#24m Unveils the Reinvented Lithium-Ion Battery Five years ago, M24 Technologies spun out from parent company A123 with plans to turn a mysterious,
semisolid electrode material into a revolution in how lithium-ion batteries are designed and built. Back then, cofounder and Massachusetts institute of technology professor Yet-Ming Chiang described a lean sheet of paperapproach, combining concepts from flow batteries and fuel cells,
and stripping the modern lithium-ion battery architecture of all its inactive materials and complex manufacturing steps.
On Monday, the Cambridge, Mass. -based startup unveiled the results--a lithium-ion battery that it says can be built at $100 per kilowatt-hour at scale,
or half the cost of today competition. And by using a fluid-like set of electrodes that can be formed into a working cell in one step,
24m says its manufacturing facilities could be one-tenth the cost of today battery plants,
and come in much smaller, modular packages. obody ever made a battery this way, Chiang said in a phone interview last week. 24m has made about 10,000 test cells so far,
using a ingle wet process from beginning to end, he said. Compared to the multi-stage process used in today lithium-ion batteries,
it implified, streamlined, with a lot of metrology, to make it as reliable and bulletproof as we can. 24m process can also incorporate a multitude of today different lithium-ion chemistries into its semisolid materials process,
he said. By early 2017, the startup intends to start producing utility-scale grid storage batteries,
using lithium iron phosphate as the cathode and graphite as the anode, he said. To scale up to this goal
24m has raised $50 million in private investment, adding to the $10 million raised in 2010 from Charles river Ventures and Northbridge Venture Partners with new investment from these VCS and some new strategic investors,
CEO Throop Wilder said. These include Japan IHI, a major manufacturer of jet engines, power turbines and other heavy industrial equipment;
PTT, Thailand state-owned oil and gas company; and a third, as yet unnamed investor that working on joint development of manufacturing systems for 24m technology,
he said. The startup expects to have sample cells available early next year, and is in the midst of raising a Series C round to set up its first production facility with its anonymous manufacturing partner by the end of 2016,
he said. ur defining goal is to chop 50 percent out of the cost of lithium-ion today,
he said. e will enter at a very competitive price, but the volumes will be lower.
Once we get to high volumes that where we get to this $100 per kilowatt-hour cost. 24m is targeting a lithium-ion energy storage market that already being targeted by contenders like Tesla motors, Boston-Power,
and Alevo, as well as established battery giants like Samsung, Panasonic and LG Chem. Breakthroughs being promised by startups with new nano-structured materials and designs, such as Amprius, Nanosys,
and the lawsuit-challenged Envia Systems, could enable even greater performance and cost improvements for traditional battery designs.
And outside lithium-ion batteries, a host of new chemistries from startups such as Aquion, Eos Energy storage and a long list of flow battery contenders are promising low-cost
multi-hour energy storage solutions at utility scale. Given the novelty of what 24m is promising, it likely to be met with a skeptical eye by the industry until it starts delivering a testable product at scale.
As GTM Research analyst Ravi Manghani noted, s with any new technology, it boils down to financeability and execution at their end, both
of which are yet to be determined for 24m. t not easy to go from lab or prototype scale to large manufacturing,
he said. At the same time, heir approach has been very cautious, not trying to push the product into the market directly,
but through integrators. So how does 24m approach make for an entirely new way of designing and building lithium-ion batteries?
Chiang offered this step-by-step explanation, starting with the novel semisolid material at its core. During 24m early days, Chiang and startup cofounder and fellow MIT professor W. Craig Carter saw its semisolid electrode material--dubbed ambridge crudefor its MIT roots--as a material to be used in flow batteries,
or perhaps as a uelfor electric vehicles. These facts, and published papers from the two scientists, have fed much of the media coverage
and speculation on the startup plans until now. In simple terms, t a fluid that can conduct electricity.
A friend of mine referred to it as a liquid wire Chiang said last week. urthermore, it stores a ton of energy.
The startup received early funding from the Department of energy ARPA-E program to explore the potential uses for this material. e originally conceived of using this type of electrode in a flow battery,
he said. ut what we realized upon forming the company was that this semisolid electrode capability had a much better home--reinventing how lithium-ion batteries are made.
