News on China's scientific and technological development.

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China pumps out half of world’s energy storage research as US share declines


•An overview of China’s output in 2022 reports it has become the ‘most active’ country in the hunt for scalable storage options for renewables
•Contributions by US scientists accounted for 10.5 per cent of papers on the subject, report says

Victoria Bela Published: 12:03pm, 30 Jun, 2023 Updated: 2:49pm, 30 Jun, 2023

China accounted for half of the world’s research papers into energy storage technology published last year, an increase of 5 per cent on 2021, according to a report by a team of researchers from a number of Chinese universities and institutes.

In contrast, contributions by US scientists made up 10.5 per cent of papers on the subject in 2022, a 2 per cent fall on the previous year’s figures, the researchers said, in a paper published by the journal Energy Storage Science and Technology.

China had become the “most active country in the world in energy storage fields on all three aspects of fundamental study, technical research, integration and application”, the report said.

The researchers searched the Web of Science index using the keywords “energy storage” as part of the study, which gives an overview of China’s research advancements in the field.

China is already the world’s leader in renewable energy installations and is also leading in energy storage, with a capacity of 59.8 gigawatts at the end of 2022, according to the China Energy Storage Alliance.

Most of China’s electricity is derived from coal and energy storage is key to the country meeting its net zero goals. But a lack of large-scale methods of increasing capacity is hampering the total generation potential of existing renewable projects.

For example, solar energy accounts for 16.6 per cent of China’s installed power generation capacity but is delivering just 2.73 per cent of usable electricity to the grid, as of the first quarter of 2o23, according to the National Energy Administration.

China remains reliant on pumped hydropower for its energy storage and leads the world in continuing to build facilities based on the technology. In 2022, the highest proportion of new storage capacity was derived from hydropower, the report said.

While China has the largest pumped hydropower storage capacity in the world, its main research focus has been on other methods, such as a variety of battery-based tools as well as thermal and flywheel technologies.

Most of the research papers released in 2021 focused on alternatives to pumped hydropower, according to last year’s report, a situation that continued in 2022.

The United States – which continues to rank among the top spots for energy storage – launched an initiative in 2020 to maintain its global position. The Energy Storage Grand Challenge goal is for all of the United States’ storage technologies to be produced domestically by 2030.

The researchers found that China had greater access to the materials and means of production than the US, but was still grappling with scalability to meet the storage demands of existing renewable installations and their energy output.

Development of new renewable facilities has continued in China, even though the energy output of solar and wind projects is not being fully harnessed, according to the NEA.

However, the increase in research and a rise in patents relating to energy storage highlighted in the report suggests that the scientific community is prioritising innovation to help China expand its large-scale capacity.

According to the report, 100 megawatt projects are becoming the norm in China, where many developments are under way.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences was responsible for one of a number of innovative advancements in 2022, with its research into a 300MW compressed air storage system, the report said.

The researchers said China would remain dominant in global rankings for published research, patent applications and the installation of energy storage capacity.

Next year would continue to be an important one for the development of energy storage and China’s technology in the field was expected to be the world’s best in the coming five to 10 years, they said.

henrik said:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1674329698816643073

Are they using the same HUD system from fighter jets?

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Similar tech to the transparent display that came out many years ago... from Xiaomi using various Chinese third party producers. Just some new OLED tech many Korean and Chinese manufacturers developed back in mid 2010s.

China uses laser for 10 times faster satellite-to-ground communication in major breakthrough

• •Team at CAS institute uses laser instead of microwaves to hit 10 Gbps space-to-ground data transfer speed from satellite in Jilin-1 constellation
• •Feat represents first such ‘ultra-high-speed’ test for business applications in China, chief designer at company behind satellite says

Zhang Tong in Beijing Published: 8:04pm, 30 Jun, 2023 Updated: 8:04pm, 30 Jun, 2023

China has successfully deployed laser-based high-speed communication technology on commercial satellites, increasing space-to-ground data transfer speed tenfold to 10 gigabytes per second (Gbps).

“Using a ground-based 500mm (19.7 inches) aperture, researchers received laser signals emitted from a transmitter on the Jilin-1 MF02A04 satellite,” the official Science and Technology Daily reported earlier this week.

The 108-strong Jilin-1 constellation in lower Earth orbit is the world’s largest imaging satellite network, and sends back commercial remote sensing data for sectors including land resource survey, urban planning and disaster monitoring. The latest breakthrough is forecast to significantly enhance ground communication with the satellites.

Traditionally, satellite-to-ground links have primarily relied on microwave technology. However, as the range of microwave frequencies is restricted, so is the speed of data transfer.
Lasers, by contrast, have a much wider spectrum. Therefore, using lasers as data carriers can help pack more data into each transmission, with the bandwidth potentially reaching several hundred gigahertz.

A team from the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), under the country’s premier research institute – the Chinese Academy of Sciences – set up a satellite-to-ground link using lasers, for what is formally known as “optical communication”.

Their system, sent into orbit with the Jilin-1 MF02A04 in December, was successfully tested on Wednesday, opening the doors to more efficient data exchange.

Li Yalin, the leader of the ground system at AIR, compared the technology to city roads.

