Thread for new battery breakthrough PR releases

Has anyone experimented with developing a Bamboo battery? Bamboo's cell structure is very similar to wood, infact it is stronger and denser than most timbers, it can be rotary pealed into very thin layers, and it is one of the fastest growing building materials available, so it's cheap and readily available. If anyone wants to back this suggestion, I have a brand name and slogan too; " 'Bam Bam Batteries' : Power for everyone."

Saw this today while browsing tech news sites. Hope it hasn't already been posted, couldn't find anything..

Basically saying that Monash University have developed a new supercapacitor with energy densities comparable to lead-acid batteries.
Most supercapacitors are made of porous carbon with a liquid electrolyte to carry the charges. TThe researchers decided to build a new, compact electrode out of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon with extraordinary electrical properties, by placing the liquid electrolyte in-between its layers, with sub-nanometer precision. This resulted in an energy density of roughly 60 Watt-hours per liter, compared to the more typical five or eight Watt-hours per liter of other supercapacitors.

Of course such a powerful supercapacitor would be of little use if it could not be mass-produced, and fortunately that should not be the case with this material. Manufacturing the electrode relied on a process similar to one used in paper making, so the transition from the laboratory to industry may not take too long.

http://monash.edu.au/news/show/soft-approach-leads-to-revolutionary-energy-storage

That could be huge.
I considered using a capacitor instead of a battery for an electric vehicle, but it just isn't practical... yet.

The value here would be that you could go to a gas station, plug a big ol' fatty charge cable into your car and zap your capacitor back to full charge in just a matter of seconds.

60wh per liter is still pretty chunky. But a car, truck, or bus that had part of its capacity in supercaps could get a very fast partial charge. That alone could be a game changer for some. Able to quickly charge enough to go 15 miles could be all many would ever need. For example, a quick refill good for 15 miles could make that extra side trip on the way home possible, make sharing one charging station at the workplace possible, Cabs could quick charge and get back out, etc.

parajared said:

zap your capacitor back to full charge in just a matter of seconds.

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This is kinda the common misconception/myth about super caps. When you're using ultra caps with very poor energy density, you can very rapidly charge them, because while they are often shedding more heat for a given amount of charge current than low Ri batteries, they hold so little energy they don't over heat before charging. They don't get a magic wand to not have all ESR*I losses all turn into internal heating, but hopefully leveraging the awesome conductivity of graphene we will see ESR's that are very low in higher energy density caps.

Unfortunately, despite all the research activity with graphene and expounding of its near-magical properties, it has apparently yet to find a single practical application. I fear it may all be too good to be true.

This is an interesting development, but the article leaves many questions unanswered: cost, lifespan, safety, performance details for example. Could be great, could have lots of issues. Time will tell....

Punx0r said:

Unfortunately, despite all the research activity with graphene and expounding of its near-magical properties, it has apparently yet to find a single practical application. I fear it may all be too good to be true.

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Yeah graphene''s like Avatar, can't possibly live up to the hype. Time will tell.

you hear of some odd new proposals and developments for batteries, but this one has me stumped..
http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?rssid=31270
They refer to it as using "molten air" as an electrolyte. !
WTF is "molten" air ??
Liquid air i can understand, but "molten" ! ?????

No, oxygen is drawn from the air, so an "air battery", the nomenclature in the literature. Its the electrolyte that is 'molten', rather than solid state. In this example, the electrolyte is Li2CO3. The patent paper can be found at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.1305.pdf. The research is for higher energy densities Wh/kg.

Well they may be smart scientists, ..but they need a few lessons in grammar !

The October issue of Chemical Engineering Progress has a nice multi-article section on many secondary lithium (lithium ion) chemistry batteries. It is a good overview of current and possible future battery technologies. It discusses some of the theoretical limits to battery technology as well and advantages/disadvantages. If you live near a university with a chemical engineering program, the library probably stocks it. Worth the read.

does someone have access and can cut and paste the articles here?

http://www.aiche.org/resources/publications/cep/2013/october

dnmun said:

does someone have access and can cut and paste the articles here?

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Yea, WPI carries that journal and is just a couple blocks away. So I'll swing over and make a copy of the article.

Awesome, thanks! Looking forward to the rest!

OK, that was fun, kinda, sort-of. Turns out WPI has one of these scanner/computer thingies that will scan and then send it to you pdf as an email attachment. And for free. Whaaathee? Ok then, there it all is. Have fun reading.

