#New manufacturing approach slices lithium-ion battery cost in half An advanced manufacturing approach for lithium-ion batteries, developed by researchers at MIT and at a spinoff company called 24m,
promises to significantly slash the cost of the most widely used type of rechargeable batteries while also improving their performance
says Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT and a cofounder of 24m (and previously a cofounder of battery company A123).
The existing process for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, he says, has changed hardly in the two decades
In this so-called low battery, the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid
and pumped through various compartments of the battery. The new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and conventional solid ones:
In this version, while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles.
Chiang and Carter refer to this as a emisolid battery. Simpler manufacturing process This approach greatly simplifies manufacturing,
and also makes batteries that are flexible and resistant to damage, says Chiang, who is senior author of a paper in the Journal of Power Sources analyzing the tradeoffs involved in choosing between solid
and flow-type batteries, depending on their particular applications and chemical components. This analysis demonstrates that
while a flow battery system is appropriate for battery chemistries with a low energy density (those that can only store a limited amount of energy for a given weight),
for high-energy density devices such as lithium-ion batteries, the extra complexity and components of a flow system would add unnecessary extra cost.
Almost immediately after publishing the earlier research on the flow battery, Chiang says, e realized that a better way to make use of this flowable electrode technology was to reinvent the lithium ion manufacturing process.
thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent.
Bendable and foldable In addition to streamlining manufacturing enough to cut battery costs by half, Chiang says,
the new system produces a battery that is more flexible and resilient. While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress,
the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent, folded or even penetrated by bullets without failing.
This should improve both safety and durability, he says. The company has made so far about 10,000 batteries on its prototype assembly lines, most
of which are undergoing testing by three industrial partners, including an oil company in Thailand and Japanese heavy-equipment manufacturer IHI Corp. The process has received eight patents
By 2020, Chiang estimates that 24m will be able to produce batteries for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour of capacity.
when is it better to build a flow battery versus a static model. This paper will serve as a key tool for making design choices
Viswanathan adds that 24m new battery design ould do the same sort of disruption to lithium ion batteries manufacturing as
The nanowires respond to an electromagnetic field generated by a separate device, which can be used to control the release of a preloaded drug.
a conductive polymer material that responds to electromagnetic fields. Wen Gao, a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Paralysis Research who worked on the project with Borgens,
when the correct electromagnetic field is applied, the nanowires release small amounts of the payload. This process can be started
by using the corresponding electromagnetic field stimulating device, Borgens said. The researchers captured and transported a patch of the nanowire carpet on water droplets that were used used to deliver it to the site of injury.
The magnitude and wave form of the electromagnetic field must be tuned to obtain the optimum release of the drug
The electromagnetic field is likely affecting the interaction between the nanomaterial and the drug molecules, Borgens said. e think it is a combination of charge effects
Once the electromagnetic field is removed, the polymer snaps back to the initial architecture and retains the remaining drug molecules
. or each different drug the team would need to find the corresponding optimal electromagnetic field for its release,
Functional Drug Delivery Using Electromagnetic field-Responsive Polypyrrole Nanowires, was published in the journal Langmuir. Other team members involved in the research include John Cirillo,
who designed and constructed the electromagnetic field stimulating system; Youngnam Cho, a former faculty member at Purdue Center for Paralysis Research;
and an electromagnetic field was applied for two hours a day for one week. By the end of the week the treated mice had a weaker GFAP signal than the control groups,
but were exposed not to the electromagnetic field. In some cases, treated mice had no detectable GFAP signal.
At just one atom thick, graphene is the thinnest substance capable of conducting electricity. It is very flexible
reactive material system capable of performing computations without external energy inputs, amplification or computer mediation. Their research, Achieving synchronization with active hybrid materials:
Chemical computing systems are limited by both the lack of an internal power system and the rate of diffusion as the chemical waves spread throughout the system,
because these movements are driven not by energy from metabolic processes but solely by physical mechanisms. From a biological point of view, there no other way to achieve this.
as the latter would require significantly more energy. When the air or fluid pressure inside the cells was increased
#New nanogenerators collect friction energy from rolling tires Team of engineers from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a collaborator from China have developed a new nanogenerator that is able to generate power from friction created by rolling
In the future such technology could help harvest otherwise wasted energy to squeeze just that extra bit of efficiency out of cars and other vehicles.
