collect data for an initial period of two years. But Alexander said he hoped the team would begin to make discoveries after just one month of data gathering.

Technology could monitor hip replacements for signs of wear

A new device could monitor hip replacements for signs of wear, powered only by the movement of the user’s walk.

The technology, designed to fit inside a typical prosthetic hip joint, uses a piezo-electric device that generates up to 3.7V of electricity as the user walks to power a strain gauge and a transmitter.

By using the strain gauge to monitor the distance between the prosthesis and the femur leg bone, doctors will able to tell if the replacement is starting to break down and advise the patient on lifestyle changes or the potential need for another operation.

‘Thirty per cent of hip replacements within six years start to show signs of osteolysis,’ said Brunel University student Luke Kavanagh, who developed the device.

‘As the joint comes loose it starts to work away at the plastic cement and these little particles then travel around the body and can actually start to corrode the rest of the femur and the hip.’

The device contains a ball bearing that rolls back and forth as the user walks along and strikes a substrate covered on one side with piezo-electric material (known as a unimorph) to produce electricity.

Kavanagh said the challenge was adjusting the rigidity of the unimorph so that it bent enough to produce sufficient power but was durable enough to survive this repetitive process.

He added that the device could be customised to adjust its output and durability depending on how active the user was.

‘An older person isn’t going to move with any real vigour, so you could put a much thinner unimorph in and get all the electricity from big deflections,’ Kavanagh said.

‘With a young person who’s going to be running around, you can put a much thicker one in, but because the velocity you’re hitting the unimorphs with is going to be so much greater you’d get the electricity you need either way.’

Material could enable cheaper method of carbon capture

A cheaper method of carbon capture could emerge from the creation of a unique porous material by UK researchers.

A team of scientists from Nottingham and Newcastle universities has designed a honeycomb-like metal organic framework (MOF) known as NOTT-202a to adsorb and release carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas at lower temperatures than existing capture methods.

The material adsorbs CO₂ under pressure and releases it as the pressure is decreased, while allowing other chemicals such as hydrogen, nitrogen and methane to pass out of it first.

NOTT-202a could avoid the need for the amine solutions that are commonly used in carbon capture but must be heated to release the CO₂ and can also be toxic.

‘The most novel aspect of this paper is the structure of the material itself,’ said Prof Marin Schröder, head of inorganic chemistry at Nottingham and one of the authors of a paper on the research published in Nature Materials.

The material consists of two interpenetrating networks formed from organic ligand molecules attached to a central indium metal atom, but with holes or defects in one of the networks to create more space in which to hold CO₂.

‘So you have a more porous network than what you would normally expect while the interpenetration means you have greater interactions between the pore walls and therefore you get stronger interactions with gases,’ said Schröder.

‘It’s a contradiction. You need narrow pores to maximise the interaction with gases but you also want the pores to be bigger so each can hold more gas.’

The researchers used the Diamond Light Source synchrotron at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Apple Laboratory to take X-ray powder diffraction measurements that allowed them to see inside the material’s structure.

They have also developed a computer simulation that will allow them to test new designs of the material as they go through the process of optimising it so it can be scaled up for use in real carbon capture systems.

‘There are all manner of issues about scale-up of this material,’ said Schröder. ‘Can we make this material cheaply? Can we develop the ligand synthesis to be more green?’

These articles first appeared on The Engineer.

Radio appearance: robotic elephant trunks and controlling your computer by waving your hands

I discuss motion control computer interfaces, searching for oil deposits with satellite technology and robotic elephant trunks with Monocle 24's Matt Barbet.

Is the UK automotive industry on the road to revival?

Road to success: Vauxhall will build the new Astra in the UK

This week saw a big moment for UK manufacturing, one that probably should have received more attention than it has. According to March trade figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Britain now makes more money from exporting cars than it spends on importing them for the first time since 1976.


The announcement yesterday that Vauxhall would build the new Astra at its Ellesmere Port plant was headline news, but even more important than the 2,100 jobs saved as a result was the longer-term trend that it represented: the turnaround of the UK automotive industry.


In recent months we’ve seen Honda and Nissan also announce the creation of hundreds of jobs at their UK plants while Jaguar Land Rover has pledged to invest a further £1bn with British suppliers over the next four years.


‘It’s not an uncertain anymore: there is a renaissance in UK automotive manufacturing,’ says Paul Everitt, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).


