Agreed, I'm shocked I missed this when it was released in 2014. Rare earths no longer needed for magnets strong and light enough for windmills and electric motors? I remember the reports on how vulnerable our infrastructure was to neodymium supply disruptions, it was really high on the priority list. This is fantastic if it can be manufactured reasonably!
Windmills and electric motors don't actually require strong permanent magnets - electromagnetism/induction is somewhat more complex to manage but potentially more powerful and efficient. This is not theory or speculation - Tesla car motors don't involve strong permanent magnets [1] Large wind turbines do not require large rare earth magnets [2]
(Im not saying powerful magnets are not very valuable, but requirements for them can be overrated)
With windmills, strong magnets are useful because they reduce or eliminate the gearbox. PM motors can be efficient at lower speeds than induction motor so it simplifies and shrinks the nacelle, raises efficiency a bit, and might lower maintenance. That said, it's totally not necessary.
>electromagnetism/induction is somewhat more complex to manage but potentially more powerful and efficient.
Quibble- at certain RPM ranges an induction motor can be more efficient than a PM motor of equal cost, but in general a PM motor will always be smaller and more efficient than an induction motor if built to the same quality. For most applications, the cost of the motor is very minor.
Wind turbines are an exception because the converter is cheaper than the motor at that scale. Tesla uses induction motors for several reasons but the primary one is probably cost. The cost is actually more in materials handling and assembly than the magnets themselves, since magnets will always find a way to fuck up your life eventually. PM motors also have much more demanding requirements of controllers and more cogging, but in general they can only be as good as a PM motor at high speed and low load.
Interesting but I am not sure you are not over generalising the legacy experience. With Tesla motors lately using induction motors for their top performance as well as their top economy models, that is a fair suggestion that 'PM free' can be superior, perhaps enabled by capabilities of modern power controllers.
Tesla has very specific applications that make induction motors almost as good, but 3x cheaper. The efficiency of the motor is most important under that high-speed low-load point, when on the highway.
PM motors have very large advantages over induction. They have half the iron laminations of an induction motor, so they have half the hysteresis losses. On an overall basis there is no way for an induction motor to make that up. Even at high RPMs I've only seen indications (papers/FEMM sims) that induction motors can roughly match PM motors, not surpass them.
When I wrote the point of contention, i was thinking how it is possible to produce stronger magnetic fields electrically than ~materially, and what that should mean to ultimate motor performance. But I can see your correction is likely sound, that in practice PM options keep a performance edge -at least until the age of high temp superconductors arrive or other magic :)
A purely (doubly fed) superconductive motor would probably resemble a PM motor more than an inductive motor, but I'm not 100% sure. It would be for the same reduction in hysteresis losses. An air-core motor would also be possible, but that would result in 30 Tesla fields swinging around wildly, which would be a Bad thing.
You could probably get good gains with metal glass laminations, if you were gonna make a hilariously expensive motor. It's got very low core loss and extremely high permeability, which lets you shrink the motor and have a higher ratio of copper/iron, lowering winding resistance.
Still, electrical machines are so efficient it's kind of just not worth it. The friction in the bearings and the viscosity of air are significant factors in a motor's efficiency.
Rare earth magnets 'found in the towers' is a rather mysterious idea. I can only guess this is about relatively modest requirements of direction control motors.
Actually, I just learned the answer a few weeks ago when I toured a wind-farm: Vestas uses magnets to secure ladders, lights, and other items to the inside of the tower instead of drilling holes. This neatly heads off problems with water egress and rust.
It is a little daunting to see that ladder going up into the dizzying heights and see that it is held in place by the same technology that keeps the kids' art stuck on the fridge.
ISTM a generator, even if it were set up to use induction, first would need to generate a small current using permanent magnets to "jump-start" the process. Without magnets, if no current is flowing, no magnetic field is created, and no power is generated.
It was not a great reference to clarify matters, its promotional language, but they state "Vestas’ current turbine range does not use rare earth elements in the generator. "
Power dissipation in the electromagnets is the limiting factor. The more current you push through them the more power you dissipate in the windings. To offset the resistance you can make 'thicker' (current is a surface area effect but mass is a thermal sink) wires but that reduces you Ampere turns which reduces flux. Since room temp superconductors aren't an answer, you top out.
