Νew Technologies and Innovation Development in Russia

GarryB wrote:I don't think any one source of energy will suit any country, but further investment in solar and wind including solar cell technology and electric motor technology will be valuable in other areas... particularly being able to create a durable material that has solar generation material built in to it could be very useful... where you clothes or car might be made of materials that capture and store energy all the time.

I think nuclear power will remain a reliable and much cleaner energy solution for Russia too.

Tide generators could be used in certain locations and of course water flow generators would be a useful way of harnessing the energy of flowing water and sea tides without the expense of damming rivers and waterways and all the problems that creates.

The Bay of Fundy has perhaps the greatest tide on Earth.   It has been the focus of endless discussion about tidal energy exploitation.
But to this day this remains all talk and very little action.   The value of alternatives is to decrease CO2 emissions enough to save us
from catastrophic (for human existence) global warming.  People smugly dismiss this threat without having a single clue about the science
behind it.   Rush Limbaugh or some other "expert" political hack told them it is all a commie hoax.  

Russia should deploy solar and wind in a natural fashion.   From what I have heard, it is being done as a subsidy scam in Russia like
in the west.   This is a waste of taxpayer money.   Nuclear power is vastly better as a replacement for natural gas, coal and oil
power.   It has none of the issues of alternatives in terms of intermittency and off peak delivery (such as with solar power).
It is pure baseload and is thus gold.    Solar and wind require serious storage solutions.   But so far I see no deployment of such.
We had this discussion on another thread.   NH3 or even H2 (with its serious storage problems) is the right approach to converting
intermittent power into a flexible energy source.   Liquid fuels are precious.   There is a reason that gasoline and diesel have given
us the economic explosion of the 20th century.

https://fpi.gov.ru/press/news/razrabotannaya-v-ramkakh-proekta-fpi-antenna-voshla-v-top-10-izobreteniy-2020-goda/

The world's first radio-optical AESA.

From the above:

На основе изобретения созданы макеты антенн, построена антенная решетка первого в мировой практике действующего демонстрационного макета радиооптической фазированной активной антенной решетки. Технология позволяет создавать антенны и антенные решетки, которые могут быть выполнены в виде активной обшивки различных носителей с толщиной немногим более толщины лакокрасочного покрытия.

The technology allows the creation of antennas and antenna arrays in the form of an active weave on the surface of various carriers
with a thickness of slightly greater than a coating of paint or lacquer.

Yes I know all the oil we burn in a day is about 3 min of sunshine, BUT, if energy became soo cheap what if that became 2 hours of sunshine. .. I cannot see how that will not have global warming consequences. The water vapour in the atmosphere will increase and that is also a GHG.

kvs wrote:
The Bay of Fundy has perhaps the greatest tide on Earth.   It has been the focus of endless discussion about tidal energy exploitation.
But to this day this remains all talk and very little action.   The value of alternatives is to decrease CO2 emissions enough to save us
from catastrophic (for human existence) global warming.  People smugly dismiss this threat without having a single clue about the science
behind it.   Rush Limbaugh or some other "expert" political hack told them it is all a commie hoax.  

Russia should deploy solar and wind in a natural fashion.   From what I have heard, it is being done as a subsidy scam in Russia like
in the west.   This is a waste of taxpayer money.   Nuclear power is vastly better as a replacement for natural gas, coal and oil
power.   It has none of the issues of alternatives in terms of intermittency and off peak delivery (such as with solar power).
It is pure baseload and is thus gold.    Solar and wind require serious storage solutions.   But so far I see no deployment of such.

Bay of Fundy is a national treasure, we are not gonna dam it up and despoil it just for electricity (thank god). But there are many tests being done on turbines that can exploit this movement further off shore without destorying this natural wonder.

There are HUGE batteries being deployed globally. If you want to see the potential of solar power look up Solar Cable. They are building a massive solar farm in Australia to provide Singapore with 1/3 of its electricity needs (about 4000+ km away) with massive battery farm as well.

GarryB wrote:

Tidal generators just need to be in the current... you don't need to dam anything up... a few towers sitting in the water with the water flowing through and driving turbine blades.... not like a wind turbine... they only work in one direction... for tidal generators it looks more like a bird cage with the vertical bars being vertical aerofoils that spin the cage when water flows through no matter what direction it comes from.... you could put them in fast flowing rivers too...