Chiang identified two main problems in today lithium-ion battery design. ne is that the current lithium-ion battery itself contains a great deal of material that doesn store any energy
he said. He referring to the inactive material that layered between the super-thin electrodes that allow today lithium-ion batteries to charge
and discharge quickly. aving a thin electrode means that the distance the lithium ion has to travel is short--and in the beginning,
this was really necessary, he said. ut our semisolid electrode design allows you to get around this problem,
and to create a battery that has much thicker electrodes, and thus much less inactive materials. p until now, it has not been possible to create electrodes that are this thick
and still allow the lithium to be transported fast enoughto provide fast charge-discharge characteristics, he said. 24m seeks to solve that problem through combination of the physical arrangement of the charge material within these electrodes,
and the material we actually use, he said. he key technical concept is reducing something called tortuosity,
he said--a term that describes the state of diffusion in porous materials, like the semisolid materials that 24m forms into anodes and cathodes. hat we do is provide more line of sight paths for the lithium ions to get out of the electrode,
rather than provide a tortuous path through a maze of inactive material. That accomplished in the single-step process by
which 24m layers its anode and cathode materials together, with an electrolyte material in between. he electrolyte lies between the two layers,
but it also permeates both of the electrodes. It infused into both the cathode and the anode.
That necessary for the lithium ions to get out of the back of the battery, he said.
Once layered together, these intertwined materials are fixed in permanent position--something that possible because 24m material isn a true liquid,
which would just oze all over the place, he said. Instead, t has a consistency that,
under its own weight, doesn deform. It foldable, but it actually quite dense think of it as being like caulk.
The end result he said, is a battery cell that combines high energy capacity and high current density in the same set of materials,
he said. This graph, which shows a 24m test cell range of performance across different states of charge
as compared to typical lithium-ion batteries for power tools, tablets and electric vehicles. At the same time, e believe these to be the safest lithium-ion batteries ever created,
he said, largely due to the lack of brittle, breakable separator materials within the battery cells.
To prove that, 24m shared a series of photographs of a test pouch cell being folded up like an accordion
it never creates an internal short circuit, it still works at the end of it, and after we were done,
we left the battery on the shelf for a month and it still worked, he said.
That not just a safety bonus--it also shows that you can shape the battery,
which offers potential advantages in terms of how cells are designed to work in different form factors, he said. he second aspect of lithium-ion technology that we felt needed to be reconsidered is the whole manufacturing process,
Chiang said. hy does a conventional lithium-ion battery plant have to be so expensive and so large?
you need at least half a billion dollars, or at the grand scale of Tesla Gigafactory, up to 10 times that amount, he said.
First of all, a conventional lithium-ion battery plant starts with metal foil, and then layers liquid nk or painton it to form its electrodes,
he said. That coated metal foil then has to be dried in a series of ovens,
before it sent off for further processing, including the use of solvents that have to be recovered for reuse on the next round of products. e bypass all that by starting with a wet electrode that has need everything you in it,
he said, nd process that as a semisolid. All of these steps you would normally use to make a battery electrode that would take a full day,
we can do it in an hour. At the same time, hese electrodes do not have any exotic costly components in them,
he said. verything they use is already in the lithium-ion supply chain. And because all the materials that 24m puts into the process end up in the final product
Others have tried to adapt similar manufacturing processes to the battery business before, he noted. or example,
people have tried to make extruded batteries, he said, but hey had to have so much plastic to make that process possible,
by the time theye done, they have a ton of inactive material, and a really poorly performing battery.
That in contrast to 24m process, in which hat goes into the electrodes is just
what we need to perform their function, he said. There plenty about how 24m gets its layers of anode
cathode and electrolyte to form this perfect blend of battery performance characteristics that Chiang didn reveal in this interview.
But he did say that the startup has put together a set of methods that can allow it to be replicated in a production environment that much,
much simpler than the processes used to make lithium-ion batteries today. he formulation process for making these electrodes is spent exacting,
wee a lot of time on that, and we have a lot of trade secrets around that, he said. here are key parts to it,
using commercial off-the-shelf gear in common use in today battery manufacturing plants, as well as from industries with less of a reputation for cutting edge technology,
like the food industry. The end result, he said, is different way of thinking about how to scale production to high volumes.
many gigawatt-hours of batteries produced every year. We believe the most cost-efficient way to get there is to create manufacturing modules that you can just replicate
In bottom-line terms, e can get almost all the economies of scale with a $12 million factoryas would come from a $500 million factory today,
The startup plans to build its utility-scale batteries in partnership with its strategic investors rather than licensing the technology itself,
24m technologies, a123, alevo, aquion, arpa-e, batteries, boston-power, energy storage, eos energy storage, flow battery, imergy, investors, lg chem, lithium-ion
#GIS-based tool protects patients during power outages New geographic information system technology developed by the U s. Department of health and human services aims to help community health agencies
and emergency management officials protect those patients who rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment. The empower Map from HHS'Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness
and Response is aimed at 1. 6 million Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries whose medical and assistive equipment oxygen concentrators, ventilators,
wheelchairs depends on a steady supply of electricity. The online tool shows the monthly total number of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries'claims for electricity-dependent equipment at the national
state, territory, county and zip code levels. It then incorporates that data with real-time severe weather tracking services from the National oceanic and atmospheric administration in a GIS.
