Cerebral: A Brainier Kind of Battery

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Cerebral, the brainchild of Dr. Lynden Archer—Dean of the School of Engineering at Cornell University, is as the name implies, a smart approach to battery development.  Claimed to be three times more efficient than lithium, much safer with no fire risk, and ten times faster charging, the battery is made of recycled aluminum and graphene.  In fact, materials for the battery come from United States-based waste streams.  Low-grade domestic carbon waste, for example, goes through a “Graphitizer,” a machine “created at the University of California, Riverside’s Mechanical Engineering Department and exclusively optioned by Cerebral Energy.” (Editor’s Note: Forgive the lack of product-related images or videos here.  Your editor could not find an illustration of a graphitizer, for instance, or any research photos or graphs related to this relatively new research area.  We will share any such images as soon as they are available.) The Uncertain Graphite Supply Line This is an important development, since the U. S. imports most of …

SAS 2019: IBM Battery Research with Dr. Jangwoo Kim

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Aircraft Components, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Dr. Jangwoo Kim has a resume’ that puts a great many qualifications together that spell “battery designer.”  He has a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Yonsei University, one of three “Sky Universities” regarded as South Korea’s most prestigious.  At Cornell University, he received M. S. and Ph.D degrees in chemical engineering, and then worked for LG Chem on lithium-ion battery pack design.  After that, he returned to Cornell to work on his Ph.D, investigating “next-generation rechargeable battery technology, including Li-Air and Li-Sulfur, specialized in inorganic nanomaterial synthesis and polymer processing via an electrospraying method.”  He joined IBM Research, Almaden Research Center in 2016 and participated in the Battery 500 project, aiming to build a battery pack with a specific energy of 500 watt-hours per kilogram.   We see the project leader, Dr. Winfred Wilcke, in a short video about that project. Battery 500 intended to reduce or eliminate heavy metals such as cobalt from the cells.  Cobalt is not rare, but …