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Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, join IEEE as a paying member. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN EnergyTopicMagazineTypeFeature Australia Goes All-in on Green Hydrogen Juggernaut or boondoggle--it's too soon to tell Peter Fairley 6h 7 min read An aerial photo shows a large solar-photovoltaic generating plant. The Sun Metals solar farm, completed in 2018, supplies electricity to a zinc refinery in Townsville, Qld., Australia. The AUS $200 million, 120-hectare plant can supply 124 megawatts under ideal conditions. The plant is now owned by Ark Energy, a subsidiary of Korea Zinc, which also owns the adjacent refinery. By the end of 2023, Ark Energy plans to commission a fleet of fuel-cell trucks powered by green hydrogen to haul zinc concentrates and ingots between the refinery and a nearby port. Ark Energy For several months now, 20 teams of Australian high-school students have been designing fuel-cell cars to compete in the country's inaugural Hydrogen Grand Prix. They've been studying up on renewable energy, hydrogen power, and electric vehicles, preparing for the big day in April when their remote-controlled vehicles will rumble for 4 hours in Gladstone, a port city in Queensland. The task: make the most of a 30-watt fuel cell and 14 grams of hydrogen gas. A few months later and some 800 kilometers up Queensland's coast, Grand Prix corporate cosponsor Ark Energy aims to apply the same basic hydrogen and fuel-cell components--albeit scaled up more than 3,500 times. By 2023's third quarter, Ark expects five of the world's largest fuel-cell trucks to be hauling concentrated zinc ore and finished ingots between a zinc refinery and the nearby port of Townsville. The carbon-free rigs will pack 50 kilos of hydrogen zapped from water using electricity from the refinery's dedicated solar power plant. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to Australia, where a green-hydrogen boom is in full swing. Both the massive and the toy-size vehicles are about selling Australians on the transformative potential of green hydrogen--hydrogen gas produced from renewable energy--to decarbonize their fossil-fuel-based economy. And while coal plants still supplied over half of Australia's power in 2021, change is afoot. The government elected last year passed the country's first climate-action law in more than a decade. And green hydrogen is the centerpiece of its clean-economy growth plan. Resource-poor Asian neighbors such as Japan and Korea are also counting on Aussie green hydrogen to help get them off fossil fuels in the decades ahead. Add up the capacity figures in all of Australia's current proposals to produce green hydrogen and the sum exceeds Australia's power-generating capacity. It's all part of a green-hydrogen wave that's spreading worldwide. Observers caution that some of these green-hydrogen projects will never produce a thimbleful of hydrogen--an echo of the hydrogen boom a generation ago that ultimately went bust. "It's very easy in this current phase for two people you've never heard about to create a 30-gigawatt project and put out a press release," says David Norman, CEO for the clean-energy research organization Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre in Wollongong, New South Wales. Phantom projects are not a problem confined to Australia. Only 10 percent of the US $240 billion worth of hydrogen projects announced worldwide are actually moving forward, according to a September 2022 study by consultancy McKinsey & Company. Yet many more are actually needed. Building every electrolyzer promised for 2030 would provide only about one-sixth of the green hydrogen required to meet climate targets, according to figures from the International Energy Agency in Paris. Amid this noisy background, Queensland is home to the two projects most likely to boost the credibility of Australia's green-hydrogen juggernaut in 2023. Ark Energy's project is part of a clean-energy blitz in Australia by its parent company, Seoul-based metal-refining giant Korea Zinc. The other glimmer of reality is a project in Gladstone to build one of the world's largest electrolyzer-manufacturing plants, which promises to provide a local source of equipment amid ongoing chaos in global supply chains. Why a hydrogen truck? The 124-megawatt solar plant adjacent to Korea Zinc's Townsville refinery, completed in 2018, cut a quarter of the coal-heavy grid power it had been using to run its power-intensive electrolytic process. The coming fuel-cell trucks will trim its diesel consumption. Ark Energy CEO Daniel Kim says Korea Zinc launched his firm in 2021 to help shift its Australian operations to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030 and, in the process, pave a path for 100 percent renewable energy group-wide by 2050. Kim says the 2050 goal requires green hydrogen--or a more exportable fuel made from it--because Korea Zinc does most of its refining in South Korea, where there's limited space for solar and wind plants. Ark's first move was to access more renewable power in Australia by buying into a 923-MW wind farm that's expected to spin up in 2024. Next it ordered equipment for the Townsville truck project to begin exploring green hydrogen's capabilities and challenges. "To become