Nov
25
40,000 Battery Charging Cycles
November 25, 2011 | 4 Comments
Those lithium-ion batteries we’ve come to appreciate in cell phones and other small portable electronics don’t last as long as one would like – the full charge shrinks a little with each recharge. Stanford researchers have developed part of a new dream battery with a new electrode that employs crystalline nanoparticles of a copper compound. [...]
Nov
16
Halfway to the Ultimate Lithium Battery
November 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
Northwestern University engineers show in the journal Advanced Energy Materials they have developed technology that could hugely improve lithium batteries. The new anode technology suggests a cellphone battery might recharge in 15 minutes and last ten times longer. The scientists combined two chemical engineering approaches to address two major battery limitations — energy capacity and [...]
Oct
10
A Battery For The Grid
October 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Aquion Energy in Pittsburgh uses the simple chemistry of water-based electrolyte and abundant materials such as sodium and manganese for a grid scale battery that is expected to cost $300 for a kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, less than a third of what it would cost to use lithium-ion batteries. Third-party tests have shown that Aquion’s [...]
Sep
13
Algae To Make Better Batteries
September 13, 2011 | 1 Comment
Think alginate, that you may have met quite intimately if you’ve had dental impressions made – the gooey, but not sticky substance that was in the tray which formed to match your teeth. Alginate or more accurately the sodium alginate, the sodium salt of alginic acid, is derived from Macrocystis pyrifera algae, which is also [...]
Sep
12
Research Factory – a New Kind of School for Building Batteries
September 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) plan to cut the cost to manufacture batteries and power trains of electric vehicles in half by 2018 through closing the gaps in the innovation chain. To get there KIT scientists are developing concrete, close-to-industry solutions for energy the storage and power trains and combine them on [...]
Jun
7
The Inside Track On Lithium
June 7, 2011 | 1 Comment
Robert J. Moriarty’s 321Energy published George Mack’s talk with Daniela Desormeaux about the lithium trade. For our purposes, the question is can lithium supplies fully provision a fast growing market at prices that makes the batteries cost effective and competitive. The answers are compelling. Daniela Desormeaux is an economist and an expert in industrial chemicals [...]
Jun
6
A Better Solar Panel Result
June 6, 2011 | 2 Comments
With photovoltaic panels the solar energy is harvested, but getting the resulting electricity to a useful form is still to go. Solar panels make direct current; while the homes, businesses and the grid use alternating current. Or simply put the electrons all stream steadily one way with direct current called ‘DC’ and the electrons stream [...]
May
2
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have designed and applied a life cycle analysis to examine three of the leading vehicle battery types to determine which does the best job of powering the vehicle while causing the least amount of environmental impact during its production. For most the knowledge is clear [...]
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