‘Over the course of the last 18 months we’ve seen around £4.5bn of investment committed to the UK. Almost every single one of the major vehicle manufacturers operating here has committed and recommitted to their facilities. And so we have a forward view of almost a decade of product into UK plants, which is in memory unheard of.’


Driving change
With production rates of around 1.4 million vehicles a year, we might still be far off our 1970s peak of more than two million, or even the late 1990s when we returned to almost as high a level. But there’s been a 40 per cent increase since the 2009 recession despite the country’s continuing economic struggles and those of our main export market, the Eurozone.


So what’s behind this revival? The first thing most people mention is the continued strength of the UK engineering base. Despite the decline of manufacturing we still have the strong capabilities, innovation and skills of a developed industry, not to mention a large domestic market. But this in itself doesn’t explain the change.


Everitt argues that UK-based car companies have worked hard to improve their businesses, a point echoed by analyst Dr Daniel Guttmann, head of the automotive team at PWC. ‘Ellesmere Port is one of the most efficient production sites in Europe, so it would have been a very strange decision to close that site down,’ he says. ‘British engineering and ingenuity has gone a long way to making these plants more efficient.’


It’s a far cry from the image of British car making in the 1970s, which the industry now seems to have shed, along with the problems of worker relations. Vauxhall said a new flexible working agreement had helped Ellesmere to reduce costs and was a key part of the company’s decision, but was also welcomed by the union Unite.


‘While we would argue the relationship with the trade unions and employees has been very good for a long time, these perceptions are sometimes difficult to overcome and I think we have unquestionably changed that,’ says Everitt.


Rebound from recession
Part of the growth in the last few years has of course been the rebound from recession, aided by a good exchange rate after years of a strong pound. But political changes have played their part as well as economic ones.


‘The government has now very publicly and proactively stated its aim to grow the manufacturing sector to rebalance the economy,’ says Vauxhall’s managing director, Duncan Aldred, arguing that the government’s determination to stick to austerity at least creates consistency for investment. ‘We know the economy isn’t growing anywhere near what we want it to be but at least we have a path forward. Like it or not, there is a plan and I think that helps create stability.’


The regional growth fund, increased R&D tax credits and the willingness of ministers and even the prime minister to lobby for the UK’s automotive industry — business secretary Vince Cable flew to the US to meet with the boss of Vauxhall owners General Motors before the deal was signed — have all played their role.


And to be fair to Labour, it was the previous government and former business secretary Lord Mandelson who began the process, argues Everitt. ‘He established the Automotive Council, he worked with industry on establishing a strategy around the transition to low-carbon vehicles, strengthening the supply chain, improving communication.’


Maintaining momentum
But now that we’re seeing strong growth, the question is whether it’s sustainable. Will it last beyond the crisis in the eurozone, in a European industry that is already recognised as having an overcapacity, in the face of — as the chief executive of Ford Europe, Stephen Odell, recently pointed out — growing competition from Asian manufacturers in the wake of free-trade deals?


‘It’s a good question and there’s actually no simple answer,’ says Guttmann. ‘The overcapacity is much more acute for some manufacturers than others. And I would think the more vulnerable manufacturers are not in the UK and therefore I would expect the UK’s share of manufacturing in Europe to go up.’


Another reason to be positive about the future for the UK is the appeal of classic British brands in the upper market segment — Jaguar, Land Rover, Bentley, Aston Martin. These are seen to have particular appeal in rapidly developing countries such as China and India among a growing middle class gaining a taste for luxury. So Asia provides an opportunity as well as a threat.


Sadly, the mass-market cars built by Honda, Ford or even Vauxhall (badged as Opel abroad) don’t have the same British stamp, even if the UK industry has overcome its image problem. And there is an urgent need to nurture the supply chain after years of decline and the ravages of recession, something that will be difficult without more economic stability.


But the manufacturers’ commitments to Britain’s automotive plants have already secured some future prospects and, with continued innovation, efficiency and the right environment for investment, this could mark a major turning point in our industrial history.


This article first appeared on The Engineer

Radio appearance: electricity from viruses, brain scans to aid multitasking, and walking vehicles

My latest appearance on Monocle 24's The Briefing, discussing generating power with virus-based piezoelectrics, a brain scanner that can tell when you're multitasking and tell a computer to help out, and a video system to enable robotic vehicles with legs to walk more securely.