They are testing various turbine designs, the St. Lawrance river also has massive potential for this.

What a stupid idea... the amount of electricity generated lost in transmitting it that far would probably power a dozen local towns completely.

High voltage DC transmission is very efficient. There are no towns nearby that need powering so where is the loss? Also what are the transmission losses for Yamal LNG? lol

Ironic that once it is up and running and Russia suggests for a fraction of the price a ship based power station could be parked where it was needed with almost no power loss... and if power demands increase they can always send another on to meet demand...

That is a tiny powerplant, and its not at all cheap. Just that the situation warrants it and its cheaper then hauling diesel up there.

Huge batteries is why the US broke all its morals and overthrew Morales in Bolivia... they need sources of Lithium... as many as they can get and it is still expensive and with them putting that in SSKs to extend their performance it is only going to get more expensive.

The US has no morals, only interests. Grid batteries can be made without lithium as they do not need to be particularly compact. Sodium ion looks to be a good bet and there is unlimted sodium on the plant. Carbon air may also work eventually.

Someone brought up the NK-93 experimental airliner engine in the civil aviation thread. There's actually a documentary about it with english subs

Maybe Russia should dig back into this project.

The advanced nature of the engine attracted the attention of airframers and engine manufacturers in other countries. By 1992, the NK-93 was already drawing interest from the Japanese aviation industry.[1] Investors from South Korea were among the groups discussing investment in the NK-93 at the 2001 MAKS air show.[22] In 2004, Airbus and the Kuznetsov Design Bureau studied the feasibility of using the engine to power Airbus commercial aircraft.[23] German engine maker MTU Aero Engines purchased a Kuznetsov report on the noise characteristics of the NK-93 engine for 600,000 Deutsche marks.[24] When the NK-93 was displayed on the Il-76LL demonstrator at the 2007 MAKS air show, Chinese aircraft manufacturers reportedly made a "tempting offer" to buy all of the NK-93's blueprints and documentation.[25] In October 2013, the European Commission gave a three-and-a-half year grant to study the Innovative Counter rOtating fan system for high Bypass Ratio Aircraft engine (COBRA). COBRA was a European Union-Russia cooperative program to study an ultra-high bypass ratio (UHBR) counter-rotating turbofan (CRTF) that was similar to the NK-93. Participating organizations included Kuznetsov, CIAM, Russian propeller manufacturer Aerosila, French engine maker Safran (Snecma), the French aerospace laboratory (ONERA), and the German Aerospace Cente.

GarryB wrote:

High voltage DC transmission is very efficient.

No it isn't.

Yes it is... the most efficient one in fact

Big_Gazza wrote:DC transmission has the advantage that the impedances of transmission lines (ie inductance/capacitance) does not cause the losses that are typical with AC transmission.  DC also results in less resistive losses (due to ohms law) as it eliminates the so-called "skin effect" where current tends to flow mainly at the outer "skin" of the cable conductors, increasing current density and its effective resistance.  The flip side however is that AC-DC conversion (rectification) at the generation site introduces its own set of losses, as does the DC-AC conversion (inversion) at the connection to the national grid.  Can't say how these conversion losses compare to the transmission losses in the AC case cuz power systems isn't my field, but DC will come out ahead.

Of course, the other issue is one of cost.  AC transmission simply requires step-up/step-down transformers of suitable voltage/kVA ratings while DC requires very expensive high power/voltage conversion facilities. Without doing the numbers I'd suggest that DC probably only makes economic sense for very long distance power links where AC losses would require an increase in overhead conductor sizes (ie extra cost of cables) which has an impact on long runs.

Yes your take is correct, HVDC is used by now, given its greater cost and complexity, only in long distance, high power main links of the transport grid for voltages of 700-800 kV and higher. But it is spreading as the technology develops, it is also worth considering that the involved power electronics brings many additional advantages to shape and manage the grid, which are not present in standard synchronous generators and transformers. It can go to even higher voltage and transport rather efficiently energy along thousands of km in the East-West axis for solar (that would be a great integration project for Eurasia) or any other energy source worth the effort. Those loses are relatively small compared to those that normally appear in underdeveloped, unmaintained grids at the distribution level or those at the end user side...

