Month: October 2016
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/top-trends-in-high-capacity-enterprise-ssds.html
Top Trends in High Capacity Enterprise SSDs
Flash has gone from being ridiculously expensive to largely affordable over the past five years. And a staggering drop in price has been paralleled by another spectacular occurrence. The capacity of Solid State Drives (SSDs) has gone through the roof.
“Higher-capacity, lower-cost flash has resulted in 1 TB to 16 TB 2.5-inch SSDs,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst for StorageIO Group. “There are already some proof of concept technology demonstrations that should enable current densities to be able to double within the same footprint with reduced price over the next few years.”
As a result, SSDs continue to eat into the market share of Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Here are some of the top trends, tips and considerations related to high-capacity SSDs. This includes where the market is heading, when these huge SSDs are useful and when to avoid them, and more.
3D NAND
Let’s review a few basics. NAND is a type of non-volatile storage where power is not needed to retain data. NAND flash is popular in MP3 players, cameras, USB drives and SSDs. 3D NAND is one of the big drivers of high capacity. It is a form of flash where memory cells are stacked vertically in order to achieve higher densities and reduce cost.
“The advancements in 3D NAND have resulted in scaling and cost reductions that are outpacing Moore’s Law,” said Danny Cobb, Corporate Fellow and Vice President of Technology Strategy, Dell EMC. “Current generation flash chips are being used to create 2.5-inch SSDs that hold over 16TB of valuable, instantly retrievable business information.”
As this technology has evolved, flash makers have been able to push the envelope on capacity, resulting in huge leaps in capacity over a short period.
“High capacity SSDs are emerging with the transition to 3D NAND, delivering high capacity without sacrificing reliability or endurance,” said Julie Herd, Director Storage Product Management at NetApp. “Customers are investigating high-capacity SSDs in order to minimize their storage footprint in already crowded datacenters.”
Doubling Up
How rapidly are SSDs likely to go in terms of capacity? That’s hard to say. But Ivan Iannaccone, Director of Product Management, HPE 3PAR, said that as SSD technology evolves with the introduction of new ways of packaging NAND flash such as using 3D NAND and vertical technologies, SSD expansion will continue at a predictable rate for some time to come.
“We are seeing the overall capacities of solid state disks doubling about every 12 months,” said Iannaccone.
Outgrowing HDDs
As well as doubling in capacity each year, SSDs are also outpacing the capacity increases of HDD of late. Samsung announced 16TB drives in April this year followed by a preview of 32TB drives in August 2016 (planned for release sometime next year). Compare this with HDD drives that are still around 10TB today and expected to grow to 20 TB by 2020, said Satinder Sharma, Senior Manager in Product Management, Tintri.
“And while there is a big cost difference between the two options, the gap is narrowed by space savings technologies like deduplication, compression and cloning,” said Sharma.
Data Management
As capacity rises, the chances of something going wrong rise, too. That’s why data management is so important. So flash OEMs and storage array makers are increasingly focusing on software features to make flash arrays more reliable.
“There are new data management features being introduced for SSDs to optimize endurance and data management, including a new industry standard Multi-Stream Write introduced to the market with NetApp ONTAP 9 and Samsung SSDs,” said Herd.
Saving Space
When does it make sense to introduce high-capacity SSDs? For those wanting to pack as much high-performance storage into as small a space as possible, high-capacity SSDs are obviously one answer. Another reason to implement them is lack of space.
“If an organization is space constrained and needs a very dense rack unit (RU), then high capacity SSDs are the right choice,” said Herd. “This would include those who need to consolidate legacy performance HDD-based systems in order to shrink their footprint from 2-3 racks of HDD down to 2-3 shelves of SSD.”
Smaller Datasets
But that might not be the right approach for every user. Herd added that those focused on the best performance with smaller datasets would be better suited with smaller capacity SSDs.
