Thread for new battery breakthrough PR releases

If it's heaps you want, I guess you'll need to get those watts into solid form.

We've had links on pyrolysis, an awkward but effective way. The more graceful approaches don't produce as much power, dang it.

http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=45442

http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=48662
 
Interesting article, hopefully it pans out. Don't forget the salt.

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-all-solid-sulfur-based-battery-outperforms-lithium-ion.html
 
300 cycles? Well, it's a start, many use lipo packs.

Some news of an impressive or amazing energy or battery technology seems to come around on at least a weekly basis. It makes me sad how either slowly or impossible many of these ideas come to market.
 
Dauntless said:
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-paves-larger-safer-lithium-ion.html

Don't know if this one made it up before or not, but not to be missed.
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I've read many times that battery capacity is a big deal for storing solar and wind power. I wonder how the cost of a battery compares to the cost of pumped storage hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity .

This article seems vague if nothing else and very similar to a123.
 
The Nilar 10Ah 24v pack is now leaking and retired. It was a decent pack for a few years, but had dropped off in performance and capacity before I noticed some leakage near the - terminal.

Interesting, I did get a $350 replacement Giant 24V 6Ah pack for the Giant LaFree Lite at about the same time in 2010. That pack is still working great. The Giant is still my favorite ride for comfort and equipped with dual panniers and a usable rack top, used for hauling things about. The Currie Via Rapido accepts the same panniers and is a good bit faster ride given the 7 speed rear shifter vs 4 speed hub on the LaFree lite (that's right, 4 speed!). The old Currie Mountain bike with a 21 speed setup is the best for range, but lacks peddle assist.
 
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/159256-researchers-create-super-efficient-long-lasting-battery-from-wood


Batteries usually contain harsh chemicals that make them less than environmentally friendly, but a new research project out of the University of Maryland seeks to change that, at least on the small-scale. A team led by professor Hongli Zhu has succeeded in creating a nanoscale rechargeable battery from the most environmentally friendly material there is — wood. This alternative to existing batteries would be benign when disposed of and very cheap to manufacture.

The most common rechargeable batteries today are based on lithium-ion technology. In these cells, lithium ions carry the current by moving from the negative to positive electrode. That discharges the stored power and your cell phone or Tesla Roadster gets the necessary juice. The concept is the same with the wood-based battery designed by Hongli Zhu’s group. However, it relies on sodium instead of lithium.

But why bother with wood? As batteries charge and discharge, the swell slightly. This will slowly break down the stiff materials most batteries are based on over time. The cellulose fibers, gathered from yellow pine trees, are naturally flexible and can withstand this strain. These properties make wood an excellent material to hold liquid electrolytes and be an active part of the battery.

After being coated with a thin layer of tin, the fibers can maintain the battery’s integrity for over 400 charging cycles — that’s longer than many lithium-ion cells, and by far the most of any nanoscale battery. After being run through charge-discharge cycles, the fibers were wrinkled, but intact enough to still act as an efficient ion transport medium, which is why the cell still works.

A sodium-ion battery cannot store energy as efficiently as a lithium, but researchers have measured 339 mAh/g at this early stage. That’s impressive when you consider it’s made of wood. As the design is improved upon, Hongli Zhu’s team suspects it can vastly increase the storage capacity of the nano-batteries. Tin-based sodium-ion systems have a theoretical capacity of 847 mAh/g, so there is still room to grow.

FibersThe lower energy density of sodium-ion means this technology won’t change your smartphone’s battery into a block of wood any time soon. Instead, these wood-based batteries could be used on a larger scale to store huge amounts of energy at solar power plants and industrial facilities.

It’s going to take some time to get to that kind of general usefulness, though. The current nanoscale batteries definitely earn the moniker. The University of Maryland researchers are working with sodium-ion cells that are 1000-times thinner than a sheet of printer paper.

The team believes this same technology could serve as a template for a new generation of low-cost sodium-ion batteries. And if they aren’t as detrimental to the environment as traditional battery technology, well that’s just all the better.
 
