Hey guys, this is Hydra from Xtraits back with another weekly video and in this video We'll just start off by going over the indices and then individual names So as usual, we'll start off with the indices so SPY and QQQ Overall SPY still looks very very strong and last week We did have one week of rest and then this week again. We continue to break out higher But yeah, overall not much to say Overall SPY QQQ very very strong, right? They continue to grind up higher every single day in every single week and this week we did have a pullback on Wednesday. We did tap down pretty hard You know, we did tap down We didn't tap down that hard on SPY but on QQQ We didn't tap down, but we did have a pretty nasty pullback these three days, right? And then on Thursday we gapped up very very strong because of the video and then overall on Friday We just continue to consolidate so SPY also same thing no gap down But we did pull back here to the 20 day and then we gapped up very very strong on Thursday And then on Friday, we just pretty much consolidation day, right? So SPY and QQQ pretty much looked identical SPY is acting a little bit stronger It didn't make it did have a stronger break up in the stronger gap so overall the market is looking really really healthy and You know just continue to grind higher like I was talking about before I will say that SPY is looking pretty extended though, right? Look at the distance from it went from 408 to 510 So again, I still think SPY and QQQ or overall market is getting a little bit frothy and getting a little bit ahead of itself, but My opinion doesn't matter right as long as the trend is still intact and then continue to be bullish Then until we lose this trend line, then that's when we want to start thinking about the other side, right? So as long as this trend is intact, I'm gonna continue to remain bullish I will be cautious because we are getting extended but as long as the trend is intact then Yeah, I will continue to be bullish and same exact thing with QQQ Yeah, not much else to say right there, right? The trend line is holding QQQ looks like it's actually getting more like consolidation SPY did break out QQQ looks like it's just consolidating here overall really really good action, you know I will also say in March and April usually in We typically do get like some sort of pullback in terms of seasonality, so do watch out for that Yeah, let's take a look at IWM and ARKK as well IWM looks like it's just chopping around It did reclaim the $199 level or so that is good and Yeah, overall I think IWM looks pretty healthy And it looks like it wants to break out of this really really long base But you know, we'll see what happens overall. I would say IWM looks pretty good as well. Let's take a look at ARKK ARKK is still struggling here a little bit still like chopping around between this area It had a nice breakout here and then it rejected that 51.3 level and now it's just pretty much Just consolidating once again, right? So yeah, not much to say ARKK does look a little bit weaker compared to the indices though Now let's take a look at some individual names first We'll start off with the big cap tech stocks. So start off with Apple as usual So Apple looks like it was trying to break that downtrend, but Looks like it feels so let me actually Matches up better when I draw like this, right? So yeah, Apple is still in this downtrend and if it can take out that 185 level Then I think it can be polished and you can see a bounce But yeah, if Apple loses on 180 level, then that would be very very bearish Then AMD, AMD looks like it's just consolidating if it can take out that 184 level, it looks like they're really good on setup But yeah, not much to say other than that for AMD. It's just consolidating between the strange over here Let's take a look at Google So Google is also similar to Apple currently in that downtrend right now, but not too bad Looks like it wants to break out of this downtrend soon. So we'll see what happens. It's forming like a longer trend flag over here Overall Google looks pretty pretty good out today Yeah, it's just consolidating if they break out of that Resistance level and bounced off and it got closer and bounced off again. Now we're just timing up Be a few more days of consolidation and then a big breakout or a big breakdown Let's take a look at Meadow. Meadow is acting really really well Did have a nice breakout on Thursday. This was a nice flag set up and then cap up and go on Thursday So overall Meadow looks really really good as well Microsoft Microsoft also I was thinking this would be a short play if it lost that 403 level and it was working And then on Thursday got up because I've been media and then I actually ended up filling this gap So was he what happens now if they close this cap now? But yeah overall Microsoft looks okay Netflix also had a very very strong Very had a strong bounce here and then it consolidated and then had a gap up again And then on Friday put in a consolidation bar. So it takes out that 591 level then looks good And media had very strong earnings report Huge gap up and then very strong close on Thursday and on Friday. It looks like it hit that 800 level pretty much Got sold into but overall and media looks very very very strong. This is the true market leader for sure and Then last but not least for the tech big cup tech names take a look at Tesla Tesla is actually consolidating here pretty nicely. So it breaks down like 200 level This is a very good long play in my opinion and the target would be 207 So this one looks actually it's actually looks pretty decent I like that flag that it's building and I think it looks ready to break out next week So this would be a bit a short-term trade Now let's take a look at some individual names. I'll start up with a BNB here BNB Airbnb is looking pretty good here. It's starting to form a flag. So this can tighten up just a little bit more This one looks really really good And also looks really good on the weekly charts. Well Really nice base in this looks like it's trying to break out of this base now So overall very very good action from Airbnb I have this another one pop looks like it's ready to break out here as well Let's testing that 58.5 level. So if you can take that out, then this one looks like a very very good long set up ARM this one also is consolidating very very well The 135 level was key. So if it takes that out, then this looks like a nice long setup and right now It's just consolidating between these two levels, right? So Yeah, you can take out 135 136 looks good. And then Yeah, the support is at 117. So if it loses that then this would be short over there But yeah, it's pretty much effort on Cart had a very very strong breakout this week This one was showing relative strength all week long and I like that volume increase in volume look at the volume over here And look at the volume here, right? So that's some clear sign of accumulation going into the stock So this is one that you definitely want to pay attention to CLSK, this is probably one of my favorite setups for next week really nice move right very very strong move off the lows Went from six eight dollars to 19 a very short period of time Big volume and now starting to consolidate those sideways here and if put in that inside bar here So overall it looks really really good. And I think yeah, it's a very good long set up over that 17 And five level and coin is similar a very very strong rally pulled back in and now it's from the low flag So if it takes our 170, I think it's ready for a bounce that's a go Havana had a very strong gap up, but it got faded into overall still looks really really good Yeah on the weekly chart looks great and clear so I broke this big resistance level and Then so this was the base and then it finally broke that big resistance level and yeah, it looks pretty solid So this is definitely one that you want to keep an eye on But this one has been acting really really well recently Let it form with a little slide here and then it broke out on Friday So this one's definitely a top watch going into next week I also really like this one cuz look at that weekly chart It's been basing for a long time and just now it's starting to break out here And really really strong volume on that break out. So this one has a lot of potential This one can easily double or even triple a short period of time Next up, let's take a look at oh and oh and this doc is starting to build like the right side of its base here String to form a little flag here. So we'll see what happens But overall this stock is acting pretty well, and it did take out or yeah, it did take out that 31.57 resistance level so overall this stuff looks pretty good and it's building that right side of the base Shark this is another earnings gap up that's also been acting really well recently From the nice flag and then broke out Friday not the best clothes But we'll see what happens next week. I have a feeling that this one is going to continue moving higher And I really like that volume Yeah, really strong volume bar on that earnings report. So that looks really good SMCI this one's still consolidating This one had a very strong gap up on Thursday because of the video and then on Friday gap down again So this one's just it's very very tricky to trade right? So I think ideal situation from some sort of flag those sideways for a couple of days and then we'll see what happens Until then there's no trade set up on this and then ask you this one's similar to a pro bono I had a very strong gap up not the best clothes at all, but this one has potential Starting to yeah build that base, right? So this one you can break the 81 level then has a lot of potential for sure But yeah, that's pretty much all I have for this week And if you guys are interested in any mentoring check mentoring sessions Always feel free to DME and we can do one-on-one mentoring sessions Yeah, if you guys have any questions always feel free to DME as well. And yeah, I hope you guys have a great weekend Thank you for tuning in There's a reason why x trades is currently the fastest growing application on the market for sharing financial ideas With over 2.5 million dollars paid in the last two years to contributors Users are flocking to see what trades the top traders on the leaderboard are sharing in real time If you're looking to grow your reputation as a trader on the internet or discuss your trading ideas with other reputable investors Click the link below and get connected with a trading mentor today completely free of charge


