time to recap our top stories now. stratton's to pull out of the troubles and unless tougher border powers are granted within the leave initiative critics say undermines the bloke's principle of european unity. in egypt thousands of business or expected to descend on talk with square for the third friday in a row in a rally they say same holding the revolution on many feel the fight for democracy has been placed scramble for. also the arrests of dozens of university students running against tuition hikes and kind of produce warnings that police tactics when trying to discontent international protest. are coming right up our latest edition of technology update on breaking the very latest high tech gadgets much more.

hello and welcome to technology update as more and more people flock to big cities and gas guzzling cars clog the motorways the rush is on to limit the impact of our modern day lifestyles scientists engineers and clean energy and the world over have looked to make a difference with eco friendly solutions and here russia is certainly no exception no sure foreign automakers have grabbed the initiative with alternative fuel cars like those that run on hydrogen and even more traditional ideas like hybrids for me beyond the price range of many drivers. definitely on the way down for more they once were but improvements still need to be made before those that run entirely on the electric power can fully compete with gasoline. despite recent car of the year

awards a number of shortfalls. and that's especially true in major metropolises where it's far from certain they'll be a place to park in the battery and in russia right now there's one company working to take that worry out of the equation back in february in partnership with moscow's grid operator. the capital's first electric vehicle dedicated charging stations the company may have only got its start less than a year ago but it's already installed more than thirty electric hotspots around the city and despite the chilly winter weather drivers of all kinds of electric vehicles took advantage of this nascent charging infrastructure the first few months were a trial period during which it offered its services to the public free of charge while the project. the company thinks that it will catch on quickly. general and one for every sinew in our country and as i say to people i mean about sixty leaf sold for the whole year in france.

for that reason plans to continue expanding and make it more convenient for green minded motorists to get a little extra juice and as of april pilot period is coming to an end. of the company. environmentally friendly in fact they're looking beyond private drivers to something larger. technology to help problems. go. from. one of the problems that. is really a. public transportation fleet and with more than seven thousand public people making their rounds in moscow every day. on the

environment. governments have tried to reduce. one of. the. short has a wide range some of which have been adapted to breathe a little more easily. outfitted with a six cylinder natural gas engine which while not totally green is at least more eco friendly than traditional diesel motors. they're twisting and turning conveyor belt located about one hundred kilometers east of moscow. but when needed they can. has been in operation. when it focused on the timber industry. first.

company. says they're fully equipped to put together the industry's most. modern cities today especially. high levels of pollution. developing electric and hybrid right now we're the only ones in russia doing you could you do it. now this is. two thousand and eight and managed to save gallons of gasoline thanks to a well known electro mechanical transmission design which has been used in. the transmission. engine to run

at a more efficient rate the. main components of. a few extra bits like a generator power control. during braking energy. ration electric power from the storage unit and generator is sent through the induction motor. engine the result. is fuel economy twenty to thirty percent of regular internal combustion engines. moving step by step first we made a hybrid now we're working on electric. the global trends continue this will become a necessity. membership will be a factor for us as well so today we're developing electrical buses. and so here. they're just waiting for their more eco friendly models to come in once they do

there's relatively little that need. to be changing the production process the use of one of the existing models chassis and body a different engine in the back and with municipal and regional governments getting on board the green wave those are surely in the pipeline but leaking ski's offerings are far from russia's first step greener public transport to find one of the first we have to go back nearly half a century. it was the mid one nine hundred seventy s. when this experimental bus hit the streets of course it may have looked like just another way to get people around the city but it employed a novel way to collect and store energy it was the brainchild of a forward thinking grad student named. by using a flywheel to gather and then discharge energy just about any type of transport could be made more fuel efficient and decades later he's still working away on the passion of his life in recent years dr drew has taken his outdated flywheel energy recuperation system to a company called interest in this research came out of hibernation in two thousand

and six after publishing an article with new findings armed with a team of young engineers he's trying to get the industry to rethink the need for traditional electro chemical regeneration schemes and like so many other timeless ideas this basic principle is beautifully simple. just. running if i will is not moving the way so let's transfer the buses energy in slow down and give the flywheel running. so you can see how the bus is slowing down and the flywheel starts turning. there is going so now the bus is basically not moving let's go ahead and stop it next let's start the bus again with the flywheel . the more things change the more they stay the same now back in the previous century his design relied on a fairly basic variator to collect and then release energy on the basis of his work and demonstrations of the energy savings carmakers in the soviet union initially

took interest in as designed. when push came to shove they eventually decided to forego the notion of gasoline cheaper than mineral water the little reason to pay a little more for technology that we see. here things have certainly changed during his new idea a new lease on life. what the what started. this previous model was made basically by hand really regardless boasted fuel savings of forty five percent the one you can see here on this post is an updated model has a new transmission where there's a new super very powerful oh this is a promising idea all the major transmission companies are working on it the transmission includes a variable component which could be electrical mechanical or hydrostatic helps you to save ten percent of the overall power but that's not enough. we'll hear is small