a low-cost producer of green hydrogen, we first have to become an extreme user--to make it pervasive across our business. Diesel replacement for heavy trucks was the best prospective use," Kim says. Today, 28 heavy-duty diesel-powered trucks operate at the Townsville refinery. When ships arrive at port with zinc concentrate, or tie up to take on zinc ingots, the rigs haul triple-trailers and loop the 30 km from port to plant and back nonstop for as many as eight days. Time is money, says Kim, because occupying a berth in port can cost a whopping AUS $22,000 (US $13,800) a day. Even if a battery-powered truck could handle the refinery's 140,000-tonne loads, Kim says his company couldn't afford to wait for batteries to recharge. Fortescue's growth plan anticipates shipping most of its green hydrogen out of Australia to clean up heavy vehicles, industries, and power grids worldwide. In 2021, Ark Energy took a stake in Hyzon Motors, one of the few firms working on ultraheavy trucks powered by fuel cells. Hyzon, based in Rochester, N.Y., agreed to equip some of its first extra-beefy fuel-cell rigs with the right-hand drive and wider carriage required in Australia--something other developers couldn't offer until 2025 or 2026. "We're bringing forward the transition of Australia's ultraheavy transport sector by several years," says Kim. To fuel the trucks, Ark Energy ordered a 1-MW electrolyzer from Plug Power, based in Latham, N.Y. Kim anticipated that construction of the electrolyzer facility would start around the end of 2022, and vowed that five fuel-cell trucks would be looping to port and back on hydrogen gas in the third quarter of 2023 or sooner. Kim says these vehicles will cost "a little over three times" that of an equivalent diesel-fueled hauler, up front, but the overall project should break even or even save money over the trucks' projected 10-year operating life. Government grants and loans and high diesel prices help make hydrogen competitive. The trucks' unchanging route was also a plus: The relatively flat loop enabled use of a smaller, cheaper, fuel cell. "This is a dedicated truck for a dedicated purpose," Kim notes. Exporting green hydrogen Ark Energy expects to start exporting renewable energy around 2030. In contrast, the team delivering Queensland's second dose of green hydrogen realism this year could begin commercial-scale exports in 2025. The AUS $114 million (US $72 million) electrolyzer plant rising in Gladstone is the first brick-and-mortar green-hydrogen move by mining magnate Andrew Forrest, Australia's boldest, and wealthiest, green-hydrogen proponent. Forrest became the second-richest man in Australia running Perth-based Fortescue Metals Group, which disrupted the global iron-ore business through vertical integration and aggressive cost cutting. Now Fortescue is applying the same strategy to green hydrogen. Forrest vows to invest US $6.2 billion to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030--50 percent more than what the European Union says it needs to import to get off Russian energy and to cut carbon emissions. Doing so will require about 150GW of wind and solar generation--more than the total installed generating capacity of France. The move is projected to eliminate 3 million tonnes of carbon per year--slashing Fortescue's emissions to zero and saving it US $818 million per year. BloombergNEF predicts that the annual manufacturing capacity worldwide for hydrogen-producing electrolyzers will more than triple in the next two years. Cameron Smith, head of manufacturing for Fortescue's green-energy subsidiary, Fortescue Future Industries, says getting there means cutting costs until the company's renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. "Our objective here is to make fossil fuels irrelevant," Smith declares. Fortescue is building its own electrolyzer production plant in spite of a global glut. Market analysts at BloombergNEF project that manufacturing capacity for electrolyzers will exceed demand 10- to 15-fold this year. Smith says that's not a major concern for Fortescue, given the company's imperative to cut costs and to quickly bring green-hydrogen production on line. "We don't need to make everything, but we need a credible pathway to do so if we can't get the equipment we need at the cost and quality we need to make all our projects viable," he says. The Gladstone plant's 13,000-square-meter envelope is already in place, and Smith anticipates installation of one line's robotic machines during the second quarter of 2023. He expects the plant will end the year as a "gigawatt-scale" electrolyzer factory: producing enough electrolyzers in a year to consume 1 GW of electricity. And he expects production capacity to double with a second line early in 2024. The problem with shipping hydrogen Fortescue expects green hydrogen to help its own operations reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. But its growth plan, like Ark Energy's, anticipates exporting most of its green hydrogen to clean up heavy vehicles, industries, and power grids worldwide. First, though, they will have to make it shippable. Shipping hydrogen is pricey. As either a gas or a liquid, it has relatively low volumetric energy density. So most of Australia's prospective green-hydrogen mega-producers expect to move their energy overseas