The nanogenerator harvests the wasted tire friction energy by relying on the triboelectric effect. It is the electric charge that results from the contact or rubbing together of two dissimilar objects.
The generator harnesses energy from the changing electric potential between the pavement and a vehicle wheels.
Scientists said that it could become a very useful way to use the energy that is usually wasted due to friction taking advantage of this lost energy would improve efficiency,
which is a major goal in today automotive industry. Professor Xudong Wang, one of the authors of the study, noted that he friction between the tire
since that energy is wasted simply, f we can convert that energy, it could give us very good improvement in fuel efficiency Improving fuel efficiency would benefit everyone it would help automotive industry meet new strict regulations for emissions,
make traveling just that little bit cheaper and would improve energy efficiency which would benefit environmental causes as well.
The technology is depending on an electrode integrated into a segment of the tire. When it comes into contact with the ground,
the friction between those two surfaces ultimately produces an electrical charge-a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect.
The friction was strong enough for the electrodes to harvest enough energy to power the lights,
which means that scientists confirmed the idea that wasted friction energy can be collected and reused.
Engineers also determined that the amount of energy harnessed is directly related to the weight of a car
It means that different vehicles would waste different amounts of energy and different percentage of it could be saved using this method.
However, scientists estimated that fuel efficiency could be improved by as much as 10%,given 50%friction energy conversion efficiency.
This is always largely about collecting wasted energy. That is why this technology has a huge potential
in addition to their elementary electric charge. Just as conventional transistors have a source of electrons, a gate to control their movement,
become randomized) and lose their information during transport, unlike electric charges. Compared to manipulating populations of moving electrons through a conventional semiconductor,
controlling electron spins consumes much less energy and has the further advantage that its information content is on-volatile
when the electricity is turned off. Spintronic devices made of inorganic materials are used today for read heads on hard disk drives
and energy band alignment of the materials differently depending on the SAM being studied. In a critical finding, the data imply that the SAMS reduced the molecular hybridization between Co and Alq3,
Brandt-Pearce said. e can transmit more data without using any additional energy. As more light fixtures get replaced with LED LIGHTS,
Their breakthrough means that data can be transmitted faster with light waves using no more energy than is required already to run the lights.
and has gotten some funding from a federal Small Business Innovation Research program through the Federal department of Energy.
energy saving solution and can provide a high-speed secure network connection for a large number of users.
Noshad said. t will offer a huge energy saving for the nation since energy is used already for lighting,
and thus does need not to be expended for communications. Noshad said that some experts have forecast the LED communications market at $6 billion by 2020. here are people working on it in Asia and Europe,
and energy conversion using salinity gradients. They can shed new light on the fundamental processes occurring in the nanoscale biological pores that funnel essential ingredients into cells. e also developed some key data processing methods
Ultimately this will help design new carbon nanotube based membranes for water filtration with reduced energy consumption. rowd-sourced computing power was essential to the success of our project.
I believe that crowd-sourced computing will enable more important scientific advances in cancer treatment and clean energy, for example in the future,
and a member of the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute, operated jointly by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. he microphone and loudspeaker are some of the closest devices to commercial viability,
converting over 99 percent of the energy driving the device into sound, whereas today conventional loudspeakers and headphones convert only 8 percent into sound.
keeping their batteries charged. A group of researchers at KAIST has developed a wireless-power transfer (WPT) technology that allows mobile devices to be charged at any location and in any direction,
which is entitled ix Degrees of Freedom Mobile Inductive Power Transfer by Crossed Dipole Tx (Transmitter) and Rx (Receiver) Coils.
