Companies such as Wave and Magment offer a variety of approaches for charging vehicles without plugs while they're being stored or even used, but costs stand in the way of broader adoption.
Starting this summer, the public buses in the Oberhaching suburb of Munich, Germany, won’t have to be plugged in to charge overnight anymore. Stefan Schelle, the mayor of Oberhaching, is taking advantage of the fact that an innovative startup has its offices in his community: Magment, short for “magnetizing cement,” will install its underground charging pad in the coming months. As soon as that happens, the buses will charge while they wait at the city’s main station or while stored at their overnight quarters.
In his light-filled office, Magment’s co-founder and CEO, Mauricio Esguerra, demonstrates how the new technology works: The lights on his black model car only flash when he puts the miniature Porsche directly atop the induction plate. “This works just like when you charge your iPhone on its charging pad or heat a pot on an induction range. People don’t have to be afraid of magnetic fields or anything like that,” says the 60-year-old Colombia-born entrepreneur. “The induction only gets activated when the storage battery is placed directly on top.
Patented by Esguerra, the “magnetizing concrete” is able to target the charge quite precisely. The batteries will be mounted in a box underneath the vehicles such as the retrofitted public buses. “Look, here’s one passing by,” says Esguerra, pointing out the window as a blue city bus rides past his office.
An invention finds its purpose
Esguerra grew up in Bogotá, studied physics at the Technical University Munich where he fell in love with a German woman, and started a family in her home country. For 15 years, he developed magnetic products, including the magnetizing cement, for Siemens, Europe’s largest industrial manufacturing company. The patent belonged to Siemens, of course. “But there were hardly any electric vehicles yet,” Esguerra says, “and Siemens didn’t quite know what to do with this invention.”
Esguerra changed companies a few times but, in 2015, he got an offer from Siemens. The patent for the magnetizing cement was expiring and Siemens wasn’t interested in keeping it. Would he, as the inventor, want it back? “I did not hesitate a second,” Esguerra remembers with a smile. “I’m a magnetician at heart.” That same year, he founded Magment to finally make use of the technology he created 20 years ago.
To demonstrate how his cement is made, he opens the lid of a plastic bucket filled with cement powder. Mixed in are fingernail-sized black pieces, so-called ferrites, mainly consisting of three ceramic oxides: iron, nickel and zinc. Conventionally, they are used in electronics such as cell phones, computers and cables. Molded in concrete, ferrites create a magnetic field that can transport charge to a vehicle, potentially eliminating range anxiety for EV drivers.
Molded in concrete, ferrites create a magnetic field that can transport charge to a vehicle, potentially eliminating range anxiety for EV drivers.
Magment
“Ferrites have extremely high rejection rates,” Esguerra adds. “It’s comparable to other ceramics: As soon as there is a small tear or crack, the material is rejected. We are talking about a rejection pile of 500,000 tons per year worldwide. There are mountains of unused materials.”
Exactly this fact was the starting point of his research at Siemens: “What can we do with this energy-intensive material? Back then, it was crushed up and mixed into the cement for building streets, without adding any function.” Today, too, the Magment material can simply be mixed with the conventional material and equipment of the cement industry. “We take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to build factories and don’t have high transportation costs."
In addition to saving resources, recycled ferrite also makes concrete more durable.
No plugs, no charging breaks
A young intern in the office next door winds cables around a new coil. These coils will later be lowered underground in a box, connected to the grid and encased in magnetizing concrete. The recipient box looks similar; it’s another coil but smaller, and it will be mounted underneath the carriage of the vehicle. For a car, the battery box would be 25 by 25 centimeters (about 10 inches), for a scooter five by five centimeters (about two inches).
Esguerra pushes an electric scooter into a cemented scooter rack next to his office. The charging pad is invisible. A faint beep is the only sign that it has started charging. “Childs play!” Esguerra says. “Even when someone puts in the scooter a little crooked, the charge still works. Our efficiency rate is up to 96 percent.” From this summer on, hotel chains in Munich will try out this system with their rental scooters, at a price of about 500 Euros per charging station.
