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Quick-Charging Batteries Needed For Vehicles
Quick-charging batteries will be essential if the electric car industry is to flourish; who wants to take hours at the "pump"? The University of Illinois' Paul Braun, a professor of materials science and engineering, is one of the scientists working on an answer. He remarks:
The speed at which conventional batteries are able to charge or discharge can be dramatically increased by changing the form of their active material into a thin film, but such films have typically lacked the volume to be able to store a significant amount of energy. In the case of Braun's batteries, however, that thin film has been formed into a three-dimensional structure, thus increasing its storage capacity.
"This system that we have gives you capacitor-like power with battery-like energy. Most capacitors store very little energy. They can release it very fast, but they can't hold much. Most batteries store a reasonably large amount of energy, but they can't provide or receive energy rapidly. This does both."
( Braun's nanostructured bicontinuous cathode (left)
scanning electron microscope image of the nanostructure (right) )
To make the three-dimensional thin film, the researchers coated a surface with nanoscale spheres, which self-assembled into a lattice-like arrangement. The spaces between and around the spheres were then coated with metal, after which the spheres were melted or dissolved away, leaving the metal as a framework of empty pores. Electropolishing was then used to enlarge the pores and open up the framework, after which it was coated with a layer of the active material – both lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries were created.The system utilizes processes already used on a large scale, so it would reportedly be easy to scale up. It could also be used with any type of battery, not just Li-ion and NiMH.
Hugo award-winning science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer wrote about this kind of technology in his 1971 novel The Fabulous Riverboat; he called it a batacitor.
A giant step-down transformer of aluminum took the energy three times a day, sent it through Brobdignagian aluminum wires to a two-story device known as a batacitor. This was a late-twentieth-century electronic discovery that could accept hundreds of kilovolts in a hundredth of a microsecond and could discharge it at any rate from a tenth of a volt to one hundred kilovolts...
Via Gizmag; thanks to Chris Reed for submitting a tip on this story.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/23/2011)
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