Hexagon Agility receives a new order for its CNG transport modules

 Hexagon Agility, a Hexagon Composites company, signed an agreement in June 2021 with Xpress Natural Gas LLC (XNG), a full-service provider of compressed and renewable natural gas in the United States, to deliver its Mobile Pipeline® modules for the clean natural gas transportation. Under this contract, Hexagon Agility received its second XNG order, worth an estimated $ 2.8 million. The modules are expected to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2021.

“The TITAN 53s has allowed us to make clean natural gas accessible and affordable for our customers, keeping businesses running and homes warm during the cold winter months. Hexagon's products have proven to be of high quality - safe, reliable, and high performing, ”said Jeffrey Ciampa, XNG's chief operating officer. "

The TITAN® 53 modules offer the highest capacity in North America and will serve multiple projects to communities and industries that do not have access to natural gas or lack sufficient pipeline capacity to meet demand.

“We applaud XNG for continuing to connect industry and communities to clean natural gas. We are excited to support XNG in achieving our common vision of driving energy transformation through cost-effective clean energy options, ”said Seung Baik, President of Hexagon Agility.

Mobile Pipeline® technology is vital to driving the energy transformation from petroleum fuels to clean, renewable natural gas. Companies like XNG have been leaders in the industry, enabling customers without access to pipelines to adopt natural gas and meet their environmental goals. With more than 1,700 Mobile Pipeline® modules deployed around the world, Hexagon Agility continues to set the standard for safety, reliability and performance.

Last week, Hexagon Agility also received its eighth set of orders in 2021 under a master services agreement signed in June 2020 with a global logistics customer to deliver its CNG and renewable natural gas fuel systems for service trucks. medium and heavy. This represents an estimated value of approximately $ 12 million and deliveries of the fuel systems are scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Source: Hexagon Agility

Hanwha Solutions acquires Cimarron Composites, aims to be a global leader in high-pressure tanks by 2030

Hanwha Cimarron LLC will build a new $130 million production facility in Alabama to produce large-scale tanks for hydrogen transport, filling stations, and support expansion into tanks for UAM, drones, launch vehicle rockets, defense, rail, cargo ships, transportation and more.

Hanwha Cimarron currently manufactures large tanks for compressed hydrogen gas as well as tanks for cryogenic fuels used in space launch vehicles. This acquisition is part of Hanwha Solutions’ efforts to accelerate its expansion into the green-hydrogen industry. The company reports that Hanwha Cimarron provides the technology to manufacture tanks for hydrogen tube trailers, ultra-high-pressure tanks for hydrogen filling stations and tanks for aerospace applications, as well as for hydrogen-powered vehicles.

“Including the acquisition costs, we plan to invest at least $100 million in Cimarron Composites by 2025 to establish a strong foundation from which to develop our global hydrogen tank business,” said a spokesman for Hanwha Solutions in Dec 2020. This investment includes funding for the expansion of Cimarron’s production facilities.

Supplying tanks for Elon Musk’s SpaceX Program

According to Hanwha Cimarron, it supplied prototype high-pressure tanks to SpaceX (Hawthorne, Calif., U.S.) and in 2014 began supplying tanks that are used for the Falcon 9 rockets. Hanwha Cimarron has also expanded into producing industrial tanks. Currently, the company manufactures hydrogen tanks, cryogenic liquid gas fuel tanks for space launch vehicles and compressed natural gas (CNG) tanks to a variety of customers, including rocket manufacturers and industrial gas companies.

Cimarron complements and strengthens Hanwha’s hydrogen storage strategy

Hanwha Solutions began pursuing its hydrogen storage strategy by acquiring TK-Fujikin Corp.’s (Busan, South Korea) Type IV tank production business in December 2019. Hanwha Solutions reports that it can now produce tanks for hydrogen-powered drones and passenger cars for the Korean market. Overseas, it intends to use its Cimarron Composites acquisition to produce large-scale tanks for hydrogen tube trailers, tanks for hydrogen filling stations, and to expand into tanks for UAM vehicles, aerospace applications, and cargo ships carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG).

“Through this acquisition, we will advance our existing tank technology and expand our global tank business,” says Doo-Hyung Ryu, CEO of Hanwha Solutions’ Advanced Materials Division. “Not only will we play a key role in the growing hydrogen economy, but we also aim to become the global leader for high-pressure tanks by 2030.”

Source: Compositesworld

Scientists developing bio-based carbon fibres being "showered with requests" for sustainable version of the wonder material

 Scientists are working on carbon fibres made from biomaterials instead of fossil fuels in an attempt to create a version that does not generate carbon emissions.