2015 at a lab on KAIST campus. They used high-frequency magnetic materials in a dipole coil structure to build a thin,
Dipole Coil Resonance System (DCRS) The research team used the Dipole Coil Resonance System (DCRS) to induce magnetic fields,
The DCRS is composed of two (transmitting and receiving) magnetic dipole coils, placed in parallel, with each coil having a ferrite core
the dipole coil is very compact and has a less dimension. Therefore a crossed dipole structure has 2-dimension rather than 3-dimension of a crossed loop coil structure.
The DCRS has a great advantage to transfer power even when the resonance frequency changes in the range of 1%(Q factor is below 100).
Greater Flexibility and Safer Charging The research team rearranged the two dipole coils from a parallel position to cross them
the level of magnetic flux is below the safety level of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guideline (27 T) for general public exposure to electromagnetic field (EMF.
where they create clothing that kills bacteria, conducts electricity, wards off malaria, captures harmful gas and weaves transistors into shirts and dresses. otton is one of the most fascinating and misunderstood materials,
With ultrathin solar panels for trim and a USB charger tucked into the waist, the Southwest-inspired garment captured enough sunshine to charge cell phones
explaining that the chip would need less energy and that obtaining results would require fewer steps than other methods.
and releases the energy by a weak pressure (60 MPA). In addition, this material stores heat energy by various approaches such as (b) electric current flow or (c) light-irradiation.
and release a large amount of heat energy (230 kj L#1). This heat energy stored is large at approximately 70%of the latent heat energy of water at its melting point.
In atomic-scale transistors, this current is extremely sensitive to single electrons hopping via discrete energy levels.
The system requires only small amount of electricity or computational power for its operation. The primary power consumption is from a special LCD shutter that creates the 3d viewing experience.
No image resolution loss: The lens and shutter technology allows precise focusing of the view
#Research Team Improves Lithium air batteries For Electric car Industry A research team from Carnegie mellon University and the University of California,
Berkeley, has found that blending together different types of salts in the electrolytes within lithium air batteries can increase the batteriescapacity
Lithium air batteries will soon be a strong competitor to lithium ion batteries, which currently dominate the battery-run electronics market.
Lithium air batteries are especially promising for the electric car industry, as they allow electric car battery packs to be smaller
and more lightweight and could hold more than twice as much energy as lithium ion batteries. Batteries consist of one electrode on either side an anode and a cathode and an electrolyte between them.
Lithium ion batteriescathodes typically contain heavy metal ions like manganese, cobalt or iron, but in lithium air batteries, the much lighter oxygen in a sense acts as the cathode, creating a more efficient design.
Electrolytes consist of a salt and a solvent to dissolve the salt. he electrolytes used in batteries are just like Gatorade electrolytes,
says Venkat Viswanathan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie mellon. very electrolyte has a solvent and a salt.
So if you take Gatorade, the solvent would be water and the salt would be something like sodium chloride, for instance.
However in a lithium air battery, the solvent is dimethoxyethane and the salt is something like lithium hexafluorophosphate. arlier this year,
a team led by Viswanathan and Assistant professor Bryan Mccloskey from the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper in Nature Chemistry,
which showed that by adding just a little bit of water into the batterieselectrolyte mixture, the researchers were able to make the lithium air batteries last four to five times longer. owever,
adding water is not a perfect solution, because it comes at the cost of being able to recharge the battery,
cautioned Viswanathan, who explained that while water increased the battery capacity, it also catalyzed additional parasitic reactions,
which prevented the batteries from being recharged. Viswanathan, Mccloskey and their colleagues Mechanical engineering Ph d. Student Vikram Pande, Abhishek Khetan, a visiting Ph d. student,
and Colin Burke, a graduate student in Mccloskey lab have published just a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
which addresses the rechargeability problem. The paper, titled nhancing Electrochemical Intermediate Solvation through Electrolyte Anion Selection to Increase Nonaqueous Li-O2 Battery Capacity, explains that salts are the key not solvents
as they previously thought. ur original idea was to add something to the solvent dimethoxyethane,
lithium bis (trifluoromethane) sulfonimide and lithium nitrate. ande adds, y blending salts in the electrolyte solution,
we increased the battery capacity by triggering the so-called solution process without compromising on rechargeability.
