We first saw the appellation, “24M” four years ago in our report on research done at MIT to produce an ionic liquid called “Cambridge Crude,” usable in flow batteries. Dr. Yet-Ming Chiang headed up that work in collaboration with Professors Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond at MIT and Glenn Amatucci at Rutgers, among others. They formed a commercial spinoff and seemingly went underground for the next four years. Dr. Chiang and his associates had previously gone commercial with A123, which went through the trial of bankruptcy and being acquired by overseas investors. It’s now solvent and looking to double output. 24M is a spin-off of A123. We found that Professor Chiang had resurfaced when friend and blog reader Marshall Houston …
Cambridge Crude and Range Euphoria
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists have announced what they claim is a “Significant advance in battery architecture [that] could be breakthrough for electric vehicles and grid storage.” According to a story by David L. Chandler from the MIT News Office, the new battery system is lightweight and inexpensive, and could make recharging “as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.” Seemingly requiring some active components within the battery, this “semi-solid flow cell” pumps solid particles suspended in a carrier liquid which form the cathodes and anodes through the system. According to the MIT news item, “These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane.” Mechanically more …
A Pair of Viruses Good for Your Computer – and Maybe Your Electric Vehicle
To say that your battery is “smoking” would normally be the sign of a failed circuit, but researchers at the A. James Clark School of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Maryland may be putting a virus that’s bad even for tobacco to good use in creating a battery that may be up to 10 times more powerful than today’s best lithium cells. Professor Reza Ghodssi, director of the Institute for Systems Research and Herbert Rabin Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Clark School, is “harnessing and exploiting the ‘self-renewing’ and ‘self-assembling’ properties” of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), which in its unrestrained natural state destroys tobacco, tomatoes, peppers and other leafy green things. …