Thursday, March 12, 2009
The Future of Energy depends on batteries...
When you think of tech advances in recent years most have involved computing. Computer power and speed has been roughly doubling every 2 years for about 2 decades now. This is why we now have phones and handhelds with the same memory and computing power that desktops had less than a decade ago, progress has been rapid.
Unfortunately, power supplies haven't really kept up. The average battery improvement has been about 8% a year, not bad, but certainly no quantum leap. When you consider a roughly 50% annual improvement in computing power and all that entails, it doesn't take too many years before the computing capacity is swamping battery power. This was the chief issue with the first generation 3G iphone, it couldn't hold enough power for you to do much with it before needing another charge. This was also irritating because charging lithium batteries takes a long time. If you have to keep a phone plugged in for 8 hours to use it for 2, it's not really freeing you for ultimate mobility.
Now we hear talk of electric cars, renewable energy storage and ever more techie computer developments all of which need as much juice as your average dilithium crystal to be successfully operated. But it appears MIT scientists may have the lengthy charging time problem solved.
Lithium-based batteries are in common usage for electronic devices, because they can hold a large charge for their weight (and size). However they are usually expected to provide a steady power rather than high surges of power, and recharging, which has improved considerably, is still typically half an hour or more. These guys however felt they could do better...
Ceder and Kang theorized that the lithium ions were having trouble finding their way to the crystal structure's express tunnels. The authors helped the ions by coating the surface of the cathode with a thin layer of lithium phosphate glass, which is known to be an excellent lithium conductor. Testing their newly-coated cathode, they found that they could charge and discharge it in as little as 9 seconds.
9 seconds! That's a lot of juice to dump or pick up, a hell of a surge. It's exactly what you need for vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking! And imagine if you will, a city with charging lanes so that electric vehicles could charge in ten seconds and keep going. Now there's a scheme to conjure with.
What else could we use this for? Think immediate future, because lithium iron phosphate, which these guys were using in place of lithium-cobalt, is already a well-established manufacturing material and these fast charge/discharge batteries could start rolling out in the very near future.
Unfortunately, power supplies haven't really kept up. The average battery improvement has been about 8% a year, not bad, but certainly no quantum leap. When you consider a roughly 50% annual improvement in computing power and all that entails, it doesn't take too many years before the computing capacity is swamping battery power. This was the chief issue with the first generation 3G iphone, it couldn't hold enough power for you to do much with it before needing another charge. This was also irritating because charging lithium batteries takes a long time. If you have to keep a phone plugged in for 8 hours to use it for 2, it's not really freeing you for ultimate mobility.
Now we hear talk of electric cars, renewable energy storage and ever more techie computer developments all of which need as much juice as your average dilithium crystal to be successfully operated. But it appears MIT scientists may have the lengthy charging time problem solved.
Lithium-based batteries are in common usage for electronic devices, because they can hold a large charge for their weight (and size). However they are usually expected to provide a steady power rather than high surges of power, and recharging, which has improved considerably, is still typically half an hour or more. These guys however felt they could do better...
Ceder and Kang theorized that the lithium ions were having trouble finding their way to the crystal structure's express tunnels. The authors helped the ions by coating the surface of the cathode with a thin layer of lithium phosphate glass, which is known to be an excellent lithium conductor. Testing their newly-coated cathode, they found that they could charge and discharge it in as little as 9 seconds.
9 seconds! That's a lot of juice to dump or pick up, a hell of a surge. It's exactly what you need for vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking! And imagine if you will, a city with charging lanes so that electric vehicles could charge in ten seconds and keep going. Now there's a scheme to conjure with.
What else could we use this for? Think immediate future, because lithium iron phosphate, which these guys were using in place of lithium-cobalt, is already a well-established manufacturing material and these fast charge/discharge batteries could start rolling out in the very near future.
