Posts Tagged ‘batteries’
DARPA’s Future Li-ion Batteries Will Be Smaller Than Grains of Salt
Jane Chang, an engineer at the University of California-Los Angeles, is designing a tiny solid electrolyte that allows charge to flow between two nanoscale electrodes. Eventually, the wee batteries could be used to power a host of micro and nanodevices.
The special electrolyte is basically just a series of nanowires coated with conductive material. Chang is using painstakingly slow atomic layer deposition to spray minuscule amounts of lithium aluminosilicate onto the nanowires. The solid compound allows current to flow within a battery. The nanowires are designed to have a high surface-to-volume ratio, making them more efficient.
“We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities, as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller,” Chang says.
Nanoscale electrodes are being designed in other labs, but so far, no one has built a complete working nano-battery, according to UCLA.
If they work, they could be more effective, and perhaps less prone to scary malfunction, than or . The batteries could be useful for powering devices for medical diagnostics and treatment, among other technologies.
Chang announced her latest results Tuesday at the AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition in Albuquerque.
Power to the Paper: Researchers Turn Paper into Flexible Lithium-Ion Battery
The batteries were fabricated by materials scientists at Stanford by depositing a thin film of carbon nanotubes followed by another thin film of metal-containing lithium compound on top of the nanotube layer. These thin bilayer films are layered onto both sides of a piece of ordinary paper, which serves as both the structural support of the battery as well as the electrode separator. The lithium serves as electrodes, while the nanotube layers are current collectors.
The result is a working battery just 300 micrometers thick – that’s 300 millionths of a meter – that is flexible, super-thin, and more energy dense than other thin-bodied batteries. It’s also durable; over a 300-cycle recharge test, performance remained satisfactory. It’s also fairly easy to fabricate, making it far more commercially viable than other methods of downsizing battery technology.
Such batteries aren’t ideal for every application, but they could be extremely useful in future incarnations of smart packaging, RFID sensing, and electronic paper products.
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GM, Itochu charge up battery-maker Sakti3 with $4.2 million
GM Ventures, the venture-capital arm of General Motors, announced today it has teamed up with Itochu Technology Ventures to invest $4.2 million into Sakti3, a lithium-ion battery developer.
Sakti3, a spin-off from the University of Michigan, is working on battery cells that could be smaller, cheaper and more effective than what’s currently on the market – potentially resulting in batteries that could extend its range of electric cars. The company’s technology uses solids instead of the standard liquid electrolyte and electrodes.
“The technology will eventually make it into GM batteries/vehicles, but it’s years away from commercial applications,” said GM spokeswoman Allison Ackels. “When the technology becomes commercially viable, it could be in future GM cars and trucks.”
GM, which it set to release the Chevrolet Volt electric hybrid later this year, .
The reborn General Motors opened its venture-capital branch . With its backing and that of Japanese conglomerate Itochu (which recently invested in video platform and game startup ), Sakti3 should be able to speed the commercialization of its batteries.
This is the second announcement from GM Ventures, which said last month it would , which makes a hybrid van.
Range and the reliability of batteries are big question marks in the electric car market. While consumers have tax incentives to purchase an electric car – the Nissan , sedan and Volt all debut at the end of this year – questions remain about the range of these cars and the reliability of the batteries, which are expensive to replace. The Leaf, for example, goes about 100 miles on a single charge, but .
It’s also not clear how long the batteries last, though Nissan and Chevrolet both extended an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty to the Leaf and Volt, respectively.
Sakti3 is led by Ann Marie Sastry (pictured above, with a Volt), a University of Michigan professor in the New York Times. Sakti3’s investors include Khosla and Beringea.
Companies: , , , , , ,
New Biofuel Cell Demonstrated; Could Be Filled With Sugary Soft Drinks to Power Devices
The technology is actually as old as the beginnings of life itself, but the research represents the first working fuel cell that produces power in such a way. The new biofuel cell borrows from the mitochondria that power our bodies' own cells. Mitochondria, you'll remember from high school biology, are the powerhouses of the cell, converting sugars or fats into adenosine triphosphate -- or ATP -- which stores the energy until the cell needs to burn it.
The new fuel cell is still in prototype, but the researchers have demonstrated it in the lab. It essentially consists of a thin layer of mitochondria pressed between two electrodes, one of which is gas-permeable. In tests, cooking oil byproducts and sugar both produced electricity.
Naturally, such a power source would be useful in myriad applications. Less likely than fueling up laptops with energy drinks are uses like powering small wireless sensors. Besides, Red Bull is more expensive by the gallon than gasoline.