Indeed, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (the crowdsourced one) said they'd use Inductrack technology for their version of Hyperloop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductrack
This uses permanent magnets arranged in a Halbach Array for levitation.
This method of levitating a pod is incredibly efficient and gets more efficient at higher speeds (in a vacuum). You can actually exceed typical rail efficiency (rolling resistance of 1:1000, i.e. an effective coefficient of friction of 0.001 or a lift-to-drag ratio of 1000) at 300m/s since levitation power remains basically constant above a certain speed (as opposed to increasing linearly in the case of friction or rolling-resistance). And because you're in a vacuum, you're far exceeding what could be possible in a non-hyperloop/vactrain design:
https://www.google.com/patents/US20100064929
This might be a case where no one has actually tried it with a maker mentality. Musk was saying the other day that you need 1 atmosphere of pressure capability to create a vacuum, but 5-6 to hold back the watertable related to his tunneling network. Seems like from a first principles perspective making a vacuum should be much easier than an underwater tunnel. I'm guessing that you could create a partial vacuum in such a tunnel fairly easily. But I haven't 'done it' and that's the rub.
I don't think the problem is the pressure - holding up one atmosphere is not big deal - I think it's the porosity. It just takes one hole, anywhere, and pscchht you start losing your vaccum. You have to continuously run pumps to get rid of the air that finds its way in, and their efficiency is inversely proportional to the pressure difference.
This is also true of below-water-table tunnels and pipelines of various sort, which are often at much higher pressure and with much greater environmental risk.
It is quite a bit easier to hold back a liquid than a gas. Different minimum pore size and you get hydrophobic chemistry and surface tension on your side.
Especially at such big pipe diameters as required.
You can use cheap materials like modified concrete to patch a hole in an underwater tunnel, not so in a vacuum tube - that needs something much better and more expensive.
Not true. You can use concrete to hold back a vacuum and cheap materials like a thin polymer coating, too. Remember, Hyperloop does not require an ultra hard vacuum.
It's a 'soft' vacuum, so doesn't have anywhere near the difficulty of a 'hard' vacuum. IIRC the detailed specs of what they intend to do aren't out, so it's all just speculation.
I could come up with electrical motors and generators. Before that I saw them for controlling the arm of spinning hard drives, and those aren't used that much anymore. What else is there?
> spinning hard drives, and those aren't used that much anymore
Hey! Are you basing this statement on your own experience of your personal/business hardware? Because spinning rust has never been more heavily used, for bulk on/near-line storage.
Judging by the list of alumni from Prof. Wang's group, HDD manufacturers have a strong demand for advanced applications of magnets, plus a tiny fraction from biomedical techs.
There's still a lot of active research going into magnetic tape storage, I find it very difficult to believe research into hard drive storage is going to slow any time soon.
At least earphones and speakers use permanent magnets[1], though according to Wikipedia[2] the early ones actually used electromagnets. I agree though that relays and maglev use electromagnets. I'm not sure about the rest.
Last time I checked speakers and headphones still had a single permanent magnet + an electromagnet. However, for speakers, the "old" iron permanent magnets generally work just fine - they just have to be bigger.
Inverter-based power supplies are sufficiently light that a guitar amp should only be the weight of the wood and the speakers.
And, the speakers have to be a certain size to move the correct amount of air--so the copper coil is probably the limiting weight. It's remarkable how much air you have to actually move to get decent sound volume.
Hm...sounds plausible from a physics POV, but maybe there's something else? Since, in practice (at least as far as I can speak from experience), old-school ferrit 15" speakers are ~7-8kgs, while you can get similarly specced neodymium speakers that weigh about half (3-4kgs).
And, yes, you will find that the values are all over the map in terms of weight. There are some much less powerful speakers that are quite a bit heavier.
Most commercial drones have 4 motors w about 12 magnets each.
Some others:
electric bikes, electric skateboards, power tools, blow dryers, iPad cases.
If I recall correctly, one of the earlier iPhones was basically held together w rare earth magnets, with the screen module magnetically stuck into the case. Can't find info to verify this though, so take it w a grain of salt.
Why is this being downvoted? Prev post said you don't realize how many magnets are around you, so the parent is asking. I wanna know too. I additionally came up with speakers/headphones, connectors, reed switches.
