AVL's Reimagine Mobility Podcast

Transitioning To a Decarbonized Economy w/ Thomas Wallner

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The Transportation and Power Systems division focuses on assisting in the transition to a decarbonized economy, specifically in mobility, electricity generation, and storage for mobility applications.

 Argonne is focusing on the reliability of electric vehicle charging, particularly DC fast charging, as a benchmark for the success rate of refueling. 

 There must be a paradigm shift in how we think about refueling versus recharging. Some see the potential for electric vehicles to be an additional drag on the grid. However, if electric vehicles are connected to the grid, distributed batteries could be leveraged as a resource to stabilize and provide services. This shift in thinking about electric vehicle charging is a significant step towards a more sustainable and efficient future.

 Further energy savings opportunities are available with connected and automated vehicles. Extensive analysis and experimental work is underway, focusing on the impact of automated vehicles on traffic around the eco vehicle. While eco vehicles may be fuel-efficient, overall energy consumption may increase if they disrupt traffic flow.

 The integration of AI, ADAS and ADS automated driving features has allowed for a more integrated view of systems of systems. Argonne is interested in how people engage with the system, as full automation is still a few years away. This could have larger energy implications than building the perfect system.

 The focus on energy savings is not limited to edge cases but extends to the everyday, mundane cases that occur repeatedly. The lab is interested in understanding how people might engage with the system, as this could significantly impact overall energy consumption. The lab's engineering teams are working to understand how people might engage with the system and make informed decisions about adopting eco vehicles.

Dr. Thomas Wallner is the director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Transportation and Power Systems (TAPS) division. His team leverages its groundbreaking experimental and analytical capabilities to accelerate the development of sustainable mobility and power technologies to achieve the aggressive U.S. decarbonization goals. TAPS focuses on conducting systematic and deep analyses of all sustainable mobility technologies for on-road vehicles including light-, medium- and heavy-duty, non-road construction, agriculture, mining, rail, marine, and aviation sectors as well as decarbonizing stationary power generation, including combined heat and power systems. TAPS expertise and capabilities provide workforce development, demonstration, and deployment of innovative solutions for decarbonization that will support our nation’s transition to a cleaner and more sustainable transportation and power generation future that benefits everyone.

Thomas holds a M.S. and Ph.D. from Graz University of Technology, Austria, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed technical papers including 30 journal papers and several book chapters. He is an active Fellow Grade member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and has been serving as a session organizer and chair at several national and international conferences.

