✌️May

Batteries, track, Tech Hours, and Peace

Jun 06, 2023

Hello hello! I hope you’re doing fantastically. I’m Sasha, a 15 year old innovator based near Toronto, Canada. Welcome to my monthly newsletter, where I share what’s happened in the past month. :) With that, let’s dive in!

Moonshots

Let’s first start this off with an update about moonshots! Moonshots are a project where your goal is to make radical (10X) improvement in the world. They combine 3 things: a huge problem, a sci fi solution, and a breakthrough tech. I could not be more happy about our moonshot, the problem was definetly something I was passionate about and our overall process went very well.

We decided to focus on lithium ion battery waste, which is a massive issue that’s going to become increasingly important in the future. Lithium ion battery mining is terrible for the environment, causing excessive water usage, land degradation, and CO2 emissions. After use, 95% of these batteries end up in landfills, where they pollute soil and water, and cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage due to landfill fires. Also, all the valuable materials that we just mined are being wasted.

Lithium ion batteries power everything from our phones to our computers to the increasingly more popular electric vehicles. Accordingly, production has surged by 700% in the last 10 years.

If we were able to recycle the batteries we would be able to keep them out of landfills and from polluting, as well as recover all the valuable materials. But only 5% of lithium ion batteries are recycled. This is because recycling is slow, dangerous and expensive.

The standard method for recycling lithium ion batteries involves shredding and then pyrometallurgy (melting). This way is not very effective at recovering materials. In addition, to go from your typical tesla battery to the actual cells (with the anode cathode ect) you need to do something called pack to cell disassembly. This is done manually. And this is the problem Lithos was created to solve.

Lithos automates battery disassembly through machine learning, robotics, and a process called pyro-hydrometallurgy.

YOLO algorithm
Lithos uses the YOLO (you only look once) algorithm to identify different components of the battery with as much efficiency as possible. This works in tandem with the:
Double Robotic Arm
Our double robotic arm can physically disassemble batteries 10X faster than could be done manually.
Pyro-hydrometallurgy
After the battery is appropriately disassembled into the different components, we put the anode and cathode (which aren’t going to be able to be economically separated) through pyro (melting) hydro (dissolving) metallurgy. Pyrometallurgy is really good at filtering through large amount of material so it can eliminate 90% of the less valuable materials right away. And hydrometallurgy can recover target materials in their pure form. So by combining these two methods, we get the best of both worlds.

Through this, we expect to be able to make battery recycling 70% cheaper and 10X faster. We reduce the need for economically damaging mining, and eliminate the need for humans in the disassembly process. Through all this, we make recycling more economically feasible, which allows us to recycle more batteries.

Here’s our one pager :D

I pitched this for the moonshot competition, and I’m delighted to announce that Lithos was the overall winner! I’m again very grateful to everyone who helped us out through the process, especially our wonderful directors Jennah and Pranav.

I also had the opportunity to present this project at the TKS showcase, which was a wonderful time. I’d like to give a final shoutout to my team: Omar Alweheshy, Fatma Al Arbawi, and Adheena Fatmiah. Loved working with all of you! <3

Adheena and I are quite passionate about this project and we’d like to dive deeper. While doing so, we found out (thanks Addison!) that batteries have an identification number on them that indicates the specific type of battery.

Originally we were planning on relying on the YOLO computer vision algorithm and then machine learning to disassemble the battery, however, due to the nature of this competition, that solution is currently unfeasible. Robot and computer vision technology is simply not there yet. So if we could identify batteries through a number, and then perform a specific set of instructions for each type, that would make this project incredibly more feasible. Adheena and I are quite excited about it (we spent 10 minutes raving about how incredible this would be) and will be diving deeper throughout the summer.

I’ll stop talking about moonshots now, I’m sure you’ve realized how much fun they were for me. Here are the rest of our deliverables!

Article: https://lnkd.in/gG3_Mys2
Slide deck: https://lnkd.in/grXdtX-U
Website:https://lnkd.in/g3Jk3PRq
LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/gsHXXgXg

Space Tech X Material Science

Keerthana and I have been hard at work on our textile! (for background, we’re working on a spacesuit textile coating that’s resistant to lunar dust abrasion, or scratching.) We’ve decided on what materials we think would be best, and wrote a proposal paper about it to try to get a lab! Hopefully we are able to run the experiment!

You can see our proposal paper here!

Track

Track season is unfortunately over, it was really fun though! I competed only in a few relays. We had about 10 people from our school go to OFSAA west, which is the meet before provincials! It was very exciting. I’m super proud of the whole team. Some photos:

Quote

This is a quote that requires a bit of context. But it’s one of the most true statements I’ve ever heard.

The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.

- Ali Gawdat

This quote came from my new favourite book, Solve for Happy. It looks at happiness from an engineering perspective, breaking it down into first principles. There are 6 Grand Illusions, 7 Blind Spots, and 5 Ultimate truths that the author breaks down in the book. The main takeaway is the Happiness equation, which is:

happiness ≥ expectations - reality

I’ll explain more in the book section. But Mo was inspired to write this book after the death of his son, Ali. In the book, Mo describes Ali as an angel, a wonderful human being filled with kindness. Ali died at 21 due to a medical error, but Mo talks about how wise and at peace Ali was, even at such a young age.

Ali had this quote tattooed on his back, and he lived by it.

This reminds me of something Navid, the founder of TKS said. We were in a brainpod (think group discussion) and we got onto the topic of happiness. Navid said that we shouldn’t strive to be happy.

I was understandably confused. But then he was explaining how happiness comes and goes. We should instead strive for peace. If you were to be happy all the time, even when something terrible happened, you would need to look on the bright side of things. You would have to convince yourself it wasn’t a bad thing.

But radical acceptance is a much better path in my opinion. You can accept that something terrible happened, but if you are at peace with it, you won’t be upset. It will just be. The gravity of the battle will mean nothing.

When I first heard that from Navid, after thinking about it a bit, I’m like “this makes sense.” But not until I heard it a few more times, and especially after reading Solve for Happy, did I really internalize it.

Find peace. ✌️

Books/Podcasts

Ok soooo. This month was mostly me reading Solve for Happy. I read it multiple times :). So I only have one recommendation. But honestly, this book changed so much about how I view things in life. It was honestly one of the best books I have ever read. If you have even a sliver of interested in happiness (which I believe most people should), then you should 10000% check it out.

Whatever summary I could give would not do it justice in the slightest. Please go read it. 🙏