It is with great pleasure that I have the opportunity to introduce our speaker for today, Professor Lyndon Archer. He joined Cornell University faculty in 2000. He earned his PhD in chemical engineering from Stanford University and a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Southern California. He worked as a postdoc for a year at Bell's Laboratory, I think with Ron Larson. Is that correct? And he was on the faculty at Texas A&M from 94 to 99 in chemical engineering. And then in 2010, after joining Cornell University in 2000, to 2016 he served as the director of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell. And in the fall of 2017 he was appointed director of Cornell's Energy Systems Institute. Professor Archer is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His research contributions have been recognized within a variety of awards including the National Science Foundation Award for Special Creativity, the American Institute for Chemical Engineers, Centennial Engineer, and Nanoscience and Engineering Forum Awards. He's also received the Thompson Rooters World's Most Influential Scientific Minds, and also this was in Material Science. And not only is he a great researcher, he's also an awesome teacher. This won the James and Mary Tien's Award for Excellence in Teaching. And thrice, he's achieved the Merrill's Presidential Fellows as the most influential member of the Cornell University faculty. His research interest focuses on structure dynamics and transport phenomena in liquid, solid interfaces. Can all of the students who love transport phenomena give a clap? Alright, so I expect him to receive a standing ovation at the end of his presentation. Professor Archer is currently the James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. And I think I better stop there so that he will have plenty of time to give his presentation. But let's give him a hand. Alright, so I assume someone is going to switch to the talk. So thanks, Michael, for a very nice introduction and Arvind for the invitation. This is actually my third time visiting Purdue in two decades. And you've done well by spacing them out. Please, I have a chance to pretend that some of you forgot what I said last time. But this is quite an honor. And I think that it is true to say that there's a sort of incremental aspect to academic research. It begins with an idea to solve in this talk a big problem, a hard problem having to do with energy storage. And it does it in a field that is actually dominated by chemists and material scientists. And so when I entered this field about a decade ago, the question was what can a chemical engineer do? And what value can a chemical engineer add? And it turns out Michael is quite prescient or has a good memory. That transport phenomena is really very interesting, gives you very interesting opportunities. So that's a sort of subplot of the talk I'm going to give you today. So we are going to start big to give you a sense of why the questions I'm asking are potentially important. And then we're going to go small to talk about what are some of the solutions one can do to these problems from the perspective of molecules and material design. So like I said, I want to start by giving you a perspective and a big picture. And I was actually quite impressed with this list of 21st century grand challenges that the National Academy of Engineering came up with in the year 2008. And what caught my attention was the first two of these grand challenges. That the claim was that by, you know, for the next century, you, me, us engineers, should make a contribution that solves these 10 questions. And in particular, these first two questions, affordable solar energy and energy from fusion. And I think any of you who've spent any time thinking about, you know, how the sun produces energy, how solar energy is created, understand that actually it is from fusion. So what this list is telling us, you either learn how to use energy from our existing sun or learn how to make your own sun that is portable. So it's really about the sun, okay? Now what does that have to do with the topic of the talk, which is energy storage? Well, one of the real miracles I would say of the last half a decade or so has been the speed with which energy cost produced from solar has been dropping. Such that now levelized costs are about five cents per kilowatt hour for solar energy contracts. Which means that solar energy can compete, pound for pound, with energy generated from fossil fuel combustion, which is remarkable considering that just five years ago, the thought was that the NAE, you know, those goals were unrealistic even for a century. All right, so the question obviously then is why don't we have solar energy everywhere? Why don't we have solar farms everywhere? Why aren't we decarbonizing by essentially building our own suns or using the existing sun to generate energy? The answer is in the bottom bullet that the essence of solar energy is that it's actually intermittent. Meaning the sun isn't always shining. The end result obviously is that you either have to go where the sun is, basically, you know, rotate the panel with the rotation of the earth, which will definitely push the price back up, or you discover a way to store energy when it's in abundance to reuse it. And this is where batteries that I want to talk about come in. Now their costs have actually been also declining, but not fast enough. They're roughly about $800 a kilowatt hour in 2013 to order $200 a kilowatt hour just last year. So batteries have been coming down quite rapidly in cost, largely because of the innovations and so forth people have been implementing in manufacturing of lithium ion technology. Now obviously batteries are needed beyond just balancing renewables and that provides an additional driving force for innovation. So they're needing for leveling wind energy, which is also like solar, intermittent. They're needed by you, right? So you guys want smaller, more powerful machines. That is unfortunately still limited by the power and energy density of our batteries. And of course with every passing year, there's not a new application that needs better batteries, right? So I started off with these drones, then the cool cars. And now everywhere you look, it seems like these autonomous robots are dominating and they need a supply of energy that is portable. So I was inspired by this chart that I didn't make, but I wish I had made. That's why I started adding to it, and you see my name now associated with this chart. But it was a chart made by my colleague Yetming Chan at MIT. So Yet basically did a technical economic assessment that looked at what it would take in terms of energy cost for batteries, or the cost of batteries per unit of energy stored to produce a mortise cost, right? So remember rechargeable battery doesn't just work one time. It works over some number of years, right? And the thought is that if the rechargeable battery operates trouble-free for over three years, what would the cost need to be so that we can get to the two to three cents a kilowatt hour a mortise cost? And he came up with this chart. So the red line is says that well, if we want to get there, the materials costs have to be at least $100 a kilowatt hour or lower. And so what Yet did is organize pretty much all of the couples, anode, cathode, chemistries that he could put his hands on and did this kind of assessment of materials cost. Now it is understood that the cost of the materials in the battery is not everything. That is just part of the cost. But the analysis that's going on in the background is that if you can keep this cost below $100 per kilowatt hour, you can maintain the overall a mortise cost below this two to three cents a kilowatt hour. That would be needed to be unbalanced with solar. So the interesting result, if you look at this chart, you will see that lithium ion technologies are largely bunched up near the $100 a kilowatt hour number and materials cost, which is a good thing, which is in fact why it is that solar is today important with lithium ion technology. But if you actually come down this chart to the chemistries that will cost a dollar a kilowatt hour, ten dollars per kilowatt hour, you see there are lots of chemistries, but if you look carefully you will notice that all of them use a metal as the battery anode. Sodium, zinc, lithium, aluminum. The more earth abundant the metal becomes and the more multivalent it is, it means the energy density and the cost are both, the energy density is going up, the cost is going down, and so the energy density per unit cost goes down very rapidly. Now the question then is why is it that we don't have batteries that use metals, sodium, zinc and so forth in current circulation? If these batteries have the propensity just on the basis of the energy density of the metal anode and on the basis of the earth abundance to produce the cost and performance criteria we need, why don't we have these batteries available today? And the answer is actually pretty simple and is the genesis of the idea that I had maybe about ten years ago that I'm going to describe to you today. So the first battery or the first lithium battery was in fact of the design that yet discovered would be cost effective. It was a so-called lithium metal battery discovered when this man who actually won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry just last year, Stan Whittingham, was employed by ExxonMobil of all places. And what Stan discovered is that a battery in which we stored charge essentially plating metallic lithium in the anode discharged the battery to store the lithium as lithium ions in a cathode that could be an intercalating material could produce lots of energy at a relatively low cost. These batteries were great in the laboratory but when they were brought into practice something very strange occurred and I want to start this lecture by showing you that animation of what that strange effect is. So again at first lithium is in the anode. When the battery discharges the lithium oxidizes becomes Li plus under the action of the electric field the Li plus moves from the anode to the cathode where it's hosted. When you discharge the battery you want exactly the same thing to happen and if you're going to get three years trouble free lifetime you want this to happen repeatedly over many cycles of charge and discharge. And so the animation is going to show you why we don't have batteries of this type today. So at first everything is going great. Charge this charge but then these structures known as dendrites begin to grow on the metal anode they very easily pierce this polymer separator cross over to the cathode short the battery internally the ohmic he generated as a consequence of that short is typically enough to ignite a liquid electrolyte in the space between the cell so these things are a safety hazard and no one will insure you if you put them in say an electric vehicle. Now what caught my attention was that this is a physical problem but at least that's what I thought at the beginning. This is a physical problem can we stop it using an understanding of physics? Can we stop the material from growing in this non-planar fashion to do something more planar by understanding fundamentally what causes it to form this instability and what are the factors that control the rate at which this instability develops and propagate. So I'm a planner so I wanted to understand what the literature understood about the source of this instability and the more I learned the more complicated it seems and so I'm going to try to tell you what I learned. So I learned that there are basically two effects one at low current that's driven primarily by chemistry and one at high current that is driven by fluid mechanics. In other words you can't escape whether you're at low or high current this instability happens. At low current it is thought that what occurs is at first the metal be it lithium, sodium, aluminum reacts with the electrolyte that's present in its vicinity to form what's called a solid electrolyte interface. So this is a new material that results from the chemical conversion of the electrolyte in contact with the metal. The trouble is that for reactive metals they're quite eager to participate in these reactions and so the end result is that they react everywhere they touch the electrolyte and the consequence is that you have this sort of patchy SEI a heterogeneous interface. Remember no one knows this right so don't get carried away. People just believe this is what occurs. And these heterogeneous interfaces as you can see from the differences in color are clearly different they might have different thicknesses they might have different transport properties and so the thought is that the next step in this process is that the places along the surface that have faster lithium transport are better hosts for lithium. The end result is that when lithium deposits during the first cycle it deposits in these bumps and these bumps are called dendrite nucleates. Now many of you have heard of the lightning rod effect the lightning rod effect basically goes something like this your odds of being struck by lightning if you're going to thunderstorm is like one in a million but if you go outside with a pointy metal pole your odds are one that you will be struck. And the reason for that is that the pointy metal pole concentrates electric field lines at a point