Interview: Graham Hawkes, founder and chief engineer of Hawkes Ocean Technologies and designer of the DeepFlight personal submarines

Winged submersible specialist Graham Hawkes has set his sights on making undersea exploration more affordable.

When film director James Cameron became the first man to complete a solo trip to the deepest point in the ocean, Graham Hawkes was happy to be thousands of miles away, diving in the two-man winged submersible he had built for billionaire businessman Tom Perkins. Of course, most people would be happy in this situation, and for Hawkes it’s a regular part of his routine - he has spent the past four decades designing manned underwater vehicles for research, industry and personal pleasure. But on that day he was particularly glad to be away from civilisation, as Cameron and his team were busy achieving what Hawkes had been striving for for more than 20 years.

The viewing dome considerably increased the complexity of the design

The recent efforts of several groups to single-handedly reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (oceanographers Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard made the first journey in 1960) had become something of a media-constructed race. Cameron’s ‘competitors’ included one team backed by Virgin Oceanic that had bought the craft Hawkes designed for the late businessman and adventurer Steve Fossett. However, the DeepFlight Challenger vehicle had been ready for sea trials by the time Fossett died in 2007, and its creator was so confident it would succeed that for him the challenge was already complete.

‘No one understands this but, as an engineer, as soon as the numbers work out and you know it is possible, in some ways you’re done,’ said Hawkes. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound callous but by the time we lost Steve I had got out of that programme what I, as an engineer, wanted.’

Softly spoken with a US twang to his British accent that comes from years of living in California, Hawkes comes across as unassuming despite his achievements. He formerly held the world record for the deepest solo dive; he can recount tales of encountering a great white shark while flying under water with Richard Branson; and he even appeared in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, piloting the one-man submersible he helped design.

Yet back in the 1990s, he said, he was the only ‘nutcase’ working on a vehicle to take him to the depths of the Mariana Trench. And, crucially, he wanted to do it in a way that was much cheaper than previous missions by building a craft light enough (less than 10,000lb) not to need a dedicated launch ship. After years of failing to secure financial backing, he agreed to let Fossett - who had also long held a similar ambition - fly the craft in return for putting up the cash to build it. ‘I always felt it could be done for much less money - $5m instead of $100m,’ said Hawkes. ‘Anything more than 10,000lb is just too heavy to go and rent a ship as needed.’ Basing the craft on the most space-efficient shape - a cylinder - in order to reduce weight created the need for stronger materials to cope with extreme pressures. ‘We suddenly realised that we could get there with carbon,’ Hawkes said. ‘If we very efficiently wound carbon, fibre by fibre, then with the theoretical properties of the material - the strength-to-weight ratio - we                                                               could do it.’

Creating the viewing domes that Hawkes wanted added further complexity to the design. ‘We made life 10 times harder by the other goals we set,’ he said. ‘A steel sphere with a conical frustum viewport will answer the purpose of getting to the bottom of the ocean… But if you’re squinting through a little porthole, then why not just use a camera? If you’re going to go down there, let’s have panoramic vision or don’t bother. That requires a view dome and changes the complexity of the pressure hull enormously.’

Working very closely with Fossett on the design meant taking his input but also freed Hawkes from some typical constraints. ‘[Normally] I am not going to be responsible for taking away obvious basic safety systems but that’s what Steve and I were able to do with the design,’ he said. ‘We were able to pare this thing down to the bare minimum, which you have to do really for a record-breaking machine.’

Given the importance of Fossett to the vehicle’s design, it’s not surprising that when he disappeared while flying an aircraft over the Nevada desert the project came to a halt. ‘I felt that craft was so much Steve - and myself - that the programme best just stop,’ said Hawkes. ‘You can’t really just hand it to some third party and say “go for it”, so I didn’t try to find somebody else… I tell that story and it doesn’t make sense to most people. Most people see the end result only as going down; they don’t understand the engineering reward of having built and tested that machine.’

DeepFlight Super Falcon can be launched without a dedicated support ship

After deciding it wasn’t worthwhile to mortgage his home to buy the craft from Fossett’s estate, Hawkes and his wife Karen decided to build their own vehicle and experience for themselves the wonder of flying through the ocean. So when the Virgin-backed team, led by entrepreneur and sailor Chris Welsh, resurrected the project, Hawkes had to think twice about returning. ‘I needed assurance it would be bought for its original purpose and not be used as a tour sub,’ he said. ‘I had to be pretty sure that I thought that the person making that dive knew what they were doing and what they were getting into.’

