Wooden floors infused with silicon and metal ions can generate enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs. Researchers hope that they could provide a green energy source for homes.
Some materials can generate an electrical charge when they come into contact with another such material and are then separated, due to a phenomenon called the triboelectric effect. Electrons are transferred from one object to another and generate a charge. Materials that tend to donate electrons are known as tribopositive and those that tend to receive them are known as tribonegative.
Guido Panzarasa at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and his colleagues found that although wood sits in the middle of this spectrum and doesn’t readily pass electrons, it can be altered to generate larger charges. The team infused one panel of wood with silicon, which picks up electrons on contact with an object. A second panel was infused with nanocrystals of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), a compound containing metal ions and organic molecules, and these crystals tend to lose electrons. They called this impregnation process “functionalisation”.
The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact.
Panzarasa said: “The challenge is making wood that is able to attract and lose electrons. The functionalisation approach is quite simple, and it can be scalable on an industrial level. It’s only a matter of engineering.”
The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimetre-by-3.5-centimetre sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression – an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep – was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators.
Panzarasa and his team now hope to develop chemical coatings for wood that are more environmentally friendly and easier to manufacture.
By combining miniaturized electronics with some origami-inspired fabrication, scientists in Germany have developed what they say is the smallest microsupercapacitor in existence. Smaller than a speck of a dust but with a similar voltage to a AAA battery, the groundbreaking energy storage device is not only safe for use in the human body, but actually makes use of key ingredients in the blood to supercharge its performance.
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These devices are known as biosupercapacitors and the smallest ones developed to date is larger than 3 mm3, but the scientists have made a huge leap forward in terms of how tiny biosupercapacitors can be. The construction starts with a stack of polymeric layers that are sandwiched together with a light-sensitive photo-resist material that acts as the current collector, a separator membrane, and electrodes made from an electrically conductive biocompatible polymer called PEDOT:PSS.
This stack is placed on a wafer-thin surface that is subjected to high mechanical tension, which causes the various layers to detach in a highly controlled fashion and fold up origami-style into a nano-biosupercapacitor with a volume 0.001 mm3, occupying less space than a grain of dust. These tubular biosupercapacitors are therefore 3,000 times smaller than those developed previously, but with a voltage roughly the same as an AAA battery (albeit with far lower actual current flow).
These tiny devices were then placed in saline, blood plasma and blood, where they demonstrated an ability to successfully store energy. The biosupercapacitor proved particularly effective in blood, where it retained up to 70 percent of its capacity after 16 hours of operation. Another reason blood may be a suitable home for the team’s biosupercapacitor is that the device works with inherent redox enzymatic reactions and living cells in the solution to supercharge its own charge storage reactions, boosting its performance by 40 percent.
Prof. Dr. Oliver G. Schmidt has led the development of a novel, tiny supercapacitor that is biocompatible
Jacob Müller
The team also subjected the device to the forces it might experience in blood vessels where flow and pressure fluctuate, by placing them in microfluidic channels, kind of like wind-tunnel testing for aerodynamics, where it stood up well. They also used three of the devices chained together to successfully power a tiny pH sensor, which could be placed in the blood vessels to measure pH and detect abnormalities that could be indicative of disease, such as a tumor growth.
Earlier this week, a company Orbital Marine Power successfully launched its latest tidal turbine. Once it’s connected to the European Marine Energy Centre off the Orkney Islands, the two megawatt O2 will have the capacity to generate enough energy to power 2,000 UK households annually, making it one of the world’s most powerful tidal turbines currently in use.
Construction on the project started in 2019. The O2 builds on Orbital’s previous generation SR2000 tidal turbine. The new model consists of a 239-foot superstructure connected to two turbines with 32 foot long rotors. The blades on those can rotate a full 360-degrees. That’s a feature that allows the O2 to generate power from currents without having to move entirely when they change direction. In the future, Orbital says it also has the option to install even larger blades on the O2.
There is way too much plastic in the world—and we’re making more every day, even as we struggle to find a way to get rid of the old stuff. A new study poses an interesting solution: Melting plastic bags and bottles back into the oil it was originally made from.
The new research, published Wednesday in Science Advances, looks at a technique called pyrolysis, which essentially melts down polyolefin into its original form—aka oil and gas. Polyolefins are a very common type of plastic in everyday items from drinking straws to packaging to thermal underwear to plastic cling wrap.