and this then makes it an attractor for the lightning strikes exactly the same thing occurs inside the battery where these bumps become essentially like lightning rods the electric field lines concentrate on the rods accelerates the lithium deposition on the bumps and off to the races and the dendrites are formed. Alright so the first step is chemistry the second step is deposition and the third step is electrodynamics or electrohydrodynamics the deposition of the metal on the bumps so you've got to understand all of that in principle to solve this problem. The second pathway is actually somewhat more interesting and one that I will start with in terms of proposing solutions that basically any electrolyte that contains cations and anions driven at a current above a certain special value called the diffusion limit which is sort of like the speed limit at which ions can move in a liquid electrolyte develops a hydrodynamic instability that looks like turbulence the fluid mechanical turbulence and that instability in a closed cell has a certain pattern and the pattern is actually illustrated here in this very nice work by Hoof since the 1990s it has this very nice roll cell structure where it has the configuration that it dumps material to certain specialized spots at the interface between the electrolyte and the electrode with the end result that you produce not by chemistry but by hydrodynamics a configuration that's very similar to the one produced by chemistry bumps that are distributed on the surface and just as in this case once those bumps are formed they concentrate felines and off to the races the dendrites grow so what in the world can one do? So we spent a lot of time now classifying the types of instabilities that could occur as a consequence of the two pathways I just described and we know that they're essentially four there's a hydrodynamic which is the last thing I told you about this sort of idea that fluid mechanics produces turbulent like effects at the interface between the electrolyte and the electrode and then there's a first phenomenon a chemical that produces the bumps that act as lightning rods that ends up causing so-called morphological instability Now there are others there's a mechanical instability that I had some really nice discussions this morning with some people interested in mechanics of how dendrites form and break and there's also a kind of chemical corrosion type instability that is quite important but in the interest of keeping this stock under five hours I will just focus on the two and the intention is not to tell you everything but to give you a perspective on how we think what we do and what the results are So let's begin here and we're going to begin with a bit of an introduction to electrokinetics which is transport inside a battery So the equations of electrokinetics are written here and they look kind of foreboding but they're simple equations so the first one is the conservation of mass the second one is the conservation of momentum this one here is the conservation of mass in an incompressible fluid grad dot u equals to zero uf means the velocity of the fluid f means fluid and this one here is the so-called Planck equation or Coulomb's equation that basically tells you that all of this is happening inside an electric chemical system it's driven by an electric field Now in principle these equations are a set of very complicated coupled differential equations that could also be time dependent that you have to solve to determine the concentration of ions and how ions move the velocity in the electric chemical cell Now people are lazy and with some justification in general and they say well it's a battery it's a closed cell so we don't expect any fluid flow to occur so we set uf to be zero we say well we're going to wait long enough and we're going to consider this problem to reach steady state and so we set the time dependent terms to be zero and we say well in principle electroneutrality is typically right in liquids so we're going to basically set the right hand side of the Poisson equation to also be zero Now when you do that you get a very nice and interesting solution to this problem that's illustrated in the right where I plot basically the flux of ions or a current J as a function in this case of the potential V that I apply in other words the driving force what we find is that the current at low potentials is actually proportional to the potential this is a so-called Ohm's law-like response right V is equal to IR so the current just responds in proportion to the potential but when you get above a current this is a dimensionless potential of order four you notice the current saturates a certain value such that this ratio J over JL is one and that value is called the diffusion limit this is where J becomes JL the so-called limiting current so it's telling you that in an electrochemical cell there's a maximum current that you can operate at once you get to that maximum current it doesn't matter how hard you drive this system you can't get any more current out of this system that's what these equations tell us reality is very different in fact what people typically find is that if you measure the current versus voltage in an actual electrochemical cell you in fact get the Ohm's law regime as predicted at low potentials the linear regime you in fact get this transition to the limiting current regime but if you keep driving the system what you deserve is that you get an additional regime where the current starts to increase with voltage and this is referred to as over limiting conductance now when this was first discovered it was highly controversial it was controversial because most of the discoveries were made in electrolytes that used water and so the thought was that this extra current was actually coming from the electrolysis of water that you are basically breaking down the water and producing electrical energy in 2013 a group at Stanford decided well why don't we simulate this we have very powerful numerical simulations where we don't have to make any of the assumptions I made earlier to solve the Nernst-Planck equations let's just solve this thing with a very powerful computer and what they discovered this is the group of Alimani is something very beautiful so what they discovered that at first everything is fine the ions in the electrolyte are homogeneously distributed more or less in the bulk except for a very small layer the so-called quiescent electric double layer or the Dubai Huckle double layer some of you may know it that's affiliated to the surface that has a slight increase in positive charges because the surface is slightly negative in charge when you drive the system at potentials above the limiting current the prediction is that suddenly you start to create these roles these turbulent roles if you drive it even faster what they discovered is that these roles become chaotic and time dependent and in fact when you look at the chaos and the time dependence it looks very much like normal fluid mechanics so-called inertial turbulence but except this kind of turbulence is coming from the right hand side of the momentum balance equation it's coming from the coupling between the electric field and the charge distribution whereas the normal turbulence comes from the left hand side which is from the non-linear term the V grad V term in the momentum balance equation so this is an eye-opener that says that even in a system that is at flow fields well below what you would consider laminar it can become turbulent in an electric chemical setting I know the hydrodynamics folks are having fun and the rest of you are thinking what is he talking about so let's move on I have to say that that is fun so we decided simulations are simulations theories are theories is this really true so we decided to do an experiment very simple experiment where we took an electrolyte we put tracer particles in this electrolyte they're dyed blue this is why everything looks blue on the right and we developed a microscopy cell where we can just watch and see what happens to those tracer particles and we can then gradually ramp up the electric field to see if the simulations are right and so the next click should give you a video of what we see and there's nothing special here and so if you look near the wall you will see that all hell breaks loose in the fluid and in fact if you look at the structure of these roles you'll see that they're not dissimilar to what the theory says indicating that indeed this hydrodynamic instability predicted by simulations this role cell instability can produce convection and can produce highly localized convection which can lead to the instability in the high current case that I mentioned earlier so that was good now we can do more we can actually map out the velocity profile in the fluid near the wall and what we discovered is that if we now map out the velocity field based on the particles the velocity has two dominant components it has a component u that is parallel to the surface and a component v that's actually perpendicular to the surface so stuff comes in and goes out kind of like that okay and so this is u this is v no sorry I lied v u okay now what is even more interesting is that if you now monitor u as a function of distance from the wall so the wall is here right roughly at about 1200 or 1180 microns it initially rises with distance meaning this fluid is moving faster as you're going away from the wall but then it starts to fall and this point is what's called a boundary layer so there's a transition in the physics that are occurring as you go from the wall outwards such that if you were far away from the wall you might think that the fluid is actually slipping at this plane okay so this is a kind of interesting result so it's slipping near the plane and in the region near the wall the fluid is experiencing a very strong shear flow right very strong shear because the velocity is changing very quickly with distance what can a chemical engineer do alright well so so I convince a whole bunch of students that polymers are the answer okay and they've all gone on to do great things so it tells you they are partly the answer okay so the reason I thought polymers were the answer is that polymers allow us to do two very interesting things right so the first is illustrated in this cartoon we can create polymers in configurations that selectively stop the fluid from moving meaning they provide a net that stops the fluid from moving high viscosity net that stops the fluid from moving but if the spacing between the net is large enough the ions in the fluid can move as if the polymer is not there now why is that important we're trying to make a battery and at the end of the day if we stop the instability and also stop the ions we've gotten nowhere okay so polymers that are entangled with big entanglement spacings this is our kind of instinct would be a good idea because it can stop the hydrodynamic flow that produces the eddies without compromising the ability of ions to get to the interface which is what a battery needs to do and so I'm not a betting person so I decided that one hypothesis isn't enough you need two okay just so that you have a trap door in case the one does not work and so the second hypothesis is actually more interesting and it comes from the structure of the velocity profile of the particles we measured by experiment so the structure of the velocity profile told us that the fluid came down towards the surface and then moved outwards came down and outwards and remember earlier I said to you that the places where it came down were the places where the bumps bumps formed this is where the lightning rods form and that is called a stagnation point and so the thought is that if I can somehow have big enough polymers localized near the interface at that stagnation point they will be stretched out and when they are stretched out they should exert very large stresses on the fluid that essentially prevents stuff from