“Once you’ve achieved a goal, what it usually does is illuminate the next one”

After such a marathon process, Hawkes admitted that Cameron’s success stung. ‘It shouldn’t have, because it’s been a long time. He deserves that,’ he said circumspectly. ‘Life is like that - it hurt Steve much worse than it hurt me.’ But as well as the belief that DeepFlight Challenger could have made the journey much earlier had Fossett lived, Hawkes also had different goals from Cameron and it was these that led him to the craft he built for himself: the DeepFlight Super Falcon.

‘I was never in the race because I wanted to get under 10,000lb and I wanted to fly in the ocean,’ he said. ‘I’m hopeful that engineers might understand this; that once you’ve achieved a goal, what it usually does is illuminate the next one… This craft that we’ve built is the one I’m most proud of. Everyone’s going to ask “how deep does it go?” but I’ve been there and done that - I don’t care about that. What I want is a balanced capability to move in a three-dimensional space the way that big animals do.’

Now he has this capability, Hawkes isn’t leaving the submersible business behind to enjoy a retirement exploring the seas. He now aims to bring the costs down further so that thousands of people can have the experience so far limited to himself and a handful of billionaires - and hopes to make an announcement soon. ‘This is an ocean planet and there will be a Boeing of the future building craft to take us down, and I think we’re taking a shot at that,’ he said. ‘The full ocean-depth thing is a record but that means one man. We need to find something bigger than that.’

Graham Hawkes Founder and chief engineer, Hawkes Ocean Technologies
Education 
1969 Degree in mechanical engineering, Borough Polytechnic
Career 
1970 Engineer at Plessey Underwater Weapons Unit 
1974 Chief engineer at Underwater Marine Equipment; worked on JIM diving suit 
1977 Co-founded Offshore Systems Engineering; designed the Wasp and Mantis diving systems 
1981 Founded Deep Ocean Engineering 
1985 Set the world record for deepest solo dive (3,000ft) 
1989 Founded Deep Sea Discoveries 
1996 Founded Hawkes Ocean Technologies to develop DeepFlight series of winged submersibles 
1997 Founded Precision Remotes 
2010 Founded Hawkes Ocean Sports to introduce a line of manned submersibles for adventure and recreation 
2010 Founded Hawkes Remotes to launch a new generation of ROVs

Q&A
Why do you think there’s so much renewed interest in the Mariana Trench? 
If you really look hard at the situation and ask who has the hardware - who’s actually working on this as opposed to talking about it - there aren’t that many. Once you’ve got people such as Cameron and Sir Richard Branson working at this then suddenly it’s a different ball game. Before it was just Graham Hawkes and who the hell is he? Suddenly you’ve got a race and other people saying ‘I could do that’ - that’s what I think has happened here. And it’s terrific that Cameron and Branson have brought some daylight onto all this stuff.

What inspired you to take on the challenge? 
In the field I’m in, it has been the Holy Grail since I was a lad. I ended up working in the North Sea, and manned vehicles for the deep ocean were, and are, going extinct. I thought I understood why: the cost of the support ship - it’s too heavy and too clumsy. My goal was to get rid of the ship; just get to the bottom of the ocean and be done with it.

Were you always interested in submersibles?
Actually, I grew up dreaming of aircraft. It would have been great to be born at the turn of the century, when as an individual you could make a difference. You could build an aircraft in the back yard and go fly the thing and set a world record. But nowadays engineering’s just been taken over… We were born too late to make a difference. Then I got to look at this subsea stuff and I saw this is where aviation was all those years ago. The whole field was completely backwards, and that’s why I jumped in.

This article first appeared on The Engineer 

The Antikythera mechanism: a 2000-year-old computer highlights the importance of preserving and sharing knowledge

The Antikythera mechanism was preserved at the bottom of the sea for 2,000 years

We tend to think of computers as a modern invention, electronic devices with roots in the mechanical engines invented by the likes of Babbage in the 19th century. But a programme on BBC Four last night highlighted that computing has a much longer history stretching all the way back to ancient Greece.