“Using the common microwave at 375 MHz is like driving on a single lane, and the emerging [technology of a] higher 1.5 GHz microwave would be a four-lane road,” he said. “Lasers, meanwhile, can accommodate hundreds or even thousands of lanes.”

“With [such] optical communication, it is possible to transmit a high-definition movie in one second, which is 10 to 1,000 times faster than the current microwave communication method.”
The first batch of data sent back to Earth by the Jilin-1 transmitter included a picture of Doha, the capital of Qatar.

“It is the first ultra-high-speed [10 Gbps] satellite-to-ground optical communication test for business applications in China, and the single communication lasted for more than 100 seconds,” chief designer Chen Shanbo at Chang Guang Satellite Technology, the commercial company that launched the Jilin-1 MF02A04 satellite, said.

The highly concentrated energy of lasers also means the size, weight, and power consumption of satellite-borne laser transmitters are markedly less than those powered by microwave.
Lasers also have strong anti-electromagnetic interference capabilities, which can significantly improve the security of ground-to-satellite communication.

Notably, Nasa has speeded up similar research, and teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers to achieve a downlink speed of 100 Gbps last June.

The feat was achieved by the MIT-developed TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system, which was taken into orbit by Nasa’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) satellite. The system is named after the terabyte, a unit of digital data that equals 1,000 gigabytes or about 500 hours of high-definition video.

PTD-3 is about the size of two stacked cereal boxes, and the TBIRD payload it carries is no larger than the average tissue box, according to Nasa.
This year, the US laser link doubled that data rate, reaching a record-breaking transmission speed of 200 Gbps.

Nice! Laser comm signals may be invisible to the human eye, but TBIRD is making the whole place shimmer with its recent 4.8 terabyte pass at 200 Gbps. The @NASASCaN payload is demo-ing how laser communications’ #swift data transfer can benefit science and exploration missions.

An illustration of the TBIRD payload in orbit downlinking data to an optical ground station in California. On the side, science images and the text saying "Higher data rates = more science"

“With optical communications, we’re blowing that out of the water as far as the amount of data we can bring back. It is truly a game-changing capability,” TBIRD project manager Beth Keer said.
The Nasa record, however, was achieved on a demonstration satellite, which are usually more powerful than the commercial type.

The Jilin-1 MF02A04 is a commercial satellite designed for practical use and a longer lifespan. It weighs less than 40kg (88 pounds) but the weight of its transmitter is not known.
Faster data transmission could drive development in many areas. Missions to collect important data on Earth’s climate and resources, as well as astrophysical discoveries and military detection could all be boosted by this technology.

“Laser communications is the missing link that will enable the science discoveries of the future,” Keer was reported as saying in May.

However, when it comes to the technology’s commercial application, China might have an edge. The Jilin-1 constellation is set to have 138 satellites in orbit this year and complete the second phase of construction by 2025, by which time it will have 300 satellites.

The powerful Chinese megawatt laser ‘small enough for a satellite’

The system’s powerful remote sensing image capability will generate a large amount of data every day by then, feeding the growing demand for data transmission from satellite to ground and between satellites.

Another Jilin-1 series satellite coded “02A” was successfully launched by Chang Guang Satellite Technology on June 15. It carries a new generation of optical communication payload to validate high-speed inter-satellite, and satellite-to-ground and back to satellite communication technologies, and aims to form a network with the others in orbit.

According to the company website: “As the next step, Chang Guang Satellite Technology will carry out the normalisation and commercial trial operation of ground-to-satellite laser communication, providing a technical foundation for the subsequent large-scale application of 40 Gbps satellite-to-ground laser communication payloads.”

Earlier this year this MIT PNAS paper [] was talking about why large Fock states (basically quantization of the electromagnetic field) are considered a type of “holy grail” for quantum technology, that Fock state of 100 photons can enable computations of at least fifteen orders of magnitude larger than could be handled by even the largest supercomputers today. But current state of the art was far far behind due to technological challenges....

Academician Yu Dapeng and his group at Southern University of Science and Technology developed Fock states for quantum metrology using 100 programmable photons in superconducting microwave cavity, which is by far the largest Fock state ever realized with electromagnetic waves.

A new record of X-ray communication upto 10 Mbps based on silicon avalanche photodiode detector by Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The previous record was ~1 Mbps by the same team using silicon photomultiplier detector. X-ray communication has a theoretical upper limit upto 40 petabit per second so there's a lot of room for growth

X-ray communication is the next-generation aerospace/space photonic communication technology due to intense penetration.

China tested its first 2500m ultra deep water piling hammer.

The piling hammer is the key equipment for various platforms such as offshore oil and gas and wind power to lay the "foundation" on the seabed

Under the huge seawater pressure equivalent to 250 atmospheres, it can hammer thousands of times in the fastest 3 hours, and a 100-meter

By the end of 2022, total number of valid invention patents in had reached 4.21 mln, a YoY increase of 17.1%. Number of valid utility model patents totaled 10.84 mln, up 17.2% YoY, while number of valid registered trademarks in China was 42.67 mln, a YoY increase of 14.6%..