Lithium-ion battery
New Material Boosts Lithium-ion Battery Power
Researchers at Berkeley have developed a new anode material that can absorb eight times more lithium than current materials used in anodes.
Scientists have tested the anode for over a year and it has been provem to maintain its energy over many hundreds charge-discharge cycles.
“Most of today’s lithium-ion batteries have anodes made of graphite, which is electrically conducting and expands only modestly when housing the ions between its graphene layers. Silicon can store 10 times more – it has by far the highest capacity among lithium-ion storage materials – but it swells to more than three times its volume when fully charged, ” said Gao Liu of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD).
In this new anode, the scientists used a polymer binder to enhance the strength of silicon anode to address the degradation due to swelling. Through a combination of synthesis, spectroscopy and simulation, the team tailored a polymer that conducts electricity and binds closely to lithium-storing silicon particles, maintaining the mechanical properties during charge-discharge cycle. The fabrication process is compatible with standard lithium-battery manufacturing technologies.
“Defect-Free” Batteries Now Possible
A new transparent chemical reactor vessel was introduced by researchers of Energy Storage Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) to study the synthesis of lithium iron phosphate for rechargeable batteries. This invention will also allow scientists in other fields to study the chemistry and control the conditions in real time. BNL’s researchers have recently published their study method in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
Eliminating defects from materials used in lithium-ion batteries is essential for high energy application like in electric vehicles. The processing steps to produce defect-free material adds to the cost of the manufacturing using the conventional synthesis method.
“We wanted to identify the mildest conditions necessary to make defect-free lithium ion phosphate,” says Brookhaven Materials Scientist Jason Graetz, leader of the Energy Storage Group.
“Generally we make battery materials in a stainless steel reactor. There’s no window, no way to see the reaction—we just see what goes in and what comes out. So we designed a reactor made out of a glass capillary and, using synchrotron X-ray diffraction, we can not only probe the precursors—the initial parts of the reaction—but we can also track what happens as the reaction takes place.”
By analyzing these diffraction patterns, scientists are able to learn about the defect concentration in the material and track the defects in real time as a function of temperature or time.
According to Brookhaven Materials Scientist Jiajun Chen, this method has proven to be a cost-effective and industrial viable method for manufacturing battery materials.
Is there a potential for deploying car batteries as a “behind-the-meter” electricity storage source for utility grids
Any discussion of utility-scale energy storage inevitably must touch on the development of electric vehicles (including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) and the potential to deploy car batteries as a “behind-the-meter” electricity storage source for utility grids. Folks in the electricity storage technology business who spoke with CCBJ tended to fall into two camps on the questionof how realistic this vision is. Those backing it sometimes act as if it’s just around the corner while those selling competing stationary battery technologies generally disparage it as not viable. “People talk enthusiastically about PHEVs as a way of doing storage, but the major utilities I see say that’s not the case,” said an executive with one firm. “”They want to provide energy to PHEVs, not buy it.”
Stephan Dolezalek, who runs the cleantech practice for VantagePoint Venture Partners, offered a more measured view. “First, we need to recognize that increasing our supply of renewable energy will require both utility-scale solutions like flow batteries and taking advantage of an increasingly electrified transport fleet. We will begin to see individual U.S.-based state and city programs over the next several years, but it is likely to take 10 years to implement a national vehicle-to-grid infrastructure in this country. On the other hand, I think we’ll see it much sooner than that in Europe and probably in China as well.” He noted that Better Place, a VantagePoint-backed company that positions itself as a “mobility operator” and aims to deploy a unique battery charging and battery-swapping model to alleviate the “range anxiety” associated with EVs, has secured commitments for projects in California, Israel, Australia, Denmark and most recently Hawaii.
Better Place’s project in Israel is the furthest ahead, with Denmark following closely behind. Danish utility Dong—looking for storage to deal with the highest wind energy penetration in the world—carmarker Renault-Nissan, lithium-ion battery maker NEC and Better Place plan to get 100,000 EVs on the road and hooked up to utility grids with bidirectional power controls for charging and discharging by 2011. “In Denmark there’s a huge tax on gasoline vehicles so any EV has a significant total cost of ownership preferential,” said Dolezalek.
Tax policies combined with high gasoline prices are driving interest in Better Place’s other developing markets, but in the United States, Dolezalek suggested that “either gasoline or carbon prices will need to rise and/or battery costs will have to further decline before it becomes abundantly clear to the American public that gasoline is not the way to go with regard to vehicle power. But interest among U.S. utilities is rising. “ey see it as a very attractive market opportunity and a number of them are ready to begin studying and piloting vehicle-to-grid programs.”
CCBJ will examine the emerging vehicle-to-grid technologies and markets in more depth in its upcoming edition on the Transport segment of the Climate Change Industry. Growth within the next year to 18 months will certainly be constrained by the recession. “We fully expect that the cleantech industry as a whole will see a slowdown and capital crunch through 2009 and into 2010,” said Dolezalek. “However, the Obama Administration and increasing numbers of political figures and pundits see cleantech as a significant part of how to grow this country out of the economic crisis. In the near term, that may mean energy retrofits, efficiency and wind projects, but within a year or two the focus will shift to solar, smart-grid, enhanced transmission and V-to-G implementations.”