accumulating at those stagnation points those were two theories now it turns out we can test them and I will tell you how we did so again more equations I am sorry but I had to do this alright so these are the same equations you saw before these are the same Nerdsplank equations except now what we want to do is model them in the presence of a polymer and when you write down equations for a fluid with a polymer you need what is called a constitutive law which essentially tells you how the velocity relates to the stresses alright nothing fancy so don't read every word okay and we decided to use this very special constitutive law called the Roli-Poli model right so it sounds cool right the Roli-Poli model is probably the best constitutive model for entangled polymers that is out there and so we knew that if the Roli-Poli model couldn't predict what we were observing nothing good because this is quite the best model right so that's what we did and then we did what's called linear stability analysis and so the idea is that we perturbed the surface we say what if bumps form what if bumps form well obviously if bumps form they change the boundary conditions the fluid experiences and that then propagates through all the equations all the variables and the question was if we then enforce the boundary conditions that the fluid the ions cannot the negative ions cannot penetrate through the interface and the positive ions deposit at the interface to produce a current we can then figure out what the growth rate is of these bumps that is a mouthful the answer is nicer cleaner so what we can do is actually plot that growth rate for a fixed polymer concentration 0.01 so that's 1% at a fixed potential so this potential is 10 times the critical potential where the current approaches the limiting value so we are well into this zone of bad stuff alright and the question we are asking is the growth rate negative or positive or 0 obviously if it's positive it means a bump once form will grow and the thing is unstable we will get dendrites if it's negative or 0 it means the bumps once form will not grow and that is a good thing and so what we decided to do is for a fixed polymer concentration to vary the molecular weight of the polymer and monitor the growth rate for different sizes of the initial bumps and this is called the wave number ok and even you can see what occurs right so when there is no polymer 0 the growth rate initially is close to 0 and then it diverges meaning the system is unstable as we increase to 100 same thing happens but when we get to about 500 or 2000 the thing is completely stable so it's telling us that my hypothesis at least has support from theory the theory tells me that my hypothesis that the polymer should be able to selectively stop the perturbations from growing the bumps from forming is reasonable alright so next I did it ok and this is a bit abbreviated so I did it I just put the polymers in and I chose polymers that had relatively high molecular weights so these are 8 million PEO and polymers that had relatively low concentrations to make big pores like I wanted so 0.5 weight percent 1 weight percent and I used that device that I showed you earlier to basically monitor how the velocity of fluid was going on near the wall and what you can see is that I changed the concentration of polymer the shape of this structure doesn't change a lot but the values change a lot right so for example if we look at the peak value in you we see that it goes down by something of order a factor of 4 to 5 ok in the presence of 0.5 weight percent polymer and when I go from 0.5 weight percent to 1 weight percent it goes down by another factor of 5 to 8 alright indicating that I'm suppressing this flow like crazy in the presence of this polymer what we also notice is that the distance at which the peak appears right so this is where the so-called boundary layer that I mentioned before appears begins to shrink so as we add polymer to the system the boundary layer begins to shrink meaning that any flow is being confined to a progressively tighter and tighter layer near the interface where it's less harmful alright so the experiments the visualization experiments tell us oh the polymer is appearing to suppress the electric convective flow but remember what started me along this line of attack was this experimental observation that says that in real systems when I push the system above the diffusion limit I get new flow I get new current and the question was if this is true that the polymer is able to slow down convection which is the source of the new current then it should be able to slow down the new current itself and so we measure that and that this turns out to be a much easier measurement to make so we basically measure the current J versus V in electrolytes that force had no polymer where initially linear and then they diverge in this case they don't even get to the limiting current the flow is so strong the convection is so strong but as we add polymer you see this kind of bending over of the curve so you shift it you shift this region of upturn this flow region out to much higher voltages indicating that you're able to stabilize the flow at any given voltage so that was kind of nice where I started though was can I stop the instability which produces the dendrites from occurring I'll skip that and the answer is my goodness yes so the student who did this was actually a very interesting student she wasn't interested to just do it for lithium where what we're doing again is plotting how the trace of particles move which I showed you earlier but also looking at how the interface grows in the top this is the absence of polymer in the bottom is when we add the polymer so in the top what you notice is that first of all the bumps grow in a random way so they begin to become dendritic and as I deposit more the bumps grow even more if I look at the trace of particle lines I can see that in fact the theory is right that the trace of particles appear to point towards the bump indicating that the fluid flows are in fact feeding the growth of the bump as we speculated at the beginning in the case of electrolytes with polymers you notice something very different the growth is not completely flat but more uniform than in the case without polymers and what we also notice if we monitor the trace of particles there's this gentle rain they just come down uniformly across the surface indicating that the polymer is able to provide uniformity in the deposition now I said the student was special that she was really surprised by this result even though we predicted it and so she decided to do it for sodium aluminum copper pretty much anything she could get her hand on and as reported in this paper it works in every case indicating that this phenomena is really not about chemistry of the metal it's more fundamental and it's more physical and it is an indication that by stopping the hydrodynamic instability we can stop this so-called morphological growth that produces dendritic deposition so that was fun now I guess more math so we wanted to know how the polymer worked right so I kind of showed you that it worked I kind of show you that it's working had consequences for the limiting current I kind of show you that that had consequences for the deposition but we wanted to know in detail what is it the polymer did okay and so we decided to do more simulations right again it's the same equations just that they're written in a nicer way again but instead of using that roly-poly polymer model we use a polymer model called the Fini-CR model that is actually more amenable to very straightforward numerical simulations and what is nice here is that we can now simulate the whole system including the polymer stresses to basically see what's going on when it's happening so we can learn what the mechanism is by which the polymer is producing stability and so perhaps you can understand why it's so effective across different types of chemistry alright so the results are kind of cool so the left is essentially a video showing you what occurs this number Debra number is actually a surrogate for the polymer effect so a big Debra number means a big polymer effect it's kind of like a large polymer concentration and if you stare at this thing you will notice that as the fluid lines come down the polymers this thing becomes red so the polymers are highly stretched just like I predicted earlier but then what is occurring is that even before the fluid stops coming down the polymer relaxes and then moves again with the end result that the polymer causes a kind of chaotic flow in its own self near the interface producing and it's more apparent in the case of high polymer concentration producing a kind of back flow that homogenizes the down flow of ions towards the interface and in so doing we believe homogenizes the deposition of the metal at the interface so it's not that the polymer is stopping anything the polymer is actually making it more chaotic by providing elastic stresses that are time dependent that are driving this sort of chaotic motion of the fluid in the vicinity of the surface and that chaotic motion is causing the current if we measure it with a function of position to become generally flatter in the case of a polymer where the Debra number is non-zero so more bumpy in the case of a polymer where there are hot spots in the case of no polymer where the Debra number is zero all right so the lessons from this part of the talk are actually pretty simple but pretty important the first lesson is indicated here that over limiting conductance this upturn in the IV curve is in fact produced by convection and what is important is that we can extend the diffusion limited regime by using polymers that provide visculasticity into liquid electrolyte and perhaps more important is that if we arrest that convective instability we can arrest the dendritic deposition of the metal with the idea that we introduce unsteadiness in the flow that makes it more uniform in deposition so that is that is part A part B is a little shorter but just as exciting alright so this is the high current case the low current case is hard because it starts with chemistry and the question that I struggled with was like how do you make lithium not behave like itself which is want to react to everything how do you make chemistry of lithium look like the chemistry of copper for example and I know how to do that now but at the time we did this work I didn't and so I did what chemical engineers do I cheated alright so I said well I can't do this with you know enough confidence so I'm going to pretend the lightning rods are formed and I'm going to ask in physics win over chemistry that's what I'm going to ask in other words I'm going to do yeah this is fun but I'm going to come back please maybe in the questions okay so I asked this question right so the question I asked is just as in the last part of the talk what if bumps are formed can I learn something from the Nernst Planck the stability of the Nernst Planck equations now at low currents not at high currents which is the case I did first at low currents that gives me hope that gives me hope okay so so we did the same thing as before so we write down again the conservation of mass equations and this is the flux the flux has basically three terms so there's a diffusion term there's an electro migration term that goes like the potential difference and there's a so-called pressure diffusion term which was not known before this work and the way this pressure diffusion term works is actually pretty simple so it works as follows so imagine that this is the battery and this thing is the separator so remember the plastic thing that is between the electrodes so our thinking was that when a bump forms it slightly compresses the separator because there's no place for it to go when it compresses the separator what it does is basically reduces the volume that is available for fluid so it increases the pressure slightly on the fluid and so our