The integrated data can help hospitals, first responders and electric utility officials better plan to prevent adverse health impacts of prolonged power outages due to storms and natural disasters."
"With the rise in home-based care, real-time awareness of population-level needs, and the ability to respond to them,
is said critical Nicole Lurie, MD, assistant secretary for preparedness and response, at HHS in a June 23 press statement.
The empower Map could be used by electric utility companies to determine priority areas for restoring electrical service based on the location of the largest concentrations of electricity-dependent individuals,
and EMS teams prepare for surges in medical services. Emergency planners could also use the map to anticipate
whether emergency shelters might experience greater electricity demand due to higher concentrations of electricity-dependent Medicare beneficiaries,
"For people who rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment, prolonged power outages can mean life or death,"said Lurie."
#Patient safety driving increased RFID use in hospitals The University of Vermont Medical center in Burlington, Vt.
announced recently that five million medications have been tracked using radio frequency identification technology. Adam Buckley, MD, interim chief information officer and chief medical informatics officer at UVMC, said any time a system allows a hospital to track reliably from ordering through dispensing through administration at the bedside,
patient safety has been enhanced greatly.""It's cutting down on medication errors, ensuring that medications are given in a timely fashion,
A vial of the drug Glycopyrrolate with a strength of 1mg/ML became the five-millionth RFID-tagged dose at UVMC tracked by Kit Check, a Washington, D c,
and medication tracking software. Karen Mcbride, UVMC's director of pharmacy services, said that patient safety was the main reason for utilizing RFID technology."
"We use a lot of kits in this hospital because our ORS are set up to have dispensed individual kits to the anesthesiologist for each case,
"she said.""We have hundreds of kits in addition we have kit-like trays in our code blue carts and on our resuscitation carts."
"Mcbride stressed that when humans are involved, there's always a concern around putting the wrong medication accidentally in a kit
and that the RFID kit technology essentially eliminates that possibility. The way Mcbride explained it,
as the pharmacy receives drugs that are going to be going into these kits pharmacy technicians put into the software system
-based expert and consultant on bar code-enabled medication dispensing, preparation and administration, said Kitcheck"has succeeded out of the gate"by applying RFID tags to anesthesia kits, already operational in over 100 hospitals.
Neuenschwander noted that in the past RFID companies thought at a universal rather than a macro level,
but that's changing. For example, MEPS Real-time Inc. a company that offers a suite of Intelliguard RFID Solutions, has shifted its from focus from macro to micro RFID solutions,
he said. The company now focuses on what they refer to"critical inventory"used by hospitals high-cost medications in refrigerators and high-risk drugs in anesthesia kits and trays.
Aethon Inc.'s Medex tracking software links with its TUG robot that robotically transports items throughout hospitals
and also tags and track bullets throughout hospitals'pneumatic transport tubes with RFID. RFID vs. barcode Despite the progress RFID has made in the hospital setting, the debate over
which technology will sustain over the long hall, RFID or bar code, is ongoing among industry experts.
According to Neuenschwander, each technology has its advantages and disadvantages. Barcodes, he said, are less expensive data carriers than RFID chips.
And RFID chips have higher read-failure rates than bar codes.""Proximity reads are an advantage when
I want to read everything that is in a kit, as opposed to handling and scanning items one by one,
"said Neuenschwander. At the bedside, Neuenschwander says, proximity reads may be effective in identifying a patient without disturbing their rest.
In other words, they can read the chip through the sheets, for example. However, if two patients are side-by-side
and the read range is too generous, two patients will be identified and you cannot know which is
a nurse could know via proximity reading that he or she has five medications in his hand,
According to Neuenschwander, the nurse would then need to move all five items out of the range of read
Some industry experts have posed the question: Why RFID hasn't been applied to drug packaging for point-of-care verification scanning?
Neuenschwander said that he doubts if RFID chips will ever displace barcodes on drug packages any more than on cereal boxes in grocery stores.
Rather, he contends that RFID will augment printed codes on a select number of items."