Nitrate anion from the lithium nitrate salt does the trick by selectively dissolving previously insoluble products without facing the fundamental bottleneck produced by solvent additives. hough this research is an important advancement for lithium air batteries,
the methods the researchers have developed will also be very impactful in other areas of battery research. his research is going to be very important for another big battery technology,
or insoluble is really important for most new battery ideas that are out there. ource:
ESR works by combining a magnetic field with microwave energy, which together, get molecular bonds vibrating in telltale ways.
Instead, they introduce microwave energy by forcing high-frequency current through a microscopic wire, which acts as a tooth like probe tip that can be moved within a few micrometers of a sample material.
and energy engineering at University of Colorado Boulder. e tried to engineer the implant to meet some of neurosciences greatest unmet needs. n the study,
Property of nonstick pans improves solar cell efficiency The same quality that buffers a raincoat against downpours
or a pan against sticky foods can also boost the performance of solar cells, according to a new study from UNL engineers.
Published July 20 in the journal Nature Communications, the study showed that constructing a type of organic solar cell on a on-wettingplastic surface made it 1. 5 times more efficient at converting sunlight to electricity.
Though grain size is limited typically to the thickness of a solar cell, Huang team found that a non-wetting surface allowed it to fabricate grains up to eight times larger than the cell is thick.
Because of this vertical trajectory, the energy of the supersonic boom is dissipated in all horizontal radial directions
At its most basic level, your smart phone battery is powering billions of transistors using electrons to flip on and off billions of times per second.
they are too energy-hungry and unwieldy to integrate into computer chips. Duke university researchers are now one step closer to such a light source.
Energy trapped on the surface of the nanocube in this fashion is called a plasmon. The plasmon creates an intense electromagnetic field between the silver nanocube
and a thin sheet of gold placed a mere 20 atoms away. This field interacts with quantum dotspheres of semiconducting material just six nanometers widehat are sandwiched in between the nanocube and the gold.
#Tiny grains of rice hold big promise for greenhouse gas reductions, bioenergy Discovery delivers high starch content,
such as starch for a richer food source and biomass for energy production, according to a study in Nature.
and creates more plant biomass, a bioenergy feedstock. In early work in Sweden, Jansson and his team investigated how distribution of sugars in plants could be controlled by a special protein called a transcription factor,
it could be applied to a range of different MOFS with applications spanning energy and pharmaceuticals.
and cost-effective way to grow metal organic frameworksproducing MOF crystals has traditionally been an energy-intensive process due to the heating and cooling required,
but this new method is performed at room temperature for dramatic energy savings. ee now seeking to work with Australian chemical manufacturers to further develop the method
Cun-Zheng Ning, professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, authored the paper, monolithic white laser, with his doctoral students Fan Fan, Sunay Turkdogan, Zhicheng Liu
green or red that is determined by a unique atomic structure and energy bandgap. The attice constantrepresents the distance between the atoms.
and energy bandgaps. ur goal is to achieve a single semiconductor piece capable of laser operation in the three fundamental lasing colors.
Six years ago, under U s army Research Office funding, they demonstrated that one could indeed grow nanowire materials in a wide range of energy bandgaps
proved to be a greater challenge with its wide energy bandgap and very different material properties. e have struggled for almost two years to grow blue emitting materials in nanosheet form,
One of crucial next steps is to achieve the similar white lasers under the drive of a battery.
and Wi-fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone battery.
Zell is the CEO of Nikola Labs, a startup based in Columbus, Ohio, whose energy harvesting technology was invented by Chi-Chih Chen, a research associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State university.