thinking was that region where the pressure is slightly higher it means the chemical potential of the fluid is slightly higher so the fluid has a tendency to want to move away from that part to go elsewhere on the electrode so this so-called pressure migration term actually acts against the bump so if the bump grows the localized pressure is higher so you push things out more so it kind of stops itself from growing so that was just a thought now just as again with that complicated roly-poly model we can pretend that this thing follows linear stability theory we can perturb all the equations and we can solve for the growth rate what we discovered is something remarkable for the field that no one as far as we know at a time expected so we came up with what's called a stability map which are again our regions where sigma the growth rate are positive negative or zero the way you should understand this map the regions that are in white sigma is negative meaning that you will get stable deposition if you can operate even a system that you have no control of its chemistry in the regions in gray are regions where the lightning rod just takes off and the odds are one that it becomes unstable now what was surprising to us is that by plotting the length scale of the bumps against the modulus of the separator which again enters through this pressure term we found that you can get stability at any pressure at any modulus and the field used to think that this is only possible for solid state electrolytes where the modulus of the electrolytes is bigger than the modulus of the metal in other words if the modulus of your separator or electrolyte is larger than the modulus of the metal it means the bumps just can't go through it what we are saying here not true we are saying that if you design the system right in such a way that lambda the length scale of the bumps are smaller than a certain critical value any modulus should be able to stop the dendrites from brewing controversial the stuff that you should be thrown out of a room like this for saying but we said it and then we did it so the question was how in the world can you do this well you can predict what that length scale needs to be by looking at what the normal parameters are in a typical electrolyte and it turns out for a typical one molar LIPF6 EC DMC popular electrolyte that number is 250 nanometers so it says if you can keep those spacings if you can keep those bumps below 250 nanometers you can stop dendrites from brewing in any electrolyte and so the way we did it is to create what are called nanoporous electrolytes in two different configurations so one are electrolytes created by cross-linking nanoparticles so these things are like porous media where you control the pore size that 250 nanometer number by basically the length of the ligands that connects the particles so that's relatively easy to do chemistry from chemistry so the end result is that you make plastic like sheets where these sheets have a secret that they're porous and this is what the secret looks like so the black spots are the particles so ions can't move through them the gray spots are the empty spaces that ions can move through and again by controlling the number density of the black spots I can control the gray space size so I can control this length scale lambda okay the other system is cleaner and actually more amenable to fundamental studies so what we decided to do is to create using anodized alumina which makes very beautiful porous structures where you can control the size of the pores by the voltage at which you create the porous structures to create things that have pore sizes at range I will show you in a minute all the way from a few tens of nanometers to hundreds of nanometers and these are straight pores so we can test the predictions somewhat more rigorously so to cut a long story short we used two different methods to evaluate efficacy so one method is called the galvanostatic plate strip experiment so we apply a constant current and take lithium or any metal for that matter from one object in this case a foil oxidize it to the ions and deposit on the second element again a metal foil and we do the constant current so we take lithium from one place strip it plate it on the next one once we do that for a certain period of time we reverse it and we basically measure the voltage if the system was behaving in a simple Ohm's law like way we would get a response like this an oscillatory response where the amplitude of the current remains more or less the same okay what we observe in general is that this kind of Ohm's law like response sustains for some number of cycles in this example for about 55 plate strip cycles but then it reaches a point where something gives and we have a sudden drop in the voltage meaning that there's a lower resistance pathway somewhere this is a dendrite this is a short indicating that you can quantify very easily the effectiveness of this membrane either based on the amount of charge past CD at a time the dendrites are formed or by the number of cycles at which they're formed now we like this number better because CD would be infinite in the case of something that stops the dendrites entirely such that it's reciprocal would be zero so this gives us a really simple figure to know whether this theory is right and whether the materials we've developed are effective and so so here are the results and so you look at them for yourselves so the red is the electrolyte without the nanostructured membrane and so what you see is that after roughly about 50 hours it's random it goes to zero then it cranks up back and then it goes to zero again and that's what we did this is what happens with a 20 nanometer porous structure it goes on for hundreds, thousands tens of thousands of hours and then the challenge becomes how does a student graduate if you just keep going so I wanted to make this thing fail because we had to know when it fails so we increase the current we increase the current the values that are not even normal in lithium cells and you can see it just goes on and on indicating that we've completely eliminated the propagation and proliferation of the dendritic bumps in these systems so the question was okay 20 nanometers is a lot bigger than 250 what happens is you begin to approach the limit specified by theory so we started to look at bigger and bigger AAL structures so 20, 50, 100, 200 300 at the highest current density and I think what you will notice here is that somewhere between 200 and 300 things went awry which is just remarkably consistent with the theory in fact I don't believe this to be true just so you know but it is true at least in this instance that it's almost right on the money telling us that the cutoff length scale is consistent with what we predicted theoretically there are lots of other things we did but I'm not going to bore you because I noticed that in trying to set the slides up I overstayed my welcome so I'm just going to end with this kind of summary slide that essentially says my group kind of went wild after this occurred and some of you who know my polymers were keep asking me when are you going to do more polymers were and the reason I can't is that students have been just excited by this result and we've been trying pretty much everything they can get their hands on from cross link polymers to this structure that I showed you to that structure very recently we have this very nice paper that showed up in science that looks at epitaxial control of the deposition and the framework is beautiful in that it really gives us a way of once we understand the stability of the interface it turns out that with the structure the stability of deposition so that's kind of what I told you in the second section the main result is that we're kind of excited that in a variety of configurations we can design electrolytes that appear to overcome this problem of battery failure or metal battery failure by dendrite formation on proliferation it's not over there are other things to work out and I'm happy to answer questions about some of those other things but I want to just spend a moment just saying thanks to the students who did all the great work so these are all just fabulous students one of the things we have at Cornell are just exceptional students like your professor Chang Li Yuan who many of you know who just go beyond beyond in terms of how they execute work and the elegance at which they do things and I do a lot of collaborative work with Don Koch who's a really nice person to work with and Jeff Coates who's probably one of the best polymer chemist I know and a lot of our work was actually funded not by the DOE as you might imagine but by the NSF who kind of saw this as a way of understanding how polymer structure might influence energy systems of the future alright so thank you for your attention and I'm happy to take any questions you've got we will start with we will start with a fourth of a question from students we will start with questions from students one transport question yes does the counter flow originate from the movement of the counter ion and if so does the transference number have an effect on the turbulence that's a great question so the answer is the flow actually results from the coupling between the concentration of the active ion and the electric potential the counter ion enters because electroneutrality would want the concentration of the counter ion to be everywhere equal to that of the active ion which in this case is a metal ion once you get a separation between those two as required to create a gradient in the concentration of the active ion you have an electric field penalty for that separation and so it sort of feeds on itself so that gradient creates a high electric field and is a product of that gradient and the electric field that drives the instability alright so it's so if you had a single ion conductor which is I think what you're alluding to something that literally prevents the gradient from occurring in theory we would expect to not have this instability at all and we have some work that shows that as you approach so-called transference numbers of one where you're not allowed to separate the ions because you're tethered together you do in fact have a suppressing effect that's bigger than what you see in the case of a neutral polymer one more question thank you I was wondering about the first part of your presentation regarding your really pulley model so I was wondering were you testing like polymers like for example I noticed you had done something with PEO so I was wondering if you had done some testing or knew if there was a difference between testing with the linear PEO polymer versus a like a graphed PEO polymer like PEGMA or something like that so that's something that's in our future and it's my way back to polymer science right it's an important question because there's a pretty large literature that tells us that the way a polymer stress is developed in response to share depends a lot on its architecture in particular polymers at our branch tend to stretch more and offer much larger elastic resistances than polymers that are linear and so a graphed polymer would be something that would be of a lot of interest but that would be definitely a possibility so what we will do is bring this part of the day to a close so let's thank our speaker


Did you hear what the Kareem story he tells about Will Chamberlain? Is it Kareem's face? No. You don't listen. Kareem and Will during the elevator, okay? Guy walks into the elevator, third person's in the elevator.  He goes, hey, how's the weather up there? Which is like a hacky joke that you say to tall people. He's been on him his brain. He hits on him and he goes, it's raining. Oh yeah, I've heard that joke from tall people before. Probably hitting the fifties though. It's going wild, it's going wild.  It's not a hip-hop, it's a show.  It's the pop. He's a fish.  My phone, somebody. I thrive in quick hitch, man. I know, I know. I know.


