Sekisui Chemical Co., Ltd. makes a wide variety of plastics, films, and active chemical components. Whipping up something light and powerful in their kitchen must often be a matter of tossing available ingredients into a new recipe. In this case, they’ve come up with something unique and potentially highly useful. Their research and development center director Satoshi Uenoyama announced “a high-capacity film-type lithium-ion battery “using a coating process that has simultaneously tripled its capacity (compared to other Sekisui Chemical products), increase its safety (as a result of standard safety testing, e.g. no problems with nail penetration tests or crush tests) and speeded up production by ten times (compared to other Sekisui Chemical products).” The company continues comparisons with its products, suggesting lithium-ion conductivity for the new battery is 10 times that of other Sekisui Chemical products. They claim “enhanced safety” through the use of a high-performance gel-type electrolyte, which because of its high viscosity, can be spread onto the battery’s film materials as part of …
Converging Paths Head toward Better Supercapacitors
Two different lines of research in Korea and Australia seem to be heading toward practical supercapacitors with energy densities approaching the lower end of battery technology while offering better charging efficiency and extended lifetimes. Santhakumar Kannappan, a researcher at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea has led a team who reduced graphene oxide particles with hydrazine in water, then agitated the slurry with ultrasound. This produces a “highly porous form of graphene that has a huge internal surface area,” equivalent to a basketball court for every gram. They pack the resulting powder into a coin-shaped cell, dry it at 140° C and a pressure of 300 kilograms per centimeter (4,267 pounds per square inch) for five hours. Electrodes made this way and saturated in EBIMF 1 M electrolyte have a specific capacitance of 150 Farads per gram, an energy density of 64 Watt-hours per kilogram and a current density of 5 Amps per gram. MIT’s Technology Review …
Your Black Friday (and All-Year) Giving List
With merchants beating the drums of commerce to lure you to their stores and web sites for holiday cheer (at least for the merchants), your editor has some alternative giving suggestions that could help bankroll the future of aviation (if not aviation futures). Each of these projects would welcome funding, and each has much to give back to all of us. Put Your Face in Space The Perlan Project has initiated a fund-raising program on Indie-Go-Go, with the immediate goal to complete construction of the major parts of Perlan II, a high-performance, high-altitude research sailplane recently featured in the New York Times. Its planned mission to 90,000 feet in the Polar Vortex could give us new and profound understanding of global climate change, the ozone hole and greenhouse gases. For a mere $15, you will, “Receive a professionally edited digital video of the entire Perlan Mission II aeronautical exploration, atmospheric science research and record breaking flights.” For another $14, you …
Unique, From A (for Aerodynamics) to Zee
Ilan Kroo, according to his biography page, is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, an advanced cross-country hang glider pilot, and designer of the Swift flying wing hang glider, unmanned aerial vehicles, a flying Pterosaur replica, America’s Cup sailboats, and high-speed research aircraft. Currently on a leave of absence from Stanford, he has started Zee Aero, “a bay area start-up company focusing on bringing new technologies to civil aircraft.” Zee Aero, on its first of five sparse web pages, proclaims, “We’re creating an entirely new aircraft,” a heady claim considering the lack of supporting descriptions or illustrations. But other sources have been made available, including Zee’s patent applications, which show a slim tricycle-gear fuselage surmounted by variously drawn structures holding eight upward-facing propellers and two propellers in the tail, apparently to push the whole assembly along. KGO television sent a news crew to Zee’s Mountain View headquarters, and broadcast nice views of the secure building in which …
E-volo (Doesn’t) Hit the Ceiling
According to its makers, “e-volo’s Volocopter is a revolution in aviation made in Germany. Safer, simpler, and cleaner than normal helicopters, it has a unique way of moving – a groundbreaking innovation. The Volocopter is an environmentally friendly and emission-free private helicopter. Instead of one combustion engine, eighteen electrically driven rotors propel it.” Alexander Zosel, managing director of e-volo, says that the VC200’s maiden flight and first test flights in the dm-arena in Karlsruhe, Germany on November 17 are precursors of coming production models. “There are already numerous requests for the Volocopter from around the world,” he added. The two-seat vehicle made several flights lasting several minutes each, climbing within the gymnasium but not presenting any danger to hanging lights in the 22 meter (71.7 feet) high enclosure. Notably, it did not carry pilot or passenger, but received commands from a radio-control transmitter managed by Daniel Gurdan and Jan Stumpf, two of Ascending Technologies‘ CEOs. Designed from the start as …
