 My name is Dimitris Psaltis, I'm a professor in PFL in Switzerland and together with Eftimis who you already met will be coordinating the next panel. The next panel, the topics are energy and environment. Of course, immense topics in Greece and the planet and then the main goal again is to see how highest can contribute in addressing some of these issues by collaborations between scientists of the diaspora and our colleagues in Greece. We start with our keynote speaker and we're very very very proud to have and happy to have Anna Stefano Poulou who's a professor of the University of Michigan Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She got her PhD also same place in Michigan and like pretty much everybody else here she was a she got her formation or her education at Metzhovion here here in Greece. Her area of expertise is combustion and and electrochemistry all related to energy issues. So Anna I'll give you the floor. Now you can hear me. So yeah, esteem board and colleagues, academic colleagues from Greece and I have to say also some friends. Really good to be here today. This is actually an institute. I'm very honored. This is an institute where it gave me my first scholarship, right? A lot of us have gotten the scholarships and it's a small monetary value but frankly it gives us a great boost for confidence for working and doing more research in whatever area we wanted to do and back then and still now the thing I am most interested and love to do is just to work on big powerful machines in fact controlling big powerful machines and you'll see today specifically to talk about machines that they're at the same time are respectful for our planet and safe for our lives. In preparing for today's talk, I have learned that Greece is doing a great deal, a lot of effort in decarbonizing and pursuing sustainable known carbon type of technologies and I'm sure there are going to be a lot of problems coming up and difficult roadblocks that we have to deal with as we execute this problem that execute our plan, especially with the unfortunate events, terrible events in Ukraine. So we're here today to talk about energy, the environment and of course that is looming in front of us that big issue. I am here also to say that batteries are going to be my dear friends a big important aspect of our decarbonization and that's what I will be talking today trying to glean out the topic that could be also very interesting in Greece. So as I said I have a naval architecture diploma in marine engineering from Matovio, I have a PhD from electrical engineering, I teach in mechanical engineering and I am doing chemical engineering because it's about batteries and controlling combustion so I and that's what I will talk about it today it's actually the last decade I've been working more and more on instead of combustion in batteries and I'll tell you a little bit that you know I started in designing machine rooms in big fishery boats for Greece and again this is what I love doing it was a lot of grease, heat, noise and the smell of diesel fuel. My diplomatic professors helped me get a Sea Grant and go to the University of Michigan to work on automated navigation and you'll say automated navigation what in the Midwest in the middle of the United States? Well actually if you look at this map this is Michigan and you can see all around it there are the Great Lakes and in fact Michigan is a state that has the largest coastline almost the same with the continental Greece if we take away the islands so there are actually a lot of parallels and a robust sipping industry that we have in the Great Lakes and that's why I went over there to do my masters and then of course the gravitational force or I guess the gravitational knowledge force of the automotive industry in Michigan pulled me very soon after that and then I started developing work and doing my PhD in automation of internal combustion engines for cars and so I became an emission expert which maybe some of you know me like that. I conducted great research right next to industry actually I did almost all my PhD half at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and half of it at Ford Research Labs so that's another amazing thing that we do in the United States working together with industry and back then and now even more we fully understand and we have full responsibility of how much CO we have actually produced and this chart shows very clearly the 20% contribution globally of transportation to the CO2 emissions and the global warming and you can see the contribution to passenger vehicles and other type of tracks and commercial freight so very important area and of course this chart shows globally the numbers but in Greece I looked it up it's very similar it's actually 19% even with the decrease that we saw recently with the COVID and other economic problems so in Greece it's about 19%. In the United States it's much larger it's we're closer to 30% and if you go to areas like California and my colleagues at the panel is going they're going to talk a little bit about California transportation is 40% of CO2 so it's a huge problem. This chart here shows the gains in average fuel efficiency for a fixed weight vehicle for imagine a paradigm vehicle across the last 100 years so we engineers should be really proud of ourselves this is what we have done look at the number two trillion gallons of fuel that we have actually saved by developing fuel emissions and fuel economy techniques for internal combustion engines. Well as I said I worked in that area in this chart here I know I have a bit of a soup of acronyms that a lot of you probably don't know. I worked on variable valve technology so wherever you see VVTs that's actually variable valve technologies and then I also worked on turbocharged engines and that's the turbocharged downsizing that you see over there and what the axis so in the x-axis they so basically what US technology dollars so the cost of technology every time we had to improve fuel efficiency that is the y-axis that goes up and we improved fuel efficiency apologies for my MPG in the US units miles per gallon we had to add actuators and sensors to be able to actually control tighter emissions and improve fuel efficiency so we added content we added cost and as you can see this thing climbs and it climbs and it rises and it goes steeper and steeper which means that we actually had to start talk about cost effectiveness of technology we're introducing for being able to be fuel efficient and you probably all know in the US and and across the world we are we dealt several years ago with a diesel gate and diesels indeed they were providing