So anyone else who wants to participate in the conversation about the overarching commission and the one pager that was distributed, we'd love to think with you informally about the goals of this process, about how it coordinates. We're fairly confident that we can raise money for a staff person, but everything will depend on our ability to do that. I can't promise in advance the commissioners would be appointed by a committee of Montpelier Live, the Montpelier Foundation, and the city for efficiency. On the bottom of that sheet, it describes some of the roles and responsibilities that we're looking at, the kinds of expertise that to be involved in connecting and coordinating and convening all different groups to answer some of these core priorities. The commission will need architectural expertise, hydrology, engineering, environmental science, downtown development, fundraising, land use planning, property, connecting to property owners, renters, low income individuals, nonprofit management, financing clean energy, development, housing, public health, resilience planning, experience, and other pertinent skills. And of course, we're very dedicated to involving young people and looking through the lens of diversity to make sure that we're connecting to the whole of the community and giving voice to people. So you need all of that, diversity, expertise, skilled professionals, leadership, and people with life experience that needs to be at the same table. So that's the outline. And we'd be glad to hear your thoughts about and would it be useful if I went through the application process now or we'll do so at the end. So be glad to hear your thoughts on the way this can work. Okay. I just think that it should be taken under consideration that a member of the commission be someone with lived experience of this flood. So that whatever other qualifications they might have, that it's very important to have someone on the commission who actually had, was impacted by the flood, experienced it in some substantial way. I mean we all experienced it to some degree, but I think someone who actually lived through it needs to be there. Thank you so much, sir. I was just curious how when the commission was conceived when I thought this whole forum was to actually decide and figure out what the commission was and how it was going to operate. Yeah, I think that as a group, the sponsoring organizations were hearing the same things over and over about the absence of leadership, the fact that leadership was disquiet in the community, that everyone was saying, yeah, right, have another meeting and it's just going to stick the things on the wall and who's going to follow up and is there going to be any staff leadership to do this. There was also a strong sense that this shouldn't be owned by the city. There were some who thought this should be entirely separate from the city and that would be an advisory group or a political group to push against the city. And as we thought about it, we thought you want to add up the skills and strength. There's 100 city employees. A lot of them are working on a lot of these issues now. You don't want to disconnect from their knowledge experience and the hard work that they're already doing. And as outsiders, try to duplicate all that. You want to add to it with vision, with connections, with leadership from the community and engagement of community residents to move things forward. So all that was involved. But we also thought we couldn't wait that, you know, this process has been really fast. To put this together has been very, very intense to do all of this in a month and a couple of days. And we didn't want to let it just slide. We felt like we should start getting organized and start putting this in. So we've already started looking for resources to make this happen because we feel like there's a great urgency to follow up on the public feelings. Yes, ma'am? Okay. Thank you. And because, Sandra, thank you for being here. And you know, we got to thank the bridge for your absolutely sterling coverage of all of this work. It's been just, it's been wonderful because you've been the cornerstone of knowledge around what's going on. And it's just so important. Thank you. Dan? Yeah, Paul. The state is kind of the largest, oh, Dan Jones? Hi. For those, the state is the largest sort of landowner, et cetera, and participant. Are they going to be involved in this and how or has that been considered yet? Because it seems to me like in terms of forming this, they should be a critical component. Yeah, it's important to know that this has happened so fast. But we did put in a call to the state, to buildings and general services. They're the biggest landowner in downtown Montpelier. They've got a lot of business buildings that are flood impacted. And parking lots that could absorb water potentially. So, yeah, they're on the radar. We've had a call in to them today. We're setting up an appointment to think about their connection to this. It's possible the state could be a funding partner as well as an instrumental partner in moving things forward. Yes, ma'am? My name is Lawrence Webster. This is a small procedural suggestion idea. Throughout this whole process, the past month and a half, I've been wondering where's the Regional Planning Commission and why are they not here and why is their voice not loud? They know this stuff already. A lot of it, I think, or should. And some of it's in their comp plan. I think the City Manager, Executive Director of Montpelier Alive and President of the Montpelier Foundation are given as founding members, add a representative of the Regional Planning Commission, please. Thank you so much for that. We've connected with them. The Executive Director of the Regional Planning Commission is here tonight, probably in that conversation about the watershed management. This is what they do plans, right? We need plan political muscle and dollars that actually changes the field and changes the watershed. And so it's not just the planner, but we do have planner on the list as someone and it could be the Executive Director of the Regional Planning Commission or it could be someone else that connects directly to them. But the point's very well made. Sir? My name's Mark. I have a concern about the creation of this thing so closely tied to the existing, the city government and to Montpelier Alive. Will this body have the ability to say, the bureaucratic roadblock to the course of action that we see as needed is not overly sympathized within this and say, sorry, we're going somewhere else because you can't provide the solution. I feel like it's very important that the council itself not be beholden to the city to say we have to manage up to the city's expectations or to, in the interest of continuing to have a voice and be part of that, to please the city manager or Montpelier Alive or any government entity. I feel like it's very important that this group be able to function outside of and independently of any government body. That is a great observation and it's absolutely the intent of this. The city would be part of the committee that would select individuals to be on this. There might be one city employee on this. There's not going to be people who have city votes versus people who have Montpelier Alive. I don't expect Montpelier Foundation or Montpelier Alive, they may have a one person on this commission, but most people are going to be people throughout the community that apply to be part of it. So there will always be a voting majority of people who are completely independent and this group will be independent of the city in terms of its decision making and the chair and so forth. The challenge is that you need to also build unity so you're not just a protest group and that you are using money effectively to drive things forward and connecting to existing resources to move things. So we've tried to find the right balance point and I really appreciate the question because I think that this isn't a done deal yet. It's a deal in process. What we have on paper is our best estimate of what the plan is, but we do want to already, we don't want to wait. We want to start asking people to apply immediately to participate in this process. Yes, state your name please. Yes, certainly. Hi, I'm Kate McCarthy. Mark, thanks for your point. Everybody, thanks for your points. I like the idea of the independence of this group as well as those connections for, sure. I like the idea of the independence of the group as well as connections for collaboration purposes. What authority does this group have? It does not, yeah, it does not have authority over the state or over state funds or over the city. It's a partnership that has the ability to raise big ideas in a way that because of the situation of it following from all this public engagement and because it's got support from Montpelier Live and the Montpelier Foundation and the city, it's going to have a loud voice as an advocate beyond Montpelier. It's going to have the ability to coordinate and invite people together and any number of these groups on the wall could turn into working parts of the commission immediately. So it could engage a lot of residents. There's probably a hundred people ready to be involved in this work, right? And so its goal is to be an active facilitator of public process to drive this. And everything we hear from the city is that they want that. That it's, you know, trying to convene leadership across the watershed is beyond their scope of work and their imagination, their sense of what they can do. And so this is going to pick up a lot of things that are beyond, on the other hand, there are existing committees of the city that are doing great work and are going to be probably looking at some of these issues and saying, yeah, we're already doing that or we could be doing that with more volunteers. And we'd like to use this as a way to add to the strength and volunteers that are working in those processes already. I'm going to come to you and first. Okay. Don't touch the mic. Okay. I think what people are talking about is the tricky part. It's what is the relationship to the city and the state and where does this group get to have a voice? And because there's not, you know, necessarily a lot of authority here, but if you can define early on where the group and how the group gets to have a voice with the city and the city council and maybe with state committees, that would be really helpful. I also just wanted to put a plug in not to try to have so broadly representative of a group that it becomes another advocacy group, a mini legislature. I really like smaller committees like this with the idea that people are thinking strategically and not just representing something. I mean, I appreciate Andrew's point about having people with lived experience on it, but I wouldn't want it to appoint people in a way that it became an advocacy group. We know and we don't want to build a 28 or 30 person commission and there may be many people who can serve multiple roles who have resilience expertise and they're an architect and their house was flooded. So there's going to be ways to look at this in aggregate, but we don't know who's going to want to be engaged in it, so we'll see. But I think all these points around its governance and how it has voice, I think right now there's a sort of