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One of the most notable things about the new technique is that it’s able to break down the plastics at lower temperatures than other pyrolysis methods, which helps transform the plastic into denser fuel and uses two to three times less energy.
The article then goes on to miss the implication that plastics filling our landfills could be reduced massively as they also miss the relevance of old plastics decaying and releasing poisons into the environment.
Nissan has found a second-life for old LEAF batteries inside mobile machines that help workers at Nissan factories worldwide. The old batteries are being used in automated guided vehicles or AGVs used for various tasks inside the manufacturing facilities, including delivering parts to workers on the assembly line.
AGVs are used as robotic mail carriers operating on magnetic tracks taking mail and parts exactly where they’re needed on the assembly line. The idea is to use the AGV to deliver parts so the worker doesn’t waste time searching for a component and can stay focused on installing parts. Nissan and other automotive manufacturers have found that AGVs are indispensable when it comes to saving time and increasing productivity on the assembly line.
Nissan currently operates more than 4000 AGVs around the world at its various manufacturing facilities. The factories have a system that includes 30-second automatic quick charging to keep battery packs on the electric vehicles topped off and working correctly. AGVs also have sensors that keep them operating on a set route and allow them to stop when needed. They also have wireless communications capabilities that enable them to communicate with each other to avoid collisions.
Nissan says that it has been exploring ways to reuse old LEAF batteries since 2010. The first-generation LEAF used a 24-kilowatt hour battery pack made by combining 48 modules. Nissan said eight years ago, its engineers discovered a way to take three of those modules and repackage them to fit inside the AGV. Last year, the engineers began to repurpose used battery modules instead of using new ones to power the AGVs. The team also found the repurposed LEAF batteries last a lot longer thanks to their lithium-ion design compared to the lead-acid batteries used previously.
Researchers at ETH Zurich and Empa have chemically modified wood and made it more compressible, turning it into a mini-generator. When compressed, it generates an electrical voltage. Such wood could serve as a biosensor or as a building material that harvests energy.
Ingo Burgert and his team at public research university ETH Zurich and Swiss federal laboratory Empa have proven that wood is much more than just a building material. Their research enhances the properties of wood in order to use it for new applications. For instance, they have already developed high-strength, water-repellent, and magnetizable wood.
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When a piezoelectric material is elastically deformed, it generates an electrical voltage. Measurement technology, in particular, exploits this phenomenon by using sensors that generate a charge signal when mechanically stressed.
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Wood also has a natural piezoelectric effect but only generates a very low electrical voltage. If one wants to increase the voltage, the chemical composition of the wood must be changed – and this also makes it more compressible.
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In order to convert wood into an easily formable material, one component of the cell walls must be dissolved. Wood cell walls consist of three basic substances: lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. “Lignin is the stabilizing substance that trees need to grow tall. Without lignin, which connects the cells and prevents the stiff cellulose fibrils from buckling, this would not be possible,” says Burgert.
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The researchers achieved this “delignification” by placing wood in a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid. The acid dissolves the lignin, leaving a framework of cellulose layers. “The process retains the hierarchical structure of wood and prevents disassembly of the individual fibers,” Burgert explains.
Even a little pressure can generate usable energy in the wooden sponge. Photo: ACS Nano/Empa
In this way, a piece of balsa wood becomes a white, wooden sponge, made up of layer upon layer of thin cellulose. The sponge can simply be compressed and then returns to its original shape. “The wood sponge generates an electrical voltage 85 times higher than that of native [untreated] wood,” says Sun.
A mini-generator in the wooden floor
The team subjected a test cube with a side length of approximately 1.5 cm to around 600 load cycles. The wooden sponge proved surprisingly stable: For each load, the researchers measured a voltage of approximately 0.63 volts, which would be appropriate for a sensor. In further experiments, the team tested the scalability of this mini-generator. If 30 such wooden blocks are connected up and evenly loaded with the body weight of an adult, enough electricity is generated to power a simple LCD display.