If you would like to be a guest on the show contact: namarketing@avl.com

Welcome to Reimagine Mobility Podcast series. I'm here with Thomas Wallner from Argonne National Lab. Thomas, thanks for joining us today. And thanks for together with us here. Help us reimagine mobility, certainly with your experience in this space and what you guys are doing at Argonne. So maybe just start out with tell us a little bit what your responsibility is, but then certainly tell us what is Argonne doing as everybody knows about our and I think there's a lot of people in like I don't really know exactly what they're doing, what their purpose is. So maybe we'll start out with that. And then let's let's jump in to really what your purpose is to help us all in this industry reimagine mobility. All right. Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. I'm always excited to share some about the work we do here at Argonne. So for those of you who don't know Argonne National Lab, we are a government owned, contract operated facility outside of Chicago. About 3500 employees. And we have an Applied Energy Technologies Directorate that specifically focused, as the title suggests, on addressing some of the challenges we have on the engineering side. Our main focus is really to help with the transition to a decarbonized economy. And in my division, which is the Transportation and Power Systems division, our focus is really on anything related to mobility, moving people, moving goods, and also in terms of how we potentially generate electricity or how else could we store that electricity to then eventually use it for mobility applications. So it's a pretty broad portfolio. The team here is about 140 people. We have sizable experimental facilities for vehicle testing, component testing. They go hand in hand with simulation activities that we have here where we simulate everything from the component to the system level and then even on the regional level, we have an agent based simulation tool that simulates, for example, the entire Chicago regional area. One aspect that's probably also unique for us here at Argonne is we have traditionally been engaged in workforce development. We have a student competition that's quite well established that Argonne has been managing for Department of Energy for probably 30 years. And so we also try to bridge this gap as we transition into this new electrified reality. How can we help transition the workforce to have new opportunities in that space as well? Very good. Thank you. Perfect. So let's let's jump right in. It's like within the year, everybody in the U.S. and globally also talks about the IRA irony Inflation Reduction Act, where a lot of some of the things you touched upon has come in, certainly maybe more on the manufacturing side. But as of late, we're now also talking about how do we get the let's call it the users of this new energy, hydrogen battery. Electric vehicles also encourage not necessarily the manufacturer, but also the users. Where is Argonne involved with this? I mean, how do you help not only the manufacturing side of batteries, fuel cells, hydrogen generation, but also then the user side to really adopt it and make consumers like like us drive these types of vehicles? And what do you see how you help with that transition? So I think we're quite broadly involved in this, as you suggested. It starts really on the fundamental side where we have traditionally done a lot of research on the technical solutions, and those include electrified powertrains for light duty, medium and heavy duty vehicles. Nowadays we're working more on even decarbonizing rail, marine aviation and some of those other modes. So that's more of the technical solution side. We've also have a very large footprint in the analysis side. Already spoke about the simulation that in some cases goes hand in hand with the component development. But we also do analysis, as you mentioned, for example, IRA, we are doing an analysis in terms of what are some of the financial incentives. We also do work with the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. When you think about the rollout of electric vehicle charging stations and considerations as to what might be an appropriate location based on technical requirements, based on maybe available great infrastructure, but certainly also always with an eye on environmental justice and equity. So we have a separate team outside of my division that specific looks at those aspects to make sure that that that rollout of an electric infrastructure is equitable for the entire society. Interesting. So let's stay for a moment with the electrical charging infrastructure. I'm a new proud owner of a first electric vehicle for the family, and I think at least between my wife and I, we were a little bit worried. Our unsure about different things about owning electric vehicle charging certainly is the common denominator. What do you see as the next step that we as a as a nation or maybe U.S. are gone? Are we as from the supply side or maybe we should be take and or should be more focused on to overcome some of that hesitation? And again, the reason I'm bringing it up is I've been working in this space for ten plus years, yet I consider myself very similar to maybe non automotive or automotive technology based people that also have maybe even larger concerns because we're not constantly hearing what's going on and what other people are doing. So what do you see and what is the government sort of tasking you guys with, with doing? Well, first of all, congratulations for taking that big step of having an electric vehicle in your fleet. My family also has an electric car, and I agree that at first a transition might seem scary. Intimidating because you hear about a range anxiety as one of the examples where Argonne is specifically involved in here are there is various aspects. One very important aspect right now is reliability of charging, especially when it comes to DC, fast charging. There is information out there and depending