=projects =research =startups =projects
Here are some projects that I think are good choices for research, investment, and/or new commercialization attempts. These are all topics I've thought about, so if you want to work on one of them there's a chance I'd be able to help.
cheap flow batteries
Aqueous flow batteries are the most plausibly economically viable system
for large-scale grid energy storage.
There's a significant amount of flow
battery research going on, but the vast majority of it is on systems where
the active materials are too expensive or too unstable to even potentially
be practical for grid energy storage. There are also various designs with
organic solvent where the required solvent is too expensive.
Some
examples of potentially cheap flow batteries are:
A) iron-chromium flow
batteries with some system for regenerating electrolyte as the ions cross to
the wrong side and as hydrogen is slowly generated
B) iron-iron batteries
using cheap and stable organic ligands to make the sides have different
potentials
I particularly like (B). However, most chemists doing lab research at universities are not very good at estimating what the costs of new chemicals would be with large-scale production, and when trying to publish papers, they're incentivized to pretend their systems could be practical, so there's a lot of noise.
The directors who make the big decisions and say smart phrases like "emerging technologies such as AI, cloud, and blockchain" think that LiFePO4 will solve grid energy storage, because the price will go down to $50/kWh and they'll last for thousands of cycles. The new battery requirements for new buildings in Californa were probably designed for LiFePO4. However, the electrolyte degrades at the negative electrode of Li-ion batteries, which is the same in LiFePO4, so while the cycle lifetime is relatively high, there's still degradation over time. Also, the BloombergNEF surveyed prices are heavily weighted towards subsidized Chinese batteries that can't be purchased at those prices outside China.
GaN
Gallium nitride is the future of power electronics. It's better than silicon
carbide and already somewhat competitive. That's despite GaN crystals
currently being very expensive to make.
Silicon can be melted and
crystallized, but GaN decomposes (making nitrogen gas) before melting at any
reasonable pressure. There are a few different ways of growing GaN crystals:
the main current approaches are physical vapor deposition (PVD),
ammonothermal, and sodium flux. Usable PVD crystals are narrower than their
seeds because they're bad around the edges, and the other 2 approaches are
extremely slow, so my understanding is that some combination is used now.
replacing carbon black
Release of carbon black from tires as they wear away on roads is
a
significant source of particulate pollution. Calcium carbonate
particles are much less hazardous, and it's possible to get the same
performance as carbon black (or even slightly better) if you precipitate it
in
particular ways.
methanol fermentation
Metabolic engineering of microorganisms for synthetic methylotrophy is
very possible. This is more difficult than using sugar, so it's only really
worthwhile when the lower cost per energy of methanol vs sugar is
significant, but I still expect it to be a foundational piece of future
chemical production. Even if you want renewable chemicals, it's cheaper to
gasify biomass and make methanol than to use sugar.
electron beam welding
Electron beam welding is the best type of welding, but requires a vacuum
chamber, which makes things much more expensive but is still done
industrially. With plasma windows, it's possible to do it without a vacuum
chamber. So, I think
plasma window electron beam welding should be developed
and used commercially.
truck platooning
Fully self-driving vehicles are a difficult problem. A much easier
problem is making automated vehicles closely follow a leader vehicle driven
by a human.
It's also possible to reduce aerodynamic drag by having
several trucks follow closely behind each other.
remote driving
Truck driving is an unpleasant job overall, but people pay money to play
Euro Truck Simulator. With wireless internet now widely available on
highways, it might be feasible to have remotely driven vehicles. This
is already done for large mining trucks.
The main issues I'd be concerned with are dropped connections and
accident rates. The crash rate for large UAVs is certainly much higher than
that of piloted aircraft. Like automated driving, remote control is less of
an issue on well-defined and segregated areas. A combination of automated
driving with remote control would probably have better performance than just
automated driving.
package loading
Loading and unloading things in trucks is a lot of work, and that work
is sufficiently unpleasant to be a worthy target for automation. There are
various companies working on doing that automatically, such as
AncraSystems and
Honeywell. Current
systems are expensive or problematic, but I expect automated loading and
unloading of boxes from trucks at warehouses to become standard.
reference counting
Reference counting as a garbage collection system for programs has long
been considered to have much worse performance than mark-and-sweep
generational collectors, but some relatively recent variations have shown
similar performance and could potentially be superior for parallel systems.
I
wrote a bit about this.
hiring systems
Getting hired at a large company these days typically involves the
following steps:
- A hiring manager sends a request to HR.
- HR makes
a posting for a job opening.
- Someone searches onlike and sees the
posting.
- Hundreds of people submit a resume using some online form
system.
- HR reviews the resume to see if it matches the posting.
- A
small % of submitted resumes go to the hiring manager.
- A small % of
those lead to a phone interview.
- Someone (maybe) gets hired.
This system
does not work very well. People sending out hundreds of resumes to get a job
is not good. HR has no domain knowledge and can't write postings or evaluate
resumes very well. Surely it's possible to design a system that works
better.
Perhaps a starting point would be to find some companies with
unusual hiring methods and do studies evaluating how well they work.