Thread for new battery breakthrough PR releases

I tried the ES search, and didn't find anything. My apologies if this is a re-hash.

IBM appears to be making progress with Lithium-Air (for EV cars...really, IBM?). These sound good. Not a lot of details, but it "sounds like" they wouldn't catch on fire even if abused. I'm assuming the air circulation of its battery-function also helps with heat management.

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...high-density-light-weight-lithium-air-battery

...While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in an lithium-air battery obviously comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter...The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries. The max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline...
 
texaspyro said:
The problem with (real) graphene is that it is a single layer of atoms. Care to bet how well that would hold up in the real world?

It wouldn't hold up at all.

However, it wouldn't be single layers. It would be multiple layers stacked on top of one another with layers of other substances in between to stop the graphene reverting back to graphite.
 
texaspyro said:
auraslip said:
Even low c lifepo4 can accept huge bursts of power safely.

Shane Colton charged some A123 M1 cells at like 100C (or was it 100A?)... there is video out there. They got warm but did not seem to mind it too bad.


I charged one at 385amps. The sag is so high you have to set the supply for 7v... Then it's "charged" in 20seconds, but after it stopped smoking the oils from my fingers off the ends from the temp it was at, it only delivered about 1Ah back from the 2.3Ah I input. The funny thing is, it received that 2.3Ah at over twice it's normal voltage, so the cell's charge energy storage was something like 20%, leaving 80% of that energy to go into heating and/or irreversible cell damage.

The fastest it's possible to charge one with a proper CC/CV set at 3.8v is:

3.8v peak charge voltage -3.2v charge plateau = 0.6v difference with ~0.007ohm resistance, meaning ~85amp charge current when you stick a full empty cell up to a 3.8v supply capable of infinite current delivery.

I believe Shane just connected a 200amp (maybe 400amp?) 5v supply across one, but even if it was capable of infinity amps, due to the cells resistance he didn't input the 385amps that I did by having 7v available. :)
 
Starts with a discussion of stationary power requirements and solutions (his Liquid Metal Battery) but adds some interesting analysis of other promising chemistries at the end:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear-engineering/22-081j-introduction-to-sustainable-energy-fall-2010/lectures-and-readings/MIT22_081JF10_lec21b.pdf
 
I wonder how many amp hours could get out a a ream of paper batteries..

[youtube]ea7_crd_TwQ[/youtube]
 
Apologies for not posting the direct link I am not that computer savy. Bloomberg news 6/7/12 reports " Bill Wallace, GM director of global battery systems engineering,said; " Sometimes if you use more sugar and less vanilla you get a better tasting cake. We"ve done some work at the cell level to modify the 'ingredients' to make a better end result." note- mileage on battery only is predicted to go up by 3 miles, from 35 to 38. Please pass the sugar, Daddy.
 
aroundqube said:
Apologies for not posting the direct link I am not that computer savy. Bloomberg news 6/7/12 reports " Bill Wallace, GM director of global battery systems engineering,said; " Sometimes if you use more sugar and less vanilla you get a better tasting cake. We"ve done some work at the cell level to modify the 'ingredients' to make a better end result." note- mileage on battery only is predicted to go up by 3 miles, from 35 to 38. Please pass the sugar, Daddy.

And this gets media coverage??? Crap, GM needs to double battery capacity ASAP or this company/industry is going down the tubes.

That's a joke. :roll: Makes one wonder just how committed they are??? :oops:

I guess the Nissan Leaf forces the issue... :twisted:
 
http://pulse.me/s/aJHOW
 
Stanford scientists develop ultrafast nickel-iron battery

BY MARK SHWARTZ

Stanford University scientists have breathed new life into the nickel-iron battery, a rechargeable technology developed by Thomas Edison more than a century ago.

Designed in the early 1900s to power electric vehicles, the Edison battery largely went out of favor in the mid-1970s. Today only a handful of companies manufacture nickel-iron batteries, primarily to store surplus electricity from solar panels and wind turbines.

"The Edison battery is very durable, but it has a number of drawbacks," said Hongjie Dai, professor of chemistry. "A typical battery can take hours to charge, and the rate of discharge is also very slow."

Now, Dai and his colleagues have dramatically improved the performance of this century-old technology. The Stanford team has created an ultrafast nickel-iron battery that can be fully charged in about 2 minutes and discharged in less than 30 seconds. The results are published in the June 26 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

Graduate student Hailiang Wang, lead author of the study, said the team managed to increase the charging and discharging rate by nearly 1,000 times.

"We've made it really fast," Wang said.

The high-performance, low-cost battery could someday be used to help power electric vehicles, much as Edison originally intended, Dai said.

"Hopefully we can give the nickel-iron battery a new life," he added.

Electric vehicles

Edison, an early advocate of all-electric vehicles, began marketing the nickel-iron battery around 1900. It was used in electric cars until about 1920. The battery's long life and reliability made it a popular backup power source for railroads, mines and other industries until the mid-20th century.

Edison created the nickel-iron battery as an inexpensive alternative to corrosive lead-acid batteries. Its basic design consists of two electrodes – a cathode made of nickel and an anode made of iron – bathed in an alkaline solution.

