2X Battery Going Commercial?

Dean Sigler Batteries, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

We would love to see a 5X or even 10X battery in our future, but that will happen, quite possibly, at the speed of an eight-percent increase per year, as demonstrated for the last several decades of battery development. That would mean waiting for about 10 years for battery energy densities to double.  What if we could double energy density right now, as in starting commercial production of a battery with 2X the energy density of those currently available? Solid Energy Systems, led by MIT alumnus Qichao Hu, has announced it is ready to hit the market in the next year.  According to MIT News, “SolidEnergy plans to bring the batteries to smartphones and wearables in early 2017, and to electric cars in 2018. But the first application will be drones, coming this November. ‘Several customers are using drones and balloons to provide free Internet to the developing world, and to survey for disaster relief,’ Hu says. ‘It’s a very …

Dr. Yi Cui’s Latest, a Solid-state Electrolyte

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Green Car Congress reports that, “Stanford researchers led by Professor Yi Cui have used ceramic nanowire fillers to enhance the ionic conductivity of polymer-based solid electrolyte by three orders of magnitude. The ceramic-nanowire filled composite polymer electrolyte also shows an enlarged electrochemical stability window.” With solid-state batteries coming to the fore through efforts by Ann Marie Sastry at Sakti 3 and Qichao Hu at Solid Energy Systems, an improved solid electrolyte would seem to offer greater battery safety and stability “when compared with conventional liquid electrolytes. The abstract for the Stanford researchers’ paper in the journal ACS Nano Letters explains that “Currently, the low mobility of lithium ions in solid electrolytes limits their practical application. The ongoing research over the past few decades on dispersing of ceramic nanoparticles into polymer matrix has been proved effective to enhance ionic conductivity although it is challenging to form the efficiency networks of ionic conduction with nanoparticles. In this work, we first report that ceramic nanowire …

The Magnificent Seven Ride Again

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

SolidEnergy is an MIT spin-off with a lithium battery that’s been touted by R&D Magazine as “potentially…the biggest breakthrough in battery technology since Sony introduced the first Li-ion battery in 1991.”  Unlike other manufacturers with indefinite product dates, SolidEnergy says it will release a 2 Amp-hour smartphone and wearable battery in 2016 and a 20 Ah electric vehicle battery in 2017. SolidEnergy claims their Solid Polymer Ionic Liquid (SPIL) electrolyte enables creation of an “ultra-thin lithium metal anode, and improves the cell-level energy density by 50 percent compared to graphite anodes and 30 percent compared to silicon-composite anodes.”  The electrolyte adds non-flammability and non-volatility, operating safely at temperatures up to 300° C. We reported on this company last year when Dr.  Qichao Hu, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of SolidEnergy, spoke at the eighth Electric Aircraft Symposium in Santa Rosa, California. Dr. Hu led a team of six associates in developing SolidEnergy Systems’ Solid Polymer Ionic Liquid (SPiL) rechargeable lithium …