in size and in terms of weight it also has a high rotational frequency so the key thing about it is that it has a vacuum inside which helps to cards a rotation related para losses by several hundred times will has an inbuilt reduction gear the power train itself combines the transmission and the engine it is a continuously variable power supply transmission variable component presented series electrical to handle and it can replace both the starter and the generator thanks to verity the reason no increase in weight this is the latest state of the art power train concept. so what were those engineers to get vance's to dr who the tried and true method is confident that it has a product that was after major advantages to both conventional cars as well as to traditional hybrids. if we compare our system with

conventional vehicle we are going to save forty to sixty percent of. driving. if we compare our flyable hybrid. prius. to save. fifteen to thirty percent a few it does just by more effectively harnessing the regenerated energy during braking the normal is of transforming the power in city to the battery the flywheel absorbs ninety percent of it keeping that its kinetic energy significantly reduces losses during reef celebration the battery isn't overly strained since it's mechanical power is the primary mover now some people might raise concerns that gyroscopic forces during driving could cause complications but here i was testing facility there checking everything many times over to make sure there is in fact no threat even if someone manages to alter the configuration to get more power out of it but anyways unlike other high performance oriented flywheel setups this one is

said to be small enough not to pose any danger and that should all be on show for carmakers to see in the very near future. we are going to demonstrate the prototype of this huge very. tests bench in august this year. till the end of this year we're going to demonstrate a prototype of pliable unit. and then when we have both companies going to build test and demonstrate. in the middle of next year now it's the start of spring in moscow during the depths of winter temperatures can drop well below zero all this talk about electrics and hybrids could be short lived if the harsh russian winter proves too powerful so testing just how vehicles would cope with such driving conditions was another gold charging station project. so

far. only for. real life conditions it was very cold winter a lot of sort of through it was the coldest temperature. so the good conclusion was that the. cars. of course arranged decrease some chorus it was worse some cars it was less but cars were the only thing under scrutiny moscow's grid operator also wanted to investigate what kind of impact hooking up increasing numbers of battery powered cars to the network would have what they found was that each electric vehicle used up about as much water as a residential household fortunately has the spare capacity to handle any significant upticks in demand. in order to make a real difference in terms of electrical energy we need to be talking about charging tens of thousands of vehicles in moscow at the same time our energy

network is ready for this demand right now we're able to handle a fifteen to twenty percent increase in energy consumption. but a massive fleet of electric vehicles hope to the grid isn't just a drain on energy resources they could in fact be used to feed power back into the network during the day the cars plugged in can in theory also give energy back to the grid during times of peak demand and that's good for the owners as well if they charge at night when tariffs are low but sell spare juice when tariffs are high during the day electric cars could make money as well as. fifty million roubles were spent on building the current electric vehicle charging system at present just like any pilot project it's not profitable yet but we have our eye on the future when there will be thousands of electric cars and then a g. consumption will grow. and as a project moves forward revolt itself hopes to supply their own charging stations

for the first stages they've relied on imported energy pumping columns but their office in moscow their diligent programmers are working on tweaking the internal nuts and bolts to enable a truly smart monitoring and grid system. they hope that a lower cost providing more incentive for others to go green but before more drivers are willing to make this switch to fully electric vehicles they need to make sure they won't be stranded short of their destination with that in mind a team at moscow state university is working on the next generation battery that breeds offering ranges never before possible and present just about every device you might own from three players to laptops to hybrid and electric vehicles is powered by a lithium ion battery and here at moscow state universities chemistry department a few chemical engineers have formed a team focused on improving existing types and investigating future directions for batteries and at this testing stand these moscow based scientists are looking into

different lithium ion metals to see which work best for specific functions. of the world out there with a battery works basically like a rocking chair. or from one electrode to the other when we charge it. move under the influence of the external current of the device back from the positive electrodes to the negative one at the atomic level of the materials that make up the electrodes are arranged in layers and the ions are sandwiched between these players this. is a personally extraordinary depends on the type of material we use for the electrodes in such a battery lithium moves from one electrode to another and occupies the empty spaces inside the matter so if we want to increase the energy or decrease the weight or volume of the battery we're limited by the materials we use. right now there are

various types based on transition metal oxides these are cobbled nickel manganese oxide and very popular these days is lithium and phosphate all these materials can store around one hundred fifty to one huh. and seventeen. hours programs and they're already approaching their theoretical limits. to push beyond the current limitations industry giants like g.m. are pumping resources to give their cars that extra bit of juice with that in mind the american major recently launched a big new development testing a production facility additionally i.b.m. has announced a new with the air battery but has so far been mum on the details about it but the group at moscow state university also has their own oxygen sucking power source that they're working on. we need to replace the chemical composition of batteries with an entirely new one which would allow us take major steps forward for example

if we wanted to significantly increase stored energy we need to stop using the graphite for the negative electrode and go back to the lithium metal which was used in the beginning. then it caused a lot of problems such as the growth of electrolyte evaporation but other safety issues which made it simply not possible to reproduce such electrodes so when you today we found special electrolytes such as poly merrick glass ceramic electrolytes and electrolyte supplements which allow us to deposit the lithium as a thin film in such a way that prevents dendrite growth and enables us to reverse the lithium precipitation as well as avoid problems associated with that so if we use lithium for oil as the negative electrode we can increase stored energy ten times compared to graphite. now the lithium the scientists use comes as a byproduct from other industrial processes like aluminum smelting or protest