“Maximum system performance can be achieved with only 1 or 2 shelves of SSDs (regardless of size) and many datasets (especially transactional datasets) are not large enough to fill a high capacity SSD,” said Herd. “The only concern would be that after the controller has reached its performance limit, then adding more SSDs will not increase the performance of the system any further. However, adding more SSDs will not negatively affect cost or performance of the system.”
Think in Futures
It is vital, therefore, to understand what the key criteria are for purchase. Best density will drive the discussion to high-capacity SSD. Best performance per system (with smaller datasets) would keep a customer on a smaller capacity SSD.
“Also, understanding the rate of growth of your data will help with planning initial and future purchases,” said Herd.
Fewer SSDs or Larger SSDs?
The main gains of all-flash comes from latency reduction and this can be achieved with fewer high capacity SSDs just as it can with multiple small capacity SSDs. However, in the former case, you are going to be able to lower the cost per IOP due to greater drive density.
“There is always a tradeoff when it comes to IOPs density,” said Iannaccone. “The only caution is around the overall amount of IOPs/throughput that a single SSD can produce. The fewer drives, the lesser the overall system performance until the controller bottleneck is hit.”
SAS SSDs for Failover
There are various kinds of SSD such as SAS, SATA and PCIe. SATA and PCIe drives are generally designed for server-side deployments. Therefore, IT managers who want to build their own all-flash array for shared storage with capacity should opt for SAS SSDs.
“SAS SSDs are the only drives available today with dual ports,” said Walter Hinton, Director of Client and Enterprise Solutions Marketing, Western Digital. “Dual port means that each drive may be mapped to two separate controllers for fail-over and multi-path IO.”
Look Beyond SSDs
It is quite possible to implement high-capacity, high-performance SSDs and yet fail to realize the expected gains. This could be caused by a failure to understand your workloads and access time and throughput requirements.
“In some cases, the bottleneck will be the network or CPU, not storage,” said Hinton.
Controller Bottleneck
The controller, too, can be the bottleneck. Therefore, organizations need to be thoughtful about the relationship between their SSD capacity and their controllers. Back in the day, the compute power available in storage controllers to extract IO from HDDs was much higher than what a collection of drives could deliver. Getting more performance was all about using as many drives as possible.
Today, however, the performance of SSDs has outpaced what a storage controller can deliver. Each flash drive is capable of delivering >100,000 IOPs. Which means, for instance, that 24 of them can deliver >2.4M, but the storage array is limited to what controllers are capable of delivering.
“Organizations need to ensure that they are not putting too much capacity behind a storage controller,” said Sharma. “They need to pick systems that can at some point scale-out instead of scaling up in order to ensure a good IOPs/TB ratio. Using a small number of high capacity drives or even too many smaller capacity drives behind the same controller may result in poor IOPs/TB, which is not good for consolidation.”
Rule of Thumb
As a rule of thumb: If a storage controller can deliver 400,000 IOPs, you don’t want to have more than 400-600 TB of logical capacity behind it, so as to maintain high IOPs/TB. 600 TB of logical space translates to around 150 TB of physical space at a modest 4x data reduction. That is only ~10x 15.36 TB drive. In this case, it may be better to go with 20 x 7.6 TB SSD to get the performance benefit of flash. One can go lower on IOPs/TB and store more data behind the same controllers if the goal is to store archive data rather than manage performance oriented workloads.
“Organizations should pick a size of SSD that jives with the performance capabilities of their storage controllers,” said Sharma.
Heavy Writes
There are many other areas to pay attention to when determining if high-capacity SSDs are right for you. If you have heavy write activity, a high-capacity SSD may not have the endurance required. You may need a tiered architecture with write-intensive caching on the front end and a persistent back-end data store (capacity SSD or capacity HDD). A good example of this approach is VMware Virtual SAN, suggested Hinton.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Flash Drive
One huge SSD drive might be great in terms of capacity and performance. But it also represents a single point of failure.