the highest fuel efficiency but they also required the exhaust after treatment that make them very expensive of course when things work correctly and not not not cheating I know in Greece many of you know me perhaps from the diesel gate but that particular diesel gate cheating was a huge awakening and a and a big transformation for industry that made the industry itself switch and start focusing in batteries and electrochemical energy storage this chart here shows us how and and and see this chart by also remembering the previous one as internal combustion cost was going up as we were improving improving efficiency the same time battery cost was going down right so you can see decades a decade of improvement in technology gains breakthroughs really in battery technology and I'm specifically charting here I'm graphing lithium ion technology lithium ion batteries so the gray area shows what the predictions are about electrification specifically electric batteries in automobiles the chart to the right it shows also actually you can see that one red dot it was announced last week this is the KTL it's a Chinese company that they actually managed to break through actually achieve the goal we have in the United States for battery technologies to be able to be at the same scale capacity range and life of an internal combustion engine fossil fuel driven vehicle of course there is a lot of technology going on over there but I will as I said I looked at the literature just trying to prepare for this talk really really excited and honored to be here and I said okay we are going to electrification of transportation let's take a look at Europe and Greece this is the chart I found I'm sure you can all find it really easily unfortunately that shows that Greece has the oldest fleet and therefore right the most polluting fleet in EU this table I managed to summarize the average fleet of the European Union so it's about 12 years for cars and 13 years for buses and about the same for trucks that's the middle column and you can see the youngest fleets are happening in Luxembourg and Austria and different other countries when it comes to buses and you can see in the column to the right Greece in Greece we have cars that they're 17 years old on average that means that there are much older and here I have the same I checked with my nephew and his car is 19 years old so you know it runs in even in our family and and of course buses 19 years buses that we have so when we are talking about electrification I was like I was scratching my head Petros and the rest invited me to talk about actionable you know motions and movements that we can do and maybe some suggestions and where we can help I would love to be able to work with you in these two areas which I think in my opinion could be the strategy and a priority to be on the forefront of the technology in the research so the strategy for me is bus electrification electrifying our mass transit it would be the first thing to do in our metropolis our metro areas that they're very congested charging infrastructure is going to be really hard to achieve and you know obviously many other problems associated with cleaning our grid that I know it's moving really fast but there is a lot more work to be done and you know given the time I decided to focus on the second one which is battery second life which you know it's not actually very well known so I'd like the time to do that so battery second life the idea here is to have to really focus in Greece after all we have such old fleet we might as well just recognize and accept the fact that we might end up having a lot of second-hand electric vehicles that are coming to us from Europe and so we need to be able to prepare for this kind of second-hand electric vehicles and also maybe we can become the hub the industry hub in actually managing all these aged automotive batteries to actually repurpose them to our grid so that we can green the grid so in this second this first two strategies or these two strategies are satisfying what I also consider extremely important in the energy transition which is equity and economic growth let me therefore try to go a little bit into that hub for a second hand EV we learn to develop techniques and to build our workforce how to repair and how to refurbish we actually batteries are 30 to 40 percent of the cost of an EV we cannot afford throwing them out or even recycling them and even recycling takes energy to break it down to raw material and bring it back up to make it a shiny nice battery again so a 30 to 40 percent of the energy over an electric vehicle and the cost is the CO2 therefore is actually on the battery 2.5 billion US dollars industry is on remanufacturing engines this industry needs to transition and it needs to move and frankly I don't know maybe I can do a show hands how many people they have in their block the same place that they leave or maybe within three blocks a body shop like an auto shop in Greece you don't oh I see so many maybe because I'm tuned you know I'm into I'm into that so I think auto shops are just everywhere perhaps because we have an aged fleet and so we need a lot of auto shops to fix our cars you know all this kind of training and technology we can actually I don't know develop it here I think that would be exciting as I said 6,000 machine shops in North America are dealing actually with remanufacturing engines okay so have for a second life let's become experts in repurposing automotive aged packs repurposing batteries from automotive to the grid in 10 years or in eight years it would basically allow us to level the battery competition between the grid and the cars and therefore manage the cost we should be able to decarbonize the grid and help with the regulation frequency regulation my colleagues at the panel will talk a little bit about this difficulties improving fast charging because we will need a storage behind the meter and supporting building the carbonization which is extremely hard okay so I'm saying these things and some of you are scratching your head and see and you're thinking oh what I see talking about batteries big packs are really dangerous right they're high voltage they have some of them hydrants hydrants some of them thousands of cells the tesla pack has you know something like 5,000 cells so what are we talking about this is a picture of a fourth pack yeah I'm a 4d in some sense because I worked there and I have also the endowed chair of the William Clay Ford technology professor at the University of Michigan and so we work with them very closely in in taking packs and trying to understand you know how they age how they're used