"MRI" covers a very wide variety of imaging and analysis techniques under the general category NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance). Some forms of NMR analysis actually use the Earth's magnetic field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_field_NMR).
Basically, the stronger the fixed magnetic field, the more you can see and do.
Exactly. Super conductors are the ones I use and high temperature superconduction will likely make maintaining a super conductor much cheaper (after you spent lots on a whole new system).
"Theoretical limit of its magnetic properties are more than twice the maximum reported magnetic energy product for a rare earth magnet"
Call me a pessimist, but if the theoretical is more than twice the actual for rare earths that means the new magnet might well be weaker than the old ... in reality.
It's doubly suspicious that they don't mention the theoretical vs reality for the rare earths.
I don't think the theoretical maximum is wrong. It's just that the ion implantation can't be scaled up, doesn't work for bulk materials, and results in only ~40% of the material in the desired Iron Nitride form which has that theoretical limit.
Thank christ, have you tried to source NdB magnets at quantity lately? I hope these get to be produced at scale soon, although unfortunately it sounds like the technology has been "exclusively licensed," which in my experience means a 500% markup from whatever its aiming to supplant once it finally hits production. The price of progress, I guess.
But yeah, I tried to order a few hundred rare earth magnets from China (where almost all of the world's rare earth metals come from) and got told that they can't export "pill-shaped" objects...bullshit, that's the same mealy-mouthed politically-backed excuse that they gave for not shipping a few dozen CCP badges through customs.
Maybe someone who knows more about...all of this...can correct me, but tl;dr: Take an iron wire or sheet of diameter/thickness ~10μm-1mm. Strain it by pulling it in opposite directions, e.g. using two rollers pulling in opposite directions. While the iron is strained, heat it to ~125-600C in an atmosphere of N2 or N2+inert gas at ~0.15-1.5 Pascals for 2-10 hours. You actually need atomic Nitrogen and this part of the patent is vague, but I think ~500C might be enough to break the N2 bonds? They also describe a urea infusion process, but that sounds more difficult for a garage effort. Anyways, if that all works, it sounds like you can stack 'em to make larger and more powerful magnets. Anyone up for it?
There's a lot of canceled items in the patent, I wonder if that's because it was too vague to be part of the patent? I agree with your interpretation of the manufacturing process. They expose the sheet of <001> Fe to either nitrogen gas (N2) or NH3. NH3 does break apart with high temperature but ideally you want to work with N2 instead for safety reasons. It's more efficient to break the N2 bond using a cracking source, they use a plasma arc to break the bond of N2.
The usual problem is always going to be compositional control, you know, coming up with a method that preserves the rather excessive stoichiometry of Fe16N2. There's a bunch of other phases that can be achieved with simpler stoichiometries, so the long term stability of this magnetic phase is of concern to me. What are the ideal operating conditions of this magnet before interdiffusion occurs and we lose the right stoichiometry? Maybe there's a small window that could render this material inapplicable to many mechanical or thermal conditions.
Oxidation of the Fe sheet before nitridization is another concerns. Fe oxidizes very easily and would become a barrier for the nitrogen.
The other concern is that they characterize the magnet's performance only on the product of saturation magnetization and coercivity, and mention using ion bombardment to enhance the coercivity. This can be interpreted to mean that the Fe16N2 has a poor coercivity which means that it's a magnet that is very easy to switch with weak magnetic fields or thermal energy. Not what you want for permanent magnet applications.
So I still have a lot of questions and concerns although I do think it's worth pursuing this material because it makes a lot of financial sense as Fe and N are super common and easier to process.
Looks like there is a way to go before commercialization, but then that article was written in May 2016 so maybe they've improved the process since then.
> It is only a tiny sample, a film 500nm thick, but it is the real thing.
Some important applications properties I didn't see listed in the brief UofM blurb:
Curie temperature: - at what temperature do these magnets start to lose their magnetic energy?
Coercivity: - how easily are these magnets demagnetized by external energy input (vibration, inductive kickback from motor windings, transformers, etc.)?