“You want to have enough drives such that the failure of 1 doesn’t impact application service levels. More drives can enable more performance, given the right array design,” said Danny Cobb, Corporate Fellow for Technology Strategy at Dell EMC.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/internet-revenue-now-tops-tv-for-canada-cable-telecom-industry/article32533686/
Internet revenue now tops TV for Canada cable, telecom industry
Canadians for the first time are spending more on Internet access than television subscriptions from the country’s telecom and cable companies, the industry regulator said on Wednesday, citing soaring demand for streaming video and music services.
Telecom and cable companies brought in a total of $8.92-billion in revenue from cable, satellite and Internet-enabled television subscriptions in 2015, while they collected $9.81-billion from the supply of internet connections, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in its annual report on the industry.
Appetite for music and video streaming and other data-intensive activities led to a 44 per cent jump in wireless data usage in 2015 compared to 2014, and a 40 per cent jump in the volume of data used in the home, the CRTC said. Major Canadian players such as Rogers Communications Inc , BCE Inc and Shaw Communications Inc have seen demand for their traditional cable and satellite products hit by competition from streaming services such as Netflix Inc.
The Canadian industry is now increasingly focused on internet access and wireless data as pillars of growth.
The regulator, meanwhile, has taken an aggressive stance in support of consumer choice in recent years. It will hold hearings from Oct. 31 to Nov. 4 examining whether internet providers, which typically also own or distribute content, should be able to use “differential pricing” to favour some data over other data.
Earlier this month, the CRTC forced the major internet providers to lower wholesale rates they charge smaller rivals for access to their networks. The commission said last month it will use the pending expiry of broadcast licenses as leverage in talks with distributors to judge their adherence to new rules forcing them to offer channels individually.
http://news.ubc.ca/2016/10/27/walking-can-reduce-memory-loss-in-seniors/
Walking can reduce memory loss in seniors
CBC featured UBC research that found one hour of walking three times a week can help lower seniors’ cognitive impairment.
Study author Teresa Liu-Ambrose, director of UBC’s aging, mobility, and cognitive neuroscience laboratory, also found that the improvement in seniors’ cognitive abilities were similar to the effect of previous drug trials.
“Right now there is no effective drug therapy for those individuals with cognitive issues. Based on our research as well as research of others, I do think recommending and supporting the uptake of exercise is a sensible approach,” Ambrose said.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-deep-learning-system-to-alert-companies-before-litigation
A deep-learning system to alert companies before litigation
“The average cost per lawsuit: at least about $350,000”
October 27, 2016
Imagine a world with less litigation.
That’s the promise of a deep-learning system developed by Intraspexion, Inc. that can alert company or government attorneys to forthcoming risks before getting hit with expensive litigation.
“These risks show up in internal communications such as emails,” said CEO Nick Brestoff. “In-house attorneys have been blind to these risks, so they are stuck with managing the lawsuits.”
Intraspexion’s first deep learning model has been trained to find the risks of employment discrimination. “What we can do with employment discrimination now we can do with other litigation categories, starting with breach of contract and fraud, and then scaling up to dozens more,” he said.
Brestoff claims that deep learning enables a huge paradigm shift for the legal profession. “We’re going straight after the behemoth of litigation. This shift doesn’t make attorneys better able to know the law; it makes them better able to know the facts, and to know them early enough to do something about them.”
And to prevent huge losses. “As I showed in my book, Preventing Litigation: An Early Warning System), using 10 years of cost (aggregated as $1.6 trillion) and caseload data (about 4 million lawsuits – federal and state — for that same time frame), the average cost per case was at least about $350,000,” Brestoff explained to KurzweilAI in an email.
