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Entries in Northwestern (1)

Tuesday
Nov222011

Battery Developments via Chicago

Woke up this Sunday morning and found a lithium ion battery development in my reeder stream….love that iPad app. It's really hard to follow all the lithium battery announcements (so many), but this one is exciting for two reasons: 1) another development using silicon; and 2) lithium batteries w/ silicon is close to reaching the market and is a huge leap forward for electric vehicle batteries if it works. In fact, Panasonic will start selling LI batteries with silicon in 2013. It will use a silicon alloy node to reach an energy capacity of 4 amp hours, a 30 percent improvement of the highest energy cell available today.  

Getting back to this recent announcement, researchers at Northwestern Univ. released a research paper, titled, "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si-Graphene Composite Electrode for LIthium-Ion Batteries." The new research points to the viability of using silicon for electric vehicles. The reason? A new structure in the electrode--where electricity is conducted--minimizes "expansion and contraction" of silicon when it reacts with lithium. In effect, it "sandwiches" silicon so it does not 'wear" out the electrochemical battery structure. For a deeper dive about the battery technology, visit here

The lead author of the paper is Harold H. Kung, professor of chemical and biological engineering. From this research, he says, Even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today." 

Some context on Silicon/Lithium batteries

Stanford professor named Yi Cui is also dreaming of a silicon/lithium wonderland for batteries, too. In 2008, he introduced the concept of "nanowires" that could replace carbon in the anode. Nanowires addresses "swelling" and "contraction" by shrinking to sizes where mechanical strain is no longer a problem. His company, Amprius, has raised quite a bit of dough in 2011. For more information on nanowires, visti en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire_battery