Stanford University’s Advanced Aluminum Battery: The Future of Rechargeable Batteries?

With several competing “futuristic” ultrafast-charging rechargeable batteries, is Stanford University’s Advanced Aluminum Battery poised to be the future of rechargeable batteries?

By: Ringo Bones

Technology experts recently quipped that if the advances made in rechargeable battery technology during the past 60 years mirrored that of semiconductors, we would have today rechargeable batteries that could power a mobile phone for a million years on a single charge. Sadly, such technology is still beyond the reach of the current major consumer electronic manufacturers, but recently, prototypes of ultrafast-charging rechargeable batteries that with a minutes worth of charging could either power a mobile phone for a day or drive an electric car for 300 miles are now a prototypical reality.

Lithium ion batteries have been a boon for the modern world in that they’ve replaced the heavier single-use alkaline type batteries in everything from wristwatches to the power supplies of flight control systems in late-model jumbo jets. Unfortunately, these rechargeable cells are already struggling to keep up with our ever increasing energy needs. But a new type of aluminum-ion battery recently developed by graduate students and their professor at Stanford University is not only less prone to bursting into flames than current lithium-ion types but can also be built at a fraction of the price and recharges completely in just over a minute. Best of all, “our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it” says Stanford University chemistry professor Hongjie Dai.

According to its developers, the Stanford University’s Advanced Aluminum Battery uses a graphite cathode, an aluminum anode and an ionic liquid electrolyte inside a polymer-coated pouch. “The electrolyte is basically a salt that is liquid at room temperature, so it’s very safe” said Stanford University graduate student Ming Gong, co-author of the study recently published in the science journal Nature.

Unlike earlier rechargeable aluminum-ion battery prototypes which generally fails after only about 100 recharge cycles, Stanford’s prototype Advanced Aluminum Battery are composed of aluminum-ion cells that can cycle more than 7,500 times without any capacity loss – that’s 7.5 times longer than your average lithium-ion rechargeable battery in current production. Sadly, Stanford University’s aluminum-ion cell isn’t perfect, yet, as it can produce only about 2 volts per cell – far less than the 3.6 volts per cell that current lithium-ion cells can muster. Plus aluminum-ion cells, at the moment, can only carry 40-watts of electricity per kilogram compared to lithium-ion’s 100 to 206 watts per kilogram power density.

“Improving the cathode material could eventually increase the voltage output and energy density” says Dai. “Otherwise, our battery has everything else you’d dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life. I see this as a new battery in its early days, It’s quite interesting.”

Unlike other competing prototypes, Stanford University’s Advanced Aluminum Battery that has the ability to be charged for 1 minute and yet could store enough charge to power a mobile phone for 24 hours was entirely made possible by a group of graduate students and their professor without a single cent of corporate backing whatsoever. Despite of this feat, Tesla electric car company founder Elon Musk is currently skeptical of the Stanford University’s Advanced Aluminum Battery on whether it will ever be as good – or become even better than – as those ultrafast-charging lithium ion types in current development. Hmm, if only Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk would put his money where his mouth is…

StoreDot’s Fast Charging FlashBatteries: The Future Of Rechargeable Batteries?

With the ability to recharge in 60 seconds to power a mobile phone or allow an electric vehicle to travel 300 miles with a 5 minute charge is StorDot’s FlashBattery represent the future of rechargeable battery technology?

By: Ringo Bones

During the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show – CES – in Las Vegas, Nevada, an Israeli firm called StoreDot demonstrated a newfangled battery technology that can power a mobile phone with just a 60-second charge and a bigger version that could drive an electric vehicle for 300 miles (480 kilometers) on a 5 minute charge. With such capability, StoreDot’s FlashBattery technology could represent the future of rechargeable battery technology where battery recharging of electric cars and other electric vehicles could be as fast as the time it takes to fill up with gasoline in your local gasoline filling station. According to StoreDot, their newfangled FlashBattery represents an evolutionary step forward of the current ubiquitous lithium ion batteries. 

Lithium ion batteries have been traditionally used for powering most portable devices and electric vehicles. While exhibiting relatively slow charging and discharging capabilities, over time, these chemical processes reduce the lithium battery’s ability to retain energy. Yet StoreDot has succeeded in isolating and maximizing the charge transfer rate and has enhanced it to heighten the superior characteristics of the FlashBattery.  

Lithium ion batteries contain inorganic compounds in the battery’s cathode, typically comprising metal oxides or polyanions which are continuously recharged by the insertion of lithium ions. This process limits ionic conductivity, thereby reducing the power density and shortening the battery’s life expectancy. Moreover, the electrolyte used in lithium ion batteries is highly volatile and flammable, posing a severe risk to consumers, critical especially in electric cars.

