Posts Tagged ‘batteries’
Jet-Propelled Surfboard Battles the Breakers
Unlike a Jet Ski’s circular exhaust nozzles, the oblong ones on the WaveJet save space and add power. By forcing water through smaller, flatter openings, the jets produce a higher-pressure stream. Riders turn the jets on and off with a bracelet remote control that also acts as a kill switch if they wipe out. Because the battery-and-jet module sits just ahead of the fins, where a standing surfer’s weight rests, the 15 pounds it adds only minimally affects the board’s balance and performance.
Although the WaveJet’s power could realistically help pro surfers shred harder, its true purpose is to make water sports less frustrating for amateurs. The board’s propulsion system is currently built into 11 surfboard models, including paddle- and lifeguard boards, and will soon be installed in bodyboards, kayaks and kiteboards as well.
Dimensions: 7.1 ft. x 21 in. x 3.125 in.
Weight: 32 lbs.
Run Time: 39 min.
Price: $4,500 (est.)
More Info:
‘Solar Soldier’ Project Creating Power-Harvesting Uniforms for British Infantry
The Engineering and Physical Research Sciences Center in the UK is working on a new type of fabric that uses solar photovoltaic cells, thermoelectric devices and advanced lightweight batteries. Because the system absorbs heat, it could even serve as a type of wearable stealth cloak, making a soldier less susceptible to detection with infrared cameras.
Other militaries have been looking into solar energy use, which could be especially useful in sunny hot spots like the Middle East and Africa. A U.S. Marine Corps battalion is already using to reduce battery weight, for instance. The system includes solar-panel tent shells and foldable arrays. Other systems designed to cut weight use fuel cells or li-ion batteries incorporated into armor.
But this new camouflage adds in thermoelectric energy, ensuring a constant power supply even when it’s dark or hazy.
Batteries can account for 10 percent of the 100-150 pounds of equipment that infantrymen currently carry, according to Duncan Gregory, a professor at the University of Glasgow who is working on the project. Reducing that weight could make infantry soldiers more comfortable, and therefore more mobile and perhaps more effective.
Beyond helping soldiers, the system could be used for powering satellites, keeping medicines cool in disaster areas, or supplying fresh food in hot climates, .
The $1.04 million project aims to have a prototype system by December.
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My Visit to An American Rare Earth Metals Mine
The electronic future is buried under the ground in Missouri
A chunk of magnetite guards the office door at the Pea Ridge iron mine near Sullivan, Mo., a mascot of the mine’s past and future. When Jim Kennedy bought the mine in 2001, he’d planned to restart production on a high-grade iron ore deposit. He didn’t realize he was sitting on a mother lode of 600,000 metric tons of high-grade rare earth elements -- elements the U.S. is desperately hungry for. Four years ago, he almost threw away reams of documents describing Pea Ridge’s deposit. “Nobody bothered to tell me about it,” he said.
At present, the U.S. is almost totally reliant on China for , which are used to make lasers, guided missiles, efficient batteries, and other technologies of the future. But China has recently slashed its exports of these materials, promising new regulations over their production, while raising prices — and the hackles of numerous national governments. As on possible to rare earths, some think renewed domestic production of the minerals could loosen China’s grip over 95 percent of the world’s rare earth supply.
Right now, the Pea Ridge mine is a quiet, muddy place with rusting mills, storage sheds cluttered with cracked core samples, and a marshy lake full of mine tailings. But when it’s renovated and reopened, Kennedy hopes to become only the second rare earth producer in the western hemisphere. He envisions a bustling mine producing billions of dollars of rare earths, feeding the renewable energy and defense industries. He has a few hurdles to clear before that dream becomes reality.
Rare earths are recovered just like other metals — from rocks removed from the ground that are broken up, milled and processed into purified forms. It’s a water-intensive, toxic process, but Kennedy says his mine has plenty of rare earths in the mile-long, 100-foot-deep lake of tailings, a slurry-like waste byproduct of almost 40 years of iron mining. He aims to start mining the lake’s 22 million tons of waste by the end of the year and restart underground mining in 2012.