Thanks pdf and arkmundi, hope it is an interesting and enlightning read!

it was very good. a lot of things people have their own opinions about are covered in the articles. such as the flash point for the electrolyte mixture is 25.5oC and how the carbon of the 'anode' has such a low chemical potential that it reacts with the electrolyte ethylene carbonate and forms a film on the surface of the carbon that prevent the carbon from oxidizing further but still allow ion transport through it. this is the part i always heard about of the SEI that breaks off and exposes the bare carbon when the cell is overcharged and goes into thermal runaway.

it does amaze me even more now after reading this that some people are soldering to the cans on these laptop cells with lipo. what more do you need to know when there is actual valid info published in a reputable scientific journal. duh.

OK, thanks again. Found the following to be most salient to the ongoing debate about battery chemistry. It shows why LiFePO4 is currently one of the better choices.

from Component Materials.pdf

Also the reference to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research

The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is a major research partnership that integrates government, academic and industrial researchers from many disciplines to overcome critical scientific and technical barriers and create new breakthrough energy storage technology.

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the life cycles and safety of the lifepo4 is well known.

i thought there was a lot more valuable and useful knowledge.

the discussion of how removing 50% of the lithium from the cathode causes the layered cobalt oxide structure to collapse in lico, page 54, reducing the capacity of the cell. they talk about how this led to the LNMC cathodes to reduce the impact.

also the discussion of how the dendrites grow on the anode if charging at high rates can lead to loss of lithium from the charge cycle, reducing capacity and shortening life. and can end up shorting out the electrodes if the dendrites penetrate the separator and come in contact with the opposing electrode.

they also discuss how the time spent at full charge is the primary factor in reducing cycle life for lipo too.

just a lot of good info, too bad more people did not read it.

Well, everyone is going to have different take-away and am glad you appreciated the post of the pdf's. Yea, to make it easy for folks to read up.

Its just that I've always wondered why the MIT nanotechnology lab folks which spun off A123 chose LiFePO4, or why even now that's the only chemistry in production. They could have experimented and applied their nano-engineering to anything.

arkmundi said:

OK, thanks again. Found the following to be most salient to the ongoing debate about battery chemistry. It shows why LiFePO4 is currently one of the better choices.

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Odd that the chart fails to include NCA, and instead includes a variety of totally impractical chemistry options that have no compatible electrolyte option.

Via Gizmodo:

Imagine a future without batteries. But in the same future, your cell phone charges in minutes and stays charged for weeks. Thanks to the world's first silicon power cell, this future might not be so far away—and graphene is helping us get there.

Graphene doesn't need any introduction: it's the super material to beat 'em all. But this beautiful video demonstrates how it could… Read…

A team of engineers at Vanderbilt just built such a device. Their so-called silicon supercapacitor can be built right into silicon chips and could do away with the battery as we know it. Unlike traditional batteries which store energy in chemical reactions, this device stores electricity by assembling ions on the surface of a porous silicon surface. But because silicon reacts with some of the chemicals in the electrolytes that provide the ions, the engineers coated the surface with graphene. Not only did the graphene protect the silicon; it also improved the device's energy density by over two orders of magnitude. That made the silicon supercapacitor capable of storing more energy that the big bulky commercial capacitors currently used in things like regenerative braking systems. All in a little silicon chip.

"If you ask experts about making a supercapacitor out of silicon, they will tell you it is a crazy idea," Cary Pint, the assistant professor who led the project, told Vanderbilt's news service. "But we’ve found an easy way to do it." And they didn't just do it to make a fancy device. Pint hopes to use it as "a road map for integrated energy storage." In other words, he wants to see devices that store electricity right in their silicon chips. "The more that we can integrate power storage into existing materials and devices, the more compact and efficient they will become," he said.

Thanks to improvements in fiber optics, most of the information that you consume on any given day is transported by light. Quite inefficiently,… Read…

True futurists will point out that the development of things like all-graphene chips that run on light instead of electricity is the way forward. But that kind of technology would require us to completely change the way we build electronics, whereas the Vanderbilt invention could actually be built out of recycled silicon from discarded electronics. Plus some graphene, of course. [Vanderbilt via Discovery]

NJIT Professor Invents a Flexible Battery

The battery has another revolutionary potential, in that it could be fabricated at home by consumers. All one would need to make the battery is a kit comprised of electrode paste and a laminating machine. One would coat two plastic sheets with the electrode paste, place a plastic separator between the sheets and then laminate the assembly. The battery assembly would function in the same way as a double-A or a triple-A battery.

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