Science Friday - ‘Clean Hydrogen Hub’ Awardees & Formula One Car Paint

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Seven “clean energy hubs” will receive a total of $7B to develop forms of hydrogen production with minimal carbon emissions. And, ahead of the US Grand Prix, an aerodynamicist breaks down the recent engineering changes to F1 cars.Department Of Energy Announces ‘Clean Hydrogen Hub’ AwardeesThe Department of Energy announced seven “clean hydrogen hubs,” which will receive a cumulative $7 billion. Each group will use a host of different approaches to produce hydrogen fuel with little or no emissions.SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Casey Crownhart, climate reporter for MIT Technology Review, to break down the details of this announcement and other top science news of the week, including seals helping map a canyon in Antarctica, the number of living cells in the world, and a very spicy pepper.Formula One Cars Are Stripping Off Paint To Save WeightFormula One is known as the pinnacle of motorsport, with cars that can reach speeds of 230 miles per hour. Thanks to the Netflix series Drive To Survive, the sport is more popular than ever.As engineers prepare for the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, this Sunday, teams strive to make their cars as fast as possible. To do so, they try to reduce the ultra-fast cars’ weight by altering the construction of the frame of the car, or finding lighter engine parts. But recently, many teams have been stripping the paint off the cars instead.Even though paint on an F1 car only adds up to about three pounds, races can be won by milliseconds, so every ounce counts. In the last couple years, many teams made the decision to pare down the amount of paint used on the cars, exposing the natural black color of the carbon fiber below it. It’s why the cars on the grid look darker overall, compared to previous years.Kyle Forster, a former aerodynamicist for the Mercedes-AMG F1 team and a lead aerodynamicist for JKF Consultants, breaks down the engineering changes made to F1 cars in recent years, the newest in paint science, and what aerodynamic changes he hopes to make in the years to come.To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In the high-speed world, Formula One racing, every bit of weight matters, including the paint. If you strip, say, 500 grams off the car, it's worth about 0.015 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but it does make a difference. It's Friday, October 20th, and today is Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Shoshana Bucksbaum. This Sunday, it's the Formula One Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. And thanks to the Netflix series Drive to Survive, F1 Racing is. more popular than ever. We'll talk about the feats of engineering that make these cars so special

and explain how aerodynamicists design custom parts to push cars over the finish line. Just a split second faster. But first, we'll check in on some of the week's science news with sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis. Last week, the Department of Energy announced seven clean hydrogen hubs. Together, these hubs will receive a total of $7 billion in funding. Their task, with figuring out how to make hydrogen fuel with little or no emissions. Joining me now to break down the details of this big announcement and other top science news of the week is my guest, Casey Crownheart, climate reporter for MIT Technology Review in New York City. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks so much for having me back. It is nice to have you back. So tell me what kinds of hydrogen fuel projects are these federal dollars going towards? There's really a huge range of projects here. And so each of these seven regional hubs actually has a couple of different approaches towards making and also using hydrogen. The goal here is kind of to kickstart a whole industry for clean hydrogen. So some of the projects use low carbon electricity. So renewables like wind and solar or nuclear power to make hydrogen fuel. Others, and this is kind of where some of the controversy around this comes, use. fossil fuels and then try to capture the carbon while they're making hydrogen. There's a really wide range of projects. It's really interesting to see. So we have been talking about the promise of clean hydrogen fuel for years on this show. I mean, is this enough funding to kickstart the industry and make this low or no emission carbon fuel a reality anytime soon? Oh, that's a great question.