by converting green hydrogen to ammonia--a chemical precursor for nitrogen fertilizers that already ships worldwide. Ammonia is primarily produced from hydrogen, although today it's typically done using hydrogen made with natural gas rather than electrolysis. Exported ammonia made in Australia from green hydrogen could already outcompete ammonia produced in Europe with natural gas, according to calculations by BloombergNEF, and proposed projects are multiplying. Ark Energy recently formed an industrial consortium to use 3 GW of renewable power to produce "green ammonia" for export to Korea, although first shipments wouldn't happen until after 2030. Fortescue has even bigger long-term plans, and is already sizing up a way to jump-start ammonia exports. It is considering refitting a 54-year-old fertilizer plant in Brisbane, which was slated to shut down early this year due to skyrocketing natural-gas prices. Fortescue and the plant's owner are considering installing 500 MW of electrolyzers so they can restart the plant on green hydrogen around 2025. "It's very easy in this current phase for two people you've never heard about to create a 30-gigawatt project and put out a press release," says one observer. Amid all of these grand plans, what remains to be seen, says hydrogen analyst Martin Tengler at BloombergNEF's Tokyo office, is whether green-ammonia exports can truly meet people's energy needs. Ammonia doesn't burn well on its own, he notes, and converting exported ammonia back to hydrogen for steel plants or fuel-cell vehicles requires a lot of energy. "You're using energy to import energy. If you need green hydrogen in Europe, it's probably cheaper to make green hydrogen in Europe," Tengler concludes. Some plans for green ammonia could actually extend fossil-fuel consumption and thus delay climate action. For example, some Japanese and Korean power producers have announced plans to burn green ammonia in coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions. In September, BloombergNEF estimated that power from Japanese coal plants burning 50 percent green ammonia from Australia would cost US $136 per megawatt-hour in 2030--more than it projects for power from offshore wind and solar plants in Japan backed up with battery storage. "It's not the most economical way to use ammonia," Tengler says, "or the cheapest way for Japan and Korea to decarbonize." In other words, even if green hydrogen gets real this year, there's much to learn about what it should be used for, and where. From Your Site Articles * Australia Could be 100 Percent Renewable-Powered by 2020 > * Why the Shipping Industry Is Betting Big on Ammonia > * 2022--The Year the Hydrogen Economy Launched? > Related Articles Around the Web * Investors wary of Australia's green hydrogen hype | Financial Times > * Australian billionaire sets up global green hydrogen organisation ... > * Firms plan Australian 'super hub' to produce green hydrogen > Green hydrogenelectrolyzershydrogenfortescue metals groupkorea zinc hydrogen economygigawatt electrolyzersrenewable energy Peter Fairley Peter Fairley has been tracking energy technologies and their environmental implications globally for over two decades, charting engineering and policy innovations that could slash dependence on fossil fuels and the political forces fighting them. He has been a Contributing Editor with IEEE Spectrum since 2003. The Conversation (0) This photo shows a woman working on a piece of apparatus that is suspended from the ceiling of the laboratory. ComputingTopicMagazineTypeFeature An IBM Quantum Computer Will Soon Pass the 1,000-Qubit Mark 24 Dec 2022 4 min read A screenshot of a video showing a pyramid of three yellow quadruped robots putting a bow at the top of a Christmas tree RoboticsTopicTypeNews Video Friday: Happy Holidays! 23 Dec 2022 3 min read Heavy traffic moves along the 101 freeway on Wednesday morning November 23, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. TransportationTopicEnergyTypeAnalysis The EV Transition Explained: How to Meet Sales Targets? 23 Dec 2022 8 min read DIYTopicMagazineHands OnType Two C64s Plus a Pile of Floppy Disks Equals One Accordion The Commodordion is played just like a traditional instrument Linus Akesson 23 Dec 2022 5 min read A man holding an instrument made of two Commodore 64 computers separated by a corrugated accordion bellows. Like a traditional accordion, the Commodordion can be played by squeezing the bellows and pressing keys, but in addition, it has sequencer features. James Provost Commodore 64c4electronic musicretrocomputingtype:departments Accordions come in many shapes. Some have a little piano keyboard while others have a grid of black and white buttons set roughly in the shape of a parallelogram. I've been fascinated by this "chromatic-button" layout for a long time. I realized that the buttons are staggered just like the keys on a typewriter, and this insight somehow turned into a blurry vision of an accordion built from a pair of 1980s home computers--these machines typically sported a built-in keyboard in a case big enough to form the two ends of an accordion. The idea was intriguing--but would it really work? I'm an experienced Commodore 64 programmer, so it was an obvious choice for me to use that machine for the accordion ends. As a retrocomputing enthusiast, I