Compared to plug-in charging, Magment’s benefits include smaller batteries that charge slower and, therefore, gentler, so they may last longer. Nobody needs to plug in the vehicles manually anymore. “Personally, I’ve had an EV for six years,” Esguerra says, “and how often does it happen that I forgot to plug it in overnight and then start out with a low charge in the morning? Once people get used to the invisible charging system, it will become the norm.“
There are also downsides: Most car companies aren’t ready for the new technology. Hyundai is the first carmaker that announced plans to equip some new models with inductive charging capability. “How many cars are electrified worldwide?” Esguerra asks and gives the answer himself: “One percent. And how many forklifts are electrified? More than 70 percent!” Therefore, Magment focuses on charging forklifts, e-scooters and buses.
Magment has focused most of its efforts on charging forklifts and other vehicle types that are entirely or predominantly electric, unlike cars.
Magment
On the morning of my visit to Esguerra’s office, a developer of the world’s third-biggest forklift manufacturer is there to inspect how the technology works on the ground. In the basement, a Magment engineer drives an electric forklift over a testbed with invisible charging coils, turning on the green charging light. Esguerra opens the interior of the forklift and points out the two batteries. “With our system, the forklift will only need one battery.” The savings, about 7,000 Euro per forklift, will pay for the installation of Magment’s charging system in warehouses, Esguerra calculates. “Less personnel and no unnecessary wait times for charging will lead to further savings,” he says.
To implement the new technology as efficiently as possible, Magment engineers began recording the transport routes of forklifts in warehouses. “It looks like spaghetti diagrams,” Esguerra explains. “Soon you get the areas where the forklifts pass or wait most frequently. This is where you install the chargers underground.” The forklifts will charge while in use, without having to pause for charging breaks. The method could also work for robots, for instance, in warehouses and distribution centers.
Roads of the future could be electric
Potential disadvantages might become apparent once the technology is more broadly in use. Therefore investors were initially reluctant, Esguerra admits. “Some are eager to be the first but most prefer to wait until the technology has been extensively used in real life.”
A clear hurdle today is that electrifying entire freeways with induction coils would cost at least 1 to 1.5 million Euros per kilometer. The German Department for Transportation even calculates overall costs of 14 to 47 million Euros per kilometer. So, the technology may only make sense for areas where vehicles pass or dwell the longest, like the Oberhaching train station or a busy interstate toll booth.
And yet, Magment is ramping up to compete with other companies that build larger inductive charging pads. The company just finished the first 20 meters of a testbed in Indiana, in partnership with the Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation. Magment is poised to build “the world’s first contactless wireless-charging concrete pavement highway segment,” Purdue University announced.
The project, part of Purdue’s ASPIRE (Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification) program, is financed by the National Science Foundation. “Indiana is known as the Crossroads of America, and we’re committed to fortifying our position as a transportation leader by innovating to support the emerging vehicle technology,” Governor Eric J. Holcomb said. If testing is successful, including the concrete’s capacity to charge heavy trucks operating at higher power (200 kilowatts and above), Indiana plans to identify a highway segment to install Magment’s charging pads. The earliest would be 2023 at best.
In the meantime, buses in the Californian Antelope Valley, trams at Hollywood's Universal Studios and transit buses in Tampa, Florida, are already charging with inductive technology developed by Wave, a company spun out of Utah State University. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced plans to build a test route for vehicles to charge while driving, in collaboration with the Israel-based company Electreon, and this year contracted to build the first road-based charging system in the U.S. The state is providing support through an innovative grant program.
Costs remain one of the biggest obstacles, but Esguerra’s vision includes the potential that toll roads could charge a premium for inductive charging capabilities. “And in reverse, a driver who has too much energy could feed his surplus into the grid while driving,” Esguerra dreams.