on which source you want to believe, there is a significant fraction of the attempted electric vehicle charging events that are unsuccessful. And I always remind everyone in that conversation that the benchmark that we come from is conventional vehicles. And do you remember the last time you went to a gas station and left without gasoline? I honestly don't know. The success rate in terms of refueling is very high, and that's the benchmark we have to consider when we think of electric vehicle charging. That's what we strive towards and that's a major focus for that joint officer, as I mentioned, and our teams here in the grid integration technology side are heavily involved in the standards based communication between vehicle and the charger, the standard six days. But there is certainly a lot of work to do in terms of developing performance indicators, refining the standards to ensure that this expectation that the consumer has in terms of success rate is something that we that we can meet. Another important aspect outside of DC charging, which in an ideal electrified future would be not the norm for everyone. We can suggest that every charging event is a DC charging event. Predominantly vehicles should be AC charged at home, at a workplace or elsewhere where you might be dwelling for an extended period of time. And what's important there is that we consider how do we reach the entire population with AC charging? You and I are probably fortunate that we have dedicated parking where we have EV charging available, but that is only true for about half the population. So how do we ensure equitable charging for for people that don't have a dedicated parking spot? So there is some interesting conversations going on with with curbside charging as one example, or other opportunities on how to ensure that people have access to charging when they need it. Another very important factor is really changing, almost like a paradigm shift in terms of how we think about refueling versus recharging. Right? It sounds so similar. So the initial anticipation is, well, it's the same thing. When my tank is empty, I go to the gas station. When my electric vehicle is low on charge, I'll go and recharge. But in reality, because of the distributed charging that we're advocating for, that might not be the case. And your vehicle during regular operation might never drop below least, let's say 50% say to charge, because maybe your daily driving is such that you plug in at night and you always top off the vehicle. There's another important factor when you consider that, because right now we're very concerned about electric vehicles as an additional drag on the grid, which could be a concern. But if we think of a future where electric vehicles are connected to the grid, whether they need to charge at this point in time or not, then all those distributed batteries could be leveraged as a resource and it might be able to actually help stabilize, degrade and provide services. So those are some of the areas we're looking into at a high level. That all sounds great, but you can imagine that there is a lot of details that need to be worked out, questions in terms of warranty, warranty, revenue sharing, what are the communication standards? Those are all topics that we our team is involved with, with partners at other national laboratories and in industry. Interesting. Very interesting. You alluded, Thomas, at the beginning a little bit that you're not just doing passenger vehicles and heavy duty truck. Right. But you mentioned rail, you talked Marine. I assume maybe EVTOLs or electrical airplanes, Maybe this is something you're involved as well. Share a little bit there, because I think that is sort of the the next frontier now that is sort of, in my opinion, at least adopt a electromobility or electrification push. And then certainly they are also with other industries as well. Certainly heavy duty did the hydrogen or fuel cell base, but share a little bit about those industry maybe again, outside of what you and I see on a daily basis, which is medium and heavy duty trucks and obviously the personal vehicles we drive, what are those in these almost other industries doing right, construction, marine rail, etc.? Yes. So historically, there was a lot of focus on light duty vehicles. The main reason is an obvious one that a majority of the energy consumed for transportation is in the light duty sector. But for light duty, we with electrification, we have a very workable solution as we see with significant uptake in terms of electric vehicles in the market. As we look at applications that are higher in power, longer daily driving or just higher energy density requirements, the all electric option might not be the ideal option. So the there was a release of a decarbonization roadmap from the US government fairly recently, but it really laid that out quite well in terms of what are the options we should consider. And you spoke about medium heavy duty trucking, right? Electrification might be the right answer for some of those locations. If we think of of long haul trucking, maybe there is other options we need to look into like hydrogen and fuel cells. And then when we get into other applications, we refer to them as dormant. There's actually an office in the Vehicle Technologies office at the U.S. Department of Energy. That's an acronym is DORMA decarbonization of rail, marine and aviation. Right. And when you think of those applications, electrification, direct electrification seems to be a much less likely answer. We might still be able to use renewable electricity, but how we store that for those applications might be very different. For aviation, for example, sustainable aviation fuel seemed to be the path that the industry is embarking on. If we think of rail in Marine, I think the answer is still somewhat open as to what might be the right application. Hydrogen and fuel cell come to mind, maybe other ways of storing hydrogen that could be ammonia or methanol or some other chemical way