Treatment with fungus instead of chemicals
In a follow-up study just published in Science Advances, the ETH-Empa research team went one step further, seeking to produce the wooden sponge without using chemicals. The researchers found the solution in nature: The fungus Ganoderma applanatum causes white rot in wood and degrades the lignin and hemicellulose gently. “Although the electrical voltage generated was lower in initial tests than with chemically treated wood, the fungal process is more environmentally friendly,” says Burgert.
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a “wearable microgrid” that harvests and stores energy from the human body to power small electronics. It consists of three main parts: sweat-powered biofuel cells, motion-powered devices called triboelectric generators, and energy-storing supercapacitors. All parts are flexible, washable and can be screen printed onto clothing.
The technology, reported in a paper published Mar. 9 in Nature Communications, draws inspiration from community microgrids.
“We’re applying the concept of the microgrid to create wearable systems that are powered sustainably, reliably and independently,” said co-first author Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Just like a city microgrid integrates a variety of local, renewable power sources like wind and solar, a wearable microgrid integrates devices that locally harvest energy from different parts of the body, like sweat and movement, while containing energy storage.”
The wearable microgrid is built from a combination of flexible electronic parts that were developed by the Nanobioelectronics team of UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang, who is the director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego and corresponding author on the current study. Each part is screen printed onto a shirt and placed in a way that optimizes the amount of energy collected.
two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth.
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Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year.
With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, “you’re essentially offsetting 2 ½ years of your life.”
It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks.
Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power.
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Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements.
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Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond founded by Dale Vince, an entrepreneur and self-styled environmentalist who says he spent five years researching how to make what he calls the world’s first “zero-impact diamonds.”
Vince takes frequent potshots at the traditional diamond industry, noting that it has a history of using child labor and underpaid women. He also points to diamond mines that have scarred the Earth and damaged wildlife. He argues that a lack of regulations has fostered civil wars in Africa that can be funded by smuggled stones sometimes called “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds.”
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In 1954, an American chemist, Tracy Hall, invented an alternative to natural stones: the first diamonds made in a laboratory. He worked for General Electric Co. and used a reactor combined with a press to subject powdered carbon to high temperatures and pressures.
The result was diamond crystals made within a few weeks. It eventually led to a new industry that manufactured “laboratory diamonds” using two competing methods. Both required a lot of energy.
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According to Shearman, the CO2 is sent to a facility in Europe where it is converted into methane. That is sent to a reactor in Chicago, where pressure and heat fueled by renewable energy convert it into diamonds.
Climeworks has gone on to make a business out of accepting donations of CO2 from various sources and, for a fee, injecting it into a rock formation near a power plant in Iceland. Once it’s underground, the gas is mixed with water, and it will turn into stone in two years. The company is building a pilot plant called Orca that is designed to bury 4,000 tons of CO2 each year.
So far, over 3,000 companies and individuals from 52 countries have made contributions in exchange for a certificate showing that they have permanently stored CO2 underground
[…] How exactly do those panels work? Unlike power from a wind turbine or even a power plant, solar panels don’t seem to have any moving parts — so how exactly is that energy being produced?
The simple answer is that solar panels are made up of silicon and conductive metals, which form an electric field. When sunlight hits, the solar energy shakes electrons in the silicon out of their “natural” state, while a circuit attached to the panel is able to generate a current out of those electrons’ desire to return to their original positions within the panel. If this seems a little too complicated, don’t worry! Our animated visualization breaks down everything into easy-to-understand sections — you won’t need to remember your physics or chemistry classes to understand. You can see it for yourself directly below:
In a recent interview with Evo magazine, Porsche VP of Motorsport and GT cars, Dr. Frank Walliser, says that synthetic fuels, also called eFuels, can reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of existing ICE cars by as much as 85 percent. And, he says, when you account for the wheel-to-well impact of manufacturing the EV, it’s a wash.
Synthetic fuels are made by extracting hydrogen via renewable energy, and capturing it liquid form with carbon dioxide. Compared to pump fuel, eFuels emit fewer particulates and nitrogen oxide as well. That’s because, as Walliser explains, they are composed of eight to 10 ingredients while the dead plants we mine contain 30 to 40, many of which are simply burned and emitted as pollution in the process.
While Porsche is continuing to develop EVs like the Taycan, it says that ICEs will continue to exist in the market for many years to come. Synthetic fuels, along with electrified cars, would be part of a multi-pronged approach to reducing emissions as quickly as possible. Mazda gave a similar statement a couple weeks earlier when it became the first car company to join Europe’s eFuel Alliance.
