For the last 60 years, your editor remembers the oft-repeated advice from garage mechanics and now lithium-ion advocates that slow charging is the way to make your batteries last for many cycles. Where does this put Tesla, for instance, with its 20-minute Superchargers? Are you damaging your expensive cells by being in a hurry? In yet another example of counter-intuitive thinking at work, researchers at SLAC, the National Accelerator Laboratory at located on the Stanford University campus have challenged several tenets of conventional battery wisdom. According to PC World, their work, “published on Sunday in the Journal, Nature Materials, challenges the commonly held notion that slowly charging a battery helps prolong its life and that it’s damaging to a battery if a large amount of energy is withdrawn in a short time.” William Chueh, a senior author of the paper and researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), told the magazine, “’We’ve always thought of a …
IBM’s Battery 500 Project
One of several presenters at this year’s sixth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium held by the CAFE Foundation at Santa Rosa, California on April 27 and 28 this year, Dr. Winfried W. Wilcke, senior, Manager of Nanoscale Science and Technology at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, initiated and heads up the Battery 500 project, a coalition to create a battery that will give electric cars a 500-mile range. Partners include the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, the Stanford Linear Accelerator National Laboratory, and Stanford University. Asahi Kasei and Central Glass have recently joined the enterprise, chosen for their expertise in battery separator membranes and electrolytes respectively. The Project’s goal is to eliminate range anxiety for EV owners and use the excess capacity of the electrical grid at night for charging. Dr. Wilcke explained that if all U. S. drivers had battery-powered electric cars, 73 percent of those EVs could be recharged at night with excess electricity from the grid. Given …