Dr. Yi Cui - Battery Superstar

[safe]

Dr. Yi Cui - Battery Superstar

Is Obama really a "rock star"?

No, not in the electric vehicle world anyway. Our vision of a "rock star personality" would be anyone that is doing advanced research into Lithium cell chemistries.

Many of you have heard about the new breakthrough in lithium-ion battery storage. I had an interview with the scientist who discovered it, and hopes to bring it to market, Dr. Yi Cui, Assistant Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

Can you tell us what you have discovered?

The idea is to use silicon nanowires as the active lithium storage material for the battery electrode. Silicon can store a lot of lihtium but the volume expansion is too high, by using nanowires we are really solving the problem of this big volume expansion and we can achieve extremely high capacity, lithium storage capacity with multiple cycles. This is 10 times more than the current technology. So the implications of this discovery is very, very exciting, it means you can have a better battery.

http://www.gm-volt.com/2007/12/21/gm-voltcom-interview-with-dr-cui-inventor-of-silicon-nanowire-lithium-ion-battery-breakthrough/

 

[Ypedal]

http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2916&start=0

 

[safe]

Well... I guess "superstar status" does tend to fade. :lol:

(I had not seen that thread)

Britney Spears anyone?

 

[Link]

Dammit Safe! LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!!

 

[JRP3]

I think Cui is caught up in his own hype, his numbers are all over the place and way too optimistic from what I can see. Another article:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20000/?nlid=785

The downside is that the nanowire growth process that Cui uses, which feeds gaseous silicon to a liquid gold catalyst to make the solid electrode, is a high-temperature (600 to 900 °C) process that could be costly to scale up. Cui believes that scale-up of the vapor-liquid-solid process is nevertheless feasible, but he acknowledges that he is also "exploring another approach."
Ohio State University chemist Yiying Wu, who also works on nanowire electrodes, calls the Stanford work "definitely very important." But Wu and other materials scientists caution that additional advances will be required before lithium batteries with nanowire electrodes deliver major increases in performance of electric-vehicle batteries. Not least is the need to scale up the process of making nanowires, which have yet to be mass-produced for commercial application.
Another limitation is that while Cui's silicon nanowires make great anodes, lithium-battery technology has greater need for improved cathodes. In a given battery, substituting an anode that stores more lithium ions has no impact without a corresponding cathode that can supply more charge.