Meanwhile, Wave’s upcoming big projects are moving trucks along a route in Southern California and running a UPS route between Seattle and Portland. Wave CTO Michael Masquelier describes the inductive power transfer his company champions as “similar to a tuning fork. By vibrating that fork, you sent energy through the air and it is received by another tuning fork across the room. So it’s similar to that, but it’s magnetic energy versus sound energy.”
He hopes to partner with Magment, saying that “the magnetizing cement makes installation easier and improves the energy efficiency.” More research is needed to evaluate which company’s technology will prove to be the most efficient, practical, and cost-effective.
Esguerra’s vision includes the potential that toll roads could charge a premium for inductive charging capabilities. “And in reverse, a driver who has too much energy could feed his surplus into the grid while driving,” Esguerra dreams.
The future will soon arrive in the idyllic town of Bad Staffelstein, a quaint tourist destination in the Upper Franconia region of Germany. Visitors will be taken to and from the main station and the popular thermal bath by driverless shuttles. Together with the University of Wuppertal, the regional government of Upper Franconia wants to turn its district into “the center of autonomous driving.” Magment is about to install inductive charging pads at the shuttle stations and the thermal bath, eliminating the need for the shuttles to stop for charging times. No more drivers, no cable, no range anxiety. Masquelier believes that “wireless and autonomous driving go hand in hand.” Science fiction? It will become science reality in spring 2023.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story erroneously mentioned that Electreon required overhead cables.
Today's podcast guest, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, directs ARPA-H, a new agency formed last year to spearhead health innovations. Time will tell if ARPA-H will produce advances on the level of its fellow agency, DARPA.
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How will the agency figure out which projects to take on, especially with so many patient advocates for different diseases demanding moonshot funding for rapid progress?
I talked with Dr. Wegrzyn about the opportunities and challenges, what lessons ARPA-H is borrowing from Operation Warp Speed, how she decided on the first ARPA-H project that was announced recently, why a separate agency was needed instead of reforming HHS and the National Institutes of Health to be better at innovation, and how ARPA-H will make progress on disease prevention in addition to treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, among many other health priorities.
Dr. Wegrzyn’s resume leaves no doubt of her suitability for this role. She was a program manager at DARPA where she focused on applying gene editing and synthetic biology to the goal of improving biosecurity. For her work there, she received the Superior Public Service Medal and, in case that wasn’t enough ARPA experience, she also worked at another ARPA that leads advanced projects in intelligence, called I-ARPA. Before that, she ran technical teams in the private sector working on gene therapies and disease diagnostics, among other areas. She has been a vice president of business development at Gingko Bioworks and headed innovation at Concentric by Gingko. Her training and education includes a PhD and undergraduate degree in applied biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and she did her postdoc as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Heidelberg, Germany.
Dr. Wegrzyn told me that she’s “in the hot seat.” The pressure is on for ARPA-H especially after the need and potential for health innovation was spot lit by the pandemic and the unprecedented speed of vaccine development. We'll soon find out if ARPA-H can produce gamechangers in health that are equivalent to DARPA’s creation of the internet.
Show links:
ARPA-H - https://arpa-h.gov/
Dr. Wegrzyn profile - https://arpa-h.gov/people/renee-wegrzyn/
Dr. Wegrzyn Twitter - https://twitter.com/rwegrzyn?lang=en
President Biden Announces Dr. Wegrzyn's appointment - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statement...
Leaps.org coverage of ARPA-H - https://leaps.org/arpa/
ARPA-H program for joints to heal themselves - https://arpa-h.gov/news/nitro/ -
ARPA-H virtual talent search - https://arpa-h.gov/news/aco-talent-search/
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn was appointed director of ARPA-H last October.
Tardigrades can completely dehydrate and later rehydrate themselves, a survival trick that scientists are harnessing to preserve medicines in hot temperatures.
