Lithium-Oxygen Battery Breakthrough

Dean Sigler Biofuels, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

The University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada – not far from Niagara Falls) News, reported, “Chemists make breakthrough on the road to creating a rechargeable lithium-oxygen battery.”  Dr. Linda Nazar, Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials, led a team that “Resolved two of the most challenging issues surrounding lithium-oxygen batteries, and in the process created a working battery with near 100 per cent coulombic efficiency.” The new work, which appears this week in the journal Science, Proves that four-electron conversion for lithium-oxygen electrochemistry is highly reversible.”  Waterloo is the first to achieve this, doubling electron storage in lithium-oxygen (Li-O2 – also known as lithium-air) batteries.  The video below touches on this and a great many other chemistries. Dr. Nazar explains, “There are limitations based on thermodynamics.  Nevertheless, our work has addressed fundamental issues that people have been trying to resolve for a long time.”  As noted in the abstract for the Science paper, when Dr. Nazar and her colleagues …

Superoxides May Be New Super Materials for Batteries

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

A significantly large and geographically diverse group of researchers has invested a large amount of time and intellectual capital investigating superoxides, an innovative way to keep lithium-air batteries refreshed and ready for more. Groups at Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea; the University of Utah and the University of Kentucky all contributed to the ongoing project. While still serving as U. S. Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu called on academia and industry to develop a battery five times as powerful as then available lithium cells, at one-fifth the cost of then current batteries. We may not have arrived at that ambitious goal yet, but Argonne and UIC see a possible breakthrough in making lithium-air batteries – theoretically the most energetic of lithium chemistries – into long-lasting, energy-dense energy storage units. So far, lithium air batteries have a limiting weakness, the use of lithium peroxide, something that ends up being “an insoluble …

Cambridge’s “Ultimate” Battery? Wait 10 Years and See

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Aircraft Materials, Electric Powerplants Leave a Comment

Cambridge University researchers claim to have successfully demonstrated how several of the problems impeding the practical development of the so-called “ultimate” battery, in this case a lithium-oxygen unit, could be overcome.  They make some pretty impressive claims, saying they’ve developed a working laboratory demonstrator with “very high” energy density – comparable to that of gasoline and with greater than 90-percent efficiency, and the ability to be recharged more than 2,000 times, or 5-1/2 years with a complete cycle and recharge every day. A lithium-oxygen or lithium-air battery of this type would allow an uninterrupted drive between London and Edinburgh on a single charge, about 415 miles, over 100 miles greater than the top mileages promised by Tesla and GM at this point. Researchers add the promise of one-fifth the cost and one-fifth the weight of currently available batteries – a touchstone for electric aircraft designers, and close to the goals U. S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu asked for three years …

Ohio State’s Solar-Air Potassium Battery

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Ohio State University researchers have come up with a two-in-one solar cell/battery combination that promises great efficiency and low costs.  What’s not to like? Unfortunately for readers of the blog, it’s initially only a stationary system that will make energy storage a viable circumstance for large power plants, but it seems that the technology could be adapted to lighter, portable applications, such as electric vehicles. Ohio State is keeping somewhat mum about the patent-pending device, which they are developing as a commercial entity under the auspices of their spin-off, Kair (K for potassium, plus air and pronounced “care”).  We’ve heard a great deal about upcoming lithium-air batteries, but potassium-air is unique.  Even more unique, this battery stores energy from its own solar cell, the world’s first solar battery. A mesh solar panel allows air to enter the battery, and a special process transfers “electrons between the solar panel and the battery electrode. Inside the device, light and oxygen enable different …