"A universal shift from bar codes to chips seems as likely to me as the US converting to the metric system,
"said Neuenschwander.""The US has converted to metric selectively: grams/kilograms and liters/milliliters in pharmacy, for example.
as well as ounces, pounds, and tons are going to be with us for a long time.""After two decades of talk,
however, RFID is more than just a mirage on the frontier, he said:""RFID has materialized finally beyond prototypes to products that are live in hospitals today,
"said Neuenschwander. UVMC's Buckley said that people are going to figure out the best way to leverage RFID technology."
"Whether it will be the best way to leverage it or whether the price will be cost-prohibitive
I don't know. But I think people are going to continue to push the envelope to see how the chips could be leveraged.
I wouldn't be so absolute about what it will and will not be used for.""Going forward, UVMC said that its next step is to talk to Kitcheck about leveraging similar RFID technology in the OR setting."
"I think that there are opportunities beyond just how we're using it with Kitcheck to continue to enhance the quality of the care that we are delivering to patients,
#Hospital slashes false-positive diagnoses with CDS platform Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC's electronic surveillance framework for hospitalized kids is poised to significantly reduce false-positive identification of serious health conditions.
This according to new peer-reviewed research published today in the journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
The retrospective study of 16,239 Children's Hospital pediatric admissions between January 2006 and December 2013 compared the use of vital signs, a common indicator of patient condition, to that of Perahealth's Pediatric
PRI is a patient condition score that uses an algorithm composed of vital signs lab tests and nurse assessments (skin issues,
mental state) to identify patients requiring urgent intervention with pediatric ICU transfer. The research, conducted by Children's Hospital clinicians,
found that use of vital signs alone led to false-positive identification of serious events 46 percent of the time.
"Many symptoms of serious pediatric conditions are also found in common conditions that do not require immediate intervention,
chief of pediatric critical care medicine at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, said in a news release announcing the finding."
"Our research found the Pediatric Rothman Index to be a favorable electronic trigger for alerting clinicians to the need for rapid response teams,
complementing the efforts of our nurses and physicians.""Powered by the peer-reviewed Rothman Index,
a disease-agnostic universal score for predicting patient readmission and mortality risk, Perahealth software automatically pulls data from any major electronic health record in real-time.
The data is translated into a 0-100 Rothman Index score and presented in color-coded graphs trending patient condition across any care setting.
The goal is to promote care team communication across shifts and alert clinicians earlier to unexpected health problems.
The Joint Commission estimates that 85 to 99 percent of alarms in hospitals do not require clinician intervention.
This can lead to alarm fatigue and other alarm hazards which the ECRI Institute found to be the number one patient safety concern for 2015."
"False-positive alarms cause anxiety for care teams, patients and families, and can lead to clinicians becoming desensitized to true patient emergencies
Yet the challenges are such that establishing useful exascale computers some 50-100 times faster than today leadership machines requires the coordinated efforts of a vast array of stakeholders.
Led by Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) in partnership with Obsidian Strategic, Tata Communications and Rutgers University,
Infinicortex refers to a set of geographically distributed high performance computing and storage resources based on Infiniband technology.
The project received further attention at the recent Big data and Extreme-scale Computing (BDEC event in Barcelona, a major conference for reporting ground-breaking research at the intersection of big
In a position paper for the 3rd annual BDEC event, a team of researchers from A*Star Computational Resource Centre revealed further details about the implementation of Infinicortex. he approach is not a grid or cloud based,
and straightforward implementation of both concurrent supercomputing over global distances and implemention of very efficient workflows and here it serves as an ideal vehicle to serve both Big data
They claim it has the ability to provide a level of concurrent supercomputing necessary for supporting exascale computing They add that the concurrent and distributed fashion will address power
and infrastructure challenges and data replication and disaster recovery issues associated with a centralized approach.
The distributed supercomputing concept took off at SC14 with the demonstration 100 Gbits/s data transmission across the Pacific via subsea optical cables to the show floor.
The distances were achieved using Obsidian Strategics range extenders including routing and BGFC based sub-netting.
seven universities and two large research organizations (A*Star in Singapore and Oak ridge National Laboratory in Oak ridge, Tenn..
The organizers employed Infiniband sub-nets with different net topologies to create a single topologically optimized computational resource, a so-called Galaxy of Supercomputers.
and dsync+(TITECH/Georgia Tech) Near real-time plasma disruption detection using ADIOS (Princeton Plasma Research Lab/ORNL) Automated microscopy image analysis for cancer detection,
also using ADIOS (Stony Brook University/ORNL) Researchers who are accustomed to TCP IP based file transfer (FTP) will want to note the major increase in data throughput enabled by long distance Infiniband.