seamless interconnection between this process and the city. Everyone in the city government is listening. They're dedicated to hearing from citizens right now and this is really a strong step and this is a structure that can continue that. Does an external authority established by the three of us have any power over our elected officials? No. You know, we elect officials who represent us legally. This is an entity that doesn't have power to tell city council what to do. On the other hand, city council is looking for advice and guidance to think big about the future and this would be a tremendously valuable foil to set some of those directions and build big ideas like you were describing that can have transformational impact. You notice that things like closing this school didn't end up being prioritized at the state house or moving the downtown up the hill. Didn't get prioritized in the last sessions and I don't think it was because people were saying, none of that is useful. I think it was because people were saying, let's establish structural ways to move the ball that will be in a situation to evaluate those big opportunities and be a driver for them rather than just have a big plan that doesn't go anywhere. And this is all about, at least to my mind and I think to the organizers, it's about driving. It's not just an advisory group, it's a group to drive. Dan. Okay. I think my worry was too big and too cumbersome, echoing what Stephanie said. And I don't know if you've got any models in mind of places that have done this. The thing that came to my mind and I don't know if it's relevant, but there was a whole group put together in the medical establishment during COVID and they had a tripartite leadership and they had links to all these various institutions and so on. And I think of a sort of hub and spoke idea with this so that you could get expertise, but you didn't have to have a commission of 40 people. I think that would be. I think that's very wise and I think as we think about these groups, the potential for the formation of leadership teams and different aspects of this. Do you have a recommendation for the number of commissioners? Between 12 and 18. Lower. We've been thinking maybe 15, but that may, and some people think that's high. So. One of the things I've noticed from a number of friends who live in surrounding towns is the sense that Montpelier is the downtown for central Vermont, that we don't have, the Regional Planning Commission is one focus, but it is kind of diffuse and bureaucratic. And I don't have a specific proposal here, but rather, I think there has to be a way of having the voice of our surrounding communities involved in this because I think they're part of our decision system. They're gonna be part of our support system and they're gonna be part of what's influenced by the whole thing. I think that's a wise, I mean, just I'm a facilitator, so I shouldn't say that's a wise thing to say. But I think usually when we've done community processes, anyone who cares about that community, who goes to school there, who's a teacher there, or who is in the next town and that's their downtown, anyone who has a psychological identification that wants to help. Why would you turn them away from being on a committee to support resilience in this community? So I think it's inclusive that way, Kate, and then we'll go to... I know this isn't an official city committee, but I'm wondering, we implemented something in the last year or so that provides stipends to folks who serve on committees in case they need to pay for childcare. And it's just a wondering if that could be extended to this commission just as an equity thing that would help encourage folks to apply that might otherwise be able to afford it. It's a great idea and it's one that we're thinking about that people have brought to the table and right now we don't have a dollar. Every dollar that was raised by Montpelier Foundation, Montpelier Live has been pledged that we weren't gonna keep anything for our own expenses in doing this work, we're gonna pour it all out through. So it will require us to raise a fair amount of money and as we do it, you'll see in the sheet, we're thinking, we don't wanna build something that has to be perpetuated forever, it has to demonstrate its value to be perpetuated and so we're gonna do an evaluation after two years and we would be looking to find funding for it for two years, but I think it's very much on the table. And probably we need to decide that early rather than late. Yeah, good thought. So I just wanted to share some of the conversations that's happened from the Zoom. So one person said we need to regain our confidence in Montpelier leadership. Another said we need to have a way for community members to invest in the resilience effort like bonds. Many of us are retired and can't give away our money but might be willing to lend it. Someone noted this group sounds like an advisory group. Someone noted folks from Waterbury spoke at the last meeting, they had a very effective track record and moving forward an ambitious agenda over a 10-year period based on community commitment to preventing another Irene disaster. This seems similar. Someone asked how does a committee like this drive when it doesn't have the oomph to do it? And another one, where will the force come from to move our thoughts forward? Many times ideas go to the city and die. How do we prevent this? And someone called for new council members and somebody else said major changes require state and or federal money which people agreed with. And there was a call for student youth members of the commission. Well, some great, great thoughts and great contributions to this dialogue. Thank you. You sir and then Kate. So what I think I would like to see out of this is of course coordination and cooperation with the city. Also the ability to say once the city's ability has been exhausted to be able to go to the state or the federal or any number of these ideas, it seems is a subset of this committee, right? Whether it's raising funds at the federal or philanthropic level, whether it is coordinating efforts. I've poked my head into maybe a half a dozen or more small groups that are trying to do something and they all have one thing in common which is everyone has heard of some other small group trying to do something and it's a diluted sort of energy of a lot of people who have a lot of willingness and a lot of intelligence and passion about it but it's uncoordinated. But forgot my other point so. Yeah, it's a great perspective that as a convening center for the future of Montpelier it can convene and support any number of these groups. I mean one thing that someone said Montpelier's the place where good ideas go to die, you know, it's because we organize in opposition to each other around ideas and we start to split them off and this is a way to have a convening entity that pays attention and provides mutual support between different groups that are working on this long-term recovery and the resilience agenda and drives for results, pushes the city, pushes its committees and also raises funds to have some resources to help move pieces of it forward.  Thanks Paul, Kate McCarthy. I'm curious Paul, what do you think, I wrote it down, what do you think is the best way for a group like this to maintain its focus and avoid mission creep? By definition a convener is going to be broad, it's going to be plugged into a lot of different topics and people and ideas and help to bring those together. The risk of the flip side of that can be inaction or mission creep, so based on what you've seen, what do you think? You know, I've built like 15 policy councils and I've run processes like this in communities all across the state. The first answer is it's all about leadership and it's the same question about how do you drive the agenda in a consistent way? It's like you need to have a really vigorous, clear chair that facilitates and pulls people together with very different ideas but finds the common ground in common direction and helps them be effective. And that's going to be essential and then a really strong membership of strong willed, sharp people who want to drive change and every seat's going to be super important on this working group. But beyond that I think you have to convene and pay attention to the needs of people and you have to keep a laser like focus that you're, you know, just as this ending hunger which is really crucial to us and we care about that we keep to the parts that are going to drive recovery and resilience in a consistent way and I think people understand that and I think you can test ideas and go back to the people to renew yourself regularly. So this is more of an asks. Andrea alluded to it earlier that this is a huge lift and nobody can do it by himself. So before everybody goes, ask for a show of hands who's willing to put time in and help with this. Right now we're putting out to put in an application. So you know to be members of the commission. Yeah, we're going to have this process. I think that we're going to need volunteers for all of this stuff. My problem is I'm like, I'm a volunteer and I'm not going to do it. I know I'm not going to continue to coordinate this. There needs to be an executive director that drives this work and there needs to be a commission. Right now I'm making a lot too many decisions about what's the next agenda? How does this work? It's got to be led by a determined group of people who are thinking together in a diligent way regularly. It can't be done by an individual. And so this takes it to that other level and a level where you hire an executive director. And that should happen very, very quickly. You know, we're really interested in that. I would say that makes it more important to me that the makeup of the commission be more focused on representing the community. I know there's a need for expertise and all that stuff, but somehow people have to be vetted based on their ability to provide a perspective for different parts of the community because we know that the experiences of the flood have been really different. Sorry, I thought it was loud enough. No, that we need, just like I said, it needs to be someone who's lived, got lived experience with this flood. We also need people who have lived experience with the different aspects of the community if the expectation is to come up with something that the community is going to get behind. Thank you. I think that goes from the commission to the committees and task forces that may form around all of this. So, yeah. If people be more brought in to whatever the commission. Jackie Dagger. Yeah, I completely agree with that being able to represent lived experience. I think when I'm reading about this group and listening to all of the great comments here, I'm thinking about the value of bringing together a group like this with these different experiences and what that could lend to the city and other decision makers. And in my mind, like having these different perspectives together in this group is an opportunity to think about where things might be, where timelines might be conflicting, where prioritization is important because this is like the things we were talking about here, they're all going to have competing timelines. And with experience like this from these different experts, that's