On the frigid day I visited, Kennedy took me to Pea Ridge’s core room, a metal shed stuffed with stacks of long, thin cardboard boxes. Inside each box is a section of a core sample taken when the mine was first developed. The one-inch-diameter cylindrical rocks helped Bethlehem Steel, the original owner, determine what the mine had to offer. Back in the 1960s, however, they were only interested in iron. Kennedy pulled out a broken piece and held a magnet to it, and it stuck — a chunk of magnetite, just like the front office sentinel. Another slice of rock was embedded with some glinting yellowish speckles. Those could be bits of rare earth oxides, he said.
Kennedy aims to resume the mine's production of iron, but to produce rare earths as a byproduct of iron purification. That’s possible due to the way the metals are situated in the earth.
The iron ore is criss-crossed with breccia pipes, a mass consisting of broken sedimentary rock infused with intriguingly named minerals like xenotime and monazite. The rare earths are part of those minerals. "The entire system is flooded with rare earths," Kennedy said.
The phosphorus in these minerals must be removed if their iron is to be used, but it turns out that’s a good thing for rare earth production. The rock is crushed into a fine powder and added to a pine oil solution to produce a frothy liquid. The phosphorus and the rare earths float out, separating them from the high-grade iron.
When it starts production, Pea Ridge would follow becoming only the second American producer of rare earths. Molycorp Inc. started work at Mountain Pass in December, the mine’s first activity since 2002, when it closed amid regulatory problems stemming from a wastewater spill. Mountain Pass now produces about 3 percent of the world’s rare earth supply, and Molycorp hopes to increase that to 25 percent, producing 40,000 metric tons a year by 2013.
Mountain Pass will be the country’s leading rare earth mine, but it won’t be able to produce many of the so-called heavy rare earths, like dysprosium, which is used to make computer memory and lasers. One analyst that Molycorp should diversify by buying up companies with claims on heavy rare earth deposits. Pea Ridge has them in abundance, according to the .
Despite their name — a holdover from the 1800s and early 1900s — rare earths aren’t particularly rare; they’re much more common than gold, and some are nearly as common as lead. They’re found in relatively low concentrations, however, requiring the processing of lots of rock. Ten states are known to have significant rare-earth deposits, according to a 2010 study by the USGS. Most are in the western U.S., but the Pea Ridge deposit has the highest grade of any site in the country, averaging 12 percent rare earth oxide concentration. Mountain Pass has much more tonnage, but at an average of only 8 percent concentration (and the vast majority is “light” rare earths).
Given its resources and existing infrastructure, why isn't Pea Ridge already producing rare earths? There’s a catch. Along with iron, the heavy rare earths at Pea Ridge are found intermingled with thorium, a radioactive element that requires special processing and cleanup. Hoping to turn this into a positive, Kennedy is drumming up support for , namely powering molten salt reactors that could be scattered throughout cities. “When you mine for rare earths, you get the thorium for free,” he said.
Kennedy, a former Army Special Forces soldier and investment banker, has become an outspoken evangelist for rare earths and thorium, speaking to members of Congress, mining groups and engineers — he just gave a presentation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — about the problem of Chinese dominance and the potential for American resurgence. He is pressing lawmakers in Missouri and Washington to establish a public-private cooperative to come up with $1 billion to build a rare earth refinery in Missouri, and he is hoping to spur a new thorium energy industry.
For now, his plans center on iron production. He wants to build a pipeline to ship iron ore to the Mississippi River 44 miles to the east, where he already has a permit for a processing facility and barge port. Pea Ridge will be the only domestic producer of merchant pig iron, which is used to make steel. Currently, American mills import pig iron from countries like Brazil and Sweden. Just like in its past, iron will be the mine’s main motivation, Kennedy said. But the almost-forgotten rare earths could be the icing on the cake.
