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 ...
C Stoff and T Stoff...
Thank you. It’s amazing how oblivious people are to the fact that electricity has to be generated. Sure some of it can come from clean sources like dams, but most of it comes from burning fuels. A battery powered airplane is probably less efficient in many ways since there is a cost and waste involved in producing electricity to store in the batteries. And the batteries lose their capacity to recharge, they have to be replaced and dumped in toxic landfills at best.
Personally I wouldn’t be afraid of electric planes - many drones are electric and fly fine. But as to the issue of being cleaner and more efficient - doubtful. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
I think you mis-typed a few of your dimensions, but it looks like you’re saying that LAX uses the energy equivalent of almost four Diablo Canyon nuclear plants. Which is scheduled to be shut down.
Yeah, I know jet aircraft use an incredible amount of fuel. Just taxiing from the jetway to the runway, an A-380 uses something like three tons of fuel, which is about a thousand gallons, right?
I could be off by a factor of ten there; it may be that an A-380 uses 0.3 tons to taxi to takeoff position. That’s about 100 gallons, I think.
Elon Musk has actually said batteries could power the US grid at night. Batteries that would fit in a one mile square...
It’s math. I could have made a mistake, if there is an error point it out.
Don’t listen to him. :)
He just wants people to buy into his solar city. He may have a point about how solar powered batteries could play a role in replacing some hydrocarbon usage, but he overstates his argument.
I always keep in mind, when I make my points about renewables, in that Google spent about $5 billion dollars to see if renewables could conceivable replace hydrocarbons. They found that there was no materials known, no technology, no knowledge in physics, nothing. |
The best place for the renewables is in support systems, to either take over where the engine doesn’t have to work or in boosting accelerations from a stop. It will never be a mainstay in any place.
The move to demarket oil is so that oil stocks can be bought on the cheap, like Soros did with coal during the Obama years. He recently bought about $250 million of Alberta oil stocks, because his pet, Truedumb, is using procedural moves to keep Alberta from moving its oil and forcing companies to sell off their stocks to keep afloat.
I think hybrid is perfect, say front wheel electric motors combined with rear wheel drive gas and four wheel regenerative braking. A lot of energy is wasted in braking.
Everyone knows that pollution released thru a 70 ft smokestack doesn't affect anything.
Kinda like dumping all the trash in the ocean.
I think there is room to improve as well, which will save millions of gallons each day in the US.
The infrastructure just needs to be figured out, when it comes to moving old batteries out and new batteries in and recycling old batteries.
My thought exactly. “Could” cure the common cold, too.
One slight objection is that Diablo Canyon generates electric power from thermal energy, so the amount of heat energy that must be generated within Diablo Canyon is something like three (or even four) times the amount of electrical energy it produces; this is because nuclear plants run their turbines at much lower pressure and temperature than do fossil fuel power plants.
Aircraft jet engines convert heat energy into mechanical work in the form of thrust; no intervening conversion to electrical energy is necessary (yes I know aircraft jet engines also produce electricity, but that’s a separate issue).
Electric aircraft would use electricity from batteries that have to be charged from turbines that used heat energy from somewhere, so in terms of fuel usage, an LAX through which all-electric aircraft flew would use just as much heat energy as LAX uses today, to generate the electricity that has to be provided to charge the batteries in all those electric airplanes. As others have pointed out, the source of those heat losses just gets moved away from the airplanes themselves to the power plants that generate the electricity to charge the batteries in the planes.
What is the battery equivalent of Moore’s Law?
Battery power/unit mass or /unit volume or per buck or number of cycles of recharge doubles every 50 years?
I’ll just note that most new vehicles still come with a lead/acid battery.
Not if you plan ahead and don't use the mechanical heat brakes.
("Mobil Economy Run was an annual event that took place from 1936 to 1968, except during World War II.")
Ridiculous Happy Plane
Right! And if you aunt was plumbed different, she would be your uncle.
There is one, I'm sure, but the doubling time is a heck of a lot more than 18 months. More like 180 months (15 years).
Still, they keep chugging along.
When I started out as an engineer (late 1970s) the best batteries were "NiCads" or alkaline batteries; they weren't very good. Didn't last very long, and had pretty low energy density. And the carbon-rod type batteries (actually called "Leclanché cells") were terrible.
Since then, we've come a long way (40 years). The latest lithium batteries are pretty good, and nanotechnology will probably make them a lot better.
Just remember, a really good battery, with energy density similar to that of hydrocarbon fuels, would also be a really good bomb.
Super Capacitors always seemed appealing.
Apparently peeps have made automotive starting batteries from those for fun.
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