of storing, storing hydrogen. And fortunately, here at Argonne, we have a long history on working in large engines. We have locomotive size engines here on site. And so we have spent several decades working in that area, and we can leverage some of those resources to really try and identify some of the answers that are needed for those applications. Interesting. Interesting. So let's stay a little way with this and let's say we go back five years and what you were at Argonne doing then and compare that with what you're going to see over the next five years. What are the biggest changes you have observed and are going to observe when you look into the future as we reimagine mobility? Is it is it a tools that you have at your disposal at Argonne to do your research and do your testing and do an analysis? Is it is it the equipment? Is it simulation technology? That certainly has come a long way from five years ago, and it's going to continue with the addition of A.I. the next five years? Is it the technology that comes out of the out of the economy or from the OEMs, from all those different players we just talked about or you share with us? What do you see? What's the the big change that you have experienced? So from an application standpoint, I think we already spoke to some extent about that. We have really transitioned from traditionally having worked in light duty space and now much more focused on the medium heavy duty and some offroad as we as we spoke about. The other aspect, I think that at a high level that has changed as we used to look at individual solutions, right? You could be an automotive expert and be happy for an entire career with your blinders on and maybe not look too much left or right and I think with thinking of all the alternatives we're looking at right now, that is not the right path forward. So the term that we're using here really is systems of systems considerations. And the best example here is is electrified mobility. But we can't just look at that in isolation because if we put additional load on the grid, well, how does that impact the grid and what opportunities do we have by doing this in a smart way versus in an unmanaged way? And electric vehicles in a grid is just one of those examples. If we think of hydrogen right now, we have to think of a new refueling infrastructure. What would a built out of that look like? And you could go on and on in terms of the examples of of how systems that we previously considered separate are now being connected. And the way we approach that here at Argonne is really from a consumer needs and desire standpoint, because ultimately what we have to deliver is not the perfect technical solution, but it's the solution that customers are looking to embrace and they they are choosing modes because of individual preferences and certain constraints they might have. And the the treating them as one homogenous block isn't the right way. It's not the right way for light duty application, and it's certainly not the right way when we think of of other applications. Right. Typically we refer to some of those large applications as hard to decarbonize, which might not be true, but some of them are much easier to decarbonize than others. And the answer yet again lies into a system analysis where, you know, depending on where you are located, what resources you might be available, hydrogen might be the right answer, electrification might be the right answer. So in general, I think over the last five years, we have started to to just widen our aperture in terms of what do we need to consider to come up with the right answer versus just deep diving into into technical solutions. So I think that was probably the biggest change that we see here. And as you mentioned, improved computational resources certainly play into AI is playing into this as well. But but at a high level, it's really it has allowed us to to look at those systems of systems in a more integrated way. Yeah, that's energy. Bringing up systems of systems because we have certainly seen it evolved the last, I would say three plus years, a consistent increase in importance and staffing as well that we need for systems engineers, right where before we were sort of we also created our own Lego blocks and then assume they all came together. Today we sort of start with the systems. Okay, that then decides what the Lego blocks are before we design them and then come all together and put them together. So very, very appropriate there. Well, let's jump in on some of the megatrends. Right. So besides electrification really, or the decarbonization trend or push that you are heavily involved with Argonne and we as well we see obviously are many, many other megatrends in the automotive space or in the mobility space. One certainly is again the emergence of AI and all the different places that can be used. And I think in many places it's already used today, at least to some degree. We don't even recognize that it's truly. The other one is ADAS sort of autonomous driving. Right? And whereas a few years ago, level two was like the thing we all push for. Now it's level two plus in level three that we're really getting to. And I think we're still a little bit or several years out from truly level four to level five. But how does these are two megatrends? Again, I on one side and let's just say autonomous driving. So level four, level five, how do those two tie in to what you guys are doing at Oregon. When it comes to ADAS and ADS automated driving features? That's another area that over the last five years we have engaged heavily being a national laboratory, our Department of Energy National Laboratory, our focus is actually quite different from what's very frequently discussed, and that is the safety aspects, right? When you think of connected automated vehicles, you think of edge cases that might be of concern. And of course we all know this news stories that support that. Our interest from an energy standpoint is quite at the other end of the spectrum. And they