According to the A*Star team, the time it took to send a 1. 143 terabyte file of genomics data from Australia to Singapore via Seattle
A preview of upcoming projects includes GPGPU applications with Reims University in France, asynchronious linear solvers with University of Lille,
just got clearance to begin acquisition of a supercomputer in the 1-3 petaflops range.
#IARPA Seeks Partners in Brain-Inspired AI Initiative US intelligence officials have set in motion a five-year project to spark progress in machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the human brain.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) recently put out a call for innovative solutions with the greatest potential to advance theories of neural computation as part of the Machine intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICRONS) program.
The agency, known for its funding of high-risk/high-payoff research in support of national intelligence,
IARPA lays out its strategy for fostering multidisciplinary approaches at the intersection of data science and neuroscience that increase scientific understanding of the cortical computations underlying neural information processing.
Although there has been much progress in modeling machine learning algorithms after neural processes, the brain remains far better-suited for a host of detection and recognition tasks.
The agency sees the emerging research area of neurally-inspired machine learning as crucial for closing the performance gap between software and wetware. espite significant progress in machine learning over the past few years,
today state of the art algorithms are brittle and do not generalize well, the proposal authors contend. n contrast,
This performance gap between software and wetware persists despite some correspondence between the architecture of the leading machine learning algorithms and their biological counterparts in the brain,
The MICRONS program is predicated on the notion that it will be possible to achieve major breakthroughs in machine learning
but also employ lower-level computing modules derived from the specific computations performed by cortical circuits.
TA1 experimental design, theoretical neuroscience, computational neural modeling, machine learning, neurophysiological data collection, and data analysis; TA2 neuroanatomical data collection;
and TA3 reconstruction of cortical circuits from neuroanatomical data and development of information technology systems to store, align,
and access neural circuit reconstructions with the associated neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data. ver the course of the program, participants will use their improving understanding of the representations, transformations,
and learning rules employed by the brain to create ever more capable neurally-derived machine learning algorithms,
the IARPA proposal further explains. ltimate computational goals for MICRONS include the ability to perform complex information processing tasks such as one-shot learning, unsupervised clustering,
and scene parsing, aiming towards humanlike proficiency. MICRONS is set to run from September 2015 through September 2020.
#Obama 2016 Budget Boosts R&d, Exascale Funding On Monday, the Obama administration sent its FY 2016 budget request to Congress for the new fiscal year starting October 1.
The report says such investments are necessary to maintain US leadership in science and technology to promote sustainable growth
and address issues like job creation, food safety, climate change, and to ensure the health and security of the nation.
finding cures to Alzheimer and other diseases, developing new clean energy technologies, and promoting new advanced manufacturing opportunities.
which uns the world largest collection of scientific user facilities (aka research infrastructure) operated by a single organization in the world,
according to the request, such that dedicated exascale funding at the four DOE crosscuts Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Basic energy Sciences (BES), Biological and Environmental Research (BER),
and the energy technology offices in the development of advanced computing technologies to provide better understanding complex physical systems, notes Dehmer.
ES funding for exascale is the FY 2016 request for Computational Materials sciences; BER funding is for Climate model Development and Validation.
Out of the four crosscuts, the ASCR role is to expand the nation computational and networking capabilities
and develop exascale node technologies and exascale hardware and software computer designs at the system level;
hardware architectures and system software, and programming for energy-efficient, data-intensive applications. Other pieces of the ASCR roadmap include the mandate to maintain operations with>90 percent availability, deployment of a 10-40 petaflop upgrade at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC),
and continued preparations for 75-200 petaflop upgrades at Oak ridge Leadership Facility (ORLF) and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).
The Office of Science lays out the upgrade paths for NERSC, OLCF and ALCF with supercomputers Cori, Summit,
and Aurora presented as successors to Edison, Titan, and Mira (respectively). While Cori and Summit were announced previously,
this is the first time that we are hearing about Aurora, which along with Summit and Sierra, falls under the CORAL collaboration framework.
and weapons stockpile management. As an LLNL system, Sierra falls under the domain of the NNSA and therefore does not appear in the Office of Science budget.
As the chart below shows, the planned upgrade for ALCF is scheduled for the 2018-2019 timeframe.
The listed peak performance of more than 150 petaflops would give Aurora at least 15 times more computing power than its predecessor, Mira,
the 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q that was installed in January 2012. Funding allocated to the ASCR program would also be directed to the following efforts:
Accelerating progress in scientific computing through Scidac partnerships. Fully funding a new cohort of students through the restored Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.
Conducting mathematics research to address the challenges of increasing complexity; as well as computer science research in order to address the productivity and integrity of HPC systems and simulations and support data management, analysis and visualization techniques
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