Graphene  Sodium-Ion Batteries with 10X Energy

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

Graphene, applied in a sodium-ion battery may herald inexpensive alternatives to lithium-ion cells.  Scientists are exploring ways of making batteries not only more energy-dense, but also less costly.  Sodium, a primary ingredient in table salt, is one possibility.  It’s also abundant without too much effort required to find it. On the other hand, easily-obtainable lithium may become in short supply at a time when the world is clawing its way into the earth searching for more. Sodium is the sixth most abundant element on earth, making up about 2.6 percent of the planet.   It’s never found free in nature, but always as part of something like the salt (NaCl) one can see it crusting over from evaporating bay water near Moffett Field, California, or in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. New Atlas reports, “These sodium-ion batteries would function much like today’s lithium-ion batteries, generating power by shuttling ions between a pair of electrodes in a liquid electrolyte, but as …

The Layered Look in 1000x Solar Cells

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

We hear a lot about 10X batteries, but 1000X solar cells?  Layering up may be stylish and even practical in the fashion world, and in solar cells may be a chance to unite otherwise dissimilar materials with otherwise limited light-to-electric conversion capabilities.   That strategy produced solar cells with 1000x that.  That’s what researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) found when they created crystalline layers of layers of barium titanate (a mixed oxide of barium and titanium), strontium titanate and calcium titanate which they alternately placed on top of one another. Researchers found high increases in responses from the layered oxides because of higher permittivity – electrons able to flow more freely. The team’s paper, “Strongly enhanced and tunable photovoltaic effect in ferroelectric-paraelectric superlattices,” appears in the June 2 issue of the journal Science Advances. A Titanate Sandwich Barium titanate (BaTiO3 or BTO) is a “common ferroelectric material” used to manufacture electronic components such as capacitors.  It is, “a popular …

Smart Fabrics Generate Energy Several Ways

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

We see a great deal about wearable energy-generating fabrics, garments that will help keep the wearer warm, or cool, or visible because of built-in piezo-electric generators in the makeup of the fabric.  Several researchers are taking this to the next level, creating new warps and woofs of materials that will create energy from a greater range of energy inputs. Elias Siores and the University of Bolton In 2011, Professor Elias Siores and associates at the University of Bolton in the UK created a flexible fiber that could harvest energy from movement and light.  Siores said it was flexible enough to be woven into “a sail, window curtain or tent and generate power”.  The material was recognized as a major innovation at the 2011 Energy Innovation Awards in Manchester. In a 2013 paper, the team, led by described devising a “smart fabric.” “A smart material is one that shows extraordinary response when subjected to a stimulus. Piezoelectric materials are considered as …