“”This is a transitional time for electric energy storage,” concluded EPRI’s Rastler in his recent article. “A number of cost-effective systems and solutions exist while others will soon emerge. NAS and flow batteries are being adopted by electric utilities as a grid support asset. Advanced CAES system designs look attractive for bulk power energy storage, supporting renewable generation and reducing the sector’s carbon footprint.” “Li-ion batteries applied in PHEV and utility distributed energy storage systems could enable a transformation to more distributed power systems and a convergence of electric power and transportation. Developments in flow batteries, advanced batteries, and ultra-capacitors also continue. The ability to store electricity will become increasingly important, but much remains to be done for the cause. Current technology and products need to be integrated within the activities leading to advanced ‘smart grids.’”
“Additional R&D, including research in basic materials science, is needed, especially in advanced batteries. Current technology and that in the R&D pipeline will give a big boost to improving the efficiency of the electric enterprise in the years to come.”
Article courtesy of the Climate Business Journal.
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Hybrid boom to profit battery firms
Industry experts say that in the near future Li-Ion batteries will replace nickel hydrogen batteries, which today enjoy around 95 percent of the global market for use in hybrid electric cars. According to JP Morgan, the global EV market will expand from 740,000 units this year to around 12.9 million units by 2020.
Bosch JV to supply battery for BMW’s Megacity e-car
A joint venture between Bosch and Samsung SDI will supply Li-Ion battery cells for BMW’s Megacity project, an EV due in the first half of the next decade. BMW last week announced it would pull out of the F1 circuit at the end of this season, after management decided to focus its efforts on sustainability issues and reducing carbon emissions.
EV Li-ion batteries more reliable than in IT devices
A Japanese team succeeded in observing the interior of the lithium battery by using the MRI (Magneting Resonance Imaging) technique. Professor Kawamura answers questions about the importance of Li-Ion batteries as energy storage devices, safety risks and how MRI methods can help better understand and improve the technology.
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Vinod Khosla on why Li-Ion batteries are overhyped
Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an active cleantech investors, believes that lithium-ion batteries will be eventually replaced if costs do not go down or oil prices do not go up. But Khosla Ventures is still backing the technology because the “lithium-ion markets are here today and there are good markets.”
EV Li-Ion Battery Forum 2009 – Day One – 2 September
As all the delegates arrive from various parts of the world, the conference shall duly begin in earnest at exactly 8:30. After a short coffee & tea session, Mr Bonomi, the conference Content Strategy Director, will give a brief speech welcoming all present to the conference. Do make sure that you are there on time for the speed networking session at around 9:10 as an interesting method of delegate interaction will be used to help you get to know others.
The morning will contain four presentations of 30 minutes duration based around the topic of EV application results & feedback with a panel session held before lunch focusing on exactly what potential consumers of Li-ion vehicle batteries in Asia want and how batteries need to change in the future in order to accommodate these demands. Lunch will be conducted at 12:50 and delegates will have the opportunity to visit various exhibition booths present outside the conference hall.
In the afternoon, Li-Ion battery safety will be discussed with researchers from Toyota and LG Chem providing their knowledge on relevant matters. There will be three presentations in total followed by refreshments at around 4.
The final presentation will be about a case study from Rome & Lyon on the electric urban bus transport system (using Sodium/Nickelchloride batteries) used there. A panel session will end the day with the topic being “Marketing To End Users The Residual Value Of The Li-ion Battery Pack To Lower The Costs Of Electric Vehicles”.
After a long day of productive presentations and discussions, delegates and speakers will be invited to a special drinks reception with champagne and other premium drinks on offer. Speakers, panellists and delegates will come together to discuss the day’s topics in a more relaxed atmosphere. At this time we will also pick the winner of a gift. Make sure you remember to enter the raffle before the end of the last session.
Should you be interested in finding out more information and even earlier than the first day, you are welcome to attend the pre-conference workshops on 1 September. There will be 3 workshops in total focusing, chronologically, on business models for the industry, electric vehicle configurations and battery manufacturing topics. You can choose to register separately for just the workshops if you are not keen on attending the 3 day conference itself.
Please email me should you have any further queries or seek to obtain any further information. If you are interested in asking questions of the speakers then please do not hesitate to take this unique and rare opportunity to get to know them and do send me an email outlining your request.
Suhas Bhat
suhas@ev-li-ionbatteryforum.com
Media and Press Relations
“ A Lasting Journey ! ”
Singapore:
Tel: +65 6243 00 50
Fax: +65 6245 72 32
TH!NK and ENER1 launch new joint business stream
The first integrated EV drive-train of its kind has been developed by TH!NK (the pioneering Norwegian EV manufacturer), with EnerDel (the US-based lithium-ion battery subsidiary of ENER1) being the sole supplier of its industry-leading lithium-ion battery technology.
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EV stations coming soon to Miami beach
Continuing its focus on green technologies, Miami Beach is making moves to become an EV hub of South Florida.
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