Two varying approaches to battery development may hold clues to future directions for energy storage. At the same time, their announcements, promising as they seem, reinforce our cautious attitudes toward how battery performance numbers are presented. PNNL Attacks the Electrolyte Issue According to Green Optimistic, “Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed a new formula for battery’s electrolyte solution to enhance its performance unprecedentedly in terms of its service life and storage capacity or an electric vehicle’s range.” The video gives an overview of what it takes to make a battery and hints at the reasons battery research takes so long to give up improved energy storage devices. Unprecedented the development may be, and the promise of a battery with a 7X longer lifespan and two-to-three times longer range than currently-available batteries certainly captures our attention. Its own press release suggests that PNNL researchers are enthusiastic about the longevity of their new chemistry. “When it comes to …
Keeping Battery Fires at Bay
Fires on or in aircraft are anathema, leaving a pilot and passengers with few options. Even a laptop starting to smoke in the cabin will cause an emergency descent and a diversion to the nearest airport. As designers incorporate larger lithium batteries into new aircraft (and they are essential to motor-driven planes), the need to keep things from self-igniting becomes imperative. Researchers at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, working with funding from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) discovered, “That adding two chemicals to the electrolyte of a lithium metal battery prevents the formation of dendrites – ‘fingers’ of lithium that pierce the barrier between the battery’s halves, causing it to short out, overheat and sometimes burst into flame.” Preventing these shorts will lead to the next-generation batteries being able to take advantage of lithium-sulfur and lithium-air technologies with up to 10 times the energy per weight of batteries now used in …
Designer Carbon: High Surface Area and Porosity
Stanford researchers, working with scientists at Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and China’s National Laboratory of Microstructures (Nanjing), School of Electronic Science and Engineering, at Nanjing University, have squeezed carbon as flat (if not flatter than) as graphene and poked lots of well-sized holes in it to make designer battery and supercapacitor components. Professor Zhenan Bao led the efforts at Stanford. The combined teams’ paper, “Ultrahigh Surface Area Three-Dimensional Porous Graphitic Carbon from Conjugated Polymeric Molecular Framework,” appeared as a cover article in the May 18 edition of the journal ACS Central Science. The paper explains, “High surface area porous carbon materials are of great technological importance due to their diverse functionalities and excellent physical/chemical robustness. Their high electronic conductivity, large surface area, and good chemical and electrochemical stability are of particular interest for electrochemical energy storage devices, such as electrochemical capacitors (or supercapacitors) and batteries.” High surface area gives more space for electrolyte to interact with …