wanted to use vintage C64s with minimal modifications rather than, say, gutting the computer cases and putting modern equipment inside. As for what would go between the ends, accordion bellows are a set of semi-rigid sheets, typically rectangular with an opening in the middle. The sheets are attached to each other alternating between the inner and outer edges. Another flash of insight: The bellows could be made from a stack of 5.25-inch floppy disks. Now I had several compelling ideas that seemed to work together. I secured a large quantity of bad floppies from a fellow C64 enthusiast. And then, armed with everything I needed and eager to start, I was promptly distracted by other projects. Some of these projects involved ways of playing music live on C64 computers. The idea to model a musical keyboard layout after the chromatic-button accordion became a standalone C64 program released to the public called Qwertuoso. An illustration depicting major components of the Commodordion.In addition to two vintage Commodore 64s [left], the Commodordion has a microphone for detecting air flow through the bellows, and buttons for turning on the power and controlling a tape-deck emulator [top right]. The bellows are made from tape and 5.25-inch floppy disks [middle right]. One supporting board incorporates a microcontroller to measure the airflow and mix the audio signals, a second stores the accordion software and emulates a cassette player, and a third acts as a power hub.James Provost That could well have been the end of it, but I had all these disks on my hands, so I decided to go ahead and try to craft a bellows after all. The body of a floppy disk is made from a folded sheet of plastic, which I unfolded to form the bellow's segments. But I had underestimated the problem of air leakage. While the floppy-disk material is airtight, the seams aren't. In the end I had to patch the whole thing up with multiple layers of tape to get the air to stay inside. A real accordion uses the bellows to push air over reeds to make them vibrate. How fast the bellows is pumped determines the accordion's loudness. So I needed a way to sense how fast air was being squeezed out of my floppy-disk bellows as I played. This was trickier than I had anticipated. I went through several failed designs including one inspired by the "hot wire" sensors used in fuel injection systems. Then one day, I was watching a video and I realized that a person in the video was shouting in order to overcome noise caused by wind hitting his microphone. That was the breakthrough I needed! The solution turned out to be a small microphone, mounted at an angle just outside a small hole in the bellows. Air flowing into or out of the hole passes over the microphone, and the resulting turbulence turns into audio noise. The intensity of the noise is measured, in my case by an ATmega8 microcontroller, and is used to determine the output volume of the instrument. The bellows is attached to a simple frame built from wood and acrylic, which also holds the C64s as well as three boards with supporting electronics. One of these is a power hub that takes in 5 and 12 volts of DC electricity from two household-power adapters and distributes it to the various components. For ergonomic reasons, rather than using the normal socket on the C64s right-hand sides, I fed power into the C64s by wires passed through the case and directly soldered to the motherboards. The Commodore 64\u2019s are connected to a mixer, the output of which is passed to a multiplexing DAC. A microphone at the entrance to the bellows also passes a control signal to the DAC. The Commodordion is played by using the keys on the Commodore 64s and squeezing the bellows between. Air moving through the bellows creates a loud or soft noise depending on how hard the bellows are squeezed. A microcontroller running an envelope-following program controls a multiplexing digital-to-audio converter that sets the final volume of the combined sound from the C64s.James Provost A second board emulates Commodore's datasette tape recorder. This stores the Qwertuoso program. Once the C64s are turned on, a keyboard shortcut built into the original OS directs the computer to load from tape. The final board contains the microcontroller monitoring the bellows' microphone and mixers that combine the analog sound generated by each C64s 6581 SID audio chip and adjusts the volume as per the bellows air sensor. The audio signal is then passed to an external amplified loudspeaker to produce sound. In order to reach the keys on the left-hand side when the bellows is extended, my hand needs to bend quite far around the edge of what I dubbed the Commodordion. This puts a lot of strain on the hand, wrist, and arm. Partly for this reason, I developed a sequencer for the left-hand-side machine, whereby I can program a simple beat or pattern and have it repeat automatically. With this, I only have to press keys on the left-hand side occasionally, to switch chords. The Commodordionwww.youtube.com As a musician, I have to take ergonomics seriously. When you learn to play a piece of music, you practice the same motions over and over for hours. If those motions cause strain you can easily ruin your body. So, unfortunately, I have to restrict myself to playing the Commodordion only occasionally, and only play very