I will say that this is kind of part of a whole strategy by the U.S. and, you know, kind of internationally to make hydrogen fuel actually happen. So this funding comes from the infrastructure law that was passed a couple of years ago. There's also going to be funding from the climate bill or the Inflation Reduction Act that helps to subsidize clean hydrogen production. So I think in combination with some of those other things, people are really interested to see if this is the boost that the industry really, needs to make this fuel more economical. Yeah. And you hinted at this, but there are some critics of these clean hydrogen projects, right? Yeah. I mean, it all depends on kind of how you define clean. Like you said, the goal here is to make hydrogen with as few emissions as possible. Because when you burn hydrogen, there's no

greenhouse gases. You're just making water. So it all depends on kind of how you're making the fuel. If you're making it with renewables, thumbs up, good to go. If you're making it with fossil fuels and you're trying to capture that carbon, there's kind of a lot at stake with that kind of technology. And it's a technology that hasn't really been proven at scale. Some critics say that this is kind of entrenching the role of fossil fuels. So I think those projects are kind of being watched very carefully by a lot of folks in the climate community. So let's move on to another piece of news about fuel this week.

The EPA has officially classified leaded fuel as a danger to public health, which, Casey, I have to say I was shocked to learn that leaded fuel was still being used at all. I mean, who is still using leaded fuel? This is a great question and actually exactly the reaction that I had to this news as well. Letted fuel used to be everywhere. We used to use it in cars and everything. It was added to fuels to make engines work better. And as we started to, to learn that lead is not so great for public health, it was phased out, pretty much everywhere except for small planes. So small planes today, you know, the ones that carry between like two and ten passengers, a lot of those still use leaded fuels today. Okay. And I would imagine these smaller planes, smaller airports are maybe in communities that are maybe closer to people than like a normal, large international airport would be. Yeah, I think that that's really right. The EPA, I don't know.

that up to five million people who live near these small airports could be affected by these leaded fuels, which is why they took this step to kind of start the process of potentially phasing it out. Okay. So what's the timeline that we're looking at here? It's not totally clear yet. So this step is just kind of the first step that the agency needs to take and then it'll continue to set rules. It could be around 2030 maybe. That's what industry groups want to happen. So I mean, a few years yet, But, you know, hopefully soon we'll get the lead out of fuels. I hope so. Speaking of phasing things out, our next story is about how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

declared 21 new extinct species. So, Casey, give us, I guess, the highlights, low lights. I don't know what the right word is for this, about these new extinct species. Yes, a much more unfortunate phasing out here. So like you said, there are 21 species. that were just declared extinct. There's a lot of birds, a bat, a lot of freshwater mussels on this list. Those have all been labeled extinct.

Those were part of a list that was proposed two years ago. And so now officially the government has said, we really think these species aren't around anymore. We're going to kind of stop spending money, looking for them and protecting them and so on. So there's one species that is notably not on this list, and that is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Why has this specific move been controversial? Yeah, so the ivory-billed woodpecker was on the list two years ago to be proposed for delisting, but it did not make this final list. And that's very controversial because there's not been a reputable sighting of this bird for about 80 years.

Ivory-billed woodpeckers were the largest species of woodpecker in North America. They're very distinctive. But because of habitat destruction, because of hunting, their populations were absolutely decimated. But it's been this really interesting thing where every few years or so, there will be a sighting where somebody says, hey, look at this super grainy video, this super blurry photo that I have. I saw an ivory-billedwood pecker. And birders and birding experts are like, no, that was not an ivory-billed-wood pecker. And so it is kind of interesting that the agency did not kind of throw in the towel on these birds, even though most experts say it is really time to let the ivory

bold woodpecker go. Interesting. Well, we will keep an eye on that. We have another animal story, but luckily, this story is about animals that are alive and well and thriving, and they're actually working as research assistants. Seals have helped scientists map a deep canyon in Antarctica. This sounds kind of bananas to me. Can you tell me about this? I know. I love this story, and I love it because this isn't the first. first time that this has happened. Like, scientists have used seals as research assistance before,

but there's this new study where basically researchers put trackers on elephant seals and weddle seals. And seals often dive really deep into the ocean. And so by comparing where seals were diving with kind of known maps of the seafloor, scientists were able to find that in some spots, seals were diving deeper than they thought was possible. They thought, okay, the ocean is this deep, but then they were noticing that seals were diving deeper than that. And so that helped them find this large hidden canyon, which they later mapped with sonar. So, yeah, the cutest research assistants.

