The photo does not show a tetrataenite, just a mineral as a symbolic placeholder.
How do you imagine the year 2050? A green, CO2 emission-free future maybe? Certainly one or the other electric car will float in front of you. And hardly anyone will assume that in the middle of the century armies of combustion engines will still clog the lifelines of our cities.
However, there are a number of things standing in the way of the dream of a green future through electromobility: How can we generate and use enough clean energy so that we don’t end up with a worse CO2 balance than petrol or diesel-powered vehicles? And how do we get a grip on the problems of energy-intensive mining and the scarcity of valuable resources?
Researchers may now have found an answer to both. And this brings not only ecological but also tangible economic benefits. Why is?
Sensational accidental discovery
Batteries could soon last many times longer
Rare earths are scarce and mining is problematic
An electric motor is required to power an electric car, regardless of whether it is powered by an accumulator or a fuel cell. Permanent magnets are an essential part of electric motors. The same applies to the generators in wind turbines. Without permanent magnets, a vision of the future without CO2 emissions is practically unthinkable.
However, so-called rare earths are required for this. These are metals with special properties. They are actually not as rare as the name suggests, but large, connected deposits are few and far between, making mining expensive and unecological. Because a lot of energy has to be invested.
Add to that the dependency on China. The Middle Kingdom currently has a virtual monopoly on the mining of rare earths. Although gigantic deposits were recently discovered in Turkey, it is a long way to make them economically usable. In addition, the fundamental problem of increasing scarcity and mining remains.
material from outer space
This is what tetrataenite looks like. However, the resolution of the recording is a bit too low for the teaser image above.
An alternative to the rare earths is the so-called tetrataenite. This is one of the minerals, but it is an alloy of iron and nickel with a special crystal structure and magnetic properties. However, tetrataenite is formed almost exclusively in meteorites that cool down over millions of years. The slow cooling allows the crystal structures to grow layer by layer. Until now, producing the material artificially has been expensive and unprofitable. The iron-nickel alloy had to be bombarded with neutrons.
However, the emphasis is on so far
. Because researchers of University of Cambridge and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now succeeded in significantly accelerating the process – by adding small amounts of phosphorus.
Although the chemical element is also a limited resource, the world’s deposits are far from exhausted and mining is far less problematic from an economic and environmental point of view than rare earths. Nevertheless, reports about the SRF (Swiss radio and television) of poisoning, black lung disease and cancer in connection with the degradation of phosphate-rich soil. However, there are hardly any reliable studies on this.
Since we were just talking about space – what NASA shows in the following video is like something out of a movie, but has now even been put into practice in a test:
4:12
Almost like in a movie: NASA wants to crash a spaceship into an asteroid
Discovery almost went undiscovered
The researchers almost missed the fact that phosphorus is excellently suited to inexpensively accelerating the otherwise lengthy and expensive formation of the crystal structure of tetrataenite. When the team examined the mechanical properties of the iron-nickel alloy with small amounts of phosphorus, they initially only found the expected tree-like, disordered growth structure – so-called dendrites.
Only the trained eye of Dr. At the last second, Yuri Ivanov recognized a diffraction pattern that indicated an ordered structure. An ordered structure is important so that the alloy can also be used for high-performance magnets.
According to the researchers, the phosphorus ensures that the iron and nickel atoms can move faster and thus form the ordered structure, the tetrataenite, faster. We are talking about an acceleration of eleven to 15 orders of magnitude compared to the cooling process that has lasted for millions of years.
When will tetrataenite be on the market?
The artificially produced tetrataenite is still a long way from being ready for the market. Because the current results are only basic research. Whether and how well the material is suitable for use in permanent magnets in practice has yet to be clarified. We have more exciting things from the world of technology for you here:
how do you see it? Do you think tetrataenite will revolutionize electric motors and free us from our dependency on rare earths? Or do you think this is purely basic research that ultimately has hardly any practical consequences? Write it to us in the comments!
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