always call these the the boring, mundane cases, but the ones that happen over and over again during a day. And if you think from an energy point of view, those are the ones if you do those well in an energy efficient way, therefore the energy savings are so we really we are focusing on this niche to some extent, while everybody else is focusing on the safety aspects. We're looking at where our opportunities for energy savings with connected and automated vehicles, we have done a lot of analysis, but also some experimental work. Some examples just to highlight to you, we we operate production connected automated vehicles. We have developed our own sensory and what we are interested in is how does an automated vehicle impact traffic around itself, around the eco vehicle. The eco vehicle might be operating very fuel efficient, but if it upsets traffic flow, then overall we might see an increased energy consumption. That's an aspect we're interested in. And then going back again to the systems of systems perspective. Another aspect that's very important was connectivity. Automation is how are people going to use it? There's some very interesting studies out there that suggest that we might see more vehicle miles traveled, because if I don't have to do the driving myself, I might be willing to accept a longer commute or things I would have otherwise done with rail or flying or some other mode of transportation I'm willing to to drive now and how that might have a negative impact on the overall energy consumption. That is another area that that we are quite interested in. I think the jury is still out. As you're well aware, the full automation is is still a couple of years out, as you had mentioned. And that's going to be very interesting in terms of how people are engaging with the system, because that could have much larger energy implications than building the perfect system. And yet again, that's where select as human behavior aspect comes in that as an engineer and never thought that that would be a major concern for for for for our engineering teams to understand how people might engage with the system and. That if if OEM or suppliers are listening to this. Thomas, how can they get a hold of you guys to try and benefit from some of those studies and testing you can do or studies you do for the government to again improve the technology and sort of future proof their vehicles or their designs that it's not just geared for the next year or two, but really something that hopefully is much more future proof. We all know there is nothing that is 100% future proof but can use this to to better their products. Is there a way to get a hold of you? Is there the best way to get information from you? What would that be? So. So we are quite being the applied side of the of Argonne National Laboratory. We are quite engaged with industry. We're part of many consortia and I would encourage anyone that works in this space to either contact us and we can point you in the right direction. Some areas that come to mind is we're in consortia that are looking at improving the reliability of electric vehicle charging. There's a joint office projects consortium that's worth highlighting. Also since we spoke about connected and automated vehicles, one topic we are engaged in with it. So you think that's communities now is how would you test a fully autonomous vehicle for fuel economy? I mean, maybe following a drive cycle doesn't make any sense at that point because the vehicle is making driving decisions. So these kinds of forward looking questions is what we are interested in. And we encourage industrial players and others that are interested in that space to engage with us and engage especially with the standards bodies, because as you know, they typically move slowly in many cases, not in all, and we need to get ahead. So when those technologies are coming out that the standards are ready to really evaluate them, to. Let's create a perfect fit for what we're talking here, how we reimagine mobility. Thomas has been great. Final question for you. What's going to be your next vehicle you're going to buy and why? That's that's a tough one. You know, I mentioned that our family has an electric vehicle and actually I would be purchased was an eight year old electric vehicle. So so we were that customer that takes the risk of buying a vehicle that's out of warranty. But knock on wood, that has been treating us quite well. We we enjoy the quiet exploration and have young kids. So they enjoyed a quiet, quiet mode of operation. Right now what I might be looking for is fully electric vehicles that that can accommodate a growing family. Plus maybe, you know, some of the toys and bicycles and everything else. We see some of those vehicles coming out. And that's something I'm particularly excited about because that the more we built out options for for any individual situation, I think the more uptake we'll see of those vehicles as well. My good would I maybe to add one more last question. Subsection A, would a hybrid fall into this for you? Are you like, No, I'm really I'm more of a pure, pure heavy kind of guy. I'm I'm personally really open to the hybrid and plug in hybrid option as well, especially since we are in the Chicago area. We have family in Michigan and so that we do this drive on a regular basis. But for most of the day to day driving, we don't need the big battery, Right? So maybe there, there, there a plug in hybrid might be a logical solution to keep vehicle weight and keep costs down. But still, for the daily driving, still be able to take advantage of electric mobility. So so certainly something that's on our radar. Very good. Perfect. Thomas, thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for sharing with you. And Argonne National Lab is doing to re-imagine mobility here and for many different applications in the U.S.. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Reimagine Mobility Podcast. If you like this episode, please subscribe and tell a friend.