BASF NiMH Battery Rebirth?

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

BASF, according to Wikipedia, “is the largest chemical producer in the world and is headquartered in Ludwigshafen, Germany.  BASF originally stood for Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (English: Baden Aniline and Soda Factory). Today, the four letters are a registered trademark….” With ongoing research into increasing energy storage capabilities of nickel metal hydride (NIMH) batteries to rival or exceed that of lithium batteries, BASF could make breakthroughs in building a safer, lower-cost battery.  Using an Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) award of $3.8 million, the company is working on a project titled, “High Performance NiMH Alloy for Next-Generation Batteries.” Funding applies through February of next year. ARPA-E’s project description lists some of the anticipated benefits of “these new battery chemistries,” including better energy density allowing up to three times the driving range of current products, prevention of overheating, and immunity to catastrophic failure.  The improved NIMH batteries could be “incorporated into the structure of a vehicle to improve strength in some cases. Much of this can be accomplished at a 30% lower …

Making Hydrogen Abundant and Inexpensive

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

The quandary in producing and using hydrogen is that it’s the most common element in the universe and the oldest, having been formed within a micro-second of the Big Bang.  Despite that, it’s always associated with other materials, and to use pure hydrogen usually requires extracting from the material in which it’s found.  Water is the most common source for hydrogen, but as noted before, getting hydrogen out of water is harder than it looks. As shown in earlier blog, various techniques have been tried to make this extraction, some seemingly close to providing usable quantities at reasonable prices.  Dr. Daniel Nocera of MIT and later Harvard used a two-catalyst system to pull oxygen and hydrogen from water. State University of New York at Buffalo researchers dropped nano-sized particles of silicon in water, with resulting bubbles of hydrogen escaping in large enough quantities to power portable devices. Although the Alka-Seltzer-like reaction seems to have promise, Elena Rozhkova,  a scientist at …

Converging Paths Head toward Better Supercapacitors

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Two different lines of research in Korea and Australia seem to be heading toward practical supercapacitors with energy densities approaching the lower end of battery technology while offering better charging efficiency and extended lifetimes. Santhakumar Kannappan, a researcher at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea has led a team who reduced graphene oxide particles with hydrazine in water, then agitated the slurry with ultrasound.  This produces a “highly porous form of graphene that has a huge internal surface area,” equivalent to a basketball court for every gram.  They pack the resulting powder into a coin-shaped cell, dry it at 140° C and a pressure of 300 kilograms per centimeter (4,267 pounds per square inch) for five hours. Electrodes made this way and saturated in EBIMF 1 M electrolyte have a specific capacitance of 150 Farads per gram, an energy density of 64 Watt-hours per kilogram and a current density of 5 Amps per gram. MIT’s Technology Review …