Foreseeable Technology Research Articles

How does load-side re-electrification help carbon neutrality in energy systems: Cost competitiveness analysis and life-cycle deduction

Load-side re-electrification—the substitution of prevalent fossil fuel-dominated structures with a wider range of electric end-use technologies—has been recognized as a crucial strategy for systemic decarbonization. This strategy focuses on expanding the proportion of clean energy consumption to support the attainment of carbon neutrality goals. While prior research has explored the ramifications of re-electrification strategies within specific sectors, such as transportation, comprehensive assessments evaluating the impacts of an entire portfolio of load-side options remain scarce. This analysis bridges this gap by scrutinizing the effects of multiple load-side re-electrification options on decarbonization pathways and transition costs within energy systems. We leverage a detailed, bottom-up dispatch model with an hourly resolution for this research. A case study of Northwestern China serves to illuminate the implications of our research, demonstrating that without the deployment of carbon dioxide removal technologies, an extensive load-side re-electrification can yield a maximum carbon dioxide emission reduction of up to 37.15% by 2060. Furthermore, this study offers an in-depth comparison of the transition costs across multiple future scenarios employing foreseeable technologies.

Review on research progress in boiling acoustics

Ever-growing miniaturization of electronic devices and space-conserving endeavours of heat transfer systems pose a challenging task to the current cooling strategies. Boiling acoustics is one of the most potent and efficacious methodologies to reliably predict the boiling regime inside the cooling systems to assay the safety and address the emergency conditions. Boiling acoustics is gripping attention out of the few foreseeable technologies for the future cooling requirements. Though the potentiality of boiling acoustics was unravelled in the late 1990s, the research data present in this arena is however lacking. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature reported from the 1970s to the present date. Furthermore, this paper also details the evolution of boiling acoustics from the initial application of boiling incipience detection to regime identification. Much focus is given on salient features of boiling acoustic characterization dealing with the regime detection. Effects of various parameters such as thermos-physical properties of the heater surface and the boiling liquid that directly or indirectly influence the acoustic spectra are also presented. The prediction of the boiling regime constitutes the first necessary step in producing autonomous cooling systems. Hence, the detection and characterization of boiling noise under various conditions such as pressure, heat flux, and flow rate is essential.

The U.S. Energy System and the Production of Sustainable Aviation Fuel From Clean Electricity

Jet fuel is relatively small in terms of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions (10% of U.S. transportation sector in 2021, expected to increase to 14% by 2050). Still airlines have ambitious goals to reduce their greenhouse footprints from carbon-neutral growth beginning this year to reducing greenhouse gas emission for international flights by 50% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels. The challenge is heightened by the longevity of the current fleet (30–50 years) and by the difficulty in electrifying the future fleet because only 5% of the commercial aviation greenhouse gas footprint is from regional flights that might, conceivably be electrified using foreseeable technology. Therefore, large amounts of sustainable aviation fuel will be needed to reach the aggressive targets set by airlines. Only 3 million gallons (11.4 ML) of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) (with a heat of combustion totaling about 400 TJ = 0.0004 EJ) was produced in the U.S. in 2019 for a 26 billion gallon per year market (3.6 EJ/year). Fischer-Tropsch and ethanol oligomerization (alcohol-to-jet) are considered for producing SAF, including the use of renewable electricity and carbon dioxide. In sequencing the energy transition, cleaning the U.S. grid is an important first step to have the largest greenhouse gas emissions reduction. While carbon dioxide and clean electricity can potentially provide the SAF in the future, an ethanol oligomerization option will require less energy.

FCC: Building on the shoulders of giants

The plethora of open questions in particle physics, the new chapter opened by the Higgs boson, and the lack of clear theoretical guidance as to where new theory could lie call for a broad and diverse experimental programme boosting the intensity and energy-frontier. The proposed FCC-integrated programme consisting of a luminosity-frontier highest-energy lepton collider followed by an energy-frontier hadron collider promises the most far-reaching particle physics programme that foreseeable technology can deliver. In this essay, particular emphasis is given to the lessons from the predecessor of the LHC, LEP, which was commissioned in 1989 and finished operation in November 2000.