Bio-based carbon fibres could be used to build lightweight electric cars with greater battery range, according to senior scientist Dr Erik Frank.

In architecture, concrete could be reinforced with carbon fibres instead of steel, allowing ultra-thin structures to be built.

"It's a wonder material because it is very strong and yet light compared to metal," said Frank, who is head of carbon fibre development and new materials at the German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research in Denkendorf, southern Germany.

However, "the carbon footprint of carbon fibres is usually very bad," he added.

"The raw materials [for regular carbon fibre] come from petroleum but we're trying to move away from this," he explained. "Bio-based carbon fibres are in much higher demand than they used to be. We're being showered with requests."

Carbon fibres originally made from plant-based materials

Carbon fibres are incredibly thin threads of almost pure carbon crystals. Measuring just 5 to 10 micrometres, they are five times stronger than steel and twice as stiff.

The material was originally made from plant-based materials including cellulose and rayon, Frank said, until the lower price and higher performance of fossil-derived versions made bio-based carbon fibre unviable.

But the production process requires vast amounts of energy and generates large amounts of emissions and toxins. "If we want carbon fibres to be carbon neutral, all of this needs to be redesigned," Frank said.

To make the fibres, petroleum is first processed into highly toxic polyacrylonitrile (PAN). This is pulled into thin threads and then heated in an oven without oxygen.

Growing demand for bio-based carbon fibres

The process requires large amounts of energy and generates pollution as everything except the carbon atoms are burned away. "A couple of years ago this wasn't even a topic," said Frank. "People only cared about costs."

"Nowadays, sustainability is much more important and petroleum isn't so cheap anymore so it's a different story. Carbon fibre is a major component in that because it's so energy-intensive."

Frank is exploring ways of turning lignin, a substance found in most plants and which is a byproduct of the paper industry, into carbon fibres.

"We're working with lignin as a raw material," he explained. "It's a waste byproduct which accumulates in huge quantities in the paper industry. Normally, this is added to concrete or asphalt or incinerated. We're using it to make carbon fibre."

"To do that, we use chemical methods to purify it and get it into a good shape," he continued. "Then we can spin this into fibres, which we're trying to do directly in water rather than having to use toxic solvents. And the fibres that you get can be directly turned into carbon fibres."

Carbon fibre currently expensive and unsustainable

The performance of bio-based carbon fibre is "on the medium to lower-end" compared to PAN-based fibres, he added. "I should say the bio-based carbon fibres won't replace the PAN-based ones. It will just be a second market running alongside."

Carbon fibre is widely used to create aircraft and cars as well as high-performance products including bicycles, tennis rackets and wind turbines. It is extremely lightweight, meaning that it can significantly improve performance and reduce energy requirements.

However, it is expensive to produce as well as having an increasingly bad reputation due to its unsustainability.

"In aircraft construction, it is already used as standard," said Frank. "It can make a difference in electric cars by helping to save on weight."

The automotive industry would like to move to carbon fibre but it is as of yet too expensive and not sustainable enough. The car industry is extremely driven by price and increasingly looking to do things more sustainably."

Last year, work started on the first building featuring concrete reinforced with carbon fibre. CUBE, a two-story building designed by Henn Architekten at the Technical University Dresden in Germany, is due to be completed later this year.

"It's already happening on a small scale that concrete is reinforced with carbon fibre but it's not yet at mass adoption stage," Frank said. "The benefit is that you can make the concrete much thinner while being able to carry heavy loads so you can design completely different shapes. The aim is to get away from the huge amounts of concrete that are being used today."

Bio-based carbon fibres could be more affordable than petroleum-based options

The high cost of carbon fibre is partly due to the complex and energy-intensive production process. Frank said that the global output is just 150,000 tonnes per year.

Another drawback of the material is that it is difficult to recycle and dispose of, although ways of reusing it are now being developed. "Many people are innovating in this field," Frank said.

"There are already quite a few recycled carbon fibres and they're even being used in products. Of course, they become worse with every cycle and at some point, they will have to be disposed of. Burning isn't an option because it's really hard to burn. A lot of the time it is stored in old mines."

Airbus "looking for sustainable carbon fibres"

But the demand for sustainable, high-performance materials means that bio-based carbon fibres could soon be more affordable as research and development ramps up around the world.

"All industries are being forced to cut down on CO2," Frank said. "It's not voluntary any more because it's going to get very expensive if they don't. Even aviation companies such as Airbus are looking for sustainable carbon fibres."