StoreDot’s groundbreaking solution for their FlashBattery design is a hybrid architecture using a unique hybrid multifunction electrode (MFE), StoreDot’s FlashBattery combine two types of energy storage solutions, incorporating the high-power rapid-charging capability of current super capacitor technology with the high energy storage ability and low self-discharge rate of current lithium ion batteries.

This optimized charging ability is achieved through an innovative electrode structure containing proprietary organic polymers with legacy lithium metal oxide components on the cathode end that trigger reduction-oxidation chemical reactions. This solution causes ions to flow from a modified anode to a modified cathode at a speed that could not be attained through existing lithium ion battery technologies. Together with a proprietary separator and electrolyte, this new architecture delivers a high current and low internal resistance with enhanced energy density and a prolonged battery life. 

While some battery manufacturers were able to improve only one of the following properties – either an increase in capacity, fast charging or extended battery life – StoreDot’s novel technology has optimized all three simultaneously, in addition to enhancing its safety. StoreDot’s organic compounds and newfangled proprietary battery architecture provide 4 times more charge / discharge cycles compared to any existing rechargeable battery, increasing the number of cycles from 500 to 2,000. Using compounds that are less likely to metalize during these cycles, StoreDot’s FlashBattery eliminates the risk of an internal electrical short almost entirely, which significantly prolongs battery life expectancy.

Specially designed for high current charging, StoreDot’s FlashBattery contains, in addition to lithium, non-flammable organic compounds encased in multi-layer safety-protection structure that prevents over voltage and heating and is therefore considerably safer than traditional lithium ion batteries. Containing their proprietary electrolyte which is an ecologically-friendly material, the FlashBattery meshes polymers and metal oxide together, resulting in an increased electrode stability and SEI performance at high temperatures.

Comprising carefully engineered organic molecules with high chemical stability, FlashBattery compounds can be tuned to match a variety of applications. The FlashBattery demonstrates rapid reduction-oxidation activity optimized compounds that increase the absorption of lithium ions and their counter-ions. In contrast to other batteries that contain toxic polluting heavy metals like cadmium, lead or mercury, StoreDot’s materials leave a minimal environmental footprint. And from a manufacturing engineer’s standpoint, StoreDot’s organic and polymer electrode’s raw materials are readily available thus reducing the overall cost of the battery.   

Anode-Less Rechargeable Batteries: The Future of Rechargeable Batteries?

Even though it is an integral part of a rechargeable batteries construction for proper operation, could eliminating the anode improve current rechargeable batteries performance by leaps and bounds?

By: Ringo Bones 

Though not quite anode-less yet but a rechargeable battery manufacturing company called Solid Energy Systems is currently developing a nearly anode-less lithium ion rechargeable battery and has recently exhibited a working prototype during the 2015 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Given the already widespread acceptance of the lithium ion rechargeable battery in mobile phone and hybrid / electric vehicle applications, Solid Energy System’s concept takes the strengths of the current technology much further by reducing the space taken up by the anode since it takes up most of the space in current lithium ion rechargeable battery configuration. 

Solid Energy System’s nearly anode-less rechargeable battery concept could last twice as long as current lithium ion rechargeable batteries, while offering a 1,200 watt-hour per liter energy density. Designed with an ultra-thin metal anode, this configuration improves the cell-level energy density by 50-percent over current designs using graphite anodes and 30-percent improvement over silicon-composite anodes. Once marketed and used on current mobile devices, it could make them operate twice as long between recharging times. 

According to Solid Energy Systems, the “secret” in boosting energy storage lies in swapping the conventional electrode material – graphite – for a thin sheet of lithium metal foil, which can store more lithium ions. Other battery manufacturers have been trying to use lithium-metal electrodes in rechargeable lithium ion batteries for decades with only a limited success. Solid Energy seems to have solved a couple of key problems which have caused such batteries to either stop working after a few charges or burst into flames. Current carbon anode cell energy density is at 600 watt-hour per liter while silicon anode cells offer energy densities of around 800 watt-hour per liter, while Solid Energy Systems’ near anode-less cell offer energy densities of around 1,200 watt-hour per liter. 

Solid Energy Systems’ solution to make nearly anode-less rechargeable batteries to be as reliable as current lithium ion rechargeable cells without dying only a few recharge cycles or suddenly bursting to flames is via the use of both solid electrolyte and a liquid one. The solid electrolyte is applied to the lithium-metal foil, the ions don’t have to travel through this thin material, so it doesn’t matter that they are moving relatively slowly.