A critical view on the current application of LCA for new technologies and recommendations for improved practice

LCA is a well-known assessment tool that identifies and provides insights on the environmental impacts of products and services over their lifecycle. The guidance provided by the existing manuals typically applies to modelling and assessing environmental impacts ex-post, meaning that information is available from empirical experience after products have been commercially in use for extended periods of time. This information is not available if LCA is applied in an ex-ante manner before a technology is commercially deployed at scale. We identify the major challenges of applying LCA in an ex-ante manner and propose a route forward in dealing with these challenges that combines intuitions from other disciplinary fields. The first challenge is how to model consistent future foreground systems for the incumbent and new technology systems. Learning curves and scenario approaches are the way forward. The second challenge is how to model future background systems. Here a solution is to transform existing LCI databases towards future contexts, informed by the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that provide scenarios in line with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). Finally, uncertainty in ex-ante LCA is of a different nature as in ex-post LCAs. The main difference with conventional LCA studies is the highly uncertain information for the future. To acknowledge this. considerate attention should be attributed to the discussion on these uncertainties, both in the design of the assessment and the data used. Responsive evaluation can play a supportive role here. This will increase the transparency and efficacy of the results because the relevant stakeholders and experts are involved. In this way technology designers and other stakeholders derive insights on the influence of design choices or contextual factors (that are important, but hard to influence) on the potential environmental impacts of their foreseen technology.

Reduce and Control: A Combinatorial Strategy for Achieving Sustained HIV Remissions in the Absence of Antiretroviral Therapy.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) indefinitely persists, despite effective antiretroviral therapy (ART), within a small pool of latently infected cells. These cells often display markers of immunologic memory and harbor both replication-competent and -incompetent proviruses at approximately a 1:100 ratio. Although complete HIV eradication is a highly desirable goal, this likely represents a bridge too far for our current and foreseeable technologies. A more tractable goal involves engineering a sustained viral remission in the absence of ART––a “functional cure.” In this setting, HIV remains detectable during remission, but the size of the reservoir is small and the residual virus is effectively controlled by an engineered immune response or other intervention. Biological precedence for such an approach is found in the post-treatment controllers (PTCs), a rare group of HIV-infected individuals who, following ART withdrawal, do not experience viral rebound. PTCs are characterized by a small reservoir, greatly reduced inflammation, and the presence of a poorly understood immune response that limits viral rebound. Our goal is to devise a safe and effective means for replicating durable post-treatment control on a global scale. This requires devising methods to reduce the size of the reservoir and to control replication of this residual virus. In the following sections, we will review many of the approaches and tools that likely will be important for implementing such a “reduce and control” strategy and for achieving a PTC-like sustained HIV remission in the absence of ART.

Observing thermal Schwinger pair production

We study the possibility of observing Schwinger pair production enhanced by a thermal bath of photons. We consider the full range of temperatures and electric field intensities from pure Schwinger production to pure thermal production, and identify the most promising and interesting regimes. In particular, we identify temperatures of $\sim 20~\mathrm{keV}/k_B$ and field intensities of $\sim 10^{23}~\mathrm{Wcm}^{-2}$ where pair production would be observable. In this case, the thermal enhancement over the Schwinger rate is exponentially large and due to effects which are not visible at any finite order in the loop expansion. Pair production in this regime can thus be described as more nonperturbative than the usual Schwinger process, which appears at one loop. Unfortunately, such high temperatures appear to be out of reach of foreseeable technologies, though nonthermal photon distributions with comparable energy densities are possible. We suggest the possibility that similar nonperturbative enhancements may extend out of equilibrium and propose an experimental scheme to test this.

Achieving Global Climate and Environmental Goals by Governmental Regulatory Targeting

Strategic niche management and transition management have been promoted as useful avenues to pursue in order to achieve both specific product or process changes and system transformation by focusing on technology development through evolutionary and co-evolutionary processes, guided by government and relevant stakeholders. However, these processes are acknowledged to require decades to achieve their intended changes, a timeframe that is too long to adequately address many of the environmental and social issues many industrialized and industrializing nations are facing. An approach that involves incumbents and does not consider targets that look beyond reasonably foreseeable technology is likely to advance a model where incumbents evolve rather than being replaced or displaced. On the other hand, approaches that focus on creating new entrants could nurture niche development or deployment of disruptive technologies, but those technologies may only be marginally better than the technologies they replace. Either approach may take a long time to achieve their goals. Sustainable development requires both radical disruptive technological and institutional changes, the latter including stringent regulation, the integration of disparate goals, and changes in incentives to enable new voices to contribute to new systems and solutions. This paper outlines options for a strong governmental role in setting future sustainability goals and the pathways for achieving them.

Multi-terminal DC grids: challenges and prospects

A few multi-terminal direct current (MTDC) systems are in operation around the world today. However, MTDC grids overlaying their AC counterpart might a reality in a near future. The main drivers for constructing such direct current grids are the large-scale integration of remote renewable energy resources into the existing alternative current (AC) grids, and the promotion and development of international energy markets through the so-called supergrids. This paper presents the most critical challenges and prospects for such emerging MTDC grids, along with a foreseeable technology development roadmap, with a particular focus on crucial control and operational issues that are associated with MTDC systems and grids.