New Magnet-Powered Monitor Installed In Nuke Waste Sites Could Survive 100 Years
The problem here, of course, is that buried nuclear waste has to be completely sealed, meaning there can’t be any ductwork allowing wires to run from the surface to the inside of the containment facility. If there were water might get in or radioactivity might get out, negating the whole point of burying the waste in the first place.
But how to power sensors underground 100 years after they are buried? Conventional chemical batteries would long since have lost their charges. This answer entails a handful of magnets and a copper coil--the basis of a simple generator--and a 100-year timer.
The gist: two powerful neodymium magnets are set opposite each other about 15 centimeters apart, connected by a carbon fiber rod. A third doughnut-shaped magnet is wrapped around the rod, free to move along it in either direction. The end magnets would be polarized such that both repel this third magnet. The whole array is surrounded by a copper coil.
To set the battery, one would simply trap the doughnut-shaped magnet against one of the larger end magnets with a latch set to a 100-year timer; a century on, the timer releases the doughnut-shaped magnet, which is thrust along the rod to the other end where it is repelled by that magnet and pushed back toward the first magnet, and so on. Eventually the magnet comes to rest in the middle of the carbon fiber rod between the two repelling forces, but by then it has made several passes along the length of the copper coil, creating enough juice to charge the various sensors and transmitters necessary to get temperature and radioactivity data to the surface.
Of course, that raises the obvious problem of creating a 100-year timer to release the magnet. Researchers think such a latch could be triggered externally, perhaps by a radio signal. Because a 100-year mechanical clock would take a really, really long time to wind.
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Department of Energy Will Use Fastest Supercomputer Ever to Design Better Batteries and Answer Cosmic Questions
IBM's 10-petaflop Mira system goes online next year
The IBM-built system, nicknamed “Mira,” will be operational at Argonne National Laboratory next year. At 10 quadrillion calculations per second, it will be twice as fast as today’s fastest supercomputer and 20 times faster than Argonne’s current model. If every person in the United States performed one calculation every second, it would take almost a year for them to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second, according to IBM.
This kind of computing power means Mira can solve problems that were previously too big for the most powerful current supercomputers. It would take Mira two minutes to solve a problem that takes current supercomputers two years, .
Thanks to improved chip designs and an energy-efficient water-cooling system, Mira will also be one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, IBM said. It runs on IBM’s Blue Gene/Q platform and its include more than 750,000 processors and 750 terabytes of memory.
The DOE selected 16 projects to start off with, including reducing energy inefficiency in transportation and developing advanced engine designs. The system will be able to model tropical storms, battery performance and the evolution of the universe, along with other complex simulations.
IBM said Mira is a stepping stone toward exascale computing, which beats petascale computers by a factor of 1,000. Exascale computers could solve questions that have remained beyond our reach, such as understanding regional climate change and designing safe nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, IBM is building another 10-petaflop model called Blue Waters for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. And Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.
Mira will be operational in 2012 and scientists from industry, academia and government institutions will be able to use it.
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At Least for the Next Ten Years, “Peak Lithium” is Nonsense
At the Lithium Supply and Markets conference in Toronto, analysts make clear that until 2020 there will literally be more than enough of the element to go around
The noise about “Peak Lithium”—the idea that not enough economically extractable lithium exists in the world to support a large-scale switch to cars powered by lithium-based batteries—has quieted significantly in the past year, but I still sometimes get asked: Are we going to run out of this stuff?
Not any time soon. In fact, as a noted market analyst made clear this morning, so many companies are developing so many lithium deposits around the world that many of them will probably go out of business, because they’re on track to dramatically oversupply the world with lithium.
Currently, most of the world’s lithium comes from a handful of companies, most notably SQM, Chemetall, and FMC; they extract lithium from high-altitude salt flats in northern Chile and Argentina. Those companies have long insisted that they have access to so much lithium, and that they could expand supply so easily and quickly, that the dozens of independent lithium prospectors who hope to capitalize on arrival of the lithium-ion-powered electrified automobile are doomed.