They use the term "giant saturation magnetization" to describe an iron nitride magnet that they made. The saturation magnetization is the point where the magnetization in a material cannot increase any further. Think of it like a maximum strength of a magnet. Neodymium magnets have their saturation magnetization around 1 Tesla, and they reported that their iron nitride magnet has a saturation point at 2.68 Tesla, so it's greater. (The magnetics community likes putting words such as "giant", "colossal", and "extraordinary" in front of terms to emphasize how big something is. Especially when it comes to magnetoresistance)
BH max is a characteristic of a magnetic material. You can think of it as a kind of magnetic energy density rating, so more is better. What you linked to showed that the iron nitride magnet they made had a BH max similar to a neodymium magnet.
Also, I love the name "Minnealloy". Very Minnesotan.
Sure we do. They just become naturalized Americans if we can get our hooks into them, and honorary Americans if we can't. America loves being the sewer for everyone else's brain drains.
Just look at great Americans like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Werner von Braun, Leo Szilard, Alexander Graham Bell, William J. Kroll, Alexey Pajitnov, Igor Sikorsky, etc.
Call me when science transmogrifies base metals into gold for less than it costs to dig the stuff up from the ground: humanity has been trying since before science/ when science was alchemy.
Gold sucks compared to aluminum and other metals for most uses. Aluminum used to be way more expensive than gold. And when science was "alchemy" aluminum metal wasn't even known. It wasn't produced until the 19th Century, and at first absurdly expensive.
And we can, of course, transmute lead into gold using science. It's expensive and pointless, of course. And gold itself is mostly valued for its rarity and shininess.
But we can transmute carbon into diamond for less than the market price for diamonds. Diamonds are more expensive than gold.
Gold is a proxy not a goal. If you want a TV you don't care what it's made of just that it works. Consider it's only rather pointless blocks of actual gold that are expensive, you can make items that look and act like gold without actually using much gold.
This is interesting. I am an Electrical Power Engineer, and at my tech school, our Senior Thesis projects are essentially real Engineering firms coming to the school and assigning a group of engineers to work on a project they are actually working on in real life.
The company I worked under makes electric motors for navy ships and other government contracts. There are enormous machines in side of these things, but rare earth metals are economically volatile, on a scale unlike most other industries.
China and Malaysia have most of the rare earth metal mines (we had a bastanite mine in CA where you can mine for rare most of the rare earth metals, but the liberals did not want the pollution in California, so as a result, they closed down the mine (before it reopened for a bit and then went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year) and made America dependent on rare earth metals from Asia, where for a long time, and probably still now, they have zero emissions policies so we are effectively polluting the planet more (but not in my backyard so it feels good to feel clean and drive a prius as long as all the rare earth metals and pollution caused mining it are done by people working 1/26th the pay in China breathing in that air in not me, it makes me feel green), until Elon Musk has recently come and been working with mining companies in the U.S. for his operations.
At the time in 2011 when I was a senior working on this project and the explicit motivation for investing in research for this, China had overnight banned global trade on rare earth metals with 24hrs notice for 6months, to focus on their internal development, skyrocketing the price of 90% of the worlds rare earth metal production by over 9000%
At that time, my engineering group was contracted to come up do motor design and look for utilizing either less rare earth metals while meeting the same specifications for output or looking up for alternative metals.
We ended with a form of a Halbach array, which arranges rotor and stator magnets in a permutation of an orientation where the magnetic field is increased on one side and cancelled on the other, reducing the amount of loss not going into the relationship between the stator and the rotor and increasing the magnetic field where it did.
There is still a lot of need for this kind of design and optimization, and I ended up in a different niche of Electrical Power but, people were and are dishing out alot of money around this kind of work for good reason.
I looked up patents a few years after I graduated around this kind of thing and they have spiked up significantly in the passed few years, particularly with halbach arrays.
And you are right, most people don't realize rare earth metals are required in electric motors, wind turbines, inverters for solar panels and most movements we associate with sustainable energy, despite the fundamental components being extremely rare economically volatile, and relatively no innovation going on in the space of addressing these issues.
While the Mountain Pass mine had dumped a few hundred thousand gallons of radioactive liquid into the Mojave desert and did have pressure from environmentalists, it also got undercut by the Chinese.
It was restarted a few years ago in reaction to the possibility of the Chinese controlling a core of the defense supply chain, but again got undercut and the company that owns it is in bankruptcy.
It was definitely undercut by the chinese, they have control of 95% of the worlds rare earth metal production and the U.S. having their own internal source is a huge threat to their ability to cut exportation, skyrocketing prices exponentially within hours.