The Quest for Societal ROI in the Midst of the Perfect Storm: Can SCM Set the Standard for Twenty‐First Century Business Education?

The Academy's dual role is to discover and disseminate knowledge. For most of our tenure, we have focused on research's role in fulfilling this societal mandate. We continue that discussion here by calling for more “actionable” research—something that the supply chain discipline is particularly well positioned to do. We now extend the discussion to pedagogy. As the two epigraphs denote, society is looking for a return on its investment—even a reinvention of the university. Increased costs, poor student achievement, and disruptive technology create an environment perfect for disruption. Yet, if we do our job well, current and foreseeable technologies cannot provide the same kind of transformative education that can be cultivated through community‐engaged experiential learning. The good news: The supply chain discipline is perfectly positioned to set the standard for twenty‐first century business education.

Traffic analysis of a simplified two-dimensional elevator system

The idea of multicar operation within one hoistway is not new. Two-car systems are currently available on the market, whereby the two cars travel with restricted independence because one car must always remain above the other. With recent advances in linear machines, systems with more than two cars in one hoistway will soon become possible. In this paper, the authors go one step forward by assuming that multiple cars can move in a two-dimensional plane either attached to the facade of the building or across a vertical slice within the building. The analysis has been restricted at this stage to incoming traffic only. It is assumed that elevator cars can move upwards, downwards as well as sideways. In this way, passengers can exit at a stop very close to their destinations. The foreseeable technology is discussed, and two configurations (denoted as setups A and B) are proposed. The traffic analysis equations for such a system are also derived. A simulation is then carried out for the two setups based on one-car operation. The simulation shows that the proposed two-dimensional elevator system can reduce the total traveling time of a passenger as compared with the conventional one-dimensional setup. The system is described as special because the number of hoistways is restricted (up to a maximum of 2). Practical application: This paper provides a practical way of evaluating the round trip time for two different two-dimensional elevator applications. It also then compares three different sizes of buildings and shows that the use of two-dimensional elevator arrangements is only feasible for building with more than 30 floors high by 30 rooms wide.

Artificial moral agents are infeasible with foreseeable technologies

For an artificial agent to be morally praiseworthy, its rules for behaviour and the mechanisms for supplying those rules must not be supplied entirely by external humans. Such systems are a substantial departure from current technologies and theory, and are a low prospect. With foreseeable technologies, an artificial agent will carry zero responsibility for its behavior and humans will retain full responsibility.

Galactic neutrino communication

We examine the possibility to employ neutrinos to communicate within the galaxy. We discuss various issues associated with transmission and reception, and suggest that the resonant neutrino energy near 6.3 PeV may be most appropriate. In one scheme we propose to make Zo particles in an overtaking e+−e− collider such that the resulting decay neutrinos are near the W− resonance on electrons in the laboratory. Information is encoded via time structure of the beam. In another scheme we propose to use a 30 PeV pion accelerator to create neutrino or anti-neutrino beams. The latter encodes information via the beam CP state as well as timing. Moreover the latter beam requires far less power, and can be accomplished with presently foreseeable technology. Such signals from an advanced civilization, should they exist, will be eminently detectable in existing neutrino detectors.

Scientific justification of cryonics practice.

Very low temperatures create conditions that can preserve tissue for centuries, possibly including the neurological basis of the human mind. Through a process called vitrification, brain tissue can be cooled to cryogenic temperatures without ice formation. Damage associated with this process is theoretically reversible in the same sense that rejuvenation is theoretically possible by specific foreseeable technology. Injury to the brain due to stopped blood flow is now known to result from a complex series of processes that take much longer to run to completion than the 6 min limit of ordinary resuscitation technology. Reperfusion beyond the 6 min limit primarily damages blood vessels rather than brain tissue. Apoptosis of neurons takes many hours. This creates a window of opportunity between legal death and irretrievable loss of life for human and animal subjects for cryopreservation with possibility of future resuscitation. Under ideal conditions, the time interval between onset of clinical death and beginning of cryonics procedures can be reduced to less than 1 min, but much longer delays could also be compatible with ultimate survival. Although the evidence that cryonics may work is indirect, the application of indirect evidence is essential in many areas of science. If complex changes due to aging are reversible at some future date, then similarly complex changes due to stopped blood flow and cryopreservation may also be reversible, with life-saving results for anyone with medical needs that exceed current capabilities.