and how they evolve in in life and and you can see here some of my students and colleagues doing a what we call a tear down so taking packs and and taking them apart very carefully together with industry safety experts that mapping them and then developing our CAD drawings that will let us do our thermal management and try to really understand how to develop a cooling system and how to check and and do the testing about the cells the individual cells and this is a picture that looks like when we do thermal electrochemical and we're trying to understand the behavior of the battery so these are the packs as you can see here hydrants of cells so these are two modules the front and the back they look like couches in the back of your car or underneath your car for most most most electric vehicles and the cooling system is very important because temperature would actually degrade the cells very quickly and we're trying to develop the cooling system to have homogeneous cell to cell like reduce the cell to cell variability and as you can see here we develop models the two lines in the graphs is model and data so this is a system a virtual think about the digital twin that lives in our computers that actually emulates depending on the cooling system takes data continuously from the battery management and checks and adapts the model we have so that it's always correct and it recognizes which cells might be suffering more than others so I'm talking about aging okay I'm gonna pull out a little bit and give you my view or you know the something to remember batteries aids and if they are a lot like humans and they hate to be overworked they hate pressure external pressure high temperature or and low temperature the same human temperature they love and you know we are diverse in chemistry safe size in fact in when it comes to batteries I wish we were not so diverse and we had some standardization but right now it's the beginning of the industry so this is where we are we are statistical faulty meaning that as we get manufactured there's going to be parts per million right sigma engineering six sigma engineering says that there are going to be so many parts per per million when we manufacture that they will be faulty and all cells must die sorry about that the same with us so how do batteries degrade look at this graph what we see externally are two things two important things the first chart shows capacity reducing dropping the capacity think about the range of the vehicle capacity drops as you can see as amp hours go through amp hours means the current you draw from it that means you use the battery you're gonna degrade it period the question is how are you gonna degrade it and the color lines here are showing how fast you can degrade the red are for high temperature and they're not really high temperature they're just 45 degrees celsius and and and then in the chart next to it is resistance increases so when the resistance increases that means you cannot deliver high power so your power drops your range drops hey the battery is aged so this is what we see externally and then we have the battery management system that's my stuff this is the stuff I do in the lab so this is what we need to take care which is inside now we go from the pack to the cell and sorry for being geeky here and sewing you so much but it's I love this chart it shows the anode the cathode and the separator which is the core of the battery and it shows actually all the sort of you know good and bad things that they're happening as lithium intercalates and gets inside the material sometimes it piles up and it cannot actually get inside the material and and therefore it creates dendrites that can short the battery and it creates a thermal runaway we'll talk a little bit about that or the particle starts cracking because there is stress internal stress and because it's cracking it creates film of you know I'm gonna call it gunk but it's actually we call it a solid electrolyte interface and that increases the resistance and that resistance remember is what drops the power and then we actually you know all these things are what we need to worry about and what we need to protect for what I'm showing to the right is what we measure we measure only voltage of all the cells so only the electrical signal and what we can control is actually even worse we only control current so we can power do power denials so we can say don't take so much current take so much current and what we do so obviously what you can think is I call it like driving blind because there's so many things we have to watch to the left and right of us but actually it is we get only very few signals only electrical signals so what I call helping the instead of driving blind is what we do the battery estimation where we're basically developing the digital twin that I talked to you about and with a digital twin this is how it looks like and I'm not going to go through the equations but you see basically equations that describe what happens inside not just the cell and the electrodes the anodes and cathodes of individual cells but we actually model what happens inside particles like little particles that they're actually you know extremely small size on in the microns and we are computing as we take data and at the same time our digital twin allows us to be able to continuously tune our parameters and have a model that captures all the phenomena and at the end we take data from the road not just vehicles but also energy storage systems and looking all the time to actually understand the capacity fade the resistance increase and predict forward because remember I was here to tell you about second life so obviously there's not going to be a second life if my model predicts that this battery is going to actually start decelerating this capacity dropping really quickly and therefore it's better to recycle it right so so these are the type of things the decisions industry needs and that's why we work next to them to develop these models they need to decide about warranties they need to decide about resale value when they're doing second hand vehicles and they need to decide again they're repurposing it on the grid we do fun things kind of you know crazy things sometimes obviously these are models and as I said we don't measure too much in the real vehicle but in the lab we can actually go in actually more than the lab we can go to a nuclear reactor and the nuclear reactor can actually give us a beam and we can do the inverse of an x-ray and see inside the battery as it actually operates where the lithium goes between anode and cathode and verifier models even on the single cell