In addition, unlike our environmental standards which in California don't allow for that type of mining at all, in China there is no environmental standards, and lots of people, and already control of 95% of the market so its easy to pull strings as an underdog tries to gain market when you can pull enough strings and control prices that much.
Additionally production is much cheaper when labor is cheaper and there are no environmental restrictions whic modulate production.
it is very easy for them to undercut and it will continue to be so as long as we don't allow internal mining and buy it elsewhere because there is a pervading belief or cognitive dissonance surrounding the idea that pollution produced in China doesnt effect pollution in California, and by exporting the manufactoring of goods bought in California to China with less restrictions, we are improving the state of the world.
And you are right, most people don't realize rare earth metals are required in electric motors, wind turbines, inverters for solar panels and most movements we associate with sustainable energy, despite the fundamental components being extremely rare economically volatile, and relatively no innovation going on in the space of addressing these issues.
Rare earth elements are required for none of those things. Some specific implementations of motors and generators use rare earth permanent magnets. Most wind turbines use doubly fed induction generators. Only a minority use permanent magnets. See e.g. https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2011/5036/sir2011-5036.pdf (a bit dated now, but best non-paywalled breakdown I could find with a few minutes' work)
Utility-scale wind turbines in use or under development in 2008 included double-fed, asynchronous (induction) wound-rotor generators (used in 73 percent of the wind turbines under contract for development in 2008); asynchronous generators with a cage rotor (14 percent); direct-drive, synchronous generators (11 percent); and permanent magnet generators (2 percent) to produce electrical energy suitable for transfer to the electrical power grid
I don't know about market share of RE PM motors in electric vehicles, but I do know that Tesla for example uses RE-free induction motors.
As for solar inverters, do you have a link to a diagram/documentation for an inverter that uses RE permanent magnets? I thought that I knew basically how inverters work, and I don't see where RE permanent magnets would even optionally go...
doubly fed induction motors, wound rotor generators, and asynchronous generators actually all have rotors and stators which are comprised of rare earth metals....
Unless rotors and stators are made from something else?
What are the rotors and stators made from?
A doubly fed induction generator has conversion control systems in that you can control the rotor via power electronics control circuitry for controlling real and reactive power output and thus voltages for low voltage ride throughs, remaining synced to the power grid network frequency and other things for internally controlling the turbine when extra resources are available not needed on the grid, added on top of the generation system, but the generator is still there, and...what are these rotors and stators made out of?
A doubly
Tesla is RE free but they are an exception to the rule right now, but I am a big Tesla fan, and I'm not bashing on their designs.
Solar panels use tellerium which is a rare earth metal, and the inverters, which are also used in turbines, and air conditioning units, among other things which rely on tungsten. In addition, inverters are some of the most lossy circuits in existence and their current failure rates in production last half the lifespan, don't believe me ask Solar City....
The integration of solar roofing circuitry now requires lithography like production techniques which are incredibly expensive and filled with all kinds of rare earth elements.
The rare earth metals mine in California mined for other things other than just permanent magnets.
Electric cars are great, but there are alot of things that use permanent magnets that are transportation vehicles.
Rotor and stator materials: copper or aluminum for windings and laminated steel for cores.
Tellurium based solar PV had about 4% market share last year. The vast majority of PV is based on crystalline silicon (over 90% market share). Tellurium is rare but it is not actually a rare earth. Rare earth element is a term used to designate the lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium. "Rare earth metal" is not just another way of saying "metal that is rare on Earth."
Can you show where tungsten is used in inverters? That would be interesting to see, but tungsten too is not a rare earth metal.
I think that you are also incorrect to state that "The integration of solar roofing circuitry now requires lithography like production techniques which are incredibly expensive and filled with all kinds of rare earth elements" but I will happily admit that I am wrong if you can document it.
Rotor and stator materials: copper or aluminum for windings and laminated steel for cores.
For Tesla, but for doubly fed generators in wind turbines? Are you sure? I don't think so. For the Prius, 25ibs of rare earth metals, wind turbines have specified laminated steel for their generators?
Tungsten inaturally occurs at 1.5 parts per million in the earths crust, and otherwise has to be manufactored.