simple parts with the left hand. On the other hand, the right-hand side feels absolutely fine, and that's very encouraging: I'll use that as a starting point as I continue to explore the design space of instruments made from old computers. In that light, the Commodordion wasn't the final goal after all, but an important piece of scaffolding for my next creative endeavor. From Your Site Articles * Get Your Interpreters Ready--This Year's BASIC 10-Liner Competition Is Open For Entries > * Q&A With Co-Creator of the 6502 Processor > * Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers' Story > Related Articles Around the Web * Commodore 64: Everything You Need To Know - History-Computer > * C64.COM - To Protect and Preserve > * Commodore 64 - The Best Selling Computer In History ... > Keep Reading |Show less EnergyTopicTypeSponsored Article NYU Spearheads Project to Help Chemical Industry Go Green NYU leads multi-year project to reduce carbon emissions in chemical manufacturing Dexter Johnson Dexter Johnson is a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum, with a focus on nanotechnology. 30 Nov 2020 5 min read Renewable energy NYU Tandon School of Engineering type:sponsoredchemical industrysustainable energygreenhouse gas emissionscarbon emissionschemical manufacturing A team at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering is playing a key role in forging a collaboration involving over a dozen US universities and national laboratories aimed at sparking -- literally -- a fundamental change in how the US chemical industry operates. The goal is to address the most daunting task looming over the industry: how to make industrial chemistry -- especially petrochemistry -- greener and more sustainable, partly to meet the escalating demands of greenhouse emission regulations. The nascent, multi-institutional effort will be called "Decarbonizing Chemical Manufacturing Using Sustainable Electrification," or DC-MUSE. DC-MUSE was conceived this summer in a workshop attended by over 40 companies and institutions, and organized by a planning grant from the National Science Foundation to build capacity in convergent research. Its aim is to develop technologies and strategies to help the US chemical industry migrate from thermal-based manufacturing processes to electricity-based ones. A range of government regulations aimed at achieving zero-carbon emissions are driving this migration. These greenhouse emissions regulations will progressively come into effect in the coming decades, culminating, for example, in the European Union's aim to reduce 95 percent of 1990 level greenhouse emissions by 2050. These and other international regulations on greenhouse emissions could threaten up to 12 percent of all US exports ($220 billion), if the US chemical industry is not able to decarbonize its processes. The task is clearly enormous, not just for the industry itself but for the larger economy. Andre TaylorAndre TaylorNYU Tandon School of Engineering "Thirty percent of US industrial CO[2] emissions comes from the chemical industry, and 93% of the chemical processes use fossil fuel heat," noted Andre Taylor, associate professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. "We're talking about changing a whole industry that also involves a huge societal impact, encompassing 70,000 products, and 25% of the US gross domestic product." Many experts believe that the first step in overhauling the chemical industry will involve moving away from thermally-driven chemical reactions and separation processes that require heat from fossil fuels and moving towards reactions that use electricity generated by renewable resources, like wind and solar. While this migration has already started to occur, with penetration of renewable sources into the US electrical grid doubling in the past decade, the technologies for integrating these sources into cost-effective electrified chemical processes has remained practically non-existent. Yury DvorkinYury DvorkinNYU Tandon School of Engineering "After meeting with many chemical industry representatives, we learned that technologies that would enable electrification on the industrial scale don't exist at this time," said Yury Dvorkin, assistant professor at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. "The industry needs support to develop these technologies so they can be adopted in a way that's economically feasible." One of the areas that Dvorkin and his colleagues believed they needed to focus on was overcoming emerging reliability issues that inhibit and increase the cost of using renewable energy in the electrical grid. In other words, how do you ensure that there are no supply interruptions to the delivery of electricity when energy from the sun and wind can be intermittent? At the moment, energy storage technologies are not entirely up to the task of balancing out the intermittency of renewable electricity. As a result, NYU Tandon researchers have been looking at storing energy in the form of chemical bonds, as opposed to electrons, as a possible solution. In energy storage approaches like this, energy is stored chemically in the form of hydrogen, and that hydrogen is reused later in a fuel cell. The fuel cells used to capture the energy are referred to as redox-flow batteries (RFBs). RFBs consist