If You Have to Ask…
Binder Flugmotoren- & Flugzeugbau is a German firm specializing in high-end single and two-seat motorized sailplanes which offer outstanding performance. Their EB29d Elektro is a two-seater with winning lines and ways – as evidenced by their recent victories in European and American soaring contests. A self-launcher more intended for climbing and soaring than cross-country touring under power, the airplane shares some characteristics of operation and design with Lange’s Antares and Arcus series and some ASH models. The motor extends and retracts on a long stalk, for instance, and the batteries for power are contained in the wings. Binder’s EB28 and EB29 segelflugzeuge come in 25.3 meter (82.98 feet), 28.3 meter (92.82 feet), and 29.3 meter (96.10 feet) spans, easily reduced or extended with a set of exchangeable wingtips. Binder’s claim that “Now you can choose the optimum wing span for every weather, in order to fly at the front of the competition or to enjoy great pleasure of flight. This concept …
Lithium-Sulfur Achieves New Highs
Allen Chen at the University of California at Berkeley reports that researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) “have demonstrated in the laboratory a lithium-sulfur (Li/S) battery that has more than twice the specific energy of lithium-ion batteries, and that lasts for more than 1,500 cycles of charge-discharge with minimal decay of the battery’s capacity,” the longest cycle life reported so far for any lithium-sulfur battery. Working on the premise that if electric vehicles are to have a 300-mile range, researchers explain that batteries will need to provide a cell-level specific energy of 350 to 400 Watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg), roughly double that of lithium-ion batteries. They should also manage at least 1,000, and preferably 1,500 charge-discharge cycles before showing noticeable power loss. Elton Cairns, of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), is a professor at Berkeley in the The Berkeley Energy Storage and Conversion for Transportation and Renewables (BESTAR) Program. Part of their purpose …
Batteries That Heal Themselves
Alert reader Colin Rush provided this breaking development in battery science. Regular readers will remember Dr. Yi Cui’s name. He’s a Stanford University scientist who has worked with paper batteries, much more powerful electrodes, and means of helping batteries stay together under the continuous strain of expanding and contracting during charging and discharging. He explained that at the third annual Electric Aircraft Symposium at the Hiller Aviation Museum, and has since adopted several tactics to overcome that problem. One commercial outgrowth of his work, Amprius, is working on commercial production that benefits from his insights. Since that internal flexing eventually leads to cracking of electrodes, Dr. Cui’s latest announcement brings some hope that such things can not only be overcome, but literally healed. Just as our bodies have internal resources to fight diseases and repair muscle and bone, batteries can be made to be self-healing. Dr. Cui has been a proponent of using silicon as a major component in electrodes, …
Angela Belcher Continues Making Batteries with Viruses
Three years ago, in one of our earliest entries, this blog reported on the blending of biology and chemistry in a bionic battery created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Angela Belcher. She was honored with a press briefing with President Obama, MIT President Susan Hockfield and her prototype battery, and used the occasion to encourage federal funding for such ventures. In a later visit to her laboratory, the President accepted a business card with the periodic table, saying he would consult it periodically. She has turned her bionic battery research to improving the chances for lithium-air batteries to reach that magic 500-mile figure ( or at least 550 kilometers or 341 miles), and has explained her approach and progress in a Nature Communications paper and in the video below. Since Dr. Belcher has been using a biological approach in her research for the last decade, it was natural for her to use genetically-modified, non-toxic viruses to grow” spiky surfaces” …
Flying Donkeys – A New Cargo Paradigm
Richard Glassock, of eight-seat, self-launching, sight-seeing sailplane fame, alerted your editor to a different kind of challenge in Africa that could expand the use of drones for positive outcomes. An earlier and ongoing effort to provide “last mile” delivery of small, high-value items such as medicines and electronics to remote villages came from Matternet, a Palo Alto, California based group whose slogan, “Lifting the Rising Billion,” refers to its aspirations to deliver necessities in Africa, but was first demonstrated in Haiti in August and September of 2012. Here they fulfill a mission to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, at a camp that was set up after the 2010 earthquake. The crowding, seen from overhead, would make expeditious travel through this camp almost impossible in any way other than air. A new group, Flying Donkeys, hopes to raise the weight-carrying capabilities of Matternet’s small packages to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) and has established an “escalating series of sub-challenges” that will lead to a race …