Yeah, and it sounds like these scientists were like, okay, these seals were already doing this thing that we would like to explore. Let's just throw some devices on them and see what information we can get. Yes, I love it. And it's kind of fun, but also this could be important because these deep canyons can move warm water around, in the Antarctic region. And that can really affect how ice melts. And so it could be really important as we try to understand how ice is melting with climate change. Okay. So let's move on to another story.

And this is about a new number that just dropped. Researchers calculated how many living cells exist. So, Casey, just how many living cells are there? There are one non-million living cells. Okay. which is 10 to the 30th power. These numbers really break my brain. That means that there are a trillion times more living cells than number of sand grains on the planet and a million times more living cells than the number of stars in the universe. Okay. So aside from this just being completely mind-boggling, I mean, why is it important for us to know this? Yeah, so researchers did this and then they also kind of used that to calculate,

how many living cells have ever existed. And so by having these estimates, they're kind of able to predict, you know, in the really, really distant future, how my cells grow, how much life could the planet sustain in theory, just kind of giving us a window into kind of the deep past and the deep future. Okay. So now that you've broken our brains, it's time to burn our tongues with some very spicy news. The Guinness Book of World Records has crowned a new spiciest pepper. So, Casey, I mean, give me the lowdown. How spicy is this pepper?

It's really, really, really spicy. The name of it is Pepper X. And you might be familiar with this scale called Scoville Heat Units. And that's kind of how we measure spice. So like bland food is a zero. A jalapeno is about 5,000. Bear spray is 2.2 million. And Pepper X is 2.69 million. Scoville. So spicier than bear spray. I mean, how do you even grow a pepper that is the spicy? So there is a spicy pepper expert. His name is Ed Curry. And he crossbreeds peppers. And so Pepper X is actually the hybrid of the Carolina Reaper, which was the old record holder at, you know, a measly 1.64 million Scoville Heat units.

And so he crossed that pepper with some other mysterious. pepper that he is not revealing to come up with. Yes, it's very protected. Very mysterious. I mean, if this is spicier than bear spray, I would imagine it doesn't taste that good. What is the point of making such a spicy pepper? I don't know. I want this pepper to stay as far away from me as possible. I don't want anything to do with it. People that have eaten it say that after all of the pain subsides, there's sort of an earthy taste to it. So I guess, there really are people that are interested in this. All right.

Well, we'll have to find someone else who's brave enough to take a bite out of this pepper. But that is all the time that we have for now. Thank you so much, Casey for joining us. Thanks for having me. Casey Crownheart, climate reporter for MIT Technology Review. She's based in New York City. Say you're an engineer working for a Formula One team. And you need to figure out how to reduce weight from your ultra-fast car to new,

minimum weight requirements. Maybe you turn to the construction of the frame of the car, or you find lighter engine parts. But as of the last couple of years, many teams have been stripping the paint off of the cars instead to save weight and get that little extra bit of speed. Dr. Kyle Forrester is a former aerodynamicist for the Mercedes AMGF1 team. He runs the YouTube channel Kyle engineers and is a lead aerodynamicist for JKF consultants. He's here to break down the engineering changes made to Formula One cars in recent years, the newest in paint science, and what aerodynamic changes he has his eye on in the years to come. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, how's it going? Good, good, glad to have you here. So, Kyle, you used to work as an engineer for the Mercedes F1 team.