Formulating biologics to withstand drying and hot temperatures has been the holy grail for pharmaceutical researchers for decades. It’s a hard feat to manage. “Biologic pharmaceuticals are highly efficacious, but many are inherently unstable,” says Thomas Boothby, assistant professor of molecular biology at University of Wyoming. Therefore, during storage and shipping, they must be refrigerated at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (35 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit). Some must be frozen, typically at -20 degrees Celsius, but sometimes as low -90 degrees Celsius as was the case with the Pfizer Covid vaccine.
For Covid, fewer than 73 percent of the global population received even one dose. The need for refrigerated or frozen handling was partially to blame.
The costly cold chain
The logistics network that ensures those temperature requirements are met from production to administration is called the cold chain. This cold chain network is often unreliable or entirely lacking in remote, rural areas in developing nations that have malfunctioning electrical grids. “Almost all routine vaccines require a cold chain,” says Christopher Fox, senior vice president of formulations at the Access to Advanced Health Institute. But when the power goes out, so does refrigeration, putting refrigerated or frozen medical products at risk. Consequently, the mRNA vaccines developed for Covid-19 and other conditions, as well as more traditional vaccines for cholera, tetanus and other diseases, often can’t be delivered to the most remote parts of the world.
To understand the scope of the challenge, consider this: In the U.S., more than 984 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been distributed so far. Each one needed refrigeration that, even in the U.S., proved challenging. Now extrapolate to all vaccines and the entire world. For Covid, fewer than 73 percent of the global population received even one dose. The need for refrigerated or frozen handling was partially to blame.
Globally, the cold chain packaging market is valued at over $15 billion and is expected to exceed $60 billion by 2033.
Adobe Stock
Freeze-drying, also called lyophilization, which is common for many vaccines, isn’t always an option. Many freeze-dried vaccines still need refrigeration, and even medicines approved for storage at ambient temperatures break down in the heat of sub-Saharan Africa. “Even in a freeze-dried state, biologics often will undergo partial rehydration and dehydration, which can be extremely damaging,” Boothby explains.
The cold chain is also very expensive to maintain. The global pharmaceutical cold chain packaging market is valued at more than $15 billion, and is expected to exceed $60 billion by 2033, according to a report by Future Market Insights. This cost is only expected to grow. According to the consulting company Accenture, the number of medicines that require the cold chain are expected to grow by 48 percent, compared to only 21 percent for non-cold-chain therapies.
Tardigrades to the rescue
Tardigrades are only about a millimeter long – with four legs and claws, and they lumber around like bears, thus their nickname – but could provide a big solution. “Tardigrades are unique in the animal kingdom, in that they’re able to survive a vast array of environmental insults,” says Boothby, the Wyoming professor. “They can be dried out, frozen, heated past the boiling point of water and irradiated at levels that are thousands of times more than you or I could survive.” So, his team is gradually unlocking tardigrades’ survival secrets and applying them to biologic pharmaceuticals to make them withstand both extreme heat and desiccation without losing efficacy.
Boothby’s team is focusing on blood clotting factor VIII, which, as the name implies, causes blood to clot. Currently, Boothby is concentrating on the so-called cytoplasmic abundant heat soluble (CAHS) protein family, which is found only in tardigrades, protecting them when they dry out. “We showed we can desiccate a biologic (blood clotting factor VIII, a key clotting component) in the presence of tardigrade proteins,” he says—without losing any of its effectiveness.
The researchers mixed the tardigrade protein with the blood clotting factor and then dried and rehydrated that substance six times without damaging the latter. This suggests that biologics protected with tardigrade proteins can withstand real-world fluctuations in humidity.
Furthermore, Boothby’s team found that when the blood clotting factor was dried and stabilized with tardigrade proteins, it retained its efficacy at temperatures as high as 95 degrees Celsius. That’s over 200 degrees Fahrenheit, much hotter than the 58 degrees Celsius that the World Meteorological Organization lists as the hottest recorded air temperature on earth. In contrast, without the protein, the blood clotting factor degraded significantly. The team published their findings in the journal Nature in March.
