five thirty am in moscow these here are t. headlines outrage from internet users as the u.s. house of representatives passes a new web data gathering act and how activists call for mass protests against companies backing the controversial bill and president obama has threatened to veto the bill if it passes the senate citing civil liberty concerns. in spain public anger over severe austerity measures grows along with a number of complaints of police brutality as critics say dissent is being violently suppressed the countries of struggling with almost twenty five percent unemployment and increased cost of borrowing after it lost its a rating earlier this week. and the trial of ukraine's former prime minister for tax evasion postponed until late may after yulia timoshenko claims abuse by prison guards has left her too frail to attend the hearings she's already serving seven

years in prison for abuse of power. coming up tech update stay with us. 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 remain beyond the price range of many drivers are 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 propelled ones 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 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's still its infancy the company thinks that it will catch on quickly. and generally means and one for every sinew in our country as much 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 a. pilot period is coming to an end and. subscribers. are the company. environmentally friendly in fact they're looking beyond private drivers to something larger. technology could be a way to help solve problems in places like moscow. one of the problems that.

public transportation fleet. 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.

reach. the timber industry. first. company. says they're fully equipped to put together the industry's most stringent. today. of pollution. developing electric hybrid right now we're the only ones in russia doing you could you do it. now this is. two thousand and eight. thanks to a well known electro mechanical transmission design. the transmission.

engine to run at a more efficient rate. components of. a few extra bits like a generator power and. braking energy. electric . generator is sent through the induction motor. fuel economy twenty to thirty percent of regular internal combustion engines. are moving step. first we made a hybrid. we're working on electric. trains continue this will become a necessity. membership will be a factor for. some 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. 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. 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 updated flywheel energy

recuperation system to a company called interest in his 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. groaning and the following will is not moving the way so let's transfer the buses energy 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 back in the previous century his design relied on

a fairly basic variator to collect 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 little reason to pay a little more for technology that was safe but here things have certainly changed his new idea a new lease on life. what what started. this previous model was made basically by hand really. boasted fuel savings of forty five percent the one you can see here on this post is an updated model and 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 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 it's 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 to power train concept so. so what worked with those engineering advances to dr 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. if we compare our flyable hybrid. toyota 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 drained 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 a prototype of this very. tests bench in august this year. till the end of this year we're going to demonstrate the prototype pliable unit. and then when we have both companies go in to build test and demonstrate. in the middle of next year now it's the start of spring in moscow but 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 goal charging station project. so far. away from sugar walls. real life or school conditions it was weather cold winter a lot of sort of who 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 they're 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 the 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 in p 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 works best for specific functions. of the without that over the 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 person that extraordinary depends on the type of material we use for the electrodes in such a battery. 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 seventy. hours programs and they're already approaching their theoretical limits. and a 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 is take major steps forward for example if we wanted to significantly increase stored energy we need to stop using graphite for the negative electrode and go back to the lithium metal which was used in the beginning. back 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. today we found special electrolytes such as poly meric glass ceramic electrolytes and electrolyte supplements which allow us to deposit the lithium as a film 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 boil strips but solid 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 the steeple 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 course carbon spawn and 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 two three sometimes even four thousand mil amp hours per gram and that's compared to the regular one hundred fifty one hundred seventy 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 the electrons float 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 air batteries this potential application is still all 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 cheek of me but already this year we plan to do more. engineering work. and started 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 kind 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 engineers 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 what you do four wheel drive for example. motors in the front work as engines to power the front wheels in the bucket the motors are built into the wheels themselves. this is truly rare right now where nobody else can demonstrate this is the car moves with all four wheels and every wheel is controlled independently depending on the traction. if it slippery power is reduced if the speed is too low power is increased this is sets it apart from all other types. secondly the 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. a regular car would go forty kilometers with this battery stuck with the 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 reuse of space craft 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 would 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 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 wait is greater than over the regular bush which no criticize it. that reason in real 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 its technology continues to advance electric vehicles to become more common citing yeah but was this issue a show here similar to that of 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 so we can expect the same for transport. 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 goal whether it's chips train plane force or horse power and you know your choice to make the until next time enjoy the right whatever type of transit you choose.

when you force spring overseas my grocery birds will come home to roost. when their massive and hungry. empathy gives way to other commotions. towards those who live on the current.

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