Since late January, most users running a pre-installed Lenovo image of Windows 10 has been bitten by a bug in Lenovo’s System Update Service (SUService.exe) causing it to constantly occupy a CPU thread. This was noticed by many ThinkPad and IdeaPad users as an unexpected increase in fan noise, but many desktop users might not notice the problem. I’m submitting this story to Slashdot because Lenovo does not provide an official support venue for their software, and the problem has persisted for several weeks with no indication of a patch forthcoming. While this bug continues to persist, anyone with a preinstalled Lenovo image of Windows 10 will have greatly reduced battery life on a laptop, and greatly increased power consumption in any case. As a thought experiment, if this causes 1 million systems to increase their idle power consumption by 40 watts, this software bug is currently wasting 40 megawatts, or about 1/20th the output of a typical commercial power station. On my ThinkPad P15, this bug actually wastes 80 watts of power, so the indication is that 40 watts per system is a very conservative number.
Lenovo’s official forums and unofficial reddit pages have seen several threads pop up since late January with confused users noticing the issue, but so far Lenovo is yet to issue an official statement. Users have recommended uninstalling the Lenovo System Update Service as a workaround, but that won’t stop this power virus from eating up megawatts of power around the world for those who don’t notice this power virus’s impact on system performance.
We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus or a truck, it becomes problematic with smaller vehicles, especially ones such as scooters or even full-sized motorcycles. The Fraunhofer Institute wants to run smaller vehicles on magnesium hydride in a paste form that they call POWERPASTE.The idea is that the paste effectively stores hydrogen at normal temperature and pressure. At 250C, the paste decomposes and releases its hydrogen. While your motorcycle may seem hot when parked in the sun, it isn’t getting quite to 250C.Interestingly, the paste only provides half the available hydrogen. The rest is from water added start a reaction to release the hydrogen. Fraunhofer claims the energy density available is greater than that of a 700 bar tank in a conventional hydrogen system and ten times more than current battery technology.One thing that’s attractive is that the paste is easy to store and pump. A gas station, for example, could invest $20-30,000 and dispense the paste from a metal drum to meet low demand and then scale up as needed. A hydrogen pumping setup starts at about $1.2 million. Fraunhofer is building a pilot production plant that will produce about four tons of the material a year.
A material that can be used in technologies such as solar power has been found to self-heal, a new study shows.The findings—from the University of York—raise the prospect that it may be possible to engineer high-performance self-healing materials which could reduce costs and improve scalability, researchers say.The substance, called antimony selenide (Sb2Se3), is a solar absorber material that can be used for turning light energy into electricity.Professor Keith McKenna from the Department of Physics said: “The process by which this semi-conducting material self-heals is rather like how a salamander is able to re-grow limbs when one is severed. Antimony selenide repairs broken bonds created when it is cleaved by forming new ones.
Elon Musk on Thursday took to Twitter to promise a $100 million prize for development of the “best” technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
Capturing planet-warming emissions is becoming a critical part of many plans to keep climate change in check, but very little progress has been made on the technology to date, with efforts focused on cutting emissions rather than taking carbon out of the air.
The International Energy Agency said late last year that a sharp rise in the deployment of carbon capture technology was needed if countries are to meet net-zero emissions targets.
Researchers may have found a way to reduce the environmental impact of air travel in situations when electric aircraft and alternative fuels aren’t practical. Wiredreports that Oxford University scientists have successfully turned CO2 into jet fuel, raising the possibility of conventionally-powered aircraft with net zero emissions.
The technique effectively reverses the process of burning fuel by relying on the organic combustion method. The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft.
The approach is inexpensive, uncomplicated and uses commonplace materials. It’s cheaper than processes used to turn hydrogen and water into fuel.
There are numerous challenges to bringing this to aircraft. The lab method only produced a few grams of fuel — you’d clearly need much more to support even a single flight, let alone an entire fleet. You’d need much more widespread use of carbon capture. And if you want effectively zero emissions, the capture and conversion systems would have to run on clean energy.