The NK-93 should be deeply redesigned/modernized and should incorporate SuperOx's electric engine, to pursue a hybrid kerosene-electric engine. The Kerosene engine portion could be used to produce additional thrust for extra-heavy lift loads, and burned to recharge the batteries for the electric engine mid-flight and allow the SuperOx engines to coast at lower output settings. The electric engine could do the heavy lifting for extra fuel-efficient flight range.

GarryB wrote:

No it isn't. New Zealand is a long narrow country with most of the hydro electric power generation in the far south of the south island... a large portion of the electricity generated in the south is used up getting it to the far north of the north island where most of the population lives.

Don't get your point here, not even sure if NZ uses DC or AC transmission, but DC transmission is about 3% per 1000km

GarryB wrote:
Not really a geography expert but I would think I can say without even looking that power generation in the middle of Australia is going to result in all Australian towns and cities being closer to the place of generation than any city or town in Singapore.

Yeah you are clearly not. This will be generated near the coast and its not much further to Singapore then then major markets in Oz.

GarryB wrote:
Not the same thing... pumping stations shouldn't bleed gas the way wires lose electrical current over distance.

The massive turbo compressors don't use energy? The massive LNG ships plowing through the ice? The liquifaction and cryogenic freezing of the LNG?

GarryB wrote:

They are not cheap now but prices will go down as they make more of them and they are reliable 24/7 power supplies.

Its basically a reactor from a nuclear sub is what I read, which means its cannot be cheap, and uses enriched fuels...!!

GarryB wrote:
Demand for batteries is creating a situation where the US is killing people, not of course they seem to not mind, but I do.

The US was formed on genocide

How Russia is conquering the composite materials market
24 February

Today, the share of Russian companies in the global production of composites is about 1%, and the industry itself is extremely import-dependent. The subprogram for the development of the production of traditional and new materials, which include composite materials, is included in the state program for the development of industry in the Russian Federation, and the roadmap approved by the Ministry of Industry and Trade suggests funding from the federal budget in the amount of 30517110.7 thousand rubles. One of the targets of this program is to increase production in the composite industry to 81.3 billion rubles by 2024.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, more than two hundred enterprises and companies are engaged in the production of composites in Russia today. In 2018, on the initiative of UMATEX (Advanced Materials and Technologies Division of Rosatom State Corporation), an interregional industrial cluster "Composites without Borders" was formed on the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan, Moscow and Saratov regions. The cluster members are the leading industrial enterprises of the composite industry and scientific organizations.

Today UMATEX is the leader in the Russian market in the production of carbon composites and is one of the ten world leaders in the production of a wide range of carbon fiber. Compared with conventional structural materials (aluminum or steel), composite materials based on carbon fibers have extremely high characteristics - strength, fatigue resistance, elastic modulus, chemical and corrosion resistance, several times higher than those of steel, with a significantly lower weight.

The growth potential of the Russian carbon fiber market is estimated at 3 thousand tons by 2025, while today consumption in Russia is ten times less.

At the same time, the development of the industry is limited by a shortage of qualified personnel and weak development of the regulatory framework. The process of certifying a new material for its use in industrial equipment now takes up to three years, so it is very important to radically change the way new standards are developed and make it more compact and faster.

Advantages of composites over traditional materials

Composite materials surpass traditional metal materials in many respects. Microdamages are inherent in traditional materials with a homogeneous structure. In order to get rid of them as much as possible, such materials are used in the form of thin fibers: the thinner the fiber, the fewer defects in its section. These properties of the fiber allow for higher strength and stiffness values. Composite materials are less sensitive to stress concentrators, and the low rate of propagation of fatigue cracks in them provides increased durability of structures made of these materials.

The main advantage of any composite is the ability to independently choose the type of material, orientation and volumetric content of fibers when designing. This makes it possible to obtain structural materials with the functional properties desired for the designer and makes the use of composite materials a very valuable and promising direction in various industries: aircraft and engine building, mechanical engineering, energy, oil and gas and construction industries.

