[FRIAM] Fwd: Your Daily digest for David Pogue

[Tom Johnson]

Hummm.  Maybe.  What do our materials guys think?

===================================
Tom Johnson - Inst. for Analytic Journalism
Santa Fe, NM
tom at jtjohnson.com               505-473-9646
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Blogtrottr" <busybee at blogtrottr.com>
Date: Jan 31, 2017 3:12 PM
Subject: Your Daily digest for David Pogue
To: <tom at jtjohnson.com>
Cc:

David Pogue

EXCLUSIVE: Tufts professor invents a non-exploding battery that holds 2x as
much power <http://pogueman.tumblr.com/post/156593216402>
Jan 30th 2017, 20:21

Batteries, as you may have figured out by now, have a problem. A few
problems, actually.

They don’t hold nearly enough power. That’s a real problem for phones,
smartwatches, and electric cars.

They’re very expensive. That’s a real problem for the national electric
grid, which desperately needs some kind of energy storage if sun and wind
power are ever to become a thing.

And above all, they’re explosive. That’s a real problem for Samsung
<http://finance.yahoo.com/news/samsung-note-7-fire-recall-234416132.html>—and,
actually, anyone who would rather not carry an envelope full of fire next
to their thighs.

Isn’t anyone going to try to invent a better battery?

As it turns out, lots of people are. It’s a veritable space race to come up
with the next great battery. How do I know? Because I’ve just spent a year
interviewing them, as the host of a new NOVA special called “Search for the
Superbattery.” It premieres this Wednesday night at 9 p.m. on PBS.

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/super-battery.html>

The good ol’ lithium-ion rechargeable battery is now 26 years old. It’s had
its day.

Fortunately, I got to meet one man who’s breathtakingly close to cracking
the powerful-cheap-safe battery problem. He’s a Tufts University professor
named Mike Zimmerman <http://engineering.tufts.edu/me/people/zimmerman/>,
who runs a company on the side called Ionic Materials
<http://ionicmaterials.com/>—and until our TV cameras entered his lab, he
had never shown his invention to the press.
No more flammable liquid

Inside every lithium-ion battery on earth, there’s a positive electrode
(the anode) and a negatively charged one (the cathode). They’re separated
by a thin, microscopically porous sheet—a separator. And the rest is filled
up with a liquid called the electrolyte.
BASF explainer video

When you charge the battery, positively-charged icons flow through that
liquid from the negative side to the positive side. Then, as you use the
battery to power your gadget, they flow back again. (Here’s a good YouTube
video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PjyJhe7Q1g> explaining the whole
thing.)

The key here is that electrolyte juice. It’s nasty stuff. It’s super
flammable. Heat it up, poke it, introduce an impurity, or experience a
short circuit, and you get what battery engineers call thermal runaway,
which is what turns those Samsung Galaxies into fireballs.

What Zimmerman has done is pretty amazing: He’s created a battery that
eliminates the liquid. In its place: A special plastic film, solid and not
flammable. Yet it allows the free flow of the ions, just as the electrolyte
does.
The Ionic Materials battery is a sandwich—entirely solid.

Zimmerman’s plastic doesn’t catch fire even if you try to light it with a
grill lighter.

Zimmerman even encouraged me to cut the live battery. Into shreds. Down to
nothing. No fire, no heat, no trip to the emergency room. And the LED light
panel it was driving stayed turned on.

This is, in other words, a completely safe battery.

But wait, it gets better.

We call them lithium ion batteries because they do not, in fact, use actual
lithium metal. That’s too bad, because lithium metal batteries can store at
least twice as much power! The only reason we don’t use lithium-metal
batteries is that they’re even more dangerous than lithium ion.

But if there’s no flammable liquid, there’s no risk of fire. So Zimmerman’s
batteries *do *use actual lithium metal, and therefore hold twice as much
charge. Imagine: Three days of life on every phone charge instead of one
and a half. Four hundred miles in an electric car instead of 200. And so
on. It’s a big, big deal.
The next step

Zimmerman told me that electronics companies have already been visiting
Ionic Materials’ offices in Woburn, Mass. He’s convinced that his
solid-battery design will become a thing.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot of work left to do. “We have to do a lot of
reliability testing, and it’s going to be a lot of work to scale it up,” he
told me. “Also, we enable lithium metal, and no one has scaled up a
lithium-metal [manufacturing] process. We’ve got to work with people who
want to do that.”

Even so, I saw the Ionic batteries before my very eyes—and cut them to
shreds with my very own scissors—and they’re the real deal.

Will these really be the next generation of battery?

“Nothing’s 100 percent,” Zimmerman says. “But I’m very confident, because
we have the right technology and the right team.”

*“Search for the Superbattery” airs on Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 9
p.m. on most PBS stations; check your local station’s listings to make
sure.*

* David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic
comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com
<http://davidpogue.com>. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s
poguester at yahoo.com <poguester at yahoo.com>. You can read all his articles
here <https://www.yahoo.com/author/david-pogue>, or you can sign up to get
his columns by email
<https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-to-get-yahoo-tech-or-any-other-site-by-email-77212485423.html>.
*


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