A Long and Productive Life On his 96th birthday today, John Goodenough and his research team’s latest findings are the subject of much speculation. He, fellow scientist Maria Braga, and his research team have created a battery claimed to be three times as energy dense as existing lithium-ion contemporaries, but exhibiting the counterintuitive property of improving with repeated charging cycles. Goodenough’s career began in 1943 (a year after your editor was born) with the award of his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yale University, followed his master’s and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1951 and 1952 respectively. He worked at MIT and in 1976, left to become head of Oxford University’s Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory from 1976 to 1986. In 1986, he assumed the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, at an age where most men are cashing in their 401k’s. Texas Monthly comments on the counterintuitive nature of …
Three Battery Technologies with Great Potential
It’s a good week when at least three battery developments show promise for electric vehicle use in the near future. One advanced lithium-ion battery from France, a dual-carbon battery from Japan, and a supercapacitor that one can wrap around one’s finger comprise the trio. French Lithium-Tin Dioxide “Synthesizing nanoparticles of tin dioxide (SnO2) in the pores of a carbonaceous material,” researchers at the Institute of Materials Science of Mulhouse and Charles Gerhardt Institute of Montpellier, part of an electrochemical energy storage consortium called RS2E, have found the material to have “remarkable properties.” Their work is the subject of a patent and published in the journal, Advanced Energy Materials. Researchers, hoping to obtain better performance that that achieved with carbon electrodes, tested combinations of nickel (Ni), iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), and other materials before hitting on tin dioxide as a material of choice. All have (theretically) far greater electrochemical storage capacity than graphite, but expand and contract during charging and discharging of the battery, …
Suppressing Those Pesky Dendrites
Dendrites in the human body are tree-branch-like protuberances that help transmit synapses, defined as tiny transmitters and receivers for chemical messages between the cells. In this setting they are beneficial and necessary for brain and nervous system development. In batteries, however, such protuberances send mixed and negative messages that short out connections between the components of the host battery. This is a serious enough issue that it’s kept lithium-metal batteries from serious development, dendrites growing between dissimilar metals being a malady of such cells, and even causing fires that make lithium batteries a bit fearsome. The blog has reported on efforts by Berkeley Lab researchers to reduce dendrite growth. To enable visualization of these growths, Clare Grey, a professor of chemistry at Cambridge University, teamed up with NYU chemist Alexej Jerschow to develop a way of imaging batteries through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). As Popular Mechanics explained in 2012, “These moss-like crystalline growths, called dendrites, are the bane of battery builders. …