Boosted by @czarbucks@vmst.io
Friggin' Europe, back at it again with the micromobility.
Bicycle lockers are a game changer. First time using one. Love not having to take off my lights, bags, pump, and other widgets. #BikeTooter
Remote
Kirk Smith, PhD
@kirk@social.coop
mastodon 4.5.18🧪 Research scientist and engineer fed up with the status quo (electrochemical engineering: batteries and electrocatalysis).
⚙️ Into appropriate technology, open-source hardware, co-ops (of all kinds), solidarity economy, and that sort of thing.
🐣 Grew up across the Mississippi River from Cahokia Mounds (St. Louis, Missouri)
📍 Drôme, FR
🏕️ Distance running, bikelife, getting off-grid
🏴 In the lower left of the political compass
he/him
EN/FR
932 Followers
1053 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 17, 2023
blog:
building open-source batteries at:
PeerTube:
Replying to
@plantarum@ottawa.place @pluralistic@mamot.fr I remember my PhD supervisor talking about battery research, if you see a nice-looking academic paper in a high-impact journal from scientists at a company like Samsung or Panasonic (etc.)... It means that paper's approach is not practical in industry. Cause otherwise it would have never been published.
"Earlier this month, the FHWA quietly removed a set of recommendations — including bike lanes and speed cameras — from a list of "Proven Safety Countermeasures" that have been vetted by agency staff and shown to improve road safety.
A DOT spokesperson told NPR in an emailed statement on Wednesday that the department "continuously reviews its policies to ensure each promotes safety, efficiency, and common sense."
"Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need," the spokesperson said. "This is a common sense approach despite the Left's belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.""
Almost spat out my mouthful of cricket juice reading that last sentence 🤦 sigh, it's an uphill battle innit
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5900901/bike-lanes-dot-websites
The charging cable hanging out of the top floor window lol
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A reminder you can literally build your own (admittedly, much smaller) wind turbine using a Piggott turbine design, by getting in contact with the Wind Empowerment network at https://windempowerment.org/ . No construction permit needed 😁
#RealTimeCAD #FreeCAD writing the freaking docs takes FOREVER but is also satisfying.
Trying to follow Julian Stirling's advice for OSHW docs: don't have any photos, they will be quickly out of date 😆 (am very guilty of this)
#icanhazpdf @icanhazpdf@a.gup.pe
Edit: found!! Y'all are way too fast 😂❤️ thanks!
could someone with journal access pretty please send me the PDF of this paper? It's in Wiley Advanced Energy Materials. Battery hype making the rounds and I want to check out the details...
Paper is here: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aenm.202506734
My email is kirk@dualpower.supply
Thanks in advance!
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@lina not quite but a personal fave, I feel it could soundtrack a Luddite rebellion
"We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed"
Worker's Song - Dropkick Murphys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clj8htWcFho
Dropkick Murphys - "Worker's Song" (Full Album Stream)
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I must inform you that batteries have been determined to speak Welsh, in fact.
Hmm. The unfortunate reality of the Carnot cycle and the need to not boil the fish?
"The latest French heatwave has forced the temporary shutdown of three nuclear power stations to avoid the discharge of warm cooling water into overheated waterways."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clye4z168edo
#Energy #NuclearEnergy #EnergyTransition
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Thank you all for the myriad and helpful advice!!
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@mwt I think the main issue would be lack of height... The main driver in a hydropower system besides flow rate is the height of the water column. But there are a lot of cool systems around if you search for "pico hydro", though they are geography-specific, often in rural valleys. And you need to a run a long pipe up a hill usually. But they're awesome when they work because even if it's "low-power" compared to say a solar panel, it's often 24/7 so you can harvest a lot of energy with a small turbine.
There is also this small project recently funded in the EU: https://lauds.eu/open-calls/2/democratizing-energy-through-diy-renewable-energy-solutions/flow-optimized-water-energy-recovery-flower
They're trying to recover energy from mains water systems.
Okay it is a TEST (pardon the mess) but I can officially do charge/discharge tests on a much larger scale now! Should cover my needs for a while, can allegedly go up to 24 A/30 V/75 W (though not with this wiring setup, lol). Testing out automated charge/discharge testing as I mentioned in https://dualpower.supply/posts/lab-notebook-14/#large-cell-testing. It basically worked first try. Shout out to OSHW, this probably saves us thousands of euros on a commercial equivalent of similar precision. #EnergyStorage #Batteries #OpenScience #OpenSource
@st3phvee@mastodon.social the worst is when places install cycle/pedestrian infrastructure and then rip it out months later cause drivers complain/they can't drive properly and keep running into the barriers...