really valuable in helping prioritize certain actions or even convening groups to educate this commission about the issues. And it seems that one of the outcomes of something like that could be recommendations on how to approach some of these larger projects. And that could be a great way for this group to work with the city and other decision makers. Great, thank you. Yes. I'm definitely, oh you, I'm definitely wanna be sure that the feelings and experiences of the city are represented. But I see this group as a steering committee. When I think of a commission, I think of a lot of people sitting and listening, but not necessarily being in a position to start implementing. And to me, people in this group are gonna need to have some ability to either do it or influence it getting done and recruiting people to flesh out whatever is starting to emerge as important priorities. And not just make recommendations to who. Those recommendations need to be things that they begin to say, yeah, this could work. How do we test the waters so that we're not missing something that's important to some part of the city? I totally get with that. But this idea that they're alone gonna sit on the mountaintop and try to figure this all out themselves or something. I think we need to think of them as active doers and coordinators and schedulers and kind of a little less lofty. Thank you. Yeah, we'll go online and then we'll go to you. So a couple additional online comments. One person noted, this group needs to be driven with a passion of an effort to preserve our town in the midst of climate change. It can't get lost in process. And when there are roadblocks and needs to be able to re-raise the critical goal, it isn't about official authority to get things done. It's about the collective commitment to achieve important things. Someone's already asking how to apply, which I think you're gonna talk about at the end and that's exciting. Do we have the document? Yes, I can. Because you should post it and it will show them how to apply at the bottom of it. Great. It'll also be press release going out today or tomorrow, tonight or tomorrow morning. Perfect. So it'll be posted and press release. Decisions will be made by individual commercial property owners, business owners and homeowners. Decisions are being made now, underscoring the urgency. And I was just gonna note too, I mean, we've talked a lot about kind of limitations of the city or hope, how does this group push the city? And I just wanna note, like, I hope this group is thinking beyond the city. The city government does certain things. The state does some things. Non-profits in our community do something. So I would hope it would come in with a much more broad vision, which I think is what's reflected on the wall and look at what does the city do well and then what needs to not be the city or needs to be a partnership of the city and other actors. So if I'd like to tag on to the idea of the doers and to share a little bit about how management works and where I work, all of our so-called middle management is volunteer force. No one is paid for those positions. No one really has bosses. But what we do have is a regional leader and then below that person, there are leaders that cover specific areas. In the case of business, it's things like growth and performance, diversity, equity, inclusion, et cetera. And then each of those leaders is free to form their own team to make sure that many voices is heard and then that leader comes back to the group. So it keeps the main group somewhat lean and small. I think there are about five or six of us, but the entire leadership team is somewhat large. There are maybe 30 or 40 people, but it doesn't get bogged down. And then each one of those leaders is tasked with either their task for that week, month, whatever it is, or delegating that task to someone else on their team, whether that be the watershed person or the raising money person or the shouting upstream at the state and federal government person, et cetera, they have deliverables that is their responsibility to deliver. We have to close up. And hey, Ben, Ben, can you run down and tell everyone to come back? Thanks, not two minutes, 30 seconds. As you could anticipate, I'm a little disappointed about the results. You could have anticipated those five two weeks ago, even before you wrote them coming up. There's nothing exciting here. There's nothing that's going to engage anybody, not because it's becoming out out there, because there's no room in this process for those kinds of ideas. We need to find a way to get those ideas into this process. I suspect that people will bring these ideas into these committees and things will be driven forward. So I'm optimistic, but thanks so much. Sarah, is everybody coming back in? Okay, we're going to shift in just a second here and start talking about points of vision, but we also want to hear from our facilitators. So we got to move fast.


So, 8 months later, it's finally obtainable in-game, but was it worth the wait? Today people, we take a look at the mongol. How's it going guys? My name is DPJ and today I bring you another BL3 video. If you do enjoy it, leave a like, really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. So the mongol is a weapon we originally saw in gameplay of Borderlands 3 before the game was released. Upon its release though, the weapon was nowhere to be seen. Today, May 14th slash 15th has been recorded on the border of midnight, gearbox have made it available. So, 8 months later, they fixed what people thought was a bug holding this weapon back. And if you were sitting there thinking maybe it was purposely held back, I mean that could indeed be the case, but it has been in the game files since release and I can confirm this as I've seen many many people play with this thing on PC and have had it for months. But hey, it's finally here, it's finally a legit weapon we can farm in game and while people I think it's actually quite good. Most people will be asking though, is it top tier, is it one of the best weapons in the game? Is it the new best launcher in the game? Simple answer to that is, it isn't the best, but you gotta remember now things are going to be scaled with the two upcoming patches Gearbox not long spoke about. We will see things change in terms of weapons getting more powerful and some of the more powerful weapons being brought down a peg or two. Weapons haven't yet been discussed with us, so we don't know exactly what they are, but in my opinion I'd expect to see the OPQ system receive a nerf, the yellow cake for sure receive a nerf, possibly the lob, although I hope not, and maybe a few other weapons. Either way things are changing, so this weapon in probably a month from now could be much better than what it is now. So this mongol is a weapon exclusive at the moment to funk and sloth who can be located upon Conrad's hold on Pandora, and as far as I am aware it drops with any element the game offers or none at all. The mayhem 10 though and I do believe is close to that 30k damage though, the highest one I think I've seen is 27k damage, but the only ones I've seen with that higher damage have no element, that's not to say they don't exist though. Man is a horde animal, consumes reduced ammo per shot, just kidding, no it doesn't. Well actually that isn't true. If you think about how this thing works because yes it consumes 2 ammo per shot, but it fires up to 14 shots per 2 ammo it consumes, and you can see this when you slow it down. The longer that initial shot that initial rocket travels the more it shoots out which is pretty cool. So this is a weapon you do have to think about using, use it at a range to make it more efficient. Now using it against a single target it does great damage for sure, but it isn't on that scale of the current yellow cake as that thing's damage is almost instant and when you compare it to this, this is quite the opposite. Now this mongol does have a great great splash damage though, which in my opinion is how you make the most out of this weapon at a short range, as you can see here against Gigamind. Damage is fine yes, but when you hit him with that splash damage when he is cornered damages on another level. And using it with the slaughter shaft I for sure was having super super fun. And no it isn't the most powerful weapon in the game, but if used correctly it's definitely up there. Now it seemed to me like this thing's drop rate was extremely low, me only getting about 3 variants in about 50 runs and all was trash. So credit to my pal Silent Wraith for their Sentinel Croyal version you can see me using within this video. Now I actually really like the weapon and using it with my current build it's super great. Ammo is fine because I've counted that with the fish slap and the cut purse, meaning I get my ammo back quite often and this means I can use heavy weapons such as this for a longer period of time. And if you are interested in the builds I've actually got two, I've got one I built around a chaoson which you basically get in for an ammo 4 and I built another one around a yellow cake. This works great with both, but it's definitely more efficient with that yellow cake build. But both will be linked in the video description if you do want to check them out. They make easy work of mayhem 10, they really do. So after seeing a couple of posts of people stating this, mongol was underwhelming although I definitely wouldn't agree with that. For sure I wouldn't say it was worth the 8 months wait, but all in all I'm quite happy with the weapon. I actually think it's a good addition to the game and it's definitely unique to itself. Now the variant I've used throughout this video, the only element it offers is with that sentinel cryo anointment when that comes into play. The weapon itself doesn't actually have any element but seeing as this weapon does drop offering all elements the game offers, corrosive radiation, cryo and incendiary. And the right one for the right circumstance, this could be a great weapon for sure. So the people saying it's underwhelming, I don't think they're using the right if I'm truly honest. I myself thought it was doing great and in the slowest shaft against relatively high tier enemies, it was making easy work of them for the most part and actually found myself having fun and wanting to continue on using which I don't really get that feeling with many many heavy business games. The yellow cake and this are only a few of a massive heavy loop that I really enjoy using. But yeah all in all it is a great great weapon, I wouldn't say it was worth the eight months wait but if this was freshly dropped today and we didn't have previous knowledge of it, I would say it was a great addition to the game. So this flat off mongo rocket launcher is a weapon exclusive at the moment through funk and sloth who are located on pandora upon on comrades hold, can drop offering any element or none at all and as a weapon I do recommend you at least checking out. But on that note guys we have come to the end of the video, if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out, if you're new around here and want to see more boylands be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video I upload can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by, hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.