Like battery pack cases, the company case plugs into the bottom of the iphone; this way, Zell says,
it can intermittently send power right to the battery. Moore Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years,
Yet battery technology hasn kept the same pace, probably because its evolution is dependent on advances in chemistry.
and higher-resolution cameras, it can still be a challenge to get the battery that powering all these features to last throughout the day.
so you can keep using your phone for battery-intensive things like looking at websites,
but Zell says that Nikola phone case should be able to give users about 25 to 30 percent more battery life between charges.
Though Zell acknowledges that there plenty of skepticism surrounding the utility of harvesting energy from radio waves,
A French solar technology company called Sunpartner Technologies is already working on this with a thin, see-through overlay called WYSIPS Crystal (the acronym stands for hat you see is photovoltaic surface that sits between the glass
The WYSIPS layer is covered with small solar cells; when the phone is exposed to artificial or natural light,
A connection to the gadget battery would enable the layer to send power directly to it.
But while De Broca says the energy WYSIPS Crystal can produce depends on the kind of light it exposed tontense natural light will work better than diffuse indoor lightingn its current form it can boost battery life by only about 10 to 15 percent. t
Illinois. The device contains a battery you fill up by moving around. ee pretty active people,
hy can we harvest some of the energy from motion to power our phones??The charger,
or cycling, generating electricity that stored in an internal battery (users have to connect their phone to Ampy to siphon off its juice).
The battery inside Ampy can store enough power to fully recharge a smartphone. It might take a
I love to create is where thinking about battery life is no longer something that in everyone minds,
Made by Promethean Power systems, a company based in Pune, India, and Boston, the system keeps milk chilled with a thermal battery that stores energy and releases it,
as cooling power, over the course of a day. Like India, Bangladesh has outdated an power grid that supplies electricity sporadicallyften as little as a few hours per day.
Rural dairy farmers on the subcontinent bring their milk to village collection centers that typically rely on diesel generators, a costly, dirty way of providing electricity.
Two Americans, Sam White and Sorin Grama founded Promethean Power in 2007 to address a simple but widespread and pressing problem:
Eventually they settled on a thermal energy storage system that uses a phase-change material to store energy in the form of ice.
and the battery circulates that thermal energy into a heat exchanger to keep milk chilled over the course of the day.
The thermal battery can store up to 28 kilowatt-hours of energy. ee not delivering new forms of energy;
That a huge improvement in a country where more than 300 million people live without access to electricity
has pledged to bring reliable electricity to the full population by 2022 t
#Google App Puts Neural networks on Your Phone to Translate Signs Offline In recent years Google has used networks of crudely simulated neurons running in its data centers to improve its speech recognition,
as well as the amount of power a satellite can get from its solar panels. Most communications satellites have data-transfer speeds of around a gigabit per second,
though he then said that this might only happen by swapping in another battery at some point (Project Ara aims to let users do this without needing to turn off the phone).
Eremenko said in April last year that the bill of materials for a basic Ara handset complete with display, Wi-fi, battery,
Right now, electricity is carried by streams of electrons -but Weyl fermions could provide a much more stable and efficient way of doing the same thing.
it doesn require electricity or a sophisticated lab or an experienced technician, added Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New orleans,
so the energy enough to break up the nanotubes into ribbons, but the details of the dynamics are difficult to monitor,
Now teams from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy (HZB) and the Institute of Solid State Physics
nontoxic structural shielding materials Lightweight composite metal foams can absorb energy from impacts and block X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, according to a study from North carolina State university.
The discovery means the materials could be useful in spacecraft, the nuclear industry and in medicine.
The researchers found that the high-Z foam was as good as the bulk materials at blocking high-energy gamma rays,
how smaller batteries give more power to UK solar households When Elon musk, the chief executive of Tesla, took to the stage in California in April to launch a solar battery for the home,
the audience hollered and whooped at every detail. On the other side of the Atlantic, a more modest, quieter challenger plans to take on the US electric car giant.
