Researchers at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Illinois report, “that wood-biochar supercapacitors can produce as much power as today’s activated-carbon supercapacitors at a fraction of the cost – and with environmentally friendly byproducts.” Junhua Jiang, senior research engineer at the Center, has been reducing wood and cellulose products such as corncobs to biochar by heating the fibers in a reduced oxygen environment. This pyrolysis process creates a porous, black substance that can be used as electrodes in supercapacitors. While other researchers use carbon black or more advanced forms of carbon such as nanotubes, this more humble approach yields equal or better performance at a fraction of the cost of the more labor-intensive methods. Many of the alternatives obtain their carbon from fossil-fuels, making biochar the environmental option. Jiang notes, “Supercapacitors are ideal for applications needing instant power and can even provide constant power – like batteries, but at lower cost,” adding that they are useful in transportation, electronics …
Additive Manufacturing for Electric Motors
United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) is working with the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) on the “Additive Manufacturing of Optimized Ultra-High Efficiency Electric Machines,” or making motors through 3-D printing with metals, possibly obviating the need for rare-earth elements. The $2.7 million ARPA-E award will fund the East Hartford, Connecticut-based project through early 2016 and may lead toward the goal of creating lower-cost, more efficient motors. Because modern permanent magnet motors require rare earth minerals in their magnets for maximum performance, manufacturers must make optimum use of these minerals with minimum waste to be successful. Because these minerals do not exist in large quantities in North America, makers must import a great many of them from Asia, where certain key players maintain control over their distribution. ARPA-E explains the “workaround” possible through improved manufacturing techniques. “Rare earths are naturally occurring minerals with unique magnetic properties that are used in electric vehicle (EV) motors and wind generators. Because these …
Call for EAS VIII Papers
Dr. Brien Seeley, founder and president of the CAFE Foundation, shared this message today. “The CAFE Foundation is accepting presentation proposals for the 8th Annual Electric Aircraft Symposium, to be held April 25-26, 2014 in Santa Rosa, California. This international graduate level program will cover a comprehensive range of topics and will emphasize the latest breakthroughs in the rapidly growing domain of electric powered aircraft. Faculty and attendees will include experts from leading aerospace, electronics and energy companies. Topics will include aerodynamics, motors, energy storage, energy harvesting, control systems, recreational aircraft, propulsion, robotics, avionics, airspace integration, manufacturing, business cases and airport land uses. “Interested parties should email inquiries and abstracts to: cafe400@sonic.net“
Cheap, and It Gets Better With Age
Mixing a form of rust and water might help to make inexpensive battery electrodes with long cycle lives a real possibility. If they have much higher energy densities than more expensive “conventional” electrodes used in lithium batteries, so much the better. Zhaolin Liu of the A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore; Aishui Yu of Fudan University, China, and co-workers have created an electrode material that’s not only inexpensive, but scalable to large-scale manufacturing. Normally, lithium batteries “shuttle” lithium ions between two electrodes connected in a circuit. According to A*STAR, “During charging, lithium ions escape from the cathode, which is made from materials such as lithium cobalt oxide. The ions migrate through a liquid electrolyte and into the anode, which is usually made of graphite riddled with tiny pores. When the battery discharges, the process runs in reverse, generating an electrical current between the electrodes.” That norm for lithium batteries tends to reduce …
Aerovel Autonomously Performs Takeoff, Flight, and Landing – Twice!
