Bosch’s acquisition of Seeo Inc. is followed within seven weeks by news that an innovator in another area has acquired a battery developer. Electric-vehiclenews.com announced that “Dyson, the U.K. company famous for its bagless vacuum cleaners, has acquired Michigan-based solid-state battery startup Sakti3 for $90 million and announced plans to build an important $1 billion battery factory to mass produce the next generation battery technology.” The report noted this was the second recent purchase of a promising start-up company by a larger, richer firm. Bosch acquired Seeo Inc. to benefit from its solid-state technology, which like most solid-state batteries would, among other benefits, reduce or eliminate fire hazards – something brought to the fore by recent FAA rulings on shipping of lithium batteries. Sakti3 has announced a solid-state cell with 400 Watt-hours per kilogram energy density, roughly twice that of most competitors, including Tesla’s – reputed to be around 230 Wh/kg. Although Sakti3 founder and CEO Ann Marie Sastry joins Dyson as …
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” …