Brestoff, who studied engineering at Cal Tech before attending law school at USC, will present Intraspexion’s deep learning system in a talk at the AI World Conference & Exposition 2016, November 7–9 in San Francisco.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-27/world-first-map-of-universe-in-radio-colour/7968386
World-first images show what the universe would look like if humans could see radio waves
The world’s first pictures of the universe in radio technicolour have been produced using a $50 million radio telescope in the Western Australian outback.
The ground-breaking Galactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey has created multi-coloured images of 300,000 galaxies, millions to billions of light years away, in the southern sky.
The spectacular pictures, published today by the Royal Astronomical Society, show what the universe would look like if the human eye could see radio waves.
The galaxies were observed by the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope, located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, 315 kilometres north-east of Geraldton.
GLEAM’s lead author, Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, said the survey offered new insights into the enormity of the cosmos.
“When you’re looking up at the sky normally … you’re constrained as to what you can see,” she said.
“With the radio [telescope], we can peer out onto the immensity of the universe.
“We can see bright galaxies with super massive black holes and we can get this incredible picture of the sky.”
Dr Hurley-Walker is an astronomer with Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
Sharing the culmination of three years of “blood, sweat, tears and supercomputers” was exciting, she said.
“People think ‘Oh astronomers, how romantic, you’re out there peering through a telescope’,” Dr Hurley-Walker said.
“A lot of my day-to-day job is running code on computers until I get it right, so it’s great to have finally got it right to share with the world.”
Using cutting-edge technology to turn up the technicolour
Dr Hurley-Walker painstakingly calibrated about 45,000 images to radio frequencies between 70 and 230 megahertz to provide the colourful catalogue of celestial bodies.
“Most radio surveys just look at a single frequency,” she said.
“This … gives them essentially a black and white image of the universe.
“What’s really cool about GLEAM is that we observe over a really wide range of frequencies.”
In simple terms, GLEAM is like going from black and white to colour television.
The three colours — red, blue and green — represent physical processes taking place in space.
“It gives us a real insight into what’s going on in the universe,” Dr Hurley-Walker said.
Remote WA location crucial to breakthrough
Dr Hurley-Walker said the MWA’s remote desert location and lack of radio interference was crucial to conducting the survey.
“It doesn’t receive any other interfering radio signals from people because the Murchison is basically empty,” she said.
“There’s no wifi, there’s no mobile phones, there’s not even any FM radio.
“When we’re trying to observe at the radio frequencies, normally this radio interference is a huge problem.
“In a remote location like the Murchison … we can observe in frequencies that have never been observed before because of the human-caused radio collusion.”
MWA director Randall Wayth said GLEAM was one of the biggest radio surveys of the sky ever assembled, and was a significant achievement.
“Large sky surveys are extremely valuable to scientists and they’re used across many areas of astrophysics, often in ways the original researchers could never have imagined,” Dr Wayth said.
http://time.com/4547129/china-smartphone-market-oppo-vivo-xiaomi-huawei-leeco/
Hundreds of Millions of People Are Using Smartphones You’ve Never Even Heard Of
“I love the screen on your Oppo R9, but have you seen the camera on my Vivo X7?”
More than half a billion Chinese own smartphones. But their favorite handsets barely register any brand recognition outside of China. In the third quarter of this year, nearly one-third of the world’s largest smartphone market was controlled by two domestic makers, Oppo and Vivo, according to Counterpoint, a Hong Kong-based technology market research firm. Oppo’s R9 handset was the best selling phone in that period, besting Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy. Overall, 120 million smartphone handsets were sold in China from June to September this year, Counterpoint says.
Gone are the days when foreign competitors were guaranteed pole position in China. “Chinese companies can compete with foreign brands like Samsung or Apple not just on lower price,” says Sun Yanbiao, founder of Mobile No. 1, an independent Chinese mobile industry analysis firm. “Some of them even have better functions.”
Rather than offering low-cost handsets, Oppo and Vivo are offering premium products with local customization (seamless tie-ups with Chinese social-media, online entertainment and e-commerce platforms) and innovation (top-notch screens, cameras and battery power).