The researches are talking with industrial partners, though, and don’t see any major scientific hurdles. It might also be one of the most viable options for fleets. Many of them would have to replace their aircraft to go electric or switch fuel types. This conversion process would let airlines keep their existing aircraft and go carbon neutral until they’re truly ready for eco-friendly propulsion.
The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees (Celsius).
On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds with an ion-temperature higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign.
It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds).
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The KSTAR began operating the device last August and plans to continue its plasma generation experiment until December 10, conducting a total of 110 plasma experiments that include high-performance plasma operation and plasma disruption mitigation experiments, which are joint research experiments with domestic and overseas research organizations.
In addition to the success in high temperature plasma operation, the KSTAR Research Center conducts experiments on a variety of topics, including ITER researches, designed to solve complex problems in fusion research during the remainder of the experiment period.
The KSTAR is going to share its key experiment outcomes in 2020 including this success with fusion researchers across the world in the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference which will be held in May.
While setting fire to an iron ingot is probably more trouble than it’s worth, fine iron powder mixed with air is highly combustible. When you burn this mixture, you’re oxidizing the iron. Whereas a carbon fuel oxidizes into CO2, an iron fuel oxidizes into Fe2O3, which is just rust. The nice thing about rust is that it’s a solid which can be captured post-combustion. And that’s the only byproduct of the entire business—in goes the iron powder, and out comes energy in the form of heat and rust powder. Iron has an energy density of about 11.3 kWh/L, which is better than gasoline. Although its specific energy is a relatively poor 1.4 kWh/kg, meaning that for a given amount of energy, iron powder will take up a little bit less space than gasoline but it’ll be almost ten times heavier.
It might not be suitable for powering your car, in other words. It probably won’t heat your house either. But it could be ideal for industry, which is where it’s being tested right now.
So what happens to all that rust? This is where things get clever, because the iron isn’t just a fuel that’s consumed— it’s energy storage that can be recharged. And to recharge it, you take all that Fe2O3, strip out the oxygen, and turn it back into Fe, ready to be burned again. It’s not easy to do this, but much of the energy and work that it takes to pry those Os away from the Fes get returned to you when you burn the Fe the next time. The idea is that you can use the same iron over and over again, discharging it and recharging it just like you would a battery.
Photo: Bart van OverbeekeThe combustion of the iron powder is visible through the glass in the combustion tube.
To maintain the zero-carbon nature of the iron fuel, the recharging process has to be zero-carbon as well. There are a variety of different ways of using electricity to turn rust back into iron, and the TU/e researchers are exploring three different technologies based on hot hydrogen reduction (which turns iron oxide and hydrogen into iron and water), as they described to us in an email:
Mesh Belt Furnace: In the mesh belt furnace the iron oxide is transported by a conveyor belt through a furnace in which hydrogen is added at 800-1000°C. The iron oxide is reduced to iron, which sticks together because of the heat, resulting in a layer of iron. This can then be ground up to obtain iron powder. Fluidized Bed Reactor: This is a conventional reactor type, but its use in hydrogen reduction of iron oxide is new. In the fluidized bed reactor the reaction is carried out at lower temperatures around 600°C, avoiding sticking, but taking longer. Entrained Flow Reactor: The entrained flow reactor is an attempt to implement flash ironmaking technology. This method performs the reaction at high temperatures, 1100-1400°C, by blowing the iron oxide through a reaction chamber together with the hydrogen flow to avoid sticking. This might be a good solution, but it is a new technology and has yet to be proven.
Both production of the hydrogen and the heat necessary to run the furnace or the reactors require energy, of course, but it’s grid energy that can come from renewable sources.
If renewing the iron fuel requires hydrogen, an obvious question is why not just use hydrogen as a zero-carbon fuel in the first place? The problem with hydrogen is that as an energy storage medium, it’s super annoying to deal with, since storing useful amounts of it generally involves high pressure and extreme cold. In a localized industrial setting (like you’d have in your rust reduction plant) this isn’t as big of a deal, but once you start trying to distribute it, it becomes a real headache. Iron powder, on the other hand, is safe to handle, stores indefinitely, and can be easily moved with existing bulk carriers like rail.
French company Nawa technologies says it’s already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long.
Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits.
It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today’s typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they’re typically stuck on in a jumbled, “tangled spaghetti” fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.