Solid Energy Systems’ prototype nearly anode-less battery can be recharged 300 times while retaining 80 percent of its original storage capacity – closer to what you would need in portable electronics. It also works at room temperatures whereas competing lithium-metal battery prototypes operate at temperatures too hot to be practical. As of late, most other companies investing in Solid Energy Systems’ newfangled batteries to become an economically viable commercial product are electric car / hybrid car companies with plans to use the newfangled rechargeable battery design in their electric cars. 

Can There Be Nuclear Reactors That Consume Their Own Radioactive Wastes?

With mankind’s energy demand slated to double in the next 30 years, will a nuclear reactor that burns its own radioactive wastes provide an answer? 

By: Ringo Bones 

With coal burning power plants that emit excessive carbon dioxide no longer viable in our increasingly climate change conscious global village, is there a power plant that provides reliable safe and competitively priced energy with the extremely low carbon dioxide output of traditional nuclear fission power plants? If Leslie Dewan gets her way, there will probably be – and lots of them. 

Leslie Dewan CEO of TransAtomic Power already has plans for a “carbon neutral” energy generating power plant sans the risk and waste disposal problems of current nuclear fission power plants. Dewan was also named Time magazine’s 30 people under 30 that changed the world in 2013. Leslie Dewan got the idea of a nuclear fission power plant that consumes its own long-lived nuclear wastes back in February 2010 together with TransAtomic Power co-founder Mark Massie while working on her white-paper finishing her PhD in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Dewan and Massie turned to a nuclear fission power plant technology developed but never commercialized in the 1950s due to its relatively high initial building cost in comparison to competing designs - i.e. the  light-water fission reactors that comprise 99-percent of commercial power plants that had been in operation for over 50 years. The TransAtonic Power's WAMSR or Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor - can burn spent nuclear fuel safely in a liquid salt reactor instead of a traditional light water reactor similar to the design used in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant that went into a tragic meltdown after the March 2011 tsunami.

TransAtomic Power's WAMSR or Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor, it is way safer than current nuclear fission power plants – even from a defense analyst’s / counter-terror analyst’s point of view – because the uranium fuel assembly used to start WAMSR is “too diluted” to be used in a uranium-235 based nuclear device. On the long-lived radioactive waste issue, WAMSR produces only 20 to 30 kilograms of long-lived atomic wastes a year – like the “notorious” neptunium-237 which has a half-life of 2.2-million years (it still contains half of its radioactive strength after laying around for 2.2-million years) that can still be fashioned, with some skill, into a crude nuclear bomb. 

This is way less than a conventional commercial light-water nuclear reactor which generates 20 to 30 tons of long-lived highly radioactive wastes in a typical year of operation. Speaking of the long-lived radwaste issue, commercial light-water nuclear fission power plants currently in operation have a current stockpile of 270,000 metric tons worth of long-lived radwastes whose permanent disposal is still in Limbo. Would TransAtomic Power’s WAMSR plant provide a viable solution?

Unfortunately, TransAtomic Power currently only has 3.5-million US dollars in government funding, way less than the billions of dollars of “subsidies” rubber-stamped by “conservative politicians” at Capitol Hill to conventional commercial light-water reactors currently in operation in strategic areas in the United States. In economic viability terms, TransAtomic Power’s WAMSR nuclear fission power plant only has half the operating cost per megawatt generated when compared to conventional commercial light-water nuclear fission power plants. If Uncle Sam green-lights Dewan and Massie’s proposal, it would take 8 to 10 years to open a Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor and probably just a few years to solve the United States’ high-level long-lived radioactive waste disposal and future energy problems. 

Whatever Happened To The Schadewald Gravity Engine?

Its working principles were described a few years after the OPEC Crude Oil Embargo of 1973 as a solution to the global energy crisis, but does anyone know whatever happened to the Schadewald Gravity Engine? 

By: Ringo Bones 

The October 17, 1973 OPEC Crude Oil Embargo and its impact on the energy hungry West finally made everyone realize that we are not only addicted to crude oil – and still are until this very day – but are also very dependent on non-renewable energy sources. Given that the still ongoing global energy crisis and our desperate search for viable solutions had for sometime established some so-called “perpetual motion energy religious cult” for sometime now - as if devotees of the “Our Lady of Perpetual Motion” already has the free energy problem already worked out. Speaking of energy generating machines that relies on the principle of perpetual motion, does anyone still remember the Schadewald Gravity Engine of the late 1970s? 

The late, great physicist Paul A. M. Dirac conjectured that the universal force of gravity slowly decreasing. If this is true, consider a wheel with one heavy weight at the top. As the weight rotates to the bottom, the wheel picks up kinetic energy, which transfers back to potential energy as the weight swings up the other side. Since gravity is decreasing, the value of g is less on the second part of the full revolution, it follows that there should be a net gain in kinetic energy, causing the wheel to speed up indefinitely with every revolution. 