A concept I want to differentiate now is the 17 rare earth metals from a classical chemistry point of view, and the concept of rare earth metals in regards to the economy perceived as rare, with volatile pricing which makes investment and investment in products relying on it risky
1. The cost of mining the supposedly relatively abundant element out of the earth and the by porudcts produced by mining it
2. the locations in which it is legally allowed to be mined due to environmental or other resitrctions
3. the degree to which the country producing it is willing to export, and the exponential pricing subject to that to control its rarity relative to demand.
The fewer the countries that produce an element, and process the element, the more control they have over the pricing and its rarity relative to market distribution and therefore pricing...
For example, here's something about lithium being effectively rare earth in the eoconomy despite being the 25th most abundant elements in relation to Elon Musks ventures since I also found this as a response to someone else commenting on this saying lithium is not a rare earth issue...think again
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/mar/20/lithium-how-a-miner...
Solar
As solar roofing moves from panels to actual roofing as Solar City and many other groups are following this trend, the units of solar being integrated are becoming smaller, and lithography is effectively a technique which uses manipulation of lasers and optics on lasers to reduce the nm level size of designs ingrained on a wafer which are then after a process of four months subject to a series of chemical depositions and polishes in vacuum vapors to create transisors.
As solar integration becomes increasingly modular with decreasing size, and the integration of the circuits within them, the transfer of lithography technology from nm level transistors into backend solar panel integration is now what the industry is moving into.
Tungsten is one of the original sources that inverter technology utilized and is utilized in audio amps too.
This is also why google gave away $1 million to the little box challenge, in a crowdsourced acknowledgment of the lack of innovation around inverter technology pacing with the sustainable application that connect into the grid utilizing inverter technology, but mostly due to the inefficiency of the circuit, and the size, and less in this particular application about the pricing of the elements involved:
Yes, I am confident that typical DFIGs as used in wind turbines do not rely on rare earth materials. The foremost reason to prefer the DFIG over RE permanent magnet generators is the avoidance of high-priced materials with uncertain supply. The introductory part of this thesis provides a decent outline:
Your link about "Tungsten in relation to inverters" is talking about tungsten electrodes for welding in conjunction with inverter power supplies. It has nothing to do with materials in inverters.
You are talking nonsense about lithography in PV module manufacturing.
Are you just Cunningham's Law-ing a personal crash course on renewable energy technology and associated issues? If so, well played, but that's it for me today.
Tungsten is in inverter power supplies in other places outside of power supplies for welding. Inverters are very big, and tungsten has been used in them in many places including but not limited to almost all high quality amplification and large equipment including washing machines etc.
I understand that inverters are suddenly in vogue now and the the high end tech community is only familiar with the newest implementations in the highest end products in silicon valley, but many household products use inverters, with very standard designs of which tungsten is a apart of them, and most high quality amps use tungsten. I'm sorry you are denying reality.
You can go buy tungsten amplifiers online right now, the highest quality ones use tungsten...
or in my case in the one I designed and build from scratch this year I used vacuum tubes with tungsten filaments. Tungsten filaments reduce thermal distortion and allow a highly increased level of harmonic filtering.
Why? because transistors have a hard cut off for filtering sound, and actually most audiophiles prefer still to go back to old school designs utilizing vacuum tubes because there is no step filtering, and for people who really thrive in developing in ambient space or amplification quality for acoustics in buildings for high quality production, tungsten is still highly regarded...
in regards to the wind turbines, I believe you. I was not sure, and I've never actually seen or touched built, or designed a doubly fed induction motor, but I believe you, and I'm not arguing with you there, but I wanted to clairfy, because alot of cars, and other things that are "sustainable" are actually not when you do the research, so I always try to clarify instead of jumping to conclusions.
I know Tesla is RE free, but again, they are an exception to the rule versus the more affordable and abundant implementation like the chevy volt, nissan leaf or the prius.
In regards to lithography and PV module manufactoring, do you have any other proof than just the claim that it is nonsense?
For the only two years I stepped outside of working in Power Engineering specifically, I worked in manufactoring semiconductor chips doing chemical deposition in expitaxial growth in Diffusion.
I didn't really know anything about the industry going in, and I was lucky to be working on a team with 7 Phds from MIT who worked at AMD for 7 years, designing 14nm and 10nm transistors, and working on troubleshooting nonidealities that occurred in the line as they tested those out on the floor for the first time. So I was kind of the first person looking at results on the floor.