of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the tanks, a redox reaction occurs and generates electricity at the battery's electrodes. Several NYU researchers recently published a paper in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science that looks at improving the energy storage capabilities and economics of these RFBs. The NYU researchers didn't simply tweak RFB technology to improve its energy density or reduce their costs. Instead of just plugging RFBs into renewable energy sources to store their intermittent energy production, the NYU researchers demonstrated how you could use RFB concepts to completely integrate chemical manufacturing into the whole energy storage process. Miguel ModestinoMiguel ModestinoNYU Tandon School of Engineering "In principle, you can imagine chemical plants acting as energy storage reservoirs, but at the same time producing chemical products," explained Miguel Modestino, an assistant professor at NYU, and one of the co-authors of the Cell Reports paper. "The storage value it provides lowers the cost for the production of the chemical that you want to make at the end of the day." Modestino added that this approach also allows the chemical companies to integrate fluctuating sources of electricity, like renewables. You can thus decarbonize the industry in a way that is both economic and functions well with the dynamics of a renewable-driven grid. The DC-MUSE project has expanded dramatically since its ideas first took root a few months ago. The project has already put together a group of 30 investigators from 11 universities and 3 National Laboratories that cover a wide spectrum of research areas. At NYU Tandon, Ryan Hartman, associate professor, is leading a group to develop plasma catalysis technology for these types of chemical reactions. Taylor's and Modestino's groups are working on electrochemical reactors for chemical manufacturing. And Dvorkin has been working on integrating these plants within the grid. Other groups outside of NYU are investigating using membranes for separations and system integration. In addition, the NYU team has been consulting with faculty at the law school and the business school on how to design policies that can enable the economic transition towards renewable energy-driven chemical manufacturing. The researchers are also reaching out to industry to get early involvement. In fact, the genesis of the DC-MUSE project was a workshop in which NYU invited 50 industry experts and people from academia to come together to talk about the challenges in the chemical industry, such as process intensification. DC-MUSEDC-MUSEMiguel Modestino "We have been talking with people in the big chemical manufacturing companies[S:,:S] who have started to develop pilots for electrified chemical production," said Elizabeth Biddinger, City College of New York. Biddinger and Modestino recently published an article in ECS Interfacesdescribing how environmental advantages of electro-organic syntheses such as minimizing waste generation, utilizing non-fossil feedstocks, and on-demand chemical manufacturing are also large drivers for sustainability in chemical processes across multiple sectors. The involvement of petrochemical companies is not by accident. Petrochemical processes--and actually a very small subset of petrochemical processes--account for more than 80 percent of the energy and CO[2] emissions from chemical processes, according to Modestino. As the DC-MUSE picks up momentum, its architects at NYU envision the project as a go-to Center for the fundamental engineering research that is needed to enable these technologies. Said Modestino, "The way that we see it is that you do the research in the lab, you develop with lab-scale demonstrations, but then through partnerships with the companies you'll develop them into processes." While the DC-MUSE project awaits its expanded aim though increased funding, it is already having an impact on the pedagogical approach of the NYU professors. "We already have had discussions about joint Ph.D. positions so that a student can have multiple advisors," said Dvorkin. "In this way, we can really work together on these problems and provide students with a multidisciplinary perspective, because without this sort of collaboration, without this input delivered to the students, there is no way to solve societal problems." Taylor added: "From the applications we've seen into our program, we know that people want to pursue things that actually have an impact on changing society and improving the world. People want to discover something fundamental, but if it has a broader societal impact, people can see its importance. This is why I do research in this area." To learn more about initiatives that are going on at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, please visit its website. From Your Site Articles * Swapping Electricity for Chemicals - IEEE Spectrum > * Deploying Data Science and AI to Fight Wildlife Trafficking - IEEE Spectrum > Keep Reading |Show less Trending Stories The most-read stories on IEEE Spectrum right now ComputingTopicMagazineTypeFeature An IBM Quantum Computer Will Soon Pass the 1,000-Qubit Mark 24 Dec 2022 4 min read This photo shows a woman working on a piece of apparatus that is suspended from the ceiling of the laboratory. 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