Hmm, I'm thinking of how well beams of battery-ized wood could be integrated into a building. Serving dual purpose like that the reduced energy density wouldn't matter so much in a wind/solar/hydro house grid storage system.

3d printed concrete structure+wood battery+renewable energy= win for sustainable affordable housing for all.

Lets build the new city of Spheria! Kind of like the machines "01" I the animatrix
 
gestalt said:
3d printed concrete structure+wood battery+renewable energy= win for sustainable affordable housing for all.
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Yea, the gov't will either tax you on that, or will find another way of squeezing more dollars out of you.
 
How come they aren't using hemp, I wonder?
 
Dauntless said:
cal3thousand said:
How come they aren't using hemp, I wonder?
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Hemp? Expensive, illegal, less effective. Compelling argumentsbvagainst the use.
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#1 Expensive compared to wood? Probably only because of #2
#2 Only illegal in some places. We're not talking Marijuana...
#3 You have direct knowledge of it's efficacy?
 
As for illegal I think of in the U.S., but we had some of the composite drygoods at the school, so someone gets around something. Even American Indians have been busted for having it, depending on the Administration it CAN be talking marijuana. Ridiculous, but nonetheless the law.

Perhaps a more scientific person should address #3, but the thermal and electrical conductivity of hemp is such it's considered an insulator. Compared to say carbon fiber which is a lightning rod, etc. If you were to research it, be careful not to confuse it with HEMP. (High altitude Electro Mechanical Pulse) Wood, when carbonized, I'm familiar with it supposing to take on more metallic qualities that hemp, silk, cotton, paper, etc. What that REALLY means is still a bit beyond me.
 
Last night I ran into an old friend that I haven't seen in months. He's got property in the backwoods of Idaho and does what he can to live off the land, which includes being off-grid in the literal sense. As an EE, he's figured out how to generate power using wood. He was telling me that for the price of a pint-sized chunk of wood, maybe two in the dead of winter, that he could create anough power to keep his cabin charged using thermocouples. His "device" creates 20A service as the wood slowly burns. We talked about soot and waste, and he doesn't have that... The trick to it is that he's using old-hat 8th-grade science: Distillation. The gases given off by the heat are - aside from being self-sustaining, used to heat and power the home, and the carbon residue that's left - he plows that into the ground as fertilizer.

So in a sense, wood is the battery because it has potential. Growing the wood charges it. He's surrounded by an unending supply of battery power that grows far faster than his consumption. His "discharging" process is almost pollution-free because it is burned at high-temp. I asked him how he stores the recovered energy and for that he used traditional deep-cycle lead-acid batteries... presuming their either 12 or 24V. I just thought that was clever, man of the woods using technology at its' best.

~KF
 
I am not sure that I want to ride my e-bike around in 140f degree weather,(60 c) but this battery chemistry seems to pack 4 times the energy density of LIthium-ion....
I wonder if the inventing scientists are saying "The devil made me do it!" :lol:

Snip....The new ionically-conductive cathode enabled the ORNL battery to maintain a capacity of 1200 milliamp-hours (mAh) per gram after 300 charge-discharge cycles at 60 degrees Celsius. For comparison, a traditional lithium-ion battery cathode has an average capacity between 140-170 mAh/g. Because lithium-sulfur batteries deliver about half the voltage of lithium-ion versions, this eight-fold increase in capacity demonstrated in the ORNL battery cathode translates into four times the gravimetric energy density of lithium-ion technologies, explained Liang. ....snip
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http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20130605-00
Media Contact: Morgan McCorkle
Communications and Media Relations
865.574.7308


New all-solid sulfur-based battery outperforms lithium-ion technology

A new all-solid lithium-sulfur battery developed by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory team led by Chengdu Liang has the potential to reduce cost, increase performance and improve safety compared with existing designs.

A new all-solid lithium-sulfur battery developed by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory team led by Chengdu Liang has the potential to reduce cost, increase performance and improve safety compared with existing designs. (hi-res image)

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 5, 2013 — Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today's electronics.