"Importantly, both nickel and iron are abundant elements on Earth and relatively nontoxic," Dai noted.

Carbon has long been used to enhance electrical conductivity in electrodes. To improve the Edison battery's performance, the Stanford team used graphene – nanosized sheets of carbon that are only 1-atom thick – and multi-walled carbon nanotubes, each consisting of about 10 concentric graphene sheets rolled together.

"In conventional electrodes, people randomly mix iron and nickel materials with conductive carbon," Wang explained. "Instead, we grew nanocrystals of iron oxide onto graphene, and nanocrystals of nickel hydroxide onto carbon nanotubes."

This technique produced strong chemical bonding between the metal particles and the carbon nanomaterials, which had a dramatic effect on performance.

"Coupling the nickel and iron particles to the carbon substrate allows electrical charges to move quickly between the electrodes and the outside circuit," Dai said. "The result is an ultrafast version of the nickel-iron battery that's capable of charging and discharging in seconds."

Future applications

The 1-volt prototype battery developed in Dai's lab has just enough power to operate a flashlight. The researchers' goal is to make a bigger battery that could be used for the electrical grid or transportation.

Most electric cars, such as the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, run on lithium-ion batteries, which can store a lot of energy but typically take hours to charge.

"Our battery probably won't be able to power an electric car by itself because the energy density is not ideal," Wang said. "But it could assist lithium-ion batteries by giving them a real power boost for faster acceleration and regenerative braking."

The enhanced Edison battery might be especially useful in emergency situations, Dai added. "There may be applications for the military, for example, where you have to charge something very quickly," he said.

"It's definitely scalable," Wang said. "Nickel, iron and carbon are relatively inexpensive. And the electrolyte is just water with potassium hydroxide, which is also very cheap and safe. It won't blow up in a car."

The prototype battery has one key drawback – the ability to hold a charge over time. "It doesn't have the charge-discharge cycling stability that we would like," Dai said. "Right now it decays by about 20 percent over 800 cycles. That's about the same as a lithium-ion battery. But our battery is really fast, so we'd be using it more often. Ideally, we don't want it to decay at all."

Dai said the use of strongly coupled nanomaterials represents a very exciting approach to making electrodes.

"It's different from traditional methods, where you simply mix materials together. I think Thomas Edison would be happy to see this progress," he said.

Other co-authors of the study are postdoctoral scholars Yongye Liang and Yanguang Li, graduate student Ming Gong and undergraduates Wesley Chang and Tyler Mefford of Stanford; Jigang Zhou, Jian Wang and Tom Regier of Canadian Light Source Inc.; and Fei Wei of Tsinghua University.

This work was supported by Intel, a Stinehart/Reed Award from the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford and a Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Mark Shwartz writes about energy technology for the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
 
Scientists at Rice University tested out different paints until they found a set that could work as the necessary components for a lithium-ion battery: two current collectors, a cathode, an anode, and a polymer separator. The layers can be airbrushed on and the resulting battery is fully rechargeable. To test it out, researchers put it on steel, glass, ceramic bathroom tiles, and (why not?) a beer stein. Batteries on the bathroom tiles were able to send out a steady 2.4 volts--enough to power light-emitting diodes that spelled out "Rice" for a full six hours.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18674240

A rechargeable battery technology developed by Thomas Edison more than a century ago has been upgraded by Stanford University researchers.

The original nickel-iron battery was made at the beginning of the 20th Century to power electric cars.

But today, only a few companies use it, mainly to store surplus electricity from solar panels and wind turbines.

The original Edison battery takes hours to charge, but the improved version charges in minutes.

The research appears in the journal Nature Communications.

The original battery consists of a cathode made of nickel and an anode made of iron, bathed in an alkaline solution.

Carbon is usually used as the conductive element - but to improve its performance, the Stanford team used graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

Hopefully we can give the nickel-iron battery a new life”

Hongjie Dai
Stanford University
"In conventional electrodes, people randomly mix iron and nickel materials with conductive carbon," said Stanford graduate student Hailiang Wang, lead author of the study.

"Instead, we grew nanocrystals of iron oxide onto graphene, and nanocrystals of nickel hydroxide onto carbon nanotubes."

This method helped the scientists increase the charging rate of the battery by nearly 1,000 times, he added.
 
Stanford researchers update safer, cheaper Edison battery
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-edison-battery-20120626,0,6960650.story
 
They have no choice but to work together. A123 developed the technology in America and China makes it.
 
Tokyo University of Science
Main Sugar Constituent Provides Effective Anode Material for Sodium Ion Batteries

[youtube]wM_UflGNLNg[/youtube]
http://www.diginfo.tv/v/12-0163-n-en.php
 
Very cool keep it coming. Once i've perfected my DIY controller I may just have to start a DIY battery. :)
 
spinningmagnets said:
Sounds great! Na-Ion batteries should be about the same size, but MUCH cheaper...also no "peak sodium"

There never would be a peak lithium.
Lithium itself isn't and never will be a substantial part of the cost of lithium batts.
 
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