The Antikythera mechanism is a clockwork calculator dating back to the first century BC that was designed to predict the movement of the celestial bodies. Watching the programme, I found it difficult to decide what was more amazing: the machine itself, which combined centuries of knowledge of astronomy and mathematics with intricate engineering that some put on a par with Victorian clocks; or the techniques employed by modern researchers to discover how the mechanism worked and what it was used for by studying the calcified fragments rescued from the bottom of the sea 100 years ago.


Thinking about this incredible device sparked a discussion in The Engineer office about not only the longevity of technology but about the fragile nature of knowledge itself. So much of our most advanced engineering today is found in electronics that would unlikely survive entombment underwater for 2,000 years, while the information it stores is locked up in bits and bytes that could easily be lost, even if the machine itself remained in tact.


And yet a technology (albeit a much simpler one) created when people still believed the Earth was the centre of the universe can still impart its knowledge to us, two millennia after it was built and then lost.


While the artefacts of the ancient world had to make it through conquests, dark ages and being shunted around on ships that could easily succumb to stormy weather, it’s easy to assume that our own technological achievements will last forever. You can picture visitors to a museum in the year 4,000 staring in wonder at the simplistic design of an iPhone.


But at a time when the latest technological gadgets are viewed as disposable, this is by no means guaranteed. A lifetime of research saved on a computer without a backup can be destroyed if a hard disk fails, reflecting how more tangible ways of storing information have their benefits too. And who’s to say a future global conflict won’t send human progress spiralling backwards for decades or even centuries?


However, there is one unquestionable advantage to the electronic nature of our modern system of storing information. The internet has opened up the sharing and preservation of knowledge on a global scale, achieving more than any invention that came before it, from the alphabet to the printing press.


The Antikythera mechanism itself may have survived in some form but its impact could have been so much greater had the ancient Greeks’ knowledge of this first computer not been restricted to a small number of people. Imagine a world where the Romans or the early Muslim world had widespread use of mechanical clocks, calendars and calculators. Perhaps iPhones might have already become museum pieces thanks to such a leg-up.


Speculation of parallel worlds aside, this awareness of the importance of both preserving and sharing knowledge feeds into the debate going on today about access to scientific journals and whether publishers should make them freely available on the internet. Individuals can make huge strides in technology but how much more can society achieve if its knowledge is open to all?

The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer is available to watch on iPlayer.


This article first appeared on The Engineer.

Carbon capture and storage: a risk worth taking?

The opening of a carbon capture pilot plant for research and training in central London this week suggests that some companies are preparing for the technology to become an important part of their business.


But the launch coincided with a report from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) that reminds us just how many challenges still remain if we hope to use this technology to cut emissions while still burning fossil fuels


Though we are some way from setting up a commercial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) system in the UK and many engineering challenges remain in doing this, listening to the report’s authors makes it seem likely that the biggest barriers won’t be technical. In fact, plants with a total annual capacity of 35.4m tonnes of CO2 capture are already operating round the world.


Instead the report highlighted a huge range of uncertainties surrounding the political and economic development of CCS that could hinder or even kill its progress in the UK, from getting financial incentives right to sorting out who’s liable if CO2 ends up accidentally being released into the atmosphere.


With so many chances for costly error in a process that could tie us to a strategy for the next few decades, you can’t help but wonder whether it’s all worth it. Indeed, one of the comments made about my article on the pilot plant questioned what the overall benefits of CCS were once you take into account the additional energy use.


The problem in answering this question is the same problem faced by government and industry in trying to plan CCS’s development. We won’t really know all the answers until we build one of these things, a point keenly stressed by the report’s authors.


There are other reasons the UK should pursue CCS at this stage. If we are going to use a mixture of nuclear and renewables in the next few decades, CCS-fitted fossil fuel power stations could provide a sensible way of meeting demand when the wind doesn’t blow during peak times.


There’s also great potential in our empty North Sea oil fields to store carbon dioxide — something that most other European nations don’t have — and so it could become a source of income for the UK, as could the technology and expertise involved. And, as UKERC researcher Prof Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University pointed out, you could argue the UK has a moral responsibility to clear up the mess of carbon emissions it started with the Industrial Revolution.


But perhaps the strongest argument is still that we need to trial CCS so that we have the best range of options available to us and can make the most informed decision about our energy future. Setting up an industry race between nuclear, renewables and CCS could help avoid rash commitment to costly vanity projects, said the report’s editor, Prof Jim Watson of Sussex University.