The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries.

"Our approach is a complete change from the current battery concept of two electrodes joined by a liquid electrolyte, which has been used over the last 150 to 200 years," said Chengdu Liang, lead author on the ORNL study published this week in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Scientists have been excited about the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries for decades, but long-lasting, large-scale versions for commercial applications have proven elusive. Researchers were stuck with a catch-22 created by the battery's use of liquid electrolytes: On one hand, the liquid helped conduct ions through the battery by allowing lithium polysulfide compounds to dissolve. The downside, however, was that the same dissolution process caused the battery to prematurely break down.

The ORNL team overcame these barriers by first synthesizing a never-before-seen class of sulfur-rich materials that conduct ions as well as the lithium metal oxides conventionally used in the battery's cathode. Liang's team then combined the new sulfur-rich cathode and a lithium anode with a solid electrolyte material, also developed at ORNL, to create an energy-dense, all-solid battery.

"This game-changing shift from liquid to solid electrolytes eliminates the problem of sulfur dissolution and enables us to deliver on the promise of lithium-sulfur batteries," Liang said. "Our battery design has real potential to reduce cost, increase energy density and improve safety compared with existing lithium-ion technologies."

The new ionically-conductive cathode enabled the ORNL battery to maintain a capacity of 1200 milliamp-hours (mAh) per gram after 300 charge-discharge cycles at 60 degrees Celsius. For comparison, a traditional lithium-ion battery cathode has an average capacity between 140-170 mAh/g. Because lithium-sulfur batteries deliver about half the voltage of lithium-ion versions, this eight-fold increase in capacity demonstrated in the ORNL battery cathode translates into four times the gravimetric energy density of lithium-ion technologies, explained Liang.

The team's all-solid design also increases battery safety by eliminating flammable liquid electrolytes that can react with lithium metal. Chief among the ORNL battery's other advantages is its use of elemental sulfur, a plentiful industrial byproduct of petroleum processing.

"Sulfur is practically free," Liang said. "Not only does sulfur store much more energy than the transition metal compounds used in lithium-ion battery cathodes, but a lithium-sulfur device could help recycle a waste product into a useful technology."

Although the team's new battery is still in the demonstration stage, Liang and his colleagues hope to see their research move quickly from the laboratory into commercial applications. A patent on the team's design is pending.

"This project represents a synergy between basic science and applied research," Liang said. "We used fundamental research to understand a scientific phenomenon, identified the problem and then created the right material to solve that problem, which led to the success of a device with real-world applications."

The study is published as "Lithium Polysulfidophosphates: A Family of Lithium-Conducting Sulfur-Rich Compounds for Lithium-Sulfur Batteries," and is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201300680 . In addition to Liang, coauthors are ORNL's Zhan Lin, Zengcai Liu, Wujun Fu and Nancy Dudney.

The research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, through the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Vehicle Technologies Office. The investigation of the ionic conductivity of the new compounds was supported by the Department's Office of Science.

The synthesis and characterization was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at ORNL. CNMS is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers supported by the DOE Office of Science, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE's Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit http://science.energy.gov/bes/suf/user-facilities/nanoscale-science-research-centers .

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the Unite
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Sorry to be the pessimist but, wake me when they have a buy now button. That density is intense in my mind, mind blowing. To me, the goal for an ideal density is around twice that of what their claims are. When we reach that, assuming the charge rate isn't pathetic, everyone will own electric vehicles.
 
I'm pessimistic about this chemistry for two reasons:

Li metal electrodes mean massive amounts of Li are needed for lots and lots of vehicles. The reactivity with water is also a liability.

I do think solid state electrolytes could have a big future though. They have the potential to give us Li ion cells that never wear out (unless abused).

dh
 
...wake me when they have a buy now button
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??? ..isn't this a Lithium sulphur cell..?
http://en.winston-battery.com/index.php/products/power-battery/item/wb-lsp600aha

but they seem to be 1.5 volt cells and only high capacity ( 600Ahr is the smallest ?)
2C continuous, 20C burst, and 170whr/kg.