level this here you see actually 10 layers of cells operating and I have a movie but I will keep on going so yeah we have our students you know I call them our brave students that you know we can actually put in front of the this is a reactor a nuclear reactor and this is the beam and Zinfan was there actually imaging well not when the beam was on right he would go outside in the bank here so we do also a lot of equipment in the lab things like that they actually measure what we saw when we did this beaming and this imaging we actually need didn't even did not only see concentrations inside the battery but we actually saw the battery swelling so batteries are actually when they charge and discharge it's like breathing charging discharging they're actually swelling the lithium goes inside the carbon atoms and it opens up the diatomic structure and makes the electron swell of course the other side of the electron the electrode it's actually contracting so what you see is the combined contraction and swelling and we can actually measure it in the lab what this graph shows is that we can take current and and this is voltage so you can see that actually gets to be more and more frequent and then you see this swelling so batteries are actually again like humans we breathe when we charge discharge and that's reversible expansion and at the same time unfortunately as we age we gain weight and that's the irreversible expansion a lot of us do but not all and and so what what you see is that as the batteries how many of you have had problems with your iPads or your your computers where the battery gets swollen or your cell phone and cracked yeah yeah thank you so you know what I'm talking about there is a big deal I mean this is an area that as we are constraining our packs we don't let them expand and therefore because we don't let them expand now the stress grows inside and breaks the particles and that's what actually now we understand aids the batteries and so we really need to get more and more into that and that's what we do in my lab um and and it's actually this graph you know it also shows that we need to optimize that pressure we're applying to the battery this graph shows that we call it the Goldilocks principle right like if you apply not enough but enough pressure then you can degrade your battery very fast this graph shows but if you put more pressure then it's better and better and the batteries leave the battery leaves longer but after too much pressure again it will hurt again so trying to understand the physics okay a lot of you here uh when they talk about batteries and electrification they care about cost charging infrastructure and safety right at least in the United States that's we having recalls and and we have a lot of issues in that front so looking into signals and measuring signals that are the uh are hangyly or proagyly or you know telling us about uh faults impeding fault it would be um it would be great um and indeed batteries have a lot of energy they are that's why we love them lithium ion batteries actually have inside them five to eight times more energy what they can cycle and this graph what I'm showing you is for the same range of travel an electric battery uh has actually twice as much energy stored in the battery meaning that if there is an event a fault then there's going to be more energy released and more abruptly potentially if we don't develop and engineer the system of course we are engineering you know I'm going to say the hell out of the system and we're going to make it work really well and in all honesty batteries are not more going to be more dangerous or they're not even now more dangerous than internal combustion engines we do have fires in them and we learn how to manage them uh in the lab we try to understand how things work in a normal sense and what actually we need to be doing in an abnormal case so we actually start abusing we have abuse uh labs that we do a lot of abuse scenarios and we have the cells swelling like the picture I showed you earlier like this and then of course when they swell a lot they will vent these vents are actually flammable and so they have to we have to change the way we're thinking right now when we are initiating a problem with a fire we what we're doing is we're starving from oxygen we are closing we are enclosing the system in a battery we cannot we should not enclose it we should actually vent it because this hydrocarbons the battery includes the inside it oxygen and so you don't need oxygen from the outside it will actually have metalloxides it will give the oxygen and the fuel and the oxygen will keep the fire going and in fact reigniting months and sometimes well weeks and sometimes months later so we're actually developing even systems for deactivation in the US we have a lot of issues not just from automotive batteries but also just your little cell phones or toys that you buy for kids that they have lithium ion batteries that they're little ones and end up at the waste they end up at garbage and they dealt with garbage uh systems and and containers and then they get crashed and of course when you crash a battery what happens fire and of course it then it can ignite the associated waste around it we're working a lot in developing next generation batteries in annals that they have solid state electrolyte that it's not flammable and before we get there we will be having also batteries that they have silicon instead of graphite and they will swell a lot more in fact they swell three to six times more silicon I know actually some experts here on that and then in the cathoside we are actually going more and more towards nickel and less cobalt because of the ethical issues because cobalt a lot of it is uh is mined in Congo the only other country that has cobalt is Finland and I found out that we actually have traces of cobalt in our country but as I said next generation batteries will have a lot more nickel and from what I heard and read recently just preparing for this talk we have 80 percent of the production of nickel in Europe in here in Greece so this is an opportunity and something that we can do and again in the spirit of making bridges for the United States and for my state Michigan and Greece we look very similar I superimpose here the mediterranean to the US continent and you can see the lakes and you can see the size and the cost line and the industry and also I have to say up north in Michigan we also have ore and type of mining that we have here in the United States in the Tolemaida area that I know there are a lot of struggles in decarbonizing thanks a lot thank you very much for for this opportunity