In any areas of industry, one of the main tasks is to reduce the cost of production without losing the quality of products and reduce costs during the subsequent operation of the product.

Thus, the use of polymers and composite materials in a modern car allows you to reduce its weight by 15-30%, and a decrease in weight by 100 kg leads to a decrease in fuel consumption by 0.5 liters or more per every 100 km. Of course, high-tech composite materials are no more economical than steel or aluminum alloy, but they do not require corrosion protection.

It is known that the use of polymer composite materials (CM) in the production of aviation and space technology makes it possible to reduce from 5 to 50% the weight (mass) of the aircraft. World leaders in aircraft construction - Airbus and Boeing corporations actively use composites in their aircraft designs. If in the airplanes of the A-340 and B-777 types in 2000, about 10% of the CM from the weight of the liner was used, then in 2015 this figure was at least 50%. The total share of composites in the MS-21 structure is, according to various estimates, 30–40%.

Applications of composite materials

The areas of using composite materials are practically unlimited. And today CM have found application in many industries.

In mechanical engineering, composite materials are used to create hard coatings on cutting tools and protective wear-resistant coatings on metal surfaces with intense friction. From carbon fiber reinforced plastics in combination with an aluminum honeycomb structure, critical parts and assemblies of space aircraft are manufactured, which are exposed to intense heating and heavy overloads. In military equipment, CM is used in the manufacture of body armor and protection of tanks and helicopters from bullet and shrapnel damage, in the mining industry - in the manufacture of cutters for drilling rocks, and in the processing industry, CM and polymers are used for lining grinders for grinding solids; in turbine construction - to create blades; in the chemical industry - for autoclaves and tanks for storage and transportation of chemical and oil products.

Development of composite materials

The development and creation of parts from composite materials, as well as the development and study of the characteristics of a new material, are a complex of complex and related tasks. The approach to solving such problems is to choose the optimal combination of technologies and materials; carrying out computer modeling of the stress-strain state of the structure and technological production processes; organization of experimental research to determine the initial characteristics of materials. One of the leading Russian aircraft manufacturers recently encountered difficulties trying to accurately simulate the performance characteristics of composite parts before fabrication. Their difficulties stemmed from the more complex nature of the new material, which resulted in an unexpected failure.

The ability to accurately predict the behavior of composites during manufacturing, as well as predict the properties of the finished product, is critical to ensure design confidence, support the right approach from the start, increase the use of composites and accelerate their adoption.

The task of accurate modeling of a composite material is to obtain an accurate description of its composition. Unlike conventional material (such as steel), composite is typically a mixture of fibrous materials of varying thicknesses that can be layered on top of each other to create a single material. The orientation of the fibers in each layer (the direction of the main fiber) differs in terms of the angle, thickness, and material layered above and below. This complexity is offset by the flexibility to locally adjust the stiffness and strength properties in each part.

The engineering problems of composite structures can only be solved through detailed finite element analysis (FEM) and highly specialized modeling tools. Today there are several systems on the market for computer modeling of products made of composite materials and virtual study of CM characteristics.

When working with composites, the study of failures is also different from the study of failures when working with conventional materials. Collectively, engineers analyze local failures to determine where, how, and under what load conditions the failure occurs. Composites can fail in a variety of ways (delamination, matrix destruction, fiber damage due to compression or tension). Assessing complex failure modes is a key challenge in composite design.

Another problem is the explosive growth in the quantity and complexity of data on promising materials. It is difficult to identify and select viable materials and processing options from a rapidly growing set of possibilities. This requires a good database that captures the full range of these capabilities and provides the tools to find the data you need.

https://zen.yandex.ru/media/digital_world/kak-rossiia-zavoevyvaet-rynok-kompozicionnyh-materialov-60365f8ca332dd7373d14d3f

GarryB wrote:

Australia struggles with electricity shortages and burns a lot of coal to generate power but you think they should be sending it to Singapore?

The Australian govt is too stupid to invest in this, whereas the Singapore govt is willing to underwrite it as producing power in Australia will allow them to reduce carbon and close fossil fuel plants. The land in Singapore is so insanly valuable, they can STILL make a huge profit on redeveloping the land AND paying for this project.