The benefits are all about how far an ion has to carry its charge; on the left, a depiction of a typical, chaotic electrode structure through which an ion has to travel long and circuitous distances. On the right, the rigid structure of a vertically aligned carbon nanotube structure, which links every tiny blob of active material and the ions within straight to the current collector
Nawa Technologies
Nawa’s vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else.
The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions – the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery – since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. “The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometers through the lithium material,” Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, “instead of micrometers with a plain electrode.”
This radically boosts the power density – the battery’s ability to deliver fast charge and discharge rates – by a factor of up to 10x, meaning that smaller batteries can put out 10 times more power, and the charging times for these batteries can be brought down just as drastically. Nawa says a five-minute charge should be able to take you from 0-80 percent given the right charging infrastructure.
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“Research has shown vertically aligned – or even just well distributed – carbon nanotubes have far greater properties than randomly placed carbon nanotubes,” said Dr. Shearer. “I am not surprised a x10 in conductivity is possible. Controlling the placement of carbon nanotubes is really the way to unlock their potential. The issue in commercialization is the cost associated with producing aligned carbon nanotubes. My guess is the cost would be much more than x10.”
We put the question of cost to Nawa. “The million dollar question!” said Boulanger. “Here’s a million dollar answer: the process we’re using is the same process that’s used for coating glasses with anti-reflective coatings, and for photovoltaics. It’s already very cheap.”
“In high volume, like those processes, yes,” added Nawa CEO Ulrik Grape. “We are firmly convinced that this will be cost-competitive with existing electrodes.”
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In some cases, Nawa says, it eliminates issues that have been holding back certain other battery chemistries. Silicon-based batteries, for example, could offer around twice the energy density of lithium-ion, but the active material grows to four times its size as it’s charged and shrinks back again as it discharges, causing mechanical issues that lead to cracks. As a result, you might be lucky to get 50 charges out of a silicon battery before it dies.
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Moving to these electrodes, Grape and Boulanger say, will require battery companies to make some fairly considerable changes to the early stages of their manufacturing processes prior to cell assembly. But such dramatic performance multipliers without a price penalty or any changes to battery chemistry will surely make these things tough to compete against.
Nawa’s first large-scale customer is French battery manufacturer Saft, which is partnering with PSA and Renault as part of the European Battery Alliance to develop EV batteries for the brands under those umbrellas. The company is also speaking to a number of car companies directly, as well as other battery manufacturers supplying the EV space.
Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel wants to build his startup Redwood Materials into the world’s top battery recycling company and one of the largest battery materials companies, he said at a technology conference Wednesday.
Straubel aims to leverage two partnerships, one with Panasonic Corp 6752.T, the Japanese battery manufacturer that is teamed with Tesla TSLA.O at the Nevada gigafactory, and one announced weeks ago with e-commerce giant Amazon AMZN.O.
With production of electric vehicles and batteries about to explode, Straubel says his ultimate goal is to “make a material impact on sustainability, at an industrial scale.”
Established in early 2017, Redwood this year will recycle more than 1 gigawatt-hours’ worth of battery scrap materials from the gigafactory — enough to power more than 10,000 Tesla cars.
That is a fraction of the half-million vehicles Tesla expects to build this year. At the company’s Battery Day in late September, Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was looking at recycling batteries to supplement the supply of raw materials from mining as Tesla escalates vehicle production.
Redwood’s partnership with Panasonic started late last year with a pilot operation to recover materials at Redwood’s recycling facilities in nearby Carson City, according to Celina Mikolajczak, vice president of battery technology at Panasonic Energy of North America.
Mikolajczak, who spent six years at Tesla as a battery technology leader, said: “People underestimate what recycling can do for the electric vehicles industry. This could have a huge impact on raw material prices and output in the future.”
Straubel’s broader plan is to dramatically reduce mining of raw materials such as nickel, copper and cobalt over several decades by building out a circular or “closed loop” supply chain that recycles and recirculates materials retrieved from end-of-life vehicle and grid storage batteries and from cells scrapped during manufacturing.
In September, Redwood said it received funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, following an investment by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the maritime consultancy SSPA partnered with shipbuilders Wallenius Marine in Sweden to design a cargo ship capable of reducing the industry’s huge carbon footprint. Around three percent of today’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the shipping industry, a figure that accounts for the 90,000 ships responsible for 90 percent of all trade on the planet, according to the Financial Times. That much carbon dioxide each year rivals the output of some industrialized nations.