‘That idea of the race puts pressure on there to keep the costs down by saying it’s up to industry to choose which technologies make the most sense to meet the overall policy goals, which are emissions reduction, keeping the lights on, affordability etc. It’s not a policy goal that we must have CCS in the long run; it’s one of the suite of options there.’


For all the potential pitfalls, the report managed to propose a pathway to CCS success, drawing from examples such as flue gas desulphurisation technology and the development of nuclear reactors. But we need to take a long-term view and not close down options too early.


‘The race timescale is over decades. This is a marathon not a sprint,’ said Haszeldine. ‘So although government is trying to set out this competition between different technologies, they’re not all starting from the same starting line … There’s the possibility for technological failure to discover it really is a high cost but what the pathways also show is that there is plenty of opportunity for the government to mess it up on the way by making premature decisions.’


Listening to this, it’s no surprise that the researchers welcomed the government’s decision to start a new CCS competition after the failure of a previous one, this time opening it up to all technologies instead of focusing on a specific niche.


However, the next opportunity for a government mess-up is rapidly approaching, they argued, in the form of electricity market reform. A plan to provide the rest of the funding needed for the competition’s projects through energy bills needs to happen if companies are to get the financial backing they need.


But the detail has so far been thin and reforms have to be passed in enough time for companies to put their plans together for the competition, said Watson. ‘If they can’t get that coordination to work, the risk is you end up with no projects.’


This article first appeared on The Engineer.

Imperial's new carbon capture pilot plant opens for business

Superconducting cables head to the cities

Cold current: using superconducting cables to carry electricity within cities has many advantages, but the difficulties are also considerable

A steady stream of liquid nitrogen will next year begin flowing beneath the city of Essen in the Ruhr region of Germany. Its purpose: to cool the world’s longest superconducting cable, part of a trial to replace the city’s high-voltage transmission system with a safer, smaller and cheaper alternative.

Underground high-voltage cables are commonly used to carry 110kV of electricity or more beneath urban areas, connecting the national transmission grid to local distributions networks, where the voltage is reduced before entering people’s homes and businesses. But in the last 10 years a new alternative has emerged – implemented first in the US and due to be installed in Germany in 2013 – where superconductors are used to transmit energy at lower voltages using less material and requiring smaller trenches and fewer transformers.

A superconductor is a material that carries electricity with virtually no resistance when cooled to very low temperatures, usually below -200°C, meaning less energy is lost as heat. Some materials behave as superconductors at relatively higher temperatures and using these as electrical cables allows power to be cost-effectively transmitted at lower voltages, which would usually produce energy losses that were prohibitively expensive.

Superconducting cables can carry more current than conventional copper without generating magnetic fields

The €13.5m “AmpaCity” project in Essen will see German utility company RWE, working with cable firm Nexans and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, install a 1km underground high temperature superconductor (HTS) transmitting electricity at 10kV. Because it will connect to other medium voltage parts of the grid, it will allow RWE to reduce the number of urban transformer stations needed to step down the power from the long-distance transmission voltage of 110kV, freeing up valuable space in the city.

‘This makes the application of superconductors very attractive,’ said Mark Stemmle, project manager for superconducting cable systems for Nexans, which has designed the cable that will form the core of the AmpaCity project. ‘It’s not really an attractive application at the moment for areas in the country because normally you have a lot of space. But if you go inside the cities, you find there are often constraints in building space.’

Superconducting cables are larger than conventional power lines but only one is needed to carry the same amount of power as five traditional medium voltage cables. They don’t produce as much heat so need less insulation, nor do they create external magnetic fields, unlike conventional cables that can sometimes induce currents in adjacent underground pipes.

The smaller space needed for the cables frees up the distribution company to develop simpler network configurations, further reducing the amount of land used. A study the AmpaCity partners conducted last year found that a typical urban network of 20 transformers could be reduced to 15 using superconducting cables. Having fewer transformers is cheaper, and also reduces risks in the event of a fire in the city.

The study also found that superconductor cables – despite needing a flow of liquid nitrogen to cool them – would be cheaper both to install and run over a 40-year period than conventional high voltage lines, which require high levels of maintenance as well as the additional network infrastructure.