Matt, can you tell us about what it's like to be an aerodynamicist for a team? Yeah, well, basically the job, which some people may not know quite what it is, is to make the cars faster. And the way that the aerodynamicists make the cars faster is by changing all the little bodywork components all over the car to just get marginal gains here and there that you add up and snowball over the course of the year that progressively make the car faster and faster around a circuit, primarily by increasing the down force, which is the aerodynamic force pushing down on the car, pressing the tire into the road, and reducing the drag, which is the

aerodynamic force pushing the car backwards and essentially slowing it down a straight line. So obviously being an aerodynamicist, working in Formula One is basically the pinnacle for a motorsports aerodynamics. And you get to do some really cool stuff there because there's obviously large budgets, you've got a lot of really cool wind tunnel equipment that you can use, and also the computational resources are really strong too. So you get to do some really, really good experimentation, that you can't really do anywhere else in the world. Yeah, it sounds really exciting. Before we get into some specifics,

can you tell me a little bit about how these cars actually get made? I mean, I imagine it's not like you can just go to your local auto parts shop and pick something off the shelf. Yeah, no, so these cars, basically every component on them is bespoke. Obviously, across the grid, there's some standardized components and some things like tires, specifically, that are common between the cars. But all the components like the core tub of the car, all the bodywork of the car, all that is uniquely developed by the teams.

And then they will go and manufacture these components in-house. So the teams have varying numbers of employees from sort of 500 to 1,000 people. And there's a lot of engineers that basically design all these components. And then all the components are made in-house. There's some subcontracting out, but it's mainly made in-house from custom-machine components and custom hand-laid-up bits. So it's all very customized. So there is this governing body of Formula One called the FIA,

which sets these requirements for cars to meet. And a couple of years ago, they introduced new weight requirements for these cars. And some teams had heavier cars who wanted to trim down some weight. So why did they turn to reducing the amount of paint? I mean, to me, that doesn't seem like a natural place to start. Yeah, well, it's one of those things. things where you're kind of in the sport trying to get a lot of incremental gains. And every gram that you save on the car is a benefit. Now, the slopes for different cars vary, but

roughly you could think of it as about 10 kilograms is worth around 3 tenths of a second per lap. And if you strip, say, 500 grams off the car, it's worth about 0.015 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but at the Qatar GP for qualifying, that would have been the difference between seventh and eighth in qualifying. So it does make a difference. There's a minimum weight limit. There has been a minimum weight limit for a long time now, but minimum weight limit changes with each regulation set. When we moved to newer wheels and tires in 2022, that was when the wheels and tires got a lot bigger. The cars got heavier, so the minimum weight limit came up. However, with any big rules change. That was a big rules change in 2022. There was a large increase in the mass of the cars,

inherently by the design nature, by having those bigger and heavier wheels and tires. And what that means is that some teams are struggling to get to the minimum weight. Now, once you're below the minimum weight, you're all good. You can just add ballast to get to the minimum weight, and you put that ballast where you want it to be. But if you're above the minimum weight, you're actually just losing lap time with no benefit. So if you're, say, two, three kilos over, you're losing a lot of time. So if you're overweight, you need to find any way you can to strip weight off. And with the paint, let's say that on an F1 car, that the paint weighs around about one and a half kilos, if you can strip, say, 30% of the paint off the car, well, then you've saved that 500 grams

we spoke about earlier. Have there been any recent developments in paint science when it comes to Formula One? Yeah. So the coatings used on F1 cars are very specific lightweight coatings. Obviously, it's not quite my speciality into the coatings themselves. But my understanding is that you can get a very thin coating that still achieves the color you want and is very low density, so you get a lightweight coating. And a few years ago, I think around about 2016-2017, team started rolling out these matte paint finishes. So instead of running gloss, they were running matte. And by using these finishes, they were reducing a lot the weight of the paint on the car.

Some of the estimates being thrown around at the time was that this could be worth up to about 600 grams. Now, obviously, you can never be sure with the numbers that come out from F1, but if that is correct, then that's a big weight saving just from changing the paint, from gloss to matte. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily make that correlation. So one of the appeals for some F1 fans is how teams really have to work creatively to meet constantly changing requirements for these cars. When you were with Mercedes as an engineer, I mean, was that a frustrating part of your job? Was it an opportunity to get creative? How did you feel about these changing requirements? Yeah, I think the change of regs is a super interesting thing for the

