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Sign up with GoogleThe quest for better batteries
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Future batteries need to triple capacity, cut price by 67%
by John Timmer - Feb 27, 2015 6:48pm SAST
Battery research is one of the hottest areas of materials science, with a steady stream of promising ideas emerging from research labs. But even though battery performance has steadily climbed, a lot of that progress is due to an evolution of existing technology rather than an adoption of more radical ideas floating around in labs.
At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two of the people who run some of these labs gave good descriptions of why it has been so difficult to translate promising results into revolutionary products.
More capacity, lower price
Stanford's Yi Cui showed a slide that laid out the goals of battery research very simply. Right now, batteries cost about $300 per each kiloWatt-hour of capacity. For the two largest use cases (electric vehicles and on-grid storage), we need that figure to drop to about $100 per kW-hr in order for the technology to compete with fossil-fuel-powered cars and generating facilities. For the grid, where the batteries are stationary, it doesn't matter how much they weigh. But for a more effective electric vehicle, we'd like to see the energy density rise from its present 200 W-hr/kg to about 600 W-hr/kg.
That's tripling the capacity while cutting the price by two-thirds. A pretty tall order.
It's this challenge that's motivating Cui and fellow speaker Linda Nazar to look into new materials for battery electrodes.
Electrodes play a key role in batteries in that they're where charge carriers—lithium in today's batteries—are held. Their ability to store lithium therefore becomes a key determinant of the storage density of a battery. Right now, carbon electrodes require six atoms of carbon for each lithium atom stored. Elements further down that column in the periodic table, like silicon and germanium, however, have a more complicated electronic structure, which can interact with more lithium atoms. As a result, you can store 4.4 lithium atoms for each silicon atom—a significant boost in capacity.
So why aren't we using silicon in batteries already? The problem is that the added lithium atoms cause silicon to expand, damaging the integrity of the material. Cui's talk was essentially a history of his lab's attempts to overcome this problem.
More here
by John Timmer - Feb 27, 2015 6:48pm SAST
Battery research is one of the hottest areas of materials science, with a steady stream of promising ideas emerging from research labs. But even though battery performance has steadily climbed, a lot of that progress is due to an evolution of existing technology rather than an adoption of more radical ideas floating around in labs.
At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two of the people who run some of these labs gave good descriptions of why it has been so difficult to translate promising results into revolutionary products.
More capacity, lower price
Stanford's Yi Cui showed a slide that laid out the goals of battery research very simply. Right now, batteries cost about $300 per each kiloWatt-hour of capacity. For the two largest use cases (electric vehicles and on-grid storage), we need that figure to drop to about $100 per kW-hr in order for the technology to compete with fossil-fuel-powered cars and generating facilities. For the grid, where the batteries are stationary, it doesn't matter how much they weigh. But for a more effective electric vehicle, we'd like to see the energy density rise from its present 200 W-hr/kg to about 600 W-hr/kg.
That's tripling the capacity while cutting the price by two-thirds. A pretty tall order.
It's this challenge that's motivating Cui and fellow speaker Linda Nazar to look into new materials for battery electrodes.
Electrodes play a key role in batteries in that they're where charge carriers—lithium in today's batteries—are held. Their ability to store lithium therefore becomes a key determinant of the storage density of a battery. Right now, carbon electrodes require six atoms of carbon for each lithium atom stored. Elements further down that column in the periodic table, like silicon and germanium, however, have a more complicated electronic structure, which can interact with more lithium atoms. As a result, you can store 4.4 lithium atoms for each silicon atom—a significant boost in capacity.
So why aren't we using silicon in batteries already? The problem is that the added lithium atoms cause silicon to expand, damaging the integrity of the material. Cui's talk was essentially a history of his lab's attempts to overcome this problem.
More here
Stanford has several battery projects. Here's another announced this week.
New aluminium battery charges in 60 seconds; does not explode
One of the major issues with today’s electronics is battery life and safety, but that might be about to change thanks to the work done by researchers at Stanford University.
According to an article published in Nature, the research team managed to manufacture an aluminium-based battery that has some remarkable properties and might just be the future of energy storage. By using aluminum and graphite, the team managed to create an inexpensive, very safe and fast-recharging battery.
Unlike traditional rechargeable batteries, that use Lithium, which is highly reactive, the aluminum-based battery has no chance of exploding or overheating even when punctured. And its low reactivity also allows it to be bent, molded and used in flexible electronics.
More here, with video.
New aluminium battery charges in 60 seconds; does not explode
One of the major issues with today’s electronics is battery life and safety, but that might be about to change thanks to the work done by researchers at Stanford University.
According to an article published in Nature, the research team managed to manufacture an aluminium-based battery that has some remarkable properties and might just be the future of energy storage. By using aluminum and graphite, the team managed to create an inexpensive, very safe and fast-recharging battery.
Unlike traditional rechargeable batteries, that use Lithium, which is highly reactive, the aluminum-based battery has no chance of exploding or overheating even when punctured. And its low reactivity also allows it to be bent, molded and used in flexible electronics.
More here, with video.