High-Pressure Process Yields a Brand-New Material That Stores Massive Amounts of Energy
Material is called "the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear"
Calling the material "the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy," the researchers created the super-battery inside a diamond anvil cell, a small chamber that can create extremely high pressures within a confined space. The team filled the chamber with xenon difluoride, a white solid usually used to etch silicon conductors.
The science is in the squeezing; under normal atmospheric conditions, the molecules of xenon difluoride keep a respectable distance from one another. But under the intense pressures produced by the diamond anvils the molecules are forced together into metallic 3-D structures. At one million atmospheres -- roughly equivalent to the pressure found halfway to the center of the Earth -- the xenon difluoride is pressed neatly into these structures where the mechanical energy of all that pressure is stored in the chemical bonds between the molecules.
And just like that, the material becomes a chemical battery containing the mechanical energy from all that pressure. That raises the possibility of practical applications such as high-energy fuels, high-powered and compact batteries, or semiconductors that can function at very high temperatures.
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Why Afghanistan’s Lithium Is a Big Deal, Even If It Never Leaves the Ground
Lithium is cheap and widely available, so why do we care about a new resource in a war zone? Because it’s another counter to the irrational fear that the automobile’s lithium-powered electric future is doomed before it begins
Drowned in the noise, however, was a fascinating bit of news: that just this month a Pentagon team was hunting for minerals in Afghanistan’s dry lakes, and that early findings suggested that one site alone might contain more lithium than Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, which is believed to hold up to half the world’s known supply.
Why is this significant? Because even if Afghanistan’s lithium never leaves the ground, the sudden, black-swan appearance of a new and potentially massive resource helps further debunk the myth that the world is running out of lithium and that, as a result, an electric-car revival that relies on lithium-based batteries is doomed before it begins.
Too much of the coverage of lithium seems to be driven by the idea that it is slightly more rare than unicorn hide. It’s not. Extremely conservative estimates from the USGS peg world lithium reserves at 9.9 million metric tons, and the number is almost certainly much higher. By contrast, in 2008 (because of the recession, 2009 was an unrepresentative year) the world’s lithium mines produced 25,400 metric tons. Those mines will need to produce more in the coming years as lithium-ion batteries start going into cars, but that shouldn’t be a problem: more than 100 companies worldwide are moving into the market.
If lithium isn’t rare, however, it is unfamiliar and misunderstood. It is an exotic, intriguing element—the lightest metal in the periodic table, and therefore the ideal carrier ion for a battery. It has been called “the yeast in the dough” of the most advanced batteries we have today, the power packs that will drive the and the , both of which arrive later this year. Most of the blue-sky battery technologies in the lab now are designed to surpass lithium-ion batteries by jamming far more lithium atoms into their electrodes per unit volume and mass, thereby storing more usable electrons, so lithium will be an essential element in the construction of a clean-energy future. That’s a very good reason to pay close attention to the countries and the companies that produce it. But that doesn’t mean there’s not enough of the stuff to go around.
Here’s the backstory on the Afghanistan mineral findings. In 2007 the USGS published an estimate of Afghan mineral resources that showed that the country contained vast untouched deposits of iron, copper, rare-earth elements and other high-demand minerals. The report barely touched on lithium, simply mentioning that deposits of a rock known as pegmatite could yield “a variety of commodities,” including lithium.
Particularly in Australia companies do mine pegmatite for lithium, but digging and blasting that hard rock out of the ground and breaking it down into usable lithium is expensive, at least compared with lithium production from brines. In certain geologically anomalous spots around the world, there are large salt flats that are saturated with water rich in lithium and other minerals. Extracting lithium from the right kind of salt flat is a cheap and low-impact matter of pumping lithium-rich water from the flat into a series of evaporation ponds, where it bakes in the sun until it is concentrated into an oily yellow solution of 6 percent lithium. Currently, two of the three largest lithium producers in the world get their supply from a single salt flat in northern Chile, the Salar de Atacama. Across the border in Bolivia is the much larger Salar de Uyuni, which is loaded with lithium but which, for political and technical reasons, is still at least a few years from sending lithium to the market.
The penultimate paragraph of the Times story suggested that Afghanistan might have one dry salt lake richer than either of these. And that’s a major point that never appeared in a public USGS report.
Neither the Pentagon nor the USGS will elaborate on the mention in the Times story of a salt-lake lithium source. In an otherwise candid conversation, Jack Medlin of the USGS declined to provide any more details on the subject. Major Shawn Turner, a Pentagon spokesperson, said he had nothing to add.