engineers, because it happened. The aerodynamic regs changed quite a lot in the time span I was at Mercedes. And it was usually to do with things like trying to help the cars behind follow, so they would do adjustments like they would say you have less barge board height or you have to have a different front wing with less curvature. And basically what this does is that it completely throws your old design out the window. And then you have a new design, a new airflow all over the car. And you have to now come up with new concepts that work better with that. And every time they change the rules, what you developed before as a concept won't necessarily

work anymore. So it means you now have to come up with something from scratch. So it's quite exciting from that perspective and that you move out of this region of optimizing an existing design into creating fresh. and new designs that can deal with the new flow features. So from that point, it's interesting. It's always a little bit nerve-wracking from the point of view of when you're in a team like Mercedes, where we, I think Mercedes won, what, seven, eight championships in a row,

you're going on a winning streak and then the rules change and then you're terrified that this rules change is going to result in your car being super slow and it gives an opportunity for another team to come up. And while I was at Mercedes, we successfully defended across several rules changes. But it is a bit nerve-wracking thinking that you might have an issue where, Or Rules Change causes you to get a much slower car that could not win anymore. Right. I would imagine.

Just a quick note, I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking to Kyle Forrester about the aerodynamic science of Formula One. Are there future F1 engineering innovations that you've got your eye on that you're really excited to see get implemented in the future? Oh, that's an interesting question. Because the thing with the innovations in F1 is that a lot of it is getting more and more controlled by the rules these days. Obviously, a lot of your audience is based in the USA and may be familiar with IndyCar. Now, IndyCar is a spec series where basically all the cars are essentially the same car. There's some slight differences, but fundamentally the tub and the core design of the car is the same.

In F1, all the designs are completely different, like we discussed earlier, but the rules have been tightening year on year to try and bring a little bit more convergence to the cars, and that is hopes to make the racing better. And largely, that does seem to be the case because the field is drawing closer. However, it does stifle a little bit some of the innovations that you'd expect to see. For example, in the sort of 2020 spec cars, we had all this really cool hydraulic suspension, but these days, you're actually really limited. You're not allowed to have hydraulic suspension anymore. You're not allowed to have nerds, which are another suspension technology. So from that perspective, you lose a lot of those cool developments. However, one of the things that I'm quite interested in is there's a new set of power train rules coming out soon. And those rules should lead to some new and interesting power train solutions. And I think that what we see coming out in those next few years over the power train changes could be quite interesting. So looking forward a bit, I mean, F1 still largely uses gasoline-powered engines. There has been a little bit of a move to hybrids, but these gas-powered engines are still king. Formula E is something that exists, which is a race for electric cars. But is there a tension between this nostalgic history in the sport for gas-powered engines and switching to something like electric motors? Yeah, I think in terms of the tension, a lot of the tension seems to be more within the fans than the engineers. As an engineer, I don't specifically have a problem with it moving to more electric.

I think the largest issue is the energy density issue, where at the moment these cars are so heavily dependent on weight for performance that if you start to add mass by having poor energy density, the car will get a lot slower. So that issue needs to be solved. And that's one of the holdups of electric power trains is that they just don't have the energy density. So from an engineering perspective, you have to solve that. And then once that's solved, once the energy density issue is solved, well, then I don't see any issue with them moving to full electric once we get to that point. But I do know that there is a lot of tension when you go out on social media and have a look that a lot of fans are interested in the purity. And personally, I do love the noise of particularly the older generation F1 cars back when. and they were V-10s and even the V-8s,

the sound of those when you're next to them in real life is quite something. And that will be something that will be a bit sad to lose once we move to a more electric-based car. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. I hope you have a good race week. And thank you for being with us. No problems at all. Pleasure to be here. Dr. Kyle Forrester, former aerodynamicist for the Mercedes-AmGF1 team.

and a lead aerodynamicist for JKF consultants. That's it for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen this week, including Ariel Zich. Santiago Flores. D. Petersburg. Full of Samares. And many more.

On Monday, a new memoir about searching for life in the universe and the joy and wonder of finding your place within it all. I'm Shoshana Bucksbaum. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you next week on Science Friday.