Some Chinese brands, like Huawei and Xiaomi, the No. 3 and 4 phone-makers respectively, have attempted international forays. One-third of all smartphones sold in India, for example, are now Chinese brands. But the prize remains the domestic market, which has cycled through industry leaders with whiplash speed. Walk through any Chinese city and billboards for Apple (now No. 5 in terms of China market share) are dwarfed by advertisements starring Scarlett Johansson, Lionel Messi and even FC Barcelona—all pitching for local brands.
Here are five Chinese smartphone makers worth getting to know.
1. Oppo
From June to September 2015, Oppo controlled 9.9% of the Chinese smartphone market. This year, during the same time period, Oppo ranked No. 1 with 16.6% market share, according to Counterpoint. Its flagship R9 may look like an iPhone and act sort of like an iPhone but it’s got a bigger screen, lower price point and a much faster-charging battery. To burnish its international image, Oppo has signed a sponsorship deal with FC Barcelona. The company’s handsets have done particularly well with young Chinese from inland cities.
2. Vivo
Vivo has only been making phones for five years, but it is second only to Oppo in Chinese market share, with smartphone sales growing by 114% year-on-year this past quarter, to 16.2% of the market. Vivo’s X7 handset offers a front-facing 16 megaixel camera—perfect for selfies and the highest resolution in the industry—shared only by Oppo handsets. The similarity between the two firms’ products is no coincidence. Vivo is owned by BBK Electronics. The company first made its name with a gaming console that seemed to borrow heavily from Ninetendo’s Game Boy, but it moved into communications and now also happens to control market leader Oppo. It has two other smartphone brands, OnePlus and imoo. BBK is based in Dongguan, the southern Chinese factory town, but it has global ambitions, sponsoring India’s premier cricket league and exclusively partnering with the NBA in China. Still, it’s not clear how China’s ultra-competitive smartphone market will support both Vivo and Oppo in the future.
3. Xiaomi
Offering everything from smartphones to rice cookers, Xiaomi made history as China’s largest privately held startup. But after holding the No. 1 sales position for two years because of its low-priced phones and savvy online marketing, Xiaomi lost out to high-end local competitors. This week, Xiaomi unveiled its priciest product yet, the $600 Mi Mix, which features a Philippe Starck-designed ceramic body and bezel-less screen. The company may also be hoping that its Mi Note 2, a Galaxy Note 7 lookalike, will profit from the Samsung product’s exploding-phones debacle.
4. Huawei
Just a few months ago, Huawei ranked as China’s No. 1 selling brand, according to market researcher IDC, but the Shenzhen-based firm has since succumbed to upstarts Oppo and Vivo. Like the offerings of many of its domestic competitors, Huawei’s high-end P9 smartphone has dual SIM card slots so that people can switch between two numbers. (More than half of Chinese have two SIM cards.) The P9 camera boasts a Leica co-engineered lens. To pitch products overseas, Huawei has tapped football star Lionel Messi and Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson.
5. LeEco
Once an online video-streaming site, LeEco has expanded into smartphones, smart TVs and even blockbuster movies. (The company also promises to debut self-driving cars.) LeEco’s handset sales recorded robust growth in Q3 largely because of its ability to stream proprietary TV shows and movies onto its devices, as well as a massive library of other entertainment. The company expects to ship 25 million handsets this year. LeEco will begin online sales of its handsets (plus streaming entertainment ecosystem) in the U.S. next month but it’s hard to see how the Chinese brand can compete with the likes of Apple.
http://mobilesyrup.com/2016/10/26/apple-says-it-needs-a-little-more-time-delays-airpods-release/
Apple says it needs ‘a little more time,’ delays AirPods release
When Apple announced AirPods, its new wireless ear buds, at its September iPhone 7 keynote, the company said the wireless headphones would launch in October. It’s now late October and we still don’t have an idea when the AirPods will ship. There could be more to this story than we thought.