According to Jack Shroder, a geologist at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, a high-altitude plain that’s about a 70-mile drive northwest of the city of Ghazni known as the Dasht-i-Nawar is the obvious candidate for the mysterious Afghan mother lode. Shroder said he didn’t know for certain that this was the spot, but “if the lithium source is in a dry lake and it is near Ghazni, then it is probably the place.” (An alternative, he said, is another dry lake farther to the south called Ab-i-Istada.)
The salt flats of the “Lithium Triangle”—the high desert region where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia intersect which is currently home to the most productive lithium sources in the world—and the Dasht-i-Nawar have several uncanny similarities. They are all arid to semi-arid high-altitude salt flats where flamingos like to breed; that’s the superficial part. They all sit in high-altitude contact zones between tectonic plates, zones where ancient volcanism left behind mineral-rich igneous rocks. Most important, all three are basins surrounded by old volcanoes. (Shroder says that the Dasht-i-Nawar is what remains of the crater of a stratovolcano that erupted 2.2 million years ago.) Over the millennia, as the ice and snow melts off the surrounding mountains and volcanoes every year and seeps down to the basin below, that water leaches minerals from the volcanic rock it encounters along the way and deposits them at the bottom of the basin. In time, the water in the center of the basin grows richer in minerals like potassium, magnesium, boron and lithium.
At the second annual Lithium Supply and Markets conference in January, Afghanistan didn’t come up once in two days of presentations by mining-company executives, geologists and industry analysts. At the next such conference, it will probably be mentioned frequently as a curiosity, because it’s unlikely that Afghan lithium will have any effect on the market for decades. Mining companies aren’t necessarily scared of sketchy countries—I’ve seen North Korea mentioned as a new frontier in minerals exploration in mining trade publications—but at the moment, lithium is cheap (the market leader, SQM, cut its lithium carbonate prices by 20 percent last year) and widely available (at the moment, SQM is actually pumping excess lithium back into the Salar de Atacama because the company harvests more lithium as a by-product of potassium production than it can find a market for). There’s no reason to go lithium prospecting in a war zone.
“As far as Afghanistan is concerned, who cares?” Jon Hykawy, a mining analyst with Byron Capital Markets in Toronto, wrote in an e-mail. “I am not going to be the one leading a team into Taliban territory to try and process lithium.” He drew an analogy between Afghanistan and Colombia. Colombia has potentially excellent oil reserves, just like neighboring Venezuela, but “there has been a low-grade civil war going on in Colombia for the last couple of decades. No one is crazy enough to try and get oil out of the ground in Colombia, and no one is going to go try and get lithium out of the ground in Afghanistan until the thugs are out of the government and the Taliban stop killing anything that moves that is not allied with them.”
Companies don’t like risk and lack of security, and Afghanistan, well—“it will be probably the worst place to go to,” says Gal Luft, the executive director of the energy-focused D.C. think tank the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.” Security concerns aside, Luft points out that it took years for Chile to build the rail and road infrastructure that gets its huge copper mines running, and before Afghanistan can become a serious mining country, it will need the same infrastructure.
The most likely candidate to build that infrastructure is probably the country that seems most interested in securing Afghan mineral rights, despite the war: China. Last year, using a comprehensive package of humanitarian aid and (allegedly) bribes, a state-run mining company won the rights to the Aynak copper mine south of Kabul. Today the Chinese (the distinction between industry and the government is blurry) are fighting for rights to mine the Hajiguk Pass north of Kabul, home to 1.8 billion metric tons of iron ore—the largest iron deposit in Asia. Shroder says it’s likely that a Chinese firm could win the rights to Hajiguk, build the roads and railway necessary to ship iron ore south to the the Pakistani port of Gwadar (which Chinese concerns also built), and years from now use that existing, paid-for infrastructure to start extracting the lithium from a source like the Dasht-i-Nawar, which is about 100 miles to the south of Hajiguk.
Say this scenario actually happens. Would it have any practical effect on the price or availability of lithium? Not anytime soon. “I don’t think it has a lot of implication for the market in the first half of the 21st century,” Luft says. “This is a story for the 22nd century.”
What the story does now is help show that it is absurd to start talking about an impending shortage of a mineral that the mining industry really only started taking seriously after the spread of lithium-ion batteries in laptops and cell phones in the 1990s. When the Afghanistan news broke, a friend at a mining-industry publication confessed to never having heard of Afghanistan as a potential lithium source. But he also said he wasn’t surprised, because lithium is not rare. What other countries have high-altitude salt lakes that we’ve never paid attention to? As Luft says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if half a dozen other places get thrown around as the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium’” in the years ahead.