Posted on 07/10/2012 11:09:22 AM PDT by Red Badger
A team of Stanford and Canadian Light Source researchers have developed an ultrafast rechargeable battery from non-toxic materials.
This new rechargeable battery uses nanostructures to update a century-old idea: the nickel-iron bat-tery. Those early batteries, developed by Thomas Edison in 1901 to power electric cars, have been out of favour for a while. In addition to taking a long time to recharge, they just weren’t as powerful as other sources.
There are, however, compelling reasons to improve the batteries’ efficiency.
“Nickel-iron batteries are attractive because they are cheap and, relative to other battery materials like lithium, they are not very toxic,” explained Dr. Jigang Zhou, a Canadian Light Source Industry Scientist who worked on the project.
Stanford’s Dr. Hongjie Dai and his research team worked with CLS scientists as well as a researcher in Beijing to develop a much faster nickel-iron battery.
The new battery charges in less than two minutes, thanks to a newly developed carbon nanostructure. To achieve the desired conductivity, the team grew nanocrystals of iron oxide on thin sheets of car-bon, and nickel nanocrystals on carbon nanotubes. Traditional batteries lack this structure, mixing iron and nickel with conductors more or less randomly.
The result was a strong chemical bond between the materials, which the team identified and studied at the Canadian synchrotron. The CLS team also included Staff Scientist Tom Regier and Research Associate Jian Wang, who lent their synchrotron expertise to the Stanford team.
“The title of the paper has the term ‘strongly coupled,’ and this is important. This strongly coupled material is needed to deliver ultrafast [batteries],” Zhou said.
Strong coupling between materials makes it much easier to pass electrons -- the currency of electric flow -- just as it’s faster to give someone money when they’re sitting right next to you, than to have to cross the room to do it. The smaller the gap, or the more strongly coupled the materials are, the faster electrons move.
“You can only check if it is strongly coupled by the technique that we did here. There are other beam-lines that can do, in principle, similar work, but this is one of the best soft X-ray beamlines in the world.”
So as a result of the strong coupling identified and studied at the synchrotron, these batteries are able to charge and discharge ultrafast. However, the batteries have a limited life. They can only be re-charged about 800 times before their usable life is over.
Zhou hopes to study other potential benefits to these strongly coupled materials, and gather more information about their structures and how they change over time. Future work to understand structur-al changes over time will help researchers develop a longer-lasting, and potentially even faster, ver-sion of the battery.
This work represents a small part of the possible uses of synchrotron science in developing new energy applications and exploring new materials.
The nanocrystal structures used in the batteries. Green arrows represent discharging, while purple represent charging. Current flows in through the iron-carbon nanostructure (left) and out through the nickel-carbon nanotube structure (right).
While 800 recharges doesn't sound like a lot, it's a beginning...............
Isn’t lithium also rather rare and expensive, whereas nickel and iron are rather plentiful and cheap?
Yes, and Afghanistan could be the Saudi Arabia of Lithium........
The raw materials are fairly cheap. If it can be manufactured cheaply enough, then replacing after 800 charges may be cost effective.
The 800 charges in itself is not a problem, because you are using inexpensive materials and the battery would be easily replaceable.
It still comes down to how far you can go on a charge. Electric cars will not become viable if you cannot go 300 miles between charges.
The positive outcome of this is that it would screw China over because they’ve been stocking rare earth metals to corner the market.
If you could go 300+ miles, with reasonable performance (to beat out the semis) and can recharge in the time it takes to go to the rest room, then this may be a practical application...problem is, King Bozo Oxydol has shut down all of the coal generating capacity....
We don’t want electric cars!We want ENERGY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The key material in that nanotube matrix is graphene, a single molecular thickness layer of graphite.
Pay attention when you here the word: GRAPHENE. It may just change everything.
I heard that the main reason the nickel/iron battery was not successful a century ago was that it outgassed hydrogen whenever it was sitting idle. Leave your car in the garage overnight and have a nice kaboom in the morning. I’ve seen several articles about this new NiFe battery but none has addressed this topic.
"GRAPHENE"
http://www.nickel-iron-battery.com/
How much do carbon nanotubes cost?
Are they being used anywhere commercially?
Do you buy them by the pound? Avoirdupois?
I got it!!
Thanks, Red Badger. It outgasses hydrogen when it’s being charged, and if we could collect the hydrogen it would be an extra benefit. Because of the outgassing, there are no sealed units available.
Outside of the development labs, it’s still vaporware, yet to be commercialized but many sharp minds across several continents are hot on this, and many are in the private sector. For yuks set up an RSS or Google Alert for the constant trickle.
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