Regardless that to provide context that Lithography, Diffusion (fvx, ion implantation, RTA, LSA, EPI) is downstream in the development process from Lithography but all of the processes are interrelated, and a mistake upstream won't often be found in metrology until it reaches a downstream department, downstream in relation to the linear modules building out different steps of a semiconductor chip.
We worked with multiple customers, manufactoring designs including bitcoin mining chips, smart phones, game consoles, none of which I can name specific brands due to NDAs which I respect even though I don't work there as thats part of the NDA. As a startup, the company was always looking for new customers other groups were not looking for, and we prototypes all kinds of interesting products that otherwise would not be able to break a monopolized high priced manufactoring barrier for nm level chip production like samsung, intel, amd etc.
While I know nothing in comparison with the brilliant people I had the opportunity to work with, and did not want to work in manufactoring, and left to go back to Electric Power Engineering, I did learn alot about potential customers for solar pv for the specific purposes of litho, and it's definitely not nonsense.
If you have some alternative source of information that invalidates my existence for two years where I worked on this, please provide and I'm open to factual information, but its not productive to completely write someones comment off as nonsense just because you are not familiar with more recent developments in the crossover between industries by rapidly prototyping development before going public.
CRASH COURSE
In regards to taking a crash course in renewable energy. I havn't taken a crash course, but I do have a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering, with a concentration in Electrical Power and a Masters Degree specializing in Electric Power taking graduate classes such as
Power Generation and Control
Semiconductor Power Electronics
Advanced Semiconductor Power Electronics
Power System Analysis
Electrical High Power Engineering Lab
Electricity Economics
Electric Machinery
and am published in IEEE for large scale power flow networking.
and worked at the second company in the world to exclusively specialize in substation integration and construction of solar, geothermal and wind farms. in 2012, the startup I worked for, which at the time I was the 20th person to join and the 10th Electrical Engineer, took claim to having designed and constructed over 20% of all renewable energy farms in the United States at the time. We got bought out by a multibillion dollar company and now I work for another startup doing software design for the smart grid for large scale power flow.
I've designed and been out with my team construction team to oversee the construction of geothermal substations and solar farms, but never a wind farm, and I didn't know about the lamination in wind tubrines, which is why I asked, because in the real world, you can't just claim to know stuff you don't know, because when you do that, people can get hurt and killed when working with high power kv equipment, so I don't know about other industries, but in my industry, when we fire up a 345kv transformer and test out breakers for the first time, we don't claim to know stuff we don't know. So when I ask a question, I'm not trying to test your authority on the topic, I'm asking you to know the facts, because the facts are important in the real world...
Having been on site to construct 4 renewable energy farms and overall 39 substations in 5 different states for upgrades and other work, including replacing rare earth magnets in generators that took 8 months to build and replace due to price, processing and international importation of goods, and been in places including hydro pumping equipment stored inside mountains underground that you have to take an elevator 10 floors down to get to, I can tell you rare earth metals are alive and well all over the power grid, and their rarity is relative to the production economy, and not the chemistry table.
but please...tell me more about how I'm full of complete nonsense....
It is the most up-to-date book I know of that covers industrialized and up-and-coming PV technologies. There is only one mention of lithography in the book, on page 98. I quote:
"There are several examples of small-area laboratory scale IBC [interdigitated back contact] solar cells, using three or more photolithography steps and vacuum-deposited metallization with measured one-sun efficiencies greater than 23%. ... "
The rest of the section is about laboratory records from small cells and about how lithography is ill suited for mass production of full scale cells due to high costs. The trick to making market competitive IBC cells is avoiding lithography while keeping efficiency high. Most manufacturers do not even attempt to produce IBC cells, settling for slightly lower efficiency with significantly simpler manufacturing processes.
> but the liberals did not want the pollution in California, so as a result, they closed down the mine (before it reopened for a bit and then went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year)
Oh, so it was the fault of liberals, and not of dumping by China? That's news to me.
Besides, Tesla Motors has shown that the good old AC induction motor, which uses such rare materials as copper, iron, and aluminum, works quite nicely as an automotive drive motor. You seem to be conflating lithium mining with rare earths here.
yeh I don't think we should dump radioactive material in the desert, but if the goal is to have a greener earth and not pollute, I'm not sure how relocating the source of pollution halfway around the world reduces pollution, and then spending more energy to ship the prius back to california.