Science writer Robert Schadewald reported this breakthrough as his own in Science Digest back in April 1, 1978 – a time where the 1973 OPEC Crude Oil Embargo was still topically fresh in everyone’s minds. Schadewald even closed the article by quoting: “As of April 1, 1978, I yield my invention to the public domain, that it may solve the energy crisis and bring peace and prosperity to the world. I ask only my initials be inscribed on the wheel of every engine, so that my genius may get the sort of recognition it deserves. – Bob Schadewald.” Given that he surrendered his invention to the public domain, free energy devotees of the late 1970s became very euphoric after reading the article. 

Despite such bold hints that the article was intended as an April Fools’ Joke, Schadewald was taken seriously, even by the scientific community at the time. Some people wrote him and asked for more information. Others sent drawings of their own machines that allegedly work on the same Dirac – based principle and one person even offered to buy the plans quite convinced in believing that the physics and mathematics behind the Schadewald Gravity Engine were valid. Given the hints of “credibility” of the physics and mathematics behind the device, whatever happened to the Schadewald Gravity Engine? 

Artificial Photosynthesis: Clean Energy’s Holy Grail?

Given that unsustainable fossil fuel burning has now endangered our planet’s fragile climate, will artificial photosynthesis based energy generation be the clean and sustainable energy production’s “Holy Grail”? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Given the recent dire UN IPCC irreversible climate change warning, it seems that if humanity can master an energy generating system based on photosynthesis used by plants for millions of years would not only serve as a very viable clean, sustainable and renewable energy production for industrial use but also serve as a viable way of cleaning up the excess carbon dioxide already in the earth’s atmosphere produced by decades of uncontrolled fossil fuel burning. But is there an inherent difficulty of artificial photosynthesis that it is now labeled as the “Holy Grail” of cleaning up the energy generation systems of our industrialized world. 

Joel Ager of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories is just one of the 5 energy research labs in the United States currently working to develop a viable way to replicate photosynthesis in generating energy for industrial use. Their latest prototype is an “artificial leaf” that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and water to convert it into methanol / methyl alcohol but in a chemical reaction that’s ten times faster than typical plant based reactions found in nature. Once perfected, artificial photosynthesis could provide a truly carbon neutral way to generate electricity to power the wheels of industry. Though this is the latest phase of the development of artificial photosynthesis, research into the concept has been around for a few decades now. 

Back in 1980, “splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen via ordinary sunlight” has been a goal of photochemists finding ways to wean industry from its heavy dependence on crude oil when it comes to energy generation. Michael Grätzel and his team at Lausanne, Switzerland had devised a system with special catalysts that carries out this process with high efficiency. The catalytic material consists of platinum and ruthenium dioxide deposited on titanium dioxide. A notable feature of the system is that it is effective over long periods, with hydrogen production undiminished after two days of ordinary sunlight exposure. 

Low Cost Solar Thermal Power Plants: Sunny Future?

With increasing concerns over the deleterious effect of excess industrial activity produced carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, are low cost solar thermal power plants the viable long-term answer?

By: Ringo Bones 

Here’s a solar energy generation concept that could surely make solar power advocate Ed Begley, Jr. blush, but could low cost solar thermal power plants be a practical and economically viable long term solution in curbing our conventional power generating activity from dumping excess carbon dioxide gas into the Earth’s atmosphere? Luckily, the idea seems to point a sunny future on the concept of affordable renewable energy power generation. 

A civil engineer named Andrea Pedretti says constructing low cost solar thermal power plants using simple aluminized plastic foil is up to 50 times cheaper than the glass based mirrors currently used as the parabolic mirror through in a solar thermal power plant. Aluminized plastic foils found in the market today are now about as corrosion resistant as the glass based mirrors currently used in solar thermal power plant construction. Given that aluminized plastic foils used as a mirror are much lighter than their glass based counterparts, most of the financial savings in constructing these types of solar thermal power plants could mostly come from using cheaper support structures bearing much lighter loads.   

Andrea Pedretti’s low cost solar thermal power plant concept had been tested in a Moroccan cement factory and shows results on par with their costlier rivals that use conventional glass based mirrors on their parabolic through arrays that heat the working substance – like oil or water – that generate power by being directed to drive a dynamo type electrical generator. If scaled up, aluminized plastic foil based low cost solar thermal power plants could finally make practical clean solar power available to the parts of the world who can’t afford conventional solar thermal power plants. If the concept becomes successful, who needs the groundwater pollution risks of fracking.