As explained on their YouTube posting, Aerovel’s autonomous flight of their Flexrotor aircraft shows a remarkable level of adaptability and control. “In what are believed to be the first-ever flight cycles of an unmanned aircraft based on an unmanned boat, Flexrotor launches from a remotely-controlled skiff while underway, climbs out as a helicopter, transitions to wing-borne flight, images the skiff while flying at low and high speeds, transitions back to thrust-borne flight, and retrieves autonomously onboard. The aircraft then shuts down, is automatically refueled and restarted, and repeats the first flight, finally being secured onboard in a docking station.” Aerovel notes that the boat was radio controlled, but the Flexrotor Pandora flew the mission on its own and without human intervention during the October 16 flight over the Columbia River in eastern Oregon. This repeated maneuver is as thrilling as it looks. Tad McGeer, the founder and president of Aerovel, wrote of an earlier flight, ““transition requires a climb, pitch-over, …
Perlan Project Gets Good Press in the New York Times
Science reporter Matthew Wald visited the Perlan Project in Bend, Oregon recently to see for himself an aircraft that just might conquer the heights – 90,000 feet – in a world-record attempt that will investigate the polar vortex and the ozone hole. His report in the October 21 New York Times highlights the intellectual investment in the project, with extremes of aircraft design reaching toward extreme goals. Perlan II will fly higher than any powered or unpowered aircraft in a sustained fashion. Zoom climbs in which American and Russian fighters emulated rocket ships to reach altitude records were more ballistic than controlled. Those who recall The Right Stuff will remember Chuck Yeager’s frantic and finally unrecoverable tail slide back from the edges of space. The on-line version of the story has the advantage of including a video that very nicely explains the goals and aspirations – as well as the hazards, associated with the flight. The article has brought a …
SolidEnergy Teams with A123 for High Energy Density Battery
Take two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) business incubator realizations, mix their strengths and watch for the potential breakthroughs that could come in the form of high-energy-density batteries. According to its web site, “SolidEnergy is developing a safe, high energy density, and wide temperature capable rechargeable battery that has the potential to transform the consumer electronics, electric vehicle, and downhole exploration (as in well drilling) industries. The core technology is called a Solid Polymer Ionic Liquid (SPIL) lithium metal battery.” Founded in 2012, “one of the toughest years in the battery industry,” SolidEnergy’s “…objective is to develop an insanely great next generation battery and commercialize it in the fastest and most efficient way.” This decidedly brash approach needs a steadying hand at the wheel, which is where its partnership with A123 Systems comes into play. A123’s first collaboration under its expanded research and development model combines SolidEnergy’s SPIL technology with “the mature cell design and prototyping capabilities of A123.” This would help …
Breaking Up Isn’t So Hard to Do
A great deal of the research on lithium batteries goes into figuring out how to keep them together for the greatest number of charge-discharge cycles. Unfortunately, the active compounds in these batteries that give the greatest energy storage capacity or power output, also tend to be those compounds that come unglued under stress. Taking high-resolution 3D movies with X-ray tomography (somewhat like the CAT scans used on human subjects), researchers at the Swiss Light Source, a mecca for seeing the unseeable, have witnessed the expansion and contraction of the internal structure of lithium-ion batteries, while the batteries are operating. Stanford University’s Dr. Cui has explained that the expansion and contraction of batteries leads to their eventual failure, but until now, there has been no real-time observation of these internal reactions. Martin Ebner, a Ph.D. candidate at the Laboratory for Nanoelectronics in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) and Professor Vanessa Wood, head of the …
Conventional Batteries “A Thing of the Past?”
Volvo Car Group has announced their development of what they term, “A revolutionary concept for lightweight structural energy storage components that could improve the energy usage of future electrified vehicles.” Using carbon fiber and other composite materials to make batteries and supercapacitors within structural panels, Volvo hopes to offer “lighter energy storage that requires less space in the car, cost effective structure options and is eco-friendly.” This blog reported on earlier efforts by Dr. Emile Greenhalgh at Imperial College in London, working on creating energy storage with simple carbon-fiber/fiberglass/carbon-fiber sandwiches as an academic lead partner with Volvo. His work is directed toward creating structural supercapacitors, while efforts at Volvo in Sweden, led by Per-Ivar Sellergren and working with his nearly two-decade-old patents, are aimed toward crafting lightweight batteries to replace metal structures. Funded as part of a European Union research project, and concerned with improving energy storage, the effort has Volvo as its only car manufacturer. The car maker’s project …
A Different Kind of Hybrid
In the Innovation Pavilion at Oshkosh’s AirVenture 2013, Joseph Hutterer quietly drew people in with a model and an interesting approach to a single-fuel type of hybrid. Take the twin engines off the wings and place one of them in the modified tail. Now put a small turbojet in a retracting pod in the nose. Taxi out to the end of the runway and use both engines to take off and climb, then shut the nose jet down, retract that, and cruise on the single rear engine. Hutterer, with an Aeronautical Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota, FAA commercial pilot’s license with single-engine, multi-engine, instrument and glider ratings, and 42 years of engineering and marketing experience in the general aviation industry, has the credentials and the patents to make his approach credible. Consider that aircraft such as the Solar Impulse cruise on only about 10-percent of what they need for takeoff and climb. A typical business twin doesn’t have …