Sells for about 750 Euro.
 
they should make 40 & 60 ah ones, it would cost way too much to get useable voltage levels with that 600 ah one.
 
Yeah, I'm with bowl, wake me when you can click buy, AND it's affordable. It's clear that lots of folks are working on lots of good stuff.

Meanwhile, we just wish hobby king would restock this year.
 
Similar news posted on NPR this morning.

All Charged Up: Engineers Create A Battery Made Of Wood

The big idea behind Joe's Big Idea is to report on interesting inventions and inventors. When I saw the headline "An Environmentally Friendly Battery Made From Wood," on a press release recently, I figured it fit the bill, so went to investigate.

The battery is being developed at the Energy Research Center at the University of Maryland in College Park.

I really wasn't sure what a wood battery would look like. I knew you could make a battery out of a potato and wires, so I figured maybe they were doing something similar with a block of wood.

Wrong. The "wood" is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nanotubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

Now, wood is comparatively cheap. So is sodium. Liangbing Hu, head of the battery project, says he's hoping the new batteries can be scaled up so they'll be useful for storing the vast amounts of energy generated by solar arrays or wind farms.

"I think this wood-based storage can play a very important role as a low-cost solution," he says.

Right now the battery is just a prototype. Hu and his colleagues will need to tweak the materials before they have something commercially viable.

There was something else interesting about the new battery: One of the authors on the paper describing it in Nano Letters was an undergraduate. What's up with that? How does a young college student wind up co-authoring a paper in a major scientific journal?

Hu says Nicholas Weadock was an engineering major who expressed an interest in working in the lab. "In the very beginning he was helping students, my Ph.D. students actually, correct some English grammar," says Hu. A lot of Dr. Hu's doctoral students are from outside the U.S. "During the process ... he asked a lot of interesting, very insightful questions, not only about the language, but about the science behind it."

Weadock says he had originally wanted to work on wind power, but became interested in energy storage technology and wanted to show Hu that he could be a contributor to the lab.

"I came to the group meetings, I made suggestions, and I was ambitious enough to show him that I can do my own project," he says.

Weadock is off to the California Institute of Technology in the fall for graduate school, where he plans to continue work on energy storage. Hu says the positive experience with Weadock has convinced him to recruit more undergraduates to his lab.
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If it leads to planting more trees than we consume, I'm for it.
~KF
 
How will it handle overcharging? What kind of charge/discharge rates will be safe with this technology?

If those questions are answered better than today's lithium, it has a good chance to be more than vaporware.
 
Hillhater said:
...wake me when they have a buy now button
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??? ..isn't this a Lithium sulphur cell..? and 170whr/kg.
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I am sorry, I am not great at conversions it seems. Are you saying that what they have available is the equivalent of what is being stated in this article? It doesn't sound like it, and frankly, the technical name for the chemistry isn't all that important.

My point was, countless amazing sounding batteries are claimed in labs so often and have been for so so long. I am jaded as hell about hearing these things, I still have a certain level of enthusiasm about great battery density and other specifications that might go along with it, but it often feels like something that will come along in decades rather than a few years. I want to see a buy here site with a battery that has proven tremendous capacity. Sure, what we have now isn't bad, but it's ferret farts in comparison to what I'd like to have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density Look at the chart on this page, see gasoline. Multiply it's number by .2 to .3, that is the ideal battery energy density in my mind.

I am not trying to dissuade anyone from posting things, but sometimes it feels as though maybe it would be better to hear about things that are rather than things that could be. A lot of writers write things with spectacular headlines used to draw attention and drum up web traffic, but often these claims are fabricated or pointless to write about for various reasons. I appreciate enthusiasm, but it is important not to mistake activity for achievement.

Or, maybe I am just being a silly whiny brat who flails about until I get what I want (radically higher affordable battery density) and doesn't want to see the candy isle knowing I will simply be denied what my childish desires scream for.
 
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