production but here in their lab they slice off bits of the soft metal and then they flatten it out to form the oil strips but some of lithium metal is just one piece of the puzzle finding the right counterpart is where all the hard work comes in. but based on the past few years of research they think that they finally found the combination that gives them the best performance. of best to people as we know it explored the who want to use something very light which for the positive like troat the lithium air battery that we're developing house of porous carbon spawn in the place of the positive electrode which is where the reaction between ions of lithium and oxygen takes place my changing the electro chemical system by changing the chemistry of such batteries on one electrode we get three thousand eight hundred million pair hours per gram on the other electrode we get to three sometimes even four thousand mil amp hours per gram and that's compared to the

regular one hundred fifty one hundred seventy mile on powers that you get with lithium ion batteries. so all that power will be packed into a little sound like this but the thing that makes it all possible is one of the least assuming aspects of the battery the solid glass ceramic electrolyte let's lift the electrons flowed back and forth as needed and this is where most research in the field is now focused i mean it looks like much but this solid fin wafer helps make the battery safer allowing these designers more flexibility to build a better membrane that ultimately protects against water related explosions but for the time being lithium batteries is a potential application is still theoretical nobody quite knows how undersized experimental versions will work in real life so these lab rats still need to go through the painstaking process of testing every component over and over before they can ramp up any kind of meaningful production but for them it's only

a matter of time that the batteries that fuel all our devices are breathing in air just like you and me. right now we are working on lab cells cica me but already this year we plan to do more. engineering work. and starts building small disc shaped prototypes. but innovation in the clean machine game isn't just limited to a major university in fact some of it's not even limited to this planet one of the most exciting ideas has its roots in space and that takes us to the moscow suburb of. it was here at a company called tampa where just a few kilometers northeast of the russian capital the new approach to direct drive in a wheel motors was born in ten years in the city that's the heart of the country space industry realize that all experience whether it be from this planet or not could be used to improve greenfield back here on earth.

i'm going to study we take all the good parts of regular cars and apply them electric vehicles. four wheel drive for example double to two wheel motors in the front work as engines to power the front wheels in the black voters are built into the wheels themselves. this is truly rare right now nobody else can demonstrate this in the car moves with all four wheels and every wheel is controlled independently depending on the traction. slippery power is reduced if the speed is too low power is increased this is said to depart from all of those times. but secondly my party in wheel motor frees up a lot of space inside the car so a lot of electrical energy is stored in the small space of the lithium ion batteries but short of a regular car would go forty kilometers with his battery stuck with

a sort of climate. system built in here as well so the car can go seventy kilometers but all the braking energy first goes to the capacitor and then is used on the car's movement. of. the inspiration for the system came from designers of moscow's only reusable spacecraft and developing the countless new engineering solutions were found but at the time it just wasn't possible to apply those in civilian sectors but now nearly twenty five years later things like bronze fluctuating testing stand and acid resistant materials have led to improved engine designs and more effective energy storage systems both of which are helping make electric vehicles both better and cheaper. having solved the problem of performance quick turns for the boron spacecraft. our engineers realized they can try and make a compact motor. today it will in

a twenty inch wheel. we can fit an electric engine bus that it's unique to each t.v. gets in the fridge during acceleration can increase power up to fifty kilowatts that is going to be deceptive according to tampa engineers and that's a one and a half times more than any other similar in wheel mode on the market the secret to this lies in two sets of opposing magnets that was around a stationary coil which offers more pushing power than the traditional set up of one electromagnetic field and so when you combine all four wheel motors in addition to the direct application of power you get a fully electric vehicle with plenty of get up and go but like with all green machines the proof of the pudding is really in the battery. here tim squeezes the same performance from a smaller power pack by using what's called a super capacitor it more efficiently stores and releases energy and since batteries make up around seventy percent of an electric vehicles cost any reduction

here is good news for all. there is one condition which cut off from we need to have good roads. because the weight is greater than that of a regular wheel. which no criticize it. the reason these individual motors can expect to find increasing use in things like smaller carts they're lighter weight and lower speeds mean the extra heft in the wheels isn't as much of a problem this specially designed cart was used at last year's big air show in moscow and as technology continues to advance electric vehicles become more common citing yeah but was this issue a show here it's similar to mobile telephones if you look at forecasts about the twenty first century from the end of the 1980's leading analysts thought mobile phones would play a major role in the future of technology. what's happening today everybody has a cell phone we can expect the same for transport for them. however at the moment a green machine that can truly compete with traditional ones in terms of range and

cost is still mostly a dream of concept car designers but with the worldwide effort including the innovations you see today the moment that becomes a reality might be closer than we all expect at the very least having more options from getting from point a to point b. can never be considered a bad thing. the pope whether it's hippie train plane fourth or fourth power and you know your choice to make the until next time enjoy the right job or type of transit you choose. there hasn't been anything good on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact. the source material is what helps keep journalism on us.

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