I'm sorry but if there are problems with the way we do something, but we still want the benefits (products) offered from the materials of that process, shipping the process off to another country which is untransparent about its practices, is not a solution to the problem...its just throwing the clutter in the closet for the guests. out of site out of mind.
rare earths become rare earths not when they decrease in abundance, but when the places in which they are legally allowed to be mined and processed are restricted due to local environmental resitrictions, to foreign locations which have the ability to restrict exportation.
This is why Elon Musk worked with the new company in Nevada to start a new mining company in Nevada....
Lithium is used in the charging walls and I am not sure about Teslas batteries but regardless, Elon Musk seems to find decreasing the perceived rareness of lithium economically a huge priority....
please read about lithium and the tripling in price, and how global economics effects what is considered rare earth vs its occurence in parts per million or billion in the earths crust:
This Elon Musk in light of lithium tripling in price in 2015 and many times before that due to the rarity in its production locations, in which the prohibition of producing it in this country increases the rarity/price/cost/pollution of transporting it is exactly WHY hes went to Japan to work with new battery technology, why hes building manufactoring system dedicated to it, an R&D plant dedicated to it to get away from lithium, and reducing the cost of lithium production, making it less of a rare earth metal in the commodities market by day, and why hes working with a mining company in Nevada to utilize materials mined in this country to do so.
here is the link to the mining company, you can watch the award winning documentary on their site about being the second internal lithium production company in the country, and how its closely linked to Elon Musks's ventures
Clearly while its technically in the earths crust as an abundant element, economically its rare in production and worth the 4.6 billion in investment to bring it in for local production.
I didn't say all liberals, I said liberals. I'm not sure there were any republicans apart of this but there could have been.
I concede this to you, I should not over generalize. I don't identify entirely with either and being assumed to be one or the other is annoying but more importantly degrading society as a whole with these increasingly polarizing and decreasingly diverse categorizations.
From a quick google search it does indeed look like the theoretical BHmax of rare-earth magnets is about 60 MGOe, so I think that might just be poor wording from the article. That said, I would agree that we should be waiting to sing their praises until they can beat rare-earth magnets in practice.
Maybe apples and oranges when purely considering the material properties, but I think the point being made is that FeN could replace Nd in all currently applicable technologies.
Both of those are actually common enough that if a biological ecosystem ever discovered a competitive advantage for very powerful magnetic crystals, it might have come up with Fe16N2 instead of just the magnetite (Fe3O4) and greigite (Fe3S4) that currently form the basis of biological magnetism.
Goes to show that stupidity isn't dead. I wonder what kind of "licensing fees" will they require? I also wonder how much of this research was paid for by public money?
Instead of making this available to everyone so that these kinds of magnets can get out there, they want to scrooge first. If I recall correctly, universities that have gone down this path have simply stalled the progress of mankind instead of pushing it forward.
Damn right. And just one sentence above they go on about the environmental harm rare earth extraction causes. Surely if this was a real concern just 'licence' the tech for free. I would expect universities of all organisation to understand that baking a bigger cake means more cake for everyone. Fighting like jackals over scraps is what I expect 'business' to do. But uni's have become big, inefficient fascist diploma factories, and you can tell.
Who's complaining. I am making an observation about how universities have gone down the wrong path. Anything I invent (especially on the back of others work), I share - no strings. The main reason is that anything I have designed or thought up has been expanded by others and I get to increase my knowledge by that very process.
As long as the USA (as in the people) choose the current way they have as the "best" way to run their society, then it'll never have "basic income" or even "basic health care".
I live in a country that has the most innovative/inventive people on earth bar none. But we are entrepreneurial morons as a nation and we doubt our own ability and inventiveness. If we actually got past those specific cultural biases that we have, no other country would be able to catch up to us.
There are three nations, which, if they were able to get past their individual biases, would together change the world so fast that your head would be spinning to keep up. Things like a space elevator or flying car or even individual flying machines would be passe.
So when a university does this kind of activity then we can be assured that progress will be slowed to a snails pace.
> This technology for producing iron nitride permanent magnets has been exclusively licensed.
Interesting — I wonder to whom.