The similarity lies in the product the Powervault battery which stores energy from domestic solar panels. ome people, especially if they don have solar panels,
just assume solar panels come with a battery, says Joe Warren, Powervault managing director. They don. Home energy generation has blossomed in the UK over the past four years,
with an estimated 650,000 homes fitted with solar panels. In 2010, the government introduced the feed in tariff scheme to pay householders who produce
and supply energy. The scheme aims to push renewable energy in the UK towards 15%of total energy by 2020.
In 2009, the figure stood at 2%.Powervault Tesla and other players in the emerging solar battery market aim to supply the means for householders to store energy produced during the sunniest part of the day for use at peak times,
when more people are at home but the sun is down. lot of people are not at home during the day,
they are at work, Warren says. he solar system is generating energy which is exported all. We thought,
ouldn it be great if you could store that energy and use it when you are at home in the evening?
Our system stores energy during the day when it is sunny and then gives it back to the customer in the evening.
The Powervault unit is about the size of a washing machine and weighs about 150kg (330lbs).
Inside are batteries, chargers and electronics. A charger takes the energy from the solar panels and transforms it into energy
which is stored then in the batteries and discharged around the home when needed. Powervault energy storage system is just a little smaller than the average UK washing machine. ypically the system works on a daily cycle
so it charges up when it is sunny and then on that same day discharges, Warren says. t would typically store the energy for less than 24 hours. t has a control system and a monitoring system
which works out whether you are importing or exporting electricity. If you are exporting it will charge the batteries until they are full
and if it notices that you are importing electricity, it will start to discharge energy
and reduce the amount of energy being imported from the grid by offsetting that with the energy in the battery.
The unit stores 2 to 4 kilowatt hours, enough energy to watch television for 14 or 28 hours or wash two to four full loads in the washing machine.
Priced between £2, 000 and £2, 800 per unit, it is cheaper than rivals, says Warren,
and it has been reduced in size to tailor it for The british home energy needs. he main purpose is to reduce people electricity bills,
to charge up during the day when it sunny, discharge it in the evening when people are using power.
If you made the battery bigger, you could store the energy for longer but the problem with that is it would cost a lot more.
What we have tried to do is size the unit so it is just right for a British house.
Savings from the device depend on consumption, the number of solar panels installed and how much energy they produce,
although the company estimates that it could lower electricity bills by up to 15%.%Warren said sales started in September,
with devices snapped up by early adopters and people enthusiastic about green technology. Powervault is aiming to cut the cost to £1,
000, making the savings on evolving battery technology and economies of scale. Warren says some estimates put the number of households with solar panels at 2m by 2020, by
which time the company hopes to have sold 50,000 units. hat we are trying to do here is change the electricity market,
change the way people consume energy, says Warren. he country and everybody in it are facing big challenges,
we have got huge electricity cost increases that are affecting homeowners, are affecting the country. We need to get the carbon emissions of the country down,
we need to ensure security of supply all those things affect people and affect the country as a whole.
Elon musk, of Tesla, at a glitzy launch to unveil the Powerwall home battery in April.
However, competition is expected to be harsh. Tesla wall-mounted Powerwall batteries are designed to store up to 10kw hours of wind or solar energy;
units have sold out until mid-2016. It aims to have its batteries in the UK by the end of this year.
Last month, Mercedes-benz also entered the battery market for home and business use. Eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince, chair of the renewable energy firm Ecotricity,
said the home battery market remained undeveloped until now because energy had been oo cheap for too long for it to matter Ecotricity is also developing a product expected to be launched next year with a working title of lack box a 2ft to 3ft-high device that will control power coming in and out of the home.
The missing link Energy storage has been described as the missing link of solar energy adoption. A report from Deutsche Bank this year said solar energy storage would be cheap enough to be deployed on a large scale within five years as a result of a yearly cost reduction of 20%to 30%in the price of lithium-ion
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