Posted on 11/03/2018 12:15:15 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
Brightly colored molecular models line two walls of Yet-Ming Chiang’s office at MIT. Chiang, a materials science professor and serial battery entrepreneur, has spent much of his career studying how slightly different arrangements of those sticks and spheres add up to radically different outcomes in energy storage.
But he and his colleague, Venkat Viswanathan, are taking a different approach to reach their next goal, altering not the composition of the batteries but the alignment of the compounds within them. By applying magnetic forces to straighten the tortuous path that lithium ions navigate through the electrodes, the scientists believe, they could significantly boost the rate at which the device discharges electricity.
That shot of power could open up a use that has long eluded batteries: meeting the huge demands of a passenger aircraft at liftoff. If it works as hoped, it would enable regional commuter flights that don’t burn fuel or produce direct climate emissions.
Viswanathan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, initiated and is leading the research project. He and Chiang are now collaborating with 24M, the lithium-ion battery manufacturer Chiang cofounded in 2010, and Zunum Aero, an aircraft startup based in Bothell, Washington, to develop and test prototype batteries specifically designed for the needs of an advanced hybrid plane.
High stakes
Eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions from airplanes is one of the hardest challenges in the climate puzzle. Air travel accounts for around 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions and is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse-gas pollution.
But there are no clean alternatives today for more than a tiny sliver of air travel, because the batteries powering electric cars are still too expensive, heavy, and otherwise poorly suited for aviation.
More than a dozen companies, including Uber, Airbus, and Boeing, are already exploring the potential
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
re: “They tend to melt down their experimental projects.”
I know ALL about it. I wasn’t born yesterday. They have gone ‘black’. I was following them quite closely. I don’t know what your technical capability is regarding reading ‘white papers’, but, Dr. Mills has been quite open with his IP once it’s locked-in via patent grant ...
That is so true. I have been interested in alternative energy technology from the time I was a child in the 1960s. My class took a field trip to the Science Center in Seattle and they had a stationary bicycle hooked up to a generator and the harder you pedaled the more headlights you lit up. It sparked my imagination and not too many years later I had already built several versions of my own which were all more capable and efficient than the one at the Science Center.
The biggest problem these days is that the entire field of alternative energy is completely dominated by people who are scam artists at heart. They completely crowd out any true innovators and innovations. It is actually stunting actual progress from the grass roots to major corporations. And even the actual innovators use the global warming scam as a crutch. The true measure of any new energy technology should always be how well it compares to existing sources without any projected advantages to a completely non-existent problem.
An experiment on September 17 ran for a limited duration to prevent heat related damage to a transparent quartz or borosilicate glass container.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf1am03sOs8
Yikes!
Maybe the researchers who are profiled in the article are on to something. Alternative energy sources are slow to develop because the physics are on the side of current technologies. The energy density of chemical ( fossil) fuels delivers more energy, more reliably and over a continuous duty cycle for less money.
For “renewable” energy to become a practical alternative to the established base the physics are going to have to change.
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Only amoron would fly in an electric powered plane.
You are completely correct, an “85 kWh” Tesla battery weighs over 1200 pounds contains 7,104 lithium-ion battery cells in 16 modules wired in series, costs as much to produce as some complete new cars and stores considerably less usable energy than 3 gallons of gasoline.
24m? 3m times 8? Manchuria manufacturing and Mining and media manipulation and Maoist machine mmmmm... I give up.
“don’t...produce direct climate emissions”
We won’t mention the indirect ones. Out of sight, out of mind.
This is the mullet of hair-brained schemes. Pass.
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