They don't use electricity. Ships even ones ploughing through ice are vastly cheaper than other forms of transport per kg delivered.

The are still using energy and I can guarantee you the loss is more then 12% of the DC transmission line. And no, pipelines are cheaper where possible. LNG is much more expensive because of the need to cool and compress the gas. (about $2-3 per MMCF)

They are producing it because they have a lot of remote communities that need power. I would not say they are "commercializing" it. That would be a violation of the Non-proliferation treaty as it uses enriched uranium.

Enriched uranium is a recyclable fuel, they have the technology to re-enrich the spent fuel rods by placing them near the pile in a breeder or fast neutron reactor...

You are not recycling it, just reprocessing. When you get into this stuff you end up with some pretty dangerous fuels that contain plutonium. .....

GarryB wrote:

Paying to build something as strategically important as electrical power generation in a foreign country that is not super friendly... if it works the Aussies might find themselves cap in hand asking to buy some of that electrical current from Singapore... or just pinching it.

Actually Oz and Singapore are extemely friendly. Singapore even has a massive military training base there. Its only part of SINGs power suppy and they are also connected to Malaysias grid to share power and robustness. You can bet they also invest heavil in Malaysia even though they were actually booted out of the Malaysian Federation. Singapore is not the type of country that will let feelings get in the way of a good plan.

If you could reprocess Uranium so easily there would be no waste product called DU.

Fuel grade Uranium is not something you can pop in the bed to warm your feet on cold nights...

Reprocessing removes the depleted I believe, and concetrates the still active uranium. This is why some nasty stuff end up in it because plutonium, which is a byproduct and highly radioactive, is also part of the end product.

According to what I have read the Russians are taking German DU because they can extract more useful material from a rod with western technology is spent, and can also re-energise it to make it usable as a fuel rod again in a conventional nuclear power station.

Sounds pretty good to me.[/quote]

DU is actual fuel for fast neutron breeder reactors. They convert the stable uranium isotope 238 (the most common) into plutonium
239. Plutonium can sustain a neutron chain reaction and gets "burned" in the process.

DU comes from removing isotope 235 which is unstable and thanks to billions of years since the formation of uranium on Earth (in
supernova events long before the formation of our Sun) is a small percentage of naturally mined uranium deposits. It has to be
extracted with gas diffusion or centrifuges to be used for bombs and fuel in conventional nuclear reactors.

The magic of fast neutron breeders is that they are seeded with conventional reactor fuel (such as enriched uranium or MOX) but
produce new fuel (plutonium or other elements depending on their design) in the process. That is why breeder reactors extract
50 times more energy from a unit of uranium than conventional reactors.

These are 2 different approachs. Reprocessing removes the active fuel from the depleted rods, and uses them to make new nuclear fuel. MOX is one of the products that comes from this process. Breeder reactors are a whole different beast. In fact I wonder why Russia does not pursue the Thorium fuel cycle. India is betting heavily on the Thorium cycle where Thorium is converted to U235 via breeder reactors. Its a long project that will eventually provide India with almost unlimited nuclear energy. I am not sure if you can take the spent rods out of a conventional reactor and just put them into a breeder reactor..seems too easy. But the wiki I read on it says using this cycle would result in enough energy for 5B years. One negative of it is some of the "new" fuel it creates, quite a bit actually, is plutonium, which has weapons proliferation and toxic risks associated with it.

The Russian government has finally passed laws that stimulate the purchase of domestically designed microprocessors.
So procurement will not be swamped with Intel/AMD parts and has to be designed and fully documented in Russia even
if it is manufactured in Taiwan. So when the yanquis put pressure on Taiwan to stop manufacturing Russian processors,
Russia can move shop to China or even rely on its own fabrication. It is still possible to license foreign processor design
elements, but they cannot be exclusive to territory outside of Russia.

From the above video it is clear that Russian microprocessor manufacturing is suppressed by foreign products. These
new regulations are a semi-soft effort to grow demand inside Russia for Russian tech. And this effort is already bearing
fruit since the volume of Elbrus CPU sales is increasing.

It would be so cool if Russia could build top level gaming computers. I bet a Russian CPU would be uber cool for the gamer market if it was super fast.