The smaller trenches needed for superconducting cables help reduce the impact of the installation

The superconducting cable Nexans will produce is the product of the company’s decade of experience since their involvement in the world’s first superconductor installation on Long Island in New York. It features three concentric insulated circles of cable made from bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO), cooled to 68K (-205°C) using liquid nitrogen that flows one way through the centre of the cable and back around the outside to be recooled. ‘The reason we chose this design is because it’s the most material-efficient and therefore also ­relatively cheap, especially when you look at superconducting material, which is quite expensive still,’ said Stemmle.

As well as enabling superconduction, the nitrogen cooling is also what allows the cable to use the concentric arrangement. It means you don’t need three separate wires (unlike conventional AC transmission systems) and cancels out the cables’ magnetic fields. But pumping two to three litres per metre of cable presents one of the biggest challenges. ‘Since you have the different flows of the liquid nitrogen within one cable, there’s also a kind of heat exchange between the inner and outer flow,’ said Stemmle. ‘So you need to make sure that works because otherwise the concept won’t work.’

The first superconducting cable was installed on Long Island, New York

Although the superconductor allows energy losses to be reduced enough to make medium voltage transmission cost-effective, it still leaks more energy than a high voltage cable would – it’s the reduced cost of installation and maintenance that makes it the cheaper option. This is because to reduce the voltage but maintain the power you must increase the current, which in this case leads to an estimated average 20 per cent increase in energy losses over a one-year period.

How does Nexans expect to reconcile this with the current pervasive trend for energy efficiency? ‘There’s a reason why they originally designed the grids like they did, with high, medium and low voltage, where you transport very large amounts of power at very high voltage,’ said Stemmle. ‘Even if you’re not really more efficient in terms of energy, you’re more efficient in terms of materials. It also depends on the loading: if you have high loading in the high voltage cable it could turn in favour of the superconducting cables.’

The cable is due to be installed by the third quarter of 2013 and its use studied for the following two years. ‘We’ve already showed in other projects that it’s technically possible,’ said Stemmle. ‘This project is important to demonstrate it in a real application, we are connecting two substations within a city and this has never been done before. I think this will help the technology to gain some more trust by the utilities, which most of the time are quite conservative.’

This will be vital if superconducting technology is to become more widely used in grid systems. In the UK, no utility firms have announced any plans for similar trials and National Grid sees the technology is not sufficiently advanced for longer distance transmission, although it says it is monitoring the situation.

‘If we look far in to the future, the trend we are seeing is that metals like copper and aluminium are getting more expensive and this will be an advantage for superconducting solutions because it can be even more cost-competitive,’ said Stemmle. ‘At the moment the cooling system is still quite expensive but as we use this type of system more and more you could have a totally new concept for a city grid because you could have three or four cooling systems shared between all the cables and this would increase the efficiency.’

This article first appeared on The Engineer.

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Science journalists don’t always need to read academic papers, but it might help

The Guardian's Alok Jha introduces the debate at the Royal Institution

Earlier this week, the Royal Institution in London held an event to discuss the differences between scientists and science journalists and what they can do to better work together.

The debate moved very quickly across a range of issues and it was often hard to take much from a train of thought before we were on to the next topic.

But one thread that stayed with me, and looking at Twitter I would guess with other people too, was the issue of whether science journalists should read the research papers on which they are reporting.

There actually seem to be a few questions here. Should science journalists be able to read academic papers? Should they always read the papers? Should they try to read the papers wherever possible?

As someone who rarely reads the primary academic research I’m reporting on and, without wishing to sound boastful, rarely gets complaints about misunderstanding the science, my initial reaction to all these questions was no.

The debate has forced me to justify my position and I still think there are several good reasons for saying no, but I also think my practice may change slightly as a result.

I’m also aware I don’t often write about medical trials, which make up a lot of science reporting, and so I have to apply my judgement based on the experience I do have from covering engineering, physics, chemistry, the environment and some biology.

My first reason is a practical one: there often just isn’t time to read a paper, especially a long one and especially a complicated one. It’s almost always quicker to reach for the phone and speak to the researcher directly, which also gives you the chance to get the background info that turns a summary of research into a proper story.

Secondly, even the most intelligent, knowledgeable journalist may not understand a piece of new research – especially if it’s written up badly. And a journalist with no expertise in a field is even more likely to struggle. Speaking to the researcher means they can break things down into basic terms, another reason a phone call is preferable if you’re tight for time.

