Keeping Battery Fires at Bay

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Fires on or in aircraft are anathema, leaving a pilot and passengers with few options. Even a laptop starting to smoke in the cabin will cause an emergency descent and a diversion to the nearest airport. As designers incorporate larger lithium batteries into new aircraft (and they are essential to motor-driven planes), the need to keep things from self-igniting becomes imperative. Researchers at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, working with funding from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) discovered, “That adding two chemicals to the electrolyte of a lithium metal battery prevents the formation of dendrites – ‘fingers’ of lithium that pierce the barrier between the battery’s halves, causing it to short out, overheat and sometimes burst into flame.” Preventing these shorts will lead to the next-generation batteries being able to take advantage of lithium-sulfur and lithium-air technologies with up to 10 times the energy per weight of batteries now used in …

Cambridge Crude and Range Euphoria

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants 1 Comment

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists have announced what they claim is a “Significant advance in battery architecture [that] could be breakthrough for electric vehicles and grid storage.”    According to a story by David L. Chandler from the MIT News Office, the new battery system is lightweight and inexpensive, and could make recharging “as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.” Seemingly requiring some active components within the battery, this “semi-solid flow cell” pumps solid particles suspended in a carrier liquid which form the cathodes and anodes through the system.  According to the MIT news item, “These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane.”  Mechanically more complex than today’s batteries, the system still has a claimed “10-fold improvement over present liquid-flow batteries” (not necessarily that much better than lithium ion, then), but lower manufacturing costs. The different fluids are contained in two different containers and not …