Although tardigrades rarely live more than 2.5 years, they have survived in a desiccated state for up to two decades, according to Animal Diversity Web. This suggests that tardigrades’ CAHS protein can protect biologic pharmaceuticals nearly indefinitely without refrigeration or freezing, which makes it significantly easier to deliver them in locations where refrigeration is unreliable or doesn’t exist.
The tricks of the tardigrades
Besides the CAHS proteins, tardigrades rely on a type of sugar called trehalose and some other protectants. So, rather than drying up, their cells solidify into rigid, glass-like structures. As that happens, viscosity between cells increases, thereby slowing their biological functions so much that they all but stop.
Now Boothby is combining CAHS D, one of the proteins in the CAHS family, with trehalose. He found that CAHS D and trehalose each protected proteins through repeated drying and rehydrating cycles. They also work synergistically, which means that together they might stabilize biologics under a variety of dry storage conditions.
“We’re finding the protective effect is not just additive but actually is synergistic,” he says. “We’re keen to see if something like that also holds true with different protein combinations.” If so, combinations could possibly protect against a variety of conditions.
Commercialization outlook
Before any stabilization technology for biologics can be commercialized, it first must be approved by the appropriate regulators. In the U.S., that’s the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Developing a new formulation would require clinical testing and vast numbers of participants. So existing vaccines and biologics likely won’t be re-formulated for dry storage. “Many were developed decades ago,” says Fox. “They‘re not going to be reformulated into thermo-stable vaccines overnight,” if ever, he predicts.
Extending stability outside the cold chain, even for a few days, can have profound health, environmental and economic benefits.
Instead, this technology is most likely to be used for the new products and formulations that are just being created. New and improved vaccines will be the first to benefit. Good candidates include the plethora of mRNA vaccines, as well as biologic pharmaceuticals for neglected diseases that affect parts of the world where reliable cold chain is difficult to maintain, Boothby says. Some examples include new, more effective vaccines for malaria and for pathogenic Escherichia coli, which causes diarrhea.
Tallying up the benefits
Extending stability outside the cold chain, even for a few days, can have profound health, environmental and economic benefits. For instance, MenAfriVac, a meningitis vaccine (without tardigrade proteins) developed for sub-Saharan Africa, can be stored at up to 40 degrees Celsius for four days before administration. “If you have a few days where you don’t need to maintain the cold chain, it’s easier to transport vaccines to remote areas,” Fox says, where refrigeration does not exist or is not reliable.
Better health is an obvious benefit. MenAfriVac reduced suspected meningitis cases by 57 percent in the overall population and more than 99 percent among vaccinated individuals.
Lower healthcare costs are another benefit. One study done in Togo found that the cold chain-related costs increased the per dose vaccine price up to 11-fold. The ability to ship the vaccines using the usual cold chain, but transporting them at ambient temperatures for the final few days cut the cost in half.
There are environmental benefits, too, such as reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Cold chain transports consume 20 percent more fuel than non-cold chain shipping, due to refrigeration equipment, according to the International Trade Administration.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University compared the greenhouse gas emissions of the new, oral Vaxart COVID-19 vaccine (which doesn’t require refrigeration) with four intramuscular vaccines (which require refrigeration or freezing). While the Vaxart vaccine is still in clinical trials, the study found that “up to 82.25 million kilograms of CO2 could be averted by using oral vaccines in the U.S. alone.” That is akin to taking 17,700 vehicles out of service for one year.
Although tardigrades’ protective proteins won’t be a component of biologic pharmaceutics for several years, scientists are proving that this approach is viable. They are hopeful that a day will come when vaccines and biologics can be delivered anywhere in the world without needing refrigerators or freezers en route.