This leads on to what is probably my key reason for believing journalists don’t always need to read papers: they very often don’t need to understand the full level of detail in a paper because their readers don’t need to. If they did they could just read the paper themselves.

It may even be better for journalists to keep a certain level of distance from the detail, in order to make it easier to keep their descriptions of the work clear and avoid using jargon or prior knowledge of the topic.

Sometimes, however, I think reading the paper probably is a necessity, particularly if the journalist knows the research is controversial or the method is particularly important. 

This doesn’t mean applying some kind of science literacy test that precludes anyone from writing about science if they can’t grapple a paper, especially given that, as highlighted above, there will always be  instances where you need things explained more basically.

But journalists do need to ask questions that their readers want to know the answers to and this can sometimes mean knowing enough background information to challenge the researcher.

Having said that, and this leads me to my final reason, I’m not convinced that it’s a journalist’s job to interrogate scientists, as some people seem to believe, rather than intelligently and circumspectly reporting on their work.

Yes, we should question the significance of research and ask the researcher to justify what seem like obvious problems with it. Often it’s important to set the research in context of other work and seek outside comment on where there might be errors.

However, I don’t believe it’s a journalist’s task to pull a paper apart, scrutinising the method in detail and looking for any possible flaws. That’s what peer review is for.

On the other hand, the process of writing this blog has made me consider whether I should make more of an effort to read papers where appropriate and I think the answer’s probably yes.

Journalists shouldn’t have to be able to understand academic papers to write about science and saying they should always read them is impractical and unhelpful.

Then again, sometimes doing so could yield useful information or even occasionally the vital element of a story that turns an article from a forgettable report into a historic piece of journalism.

We need facts not nationalistic sentiment or party politics

Rarely are arguments unbiased when it comes to the energy sector. A belief that wind farms spoil the countryside or a Chernobyl-driven fear of nuclear power far too often makes its way into the debate on what sources of energy we should be investing in to keep the lights on while preventing catastrophic climate change.


Of course the solution can’t just be founded on the basic cost of power generation, and questions of safety, security and impact on our local environment have to be addressed. But these issues shouldn’t be allowed to obscure our access to the facts about the technology and economy of different energy sources – something that is happening far too often.


In January, a report alleged that two generations of ministers have misrepresented the evidence for new nuclear power stations, basing their arguments on an assumption in favour of nuclear rather than examining the facts first.


This morning we hear claims that energy bills are likely to rise due to a growing dependence on increasingly expensive gas, because industry is going ahead and building twice as many gas-fired power plants as the government previously estimated.


And in a somewhat bizarre turn, four former directors of Friends of the Earth directors yesterday warned that we were handing control of our energy supply over to the French government by building new nuclear power stations.


The scientific, environmental and political communities are all divided over what our future energy mix should look like, and how much faith we should place in gas, nuclear and renewables respectively.


With time rapidly running out to move away from fossil fuels, it’s more vital than ever that we are given a clear picture of the true costs, benefits and disadvantages of these technologies.


While warnings about backing ourselves into a corner, where we are forced to pay one company for our energy at whatever price they set, should be heeded, appealing to an odd sort of nationalism isn’t helpful. Especially as it’s one of our closest allies we’re talking about, not Russia or Iran.


Our existing nuclear sector is already largely French-owned. In fact foreign companies control a high proportion of our power generation and distribution and without major government intervention there doesn’t seem to be much alternative.


This is as true for renewables, which you’d expect Friends of the Earth to favour, as it is for more polluting forms of generation: our wind farms are mostly run by companies in Scandinavia or Germany, where the turbines are also manufactured.


There is potential for the UK to lead the world in carbon capture and storage and in marine generation, but these technologies are at too early a stage to compete with wind and nuclear for our medium-term plans. We should attempt to strengthen British industry and secure our energy supply where it makes sense to do so, but we can’t lose sight of the most important factors.


Our ultimate aim has to be to provide a secure, low-carbon energy supply in the most cost-effective way possible. The argument about how to do this should be based on facts, not pressure from industry, party politics or nationalistic sentiment. There is a great opportunity for British companies as we reshape the economy but it can’t come at the expense of our long-term energy goals.


This article first appeared on The Engineer.