This morning, Edward R. Anderson, president of the independent consulting firm TRU Group, told the assembled group of international lithium prospectors much the same thing. According to TRU’s latest study of the lithium market—an update of an earlier study TRU conducted for Mitsubishi, which the group presented at the first Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Santiago, Chile in January 2009—the world will soon be overloaded with lithium producers. Together, these producers will end up flooding the market; there will be too much lithium to go around, and all but the strongest companies will probably fail.
We at PopSci are not concerned with lithium as an investment, of course: We’re interested in what news like this means for the people who buy raw lithium, make it into batteries, and then put those batteries into electrified vehicles. For the junior mining companies in the audience, Anderson's presentation might have been bracing. For battery companies and carmakers, however, it means that there is no reason to be concerned about the availability or price of lithium, even as batteries—particularly electric-vehicle batteries—quickly come to consume the bulk of the world’s lithium supply.
To be sure, Anderson didn't even mention the words "Peak Lithium"—his was a business presentation focused on the next ten years. He's also far from the first person to argue that lithium is plentiful. (See .) But Anderson’s presentation this morning was a current and forceful argument that one vastly overhyped barrier to the near- and mid-term adoption of electrified vehicles simply doesn’t exist.
All this said, it’s worth keeping in mind that the majority of all this abundant lithium is extracted by three companies from a relatively tiny section of South American desert. There’s still a case to be made that diversifying the lithium supply is a good thing. Later in the conference we’ll hear Western Lithium, a company that controls a potentially massive lithium mine in northern Nevada, make that case.
Bottled Lightning is a blog series by Seth Fletcher, Senior Associate Editor at PopSci and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy, to be published in May 2011 by Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book is about lithium, the rechargeable lithium battery, and the technological transformations it has helped (or will help) make possible—the wireless revolution; the burgeoning electric-car revival; the coming spread of clean energy. Seth also posts off-the-cuff observations on these and other subjects on .
Video: Smallest Li-Ion Battery Ever Created Swells and Contorts While Charging
Findings could lead to better batteries
So next time you throw out (and hopefully recycle) a pair of lithium batteries, show some respect for the deformations it suffered while powering your camera.
The itty-bitty battery provided an unprecedented view of the charging process, as scientists watched it writhe and swell as ions flow in. The work, published today in the journal Science, illuminates how rechargeable batteries die and could lead to better, longer-lasting alternatives.
You can only recharge and reuse lithium batteries for so long before they lose capacity and fail, because the continual charging cycle damages the electrodes. The new nanometer-scale images show just how this happens — it turns out the electrodes fatten and stretch as lithium ions flow inside, like a snake stretching to fit its swallowed prey. The ions also change the electrode’s physical characteristics.
Over time, all these contortions damage the electrode material by introducing tiny defects, according to researchers at the .
Lithium batteries are ubiquitous in everything from cell phones to hybrid cars, but they are limited by low energy and power densities. Hoping to improve these qualities, researchers wanted to find out exactly how they work. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratory formed a tiny battery under a transmission electron microscope. It consisted of a single 100 nm diameter tin oxide nanowire anode, a bulk lithium cobalt oxide cathode, and an ionic liquid electrolyte. In one of the videos, the lithium ions look like juice being sucked through a nanowire straw.
Battery researchers do use nanomaterials as anodes, but they use them in bulk rather than individually, according to Sandia Labs researcher Jianyu Huang. It’s like “looking at a forest and trying to understand the behavior of an individual tree,” he said in a statement. By contrast, his method allowed atomic-scale observations of individual trees.
Huang and colleagues were able to measure the wire’s tortuous twisting, noting that it nearly doubled in length during charging — a fairly surprising result. Most battery developers had believed batteries swell across their diameters, not longitudinally, so a better understanding of these stretchy processes could help avoid short circuits.
The work is a testimony to the power of direct observation, said MIT materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang in a perspective article accompanying the study.
“The results should stimulate others to consider analogous experiments and mechanisms in other storage materials, and should contribute to the design of nanoscale electrodes that fully exploit the potential of ultrahigh-capacity storage materials,” Chiang wrote.
Watch the battery's growing pains below.