Apple has informed TechCrunch via a statement that it needs “a little more time” before releasing its AirPods and no longer has plans to ship the headphones in October.
Apple went on to say that despite the fact that its AirPods have been well received, it doesn’t want to ship a product before it’s ready, so the company has delayed the shipment of the devices. Apple did not say what caused the delay.Back in September MobileSyrup Senior Editor Patrick O’Rourke reviewed Apple’s AirPods, and was impressed with their performance and connectivity, titling the review, “welcome to the wireless future.”
We’ll be sure to provide updates when we can, but for now, the wireless future will have to wait a little longer.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/26/health/astronaut-back-pain-spine-health-space/
Going to space is a real pain in the back
Astronaut Scott Kelly grew taller in space 01:56
Story highlights
- Astronauts can temporarily gain 2 inches in height but suffer muscle loss and back pain
- More countermeasures involving exercise may help mitigate pain and muscle loss
(CNN)A six-month stay on the International SpaceStation can be a pain in the back for astronauts. Whilethey may gain up to 2 inches in height temporarily, thateffect is accompanied by a weakening of the musclessupporting the spine, according to a new study.
In 1994, astronaut Mark Lee had his height measured by fellow astronaut Jerry Linenger as part of a study on back pain.
Astronauts have been reporting back pain since the late 1980s, when space missions grewlonger. Their flight medical data show that more than half of US astronauts have reported backpain, especially in their lower backs. Up to 28% indicated that it was moderate to severe pain,sometimes lasting the duration of their mission.
Things don’t improve when they return to Earth’sgravity. In the first year after their mission, astronautshave a 4.3 times higher risk of a herniated disc.
“It’s sort of an ongoing problem that has been asignificant one with cause for concern,” said Dr.Douglas Chang, first author of the new study andassociate professor of orthopedic surgery and chief ofphysical medicine and rehabilitation service atUniversity of California San Diego Health. “So this studyis the first to take it from just an epidemiologicaldescription and look at the possible mechanisms for what is going on with the astronauts’backs.”
Like being in a body cast
Much attention has been focused on intervertebral discs, the spongy shock absorbers that sitbetween our vertebrae, as the culprit for the back issues that astronauts face. But the new studyruns counter to that thinking. In this research, funded by NASA, Chang’s team observed little tono changes in the discs, their height or swelling.
What they did observe in six astronauts who spent fourto seven months on the ISS was a tremendousdegeneration and atrophying of the supportingmusculature in the lumbar (lower) spine, Chang said.These muscles are the ones that help us stay upright,walk and move our upper extremities in anenvironment like Earth, while protecting discs andligaments from strain or injury.
In microgravity, the torso lengthens, most likely due tospinal unloading, in which the spinal curvature flattens.Astronauts also aren’t using the muscle tone in their lower backs because they aren’t bendingover or using their lower backs to move, like on Earth, Chang said. This is where the pain andstiffening occurs, much like if the astronauts were in a body cast for six months.
MRI scans before and after the missions revealed thatthe astronauts experienced a 19% decrease in thesemuscles during their flight. “Even after six weeks oftraining and reconditioning here one Earth, they areonly getting about 68% of their losses restored,” Changexplained.
Chang and his team consider this a serious issue forlong-term manned missions, especially whenconsidering a trip to Mars that could take eight or ninemonths just to reach the Red Planet. That trip, and theastronauts’ potential time spent in Martian gravity — 38% of the surface gravity on Earth –creates the potential for muscle atrophy and deconditioning.
The team’s future research will also look at reported neck issues, where there can be even moreoccurrences of muscle atrophy and a slower recovery period. They are also hoping to partnerwith another university on inflight ultrasounds of the spine, to look at what happens to astronautswhile they are on the space station.
Yoga in space?