Deployment strategy and performance evaluation of the IPv6 home network using the home server

IPv6 is a foreseeable technology for the ubiquitous home networks due to the increasing numbers of the consumer electronics (CEs) and the explosive demands for the home network services that require end-to-end connectivity through the Internet. In order to provide services based on IPv6 at home, a new protocol stack is required due to the late deployment of the IPv6 in the current public networks. In this paper, a protocol stack that enables an IPv6 home network is implemented. The protocol stack includes IPv4/6 dual stacks, home-to-home tunneling, protocol transition and IPv6 multicast packet forwarding over home-to-home tunneling. The packet handling performance of the IPv6 home network is evaluated on a test-bed using a home server that establishes connections between CEs and the Internet. The performance results show that the implemented protocol stack is acceptable to deploy IPv6 at home. Additionally a novel IPv4/6 transition mechanism that supports interoperability among various IPv4/6 based CEs within a home network is proposed.

Higher order relationships and the Medicinal Algorithmic Combinatorial Screen (MACS)

3079 Background: Targeted therapeutics are highly promising in combination because they are both well tolerated and interact with the signals that cause cancer. We propose a direct functional screen of combinations in the lab as a complement to the molecular insight based approach. However, with each drug added to the list, the number of possible combinations rises exponentially quickly beyond the capacity of any foreseeable technology to fully screen. We propose the MACS to identify combinations otherwise impossible to be found through a simple screen alone. The foundation of MACS is a genetic algorithm. One of the requirements for MACS will be the presence of some degree of higher order relationships among combinations. This means that knowing the behavior of some combinations formed from a set of drugs enables prediction of the behavior of other combinations formed from the same drugs. However, little is known of the degree of relatedness larger combinations of anticancer agents have. We performed experiments to evaluate this. Methods: A549 cells were plated at 2000/well and incubated in 96-well plates with drug for 66 hours before being read using the WST-1 proliferative assay (Roche). The agents were LY294002, PI-3-kinase inhibitor (Tocris); Anisomycin, activator JNK/SAPK activator (Tocris), Rapamycin, cdk inhibitor (Tocris); SP600125, JNK inhibitor (Tocris), Indirubin-3’-oxime, inhibits CDKs (Tocris); Bortezomib, proteasome inhibitor (Millennium Pharms). These were combined in all 64 combinations (pairs, triplets, quads etc.) done in triplicate at the single agent IC 20 dose of each drug with the experiment repeated another day. Results: Using regression analyses, reproducible modest higher order relationships were observed. Conclusion: We have preliminary evidence that knowledge of some of the combinations is modestly predictive of others, not enough to avoid a screen but enough to make a MACS possible. Further work will entail study of additional agents, altered doses and sequences, other NSCLC cell lines and non cancerous immortalized cell lines to represent host tissue, which will be presented at the poster. Ultimately, a pilot MACS system will be constructed the parameters for which will be guided by these data. No significant financial relationships to disclose.

Presidential Candidates Speak Out on Science Policies

Presidential Candidates Speak Out on Science Policies

Future Benefits of Time-Varying Gravity Missions to Ocean Circulation Studies

A summary is offered of the potential benefits of future measurements of temporal variations in gravity for the understanding of ocean dynamics. Two types of process, and corresponding amplitudes are discussed: ocean basin scale pressure changes, with a corresponding amplitude of order 1 cm of water, or 1 mm of geoid height, and changes in along-slope pressure gradient, at cross-slope length scales corresponding to topographic slopes, with a corresponding amplitude of order 1 mm of water, or a maximum of about 0.01 mm of geoid. The former is feasible with current technology and would provide unprecedented information about abyssal ocean dynamics associated with heat transport and climate. The latter would be a considerable challenge to any foreseeable technology, but would provide an exceptionally clear, quantitative window on the dynamics of abyssal ocean currents, and strong constraints on ocean models. Both options would be limited by the aliassing effect of rapid mass movements in the earth system, and it is recommended that any future mission take this error source explicitly into account at the design stage. For basin-scale oceanography this might involve a higher orbit than GRACE or GOCE, and the advantages of exact-repeat orbits and multiple missions should be considered.

Towards sustainability and green chemical engineering: tools and technology requirements

We report on a consultation with a panel of senior technical managers within the European process industries. The outcome of the consultation is that, with known and foreseeable technology, the European industry could remain profitable, and reduce pollution by over 20% within 10 years. This paper reports the tools and technologies that are perceived to be important in achieving low pollution levels economically. Alongside established tools such as process simulation, the study gives priority to less established tools including Computer-Aided Molecular Design (CAMD) and process synthesis. The study places a high priority on a range of established and emerging technologies. These include highly selective catalysts, fuel cells, process intensification, supercritical separation and reaction, solar cells, bulk chemicals from renewables, novel chemicals, design for recycle and processes that are economic on smaller scales.

What is the GRID

What is the GRID