"We’re working on using the raw materials of the plants and turning them straight into carbon fibre," he concluded. "This means we’ve taken the carbon from the air via the plants, rather than adding carbon from fossil sources like petroleum or coal into the atmosphere."

LYOCELL FIBER

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Filament Winding Process

 📢Time to Get Technical...📢

Let's learn more about filament winding!

Filament winding consists of winding continuous rovings of fiber onto a rotating mandrel in predetermined patterns. This method of manufacturing provides the greatest control over fiber placement and uniformity of structure.

The mandrel configuration corresponds to the internal surface of the component to be produced. Material compaction is accomplished owing to the component of the tensile stress normal to the mandrel surface. Material layers are formed with each wind offset with respect to the previous one across the width. Also, the winds are placed on the mandrel in a state of static balance (they keep it in place without sliding.)

The winding pattern is formed by periodically repeated winding cycles, with subsequent cycles offset relative to one another across the winding-tape width. The mandrel is then covered with winds uniformly along the maximum component diameter, excluding gaps and filament overlaps. In the case of exact cycle repetition without offset, multiple wind laying will occur, with the result that a netlike structure is formed with interlink frequency.

Bibliographical Reference:

Composite Manufacturing Technology - Page 77

Scientists turn water into shiny metal

 With enough pressure, you can turn anything into metal, and water is no exception. However, scientists Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague managed to turn liquid water into a bronze-like metallic state without having to apply ungodly amounts of pressure, which makes the achievement all the more impressive.

If squeezed together tightly enough, atoms and molecules can become so compacted in their lattice that they begin to share their outer electrons, allowing them to travel and basically conduct electricity as they would in a copper wire. Case in point, in 2020, French scientists turned the simplest gas in the universe, hydrogen, into a metal and fulfilled a prediction made in 1935 by Nobel Prize laureates Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington. Metal hydrogen is, in fact, a superconductor, meaning it conducts electricity with zero electrical resistance.

To do so, the French researchers subjected hydrogen to a staggering 425 gigapascals of pressure — more than four million times the pressure on Earth’s surface, and even higher than that in the planet’s inner core. Therefore, it’s impossible to find metallic hydrogen on Earth, although it may very well be found in Jupiter and Saturn, which are mostly composed of hydrogen gas and have stronger internal pressures than the Earth. Likewise, Neptune and Uranus are believed to host water in a metallic state thanks to their huge pressure.

With the same approach, water would require 15 million bars of pressure to turn it into a metal, more than three times the requirement for metallic hydrogen. That’s simply out of our current technology’s reach. However, there may be another way to turn water metallic without having to squeeze it with the pressure of a gas giant’s core, thought Pavel Jungwirth, a physical chemist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

Jungwirth and fellow chemist Phil Mason wondered if water could be coxed to behave like a metal if it borrowed electrons from alkali metals, which are highly reactive elements in the 1st group of the periodic table. They got this idea after previously, Jungwirth and colleagues found that under similar conditions, ammonia can turn shiny.

But despite their willingness to go along with this experiment, the researchers faced a predicament. You see, alkali metals are so reactive in the presence of water that they tend to react explosively.

The solution was to design an experimental setup that dramatically slowed down the reaction so that a potentially catastrophic explosion was averted.

Ironically, the key to mitigating the explosive behavior of the water-alki metal reaction was the adsorbtion of water at very low pressure, about 7,000 smaller than that found at sea level. This setup ensured that the diffusion of the electrons from the alkali metal was faster than the reaction between the water and the metals.

The researchers filled a syringe with an alkali metal solution composed of sodium and potassium, which was placed in a vacuum chamber. The syringe was triggered remotely to expel droplets of the mixture which were exposed to tiny amounts of water vapor.

The water condensed into each droplet of alkali metal, forming a layer over them just one-tenth of a micrometer thick. Electrons from the mixture diffused into the water, along with positive metallic ions, giving the water layer a shiny, bronze-like glow. The entire thing only lasted for a mere couple of seconds, but for all intents of purposes, the scientists had just turned water into metal at room temperature, a fact confirmed by synchrotron experiments.

We show that a metallic water solution can be prepared by massive doping with electrons upon reacting water with alkali metals. Although analogous metallic solutions of liquid ammonia with high concentrations of solvated electrons have long been known and characterized, the explosive interaction between alkali metals and water has so far only permitted the preparation of aqueous solutions with low, submetallic electron concentrations,” the authors wrote in the journal Nature.

Source:ZMESCIENCE