Because nobody likes back pain and muscle loss, Chang suggested countermeasures thatshould be added to the already two- to three-hour workout astronauts have on the space stationeach day. Though their exercise machines focus on a range of issues including cardiovascularand skeletal health, the team believes that space travelers also need to include a core-strenghtening program focused on the spine.
In addition to the “fetal tuck” position astronauts use inmicrogravity to stretch their lower back or alleviateback pain, Chang suggested yoga. But he knows thatis easier said than done.
“A lot of yoga depends on the effects of gravity, likedownward dog, where a stretch through the hamstring,calf muscles, back of the neck and shoulders arepossible because of gravity. When you remove that,you may not have the same benefit.”
Any machines on the space station also have to be designed with regards to weight, size andeven the reverberations they could produce on the station.
Scott Parazynski, who walked in space seven times, assisted with construction on the space station in 2007.
Chang and the other researchers brainstormed with a virtual reality team about differentexercise programs that would enable astronauts to invite friends, family or even Twitter followersto join them in a virtual workout, making the daily repetition of their workouts more fun andcompetitive.
One of Chang’s teammates has felt this pain personally. Dr. Scott Parazynski is the onlyastronaut to summit Mount Everest. He experienced a herniated disc after returning from the ISSto Earth. Less than a year later, when he attempted to climb Everest the first time, he had to beairlifted off. After a rehabilitation process, he eventually made the summit. Now, he speaks tocurrent astronauts about the ways they can contribute to studies about their health inmicrogravity.
Keeping the astronauts healthy and fit is the least theycan do, Chang said.
“When a crew comes back, they say on one side ofthe space station, they see this beautiful blue planet,”he said. “Everything they hold dear to them is on thisfragile little planet. And they look out the other windowand just see infinity stretching off into the blackness, and they come back with a different senseof themselves and their place in the universe.
“All of them are committed to furthering space knowledge and making incremental stepsforward in any way they can for the next crew.”
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-10/26/c_135782227.htm
New hybrid nanostructures may be right for next-gen green cars: U.S. scientists
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) — A new design for storage materials that uses layers of graphene separated by nanotube pillars of boron nitride, may be a suitable material to store hydrogen fuel in cars, according to U.S. scientists.
The results suggest that the new computational study is “as an excellent candidate for hydrogen storage, providing ample opportunities to further tune this hybrid material for efficient hydrogen storage,” said Farzaneh Shayeganfar and Rouzbeh Shahsavari, materials scientists from Rice University in the United States on a study published in the recent issue of the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir.
According to the study, the researchers had already used computer models to determine the resilience and toughness of pillared graphene structures. Then they added boron nitride nanotubes into the mix to model a unique three-dimensional architecture.
The researchers focused the simulations on four variants: pillared structures of boron nitride or pillared boron nitride graphene doped with oxygen or lithium.
The result: at room temperature and in ambient pressure, oxygen-doped boron nitride graphene was proved the best, holding 11.6 percent of its weight in hydrogen of its gravimetric capacity and about 60 grams per liter of its volumetric capacity.
The U.S. Department of Energy has set standards for storage materials that can make hydrogen a practical fuel for light-duty vehicles. It currently aims to develop an economic storage media that can store more than 5.5 percent of its weight and 40 grams per liter in hydrogen under moderate conditions. The ultimate targets are 7.5 weight percent and 70 grams per liter.
“What we’re looking for is the sweet spot,” Shahsavari said in a statement, describing the ideal conditions as a balance between the material’s surface area and weight, as well as the operating temperatures and pressures.
“This is only practical through computational modeling, because we can test a lot of variations very quickly. It would take experimentalists months to do what takes us only days,” the scientist said.
The researchers believed that the newly designed structure can easily beat competing technologies like porous boron nitride, metal oxide frameworks and carbon nanotubes and it must be strong enough to easily satisfy the U.S. Department of Energy’s requirement that a hydrogen fuel tank be able to withstand 1,500 charge-discharge cycles
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