Lab Notebook Entry #12
30 cycles, 133 hours, and now a UPS! Which has already saved my butt. And easier-to-read plots.
https://dualpower.supply/posts/lab-notebook-12/
#academia #OpenScience #Quarto #batteries #EnergyStorage #energy #science #electrochemistry
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@danslerush found the paper finally I think, though can't download: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aenm.202506734
Lab Notebook Entry #16
"Finished" the argon Zn-I test, but because it leaked. Made improvements to the dev kit design.
https://dualpower.supply/posts/lab-notebook-16/
#academia #OpenScience #Quarto #batteries #EnergyStorage #energy #science #electrochemistry
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anyways, watching documentaries like this is how I relax on a Sunday evening, if that tells you anything about me
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@isol that loop is fixed, it doesn't rotate! The door just slides over and then the two holes are aligned and you pass a lock through. There was also a long cable inside to go through the bike frame if you have a second lock.
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@sam I have had a good experience with OCE as fiscal host for a project I'm working on https://opencollective.com/fbrc
Edit: also we use codeberg over GitHub.
Still keen to hear/brainstorm co-op FLOSS funding models!
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@65dBnoise the synthesis was in the Supplementary Information (again, a pet peeve for me, how to make the chemical should go in the main paper and be peer-reviewed if you ask me...) and it's this:
"4-hydroxyethylpiperazine ethanesulfonic acid (AR, 99%, HPF) ... 3-(bis(2-hydroxyethyl)amino)-2-hydroxypropane-1-sulfonic acid (AR, 97%, BHS) ...
Preparation of [Fe(HPF)BHS]4- electrolytes
Adding 21.62 g (0.08 mol) FeCl3·6H2O into 200 mL of DIW, and stirring for 2 h. Subsequently, 30.50 g (0.128 mol) of HPF was added to the mix and stirred for 2 h, then dissolved 15.56 g (0.064 mol) of BHS in the solution and under 12 h vigorous stirring in N2 atmosphere. Brown product was obtained. Then, 16.00 g (2 mol) of NaOH and 22.44 g (2 mol) of KOH were added into the mixture solution and stirred for 24 h. " Then they go on to verify it with NMR and other techniques.
This would be easy for a proper chemistry lab.
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@65dBnoise This would be hard, as in, uncommonly large-scale for the average chemistry lab - but quite simple for a (electro)chemical engineering lab. I could do this with my setup effectively.
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@65dBnoise it's cool work ultimately though. If I had to pick an asymmetric RFB approach, I'd definitely pick iron-centered ligand engineering approaches over, say, all-organic approaches.
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@65dBnoise me? Technically, yes, I could cycle it if I had the chemicals but I don't have the financial/scientific resources to do it in my small home lab right now. If someone wanted to sponsor it I could 😅
The synthesis is straightforward, so probably fine without characterization---just mixing ligands with iron salts in the right proportions (they use some expensive analytical techniques to verify their compounds), but then I'd have to get Nafion membrane, which is expensive, requires hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid at temperature to pretreat, etc. Which generates waste in quantities I can't deal with. It would be more appropriate in an academic lab, which I don't have access to now.
In general I am not a fan of asymmetric systems like this because they are not robust. Crossover of active material from between sides through the membrane is inevitable and irreversible. Unless very cheap and suitable membranes become commercially available.
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@65dBnoise we don't have a good metric I know of in the battery space to measure the number of times a molecule can be converted between charge states before becoming inactive. Sort of like turnover number (in catalysis). Cycle count can be extremely misleading.
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@65dBnoise I've skimmed it and it's about what I thought, FWIW. I have done a calculation I need to double check (might make a blog post cause I'm tired of everyone sharing these articles - I have seen this article all over the place) - but it seems like their 6000 cycles took less than 5 days to complete. Because it takes only 34 seconds to charge the battery. Because they use 40 mL of electrolyte, but at fairly low concentration (0.6 M), large cell (28 sq. cm), high current density (80 mA/sq. cm), charging to 65% theoretical max SOC. Granted, those conditions do push the electrolyte hard - it is converting between charged states many times, and they show a good improvement over other ligands. But to say "6000 cycles!" is misleading, because the cycles are extremely short by design.
@st3phvee@mastodon.social oh I totally get the feeling 😅 grew up in one of those cities
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@benjamingeer@piaille.fr if we are successful, eventually yes! 😅 I'm sorry to say it's not something we'd need out of the gate... but if we do I will of course post about it here on Mastodon!
Right now my main partner in this work and I are still trying to develop some stationary battery technology and associated equipment (mostly R&D related) that would "make sense" to sell, initially to tinkerers/DIY folks, as well as teachers/universities/fellow researchers.
I honestly prefer to do research, but I am not all-in on the (French) academic game... I am using chômage from my last postdoc to try to figure this out! And learning about all the relevant regulation/bureaucracy in France/EU (it's a lot, lol).
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@BillySmith@social.coop they are in Canada mostly right? Surprised they're leaning into trump... But there are far-right fash everywhere I suppose
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@simonzerafa@infosec.exchange it was built by Total Energy, a French oil major with no shortage of cash... I just think they probably didn't care much for it!
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@Methylzero "I heard you like batteries, so I got you a battery for your battery..."
Definitely 😅 it's backing up a headless Raspberry Pi, a potentiostat, Arduino, and two peristaltic pumps.