[FRIAM] Fwd: Your Daily digest for David Pogue

Tue Jan 31 09:51:20 EST 2017

Everybody and her mother wants to be the next battery technology.  Pogue's
got a whole horse race of candidates in the wings.  But the proof is in the
pudding, when you can mass produce your technology, and that proof requires
years of scaling up.

I was impressed with a recent review article in Science (
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6321/eaad4998)  about advances in
electrocatalysis, where electricity is used to split water into hydrogen
and oxygen, and the reverse reaction which produces pure water and
electricity.

Then there was a recent article published in CACM (
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moscitho/Publications/SOSP2015.pdf)
about Software Defined Batteries where you combine cells of different kinds
into a single battery with an operating system that pulls and pushes
electrons from and to the right cell at the right time, so you can combine
fast twitch and deep charge technologies in one package,

It's all interesting,

-- rec --

On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 5:21 AM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com> wrote:

> Hummm.  Maybe.  What do our materials guys think?
>
> ===================================
> Tom Johnson - Inst. for Analytic Journalism
> Santa Fe, NM
> tom at jtjohnson.com               505-473-9646 <(505)%20473-9646>
> ===================================
> ---------- 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>
> <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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