The regulatory body International Maritime Organization has set a goal of cutting emissions by 40 percent over the next decade. That’s going to be a tall order, requiring drastic changes in the industry.
Enter Wallenius Marine’s Oceanbird, also known as the wind-Powered Car Carrier.
The ship will run on wind, but not by using conventional sails. Instead, the Oceanbird will use five 80-foot-tall wings, similar in shape to airplane wings, for propulsion. Those huge fins will be able to collapse down like a telescope to 45 feet in order to slip under bridges or when encountering rough seas. The plan is for the Oceanbird to be capable of transporting 7,000 cars across the Atlantic in 12 days, a trip that with current internal combustion engines takes seven or eight days. The ship will also be equipped with a small motor, probably electric, for navigating harbors and tricky areas.
Wallenius says the concept starts with cargo shipping but could be used by cruise lines as well. Of course, the Oceanbird concept won’t be ready for launch until probably 2025, according to SSPA. All the cool, world-changing technology seems to always be a few years away, doesn’t it? Still, Wallenius has been in the shipbuilding and logistics business for 30 years, and it has built 70 ships during that time. Maybe this could actually work. We’ve got to try something.
By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.
“If we don’t mandate recycling, many of the modules will go to landfill,” said Arizona State University solar researcher Meng Tao, who recently authored a review paper on recycling silicon solar panels, which comprise 95 percent of the solar market.
Solar panels are composed of photovoltaic (PV) cells that convert sunlight to electricity. When these panels enter landfills, valuable resources go to waste. And because solar panels contain toxic materials like lead that can leach out as they break down, landfilling also creates new environmental hazards.
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Under EU law, producers are required to ensure their solar panels are recycled properly. In Japan, India, and Australia, recycling requirements are in the works. In the United States, it’s the Wild West: With the exception of a state law in Washington, the US has no solar recycling mandates whatsoever. Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope. “Right now, we’re pretty confident the number is around 10 percent of solar panels recycled,” said Sam Vanderhoof, the CEO of Recycle PV Solar, one of the only US companies dedicated to PV recycling. The rest, he says, go to landfills or are exported overseas for reuse in developing countries with weak environmental protections.
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Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. (Because the vast majority of that mixture by weight is glass, the resultant product is considered an impure, crushed glass.) Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the US is between $12 and $25—after transportation costs, which “oftentimes equal the cost to recycle.” At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid-waste landfill.
“We believe the big blind spot in the US for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue,” Meng said. “It’s on the order of a 10-to-1 ratio.”
If a solar panel’s more valuable components—namely, the silicon and silver—could be separated and purified efficiently, that could improve that cost-to-revenue ratio. A small number of dedicated solar PV recyclers are trying to do this. Veolia, which runs the world’s only commercial-scale silicon PV recycling plant in France, shreds and grinds up panels and then uses an optical technique to recover low-purity silicon. According to Vanderhoof, Recycle PV Solar initially used a “heat process and a ball mill process” that could recapture more than 90 percent of the materials present in a panel, including low-purity silver and silicon. But the company recently received some new equipment from its European partners that can do “95 plus percent recapture,” he said, while separating the recaptured materials much better.
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In addition to developing better recycling methods, the solar industry should be thinking about how to repurpose panels whenever possible, since used solar panels are likely to fetch a higher price than the metals and minerals inside them (and since reuse generally requires less energy than recycling). As is the case with recycling, the EU is out in front on this: Through its Circular Business Models for the Solar Power Industry program, the European Commission is funding a range of demonstration projects showing how solar panels from rooftops and solar farms can be repurposed, including for powering ebike charging stations in Berlin and housing complexes in Belgium.
In a step closer to skyscrapers that serve as power sources, a team led by University of Michigan researchers has set a new efficiency record for color-neutral, transparent solar cells.
The team achieved 8.1% efficiency and 43.3% transparency with an organic, or carbon-based, design rather than conventional silicon. While the cells have a slight green tint, they are much more like the gray of sunglasses and automobile windows.
“Windows, which are on the face of every building, are an ideal location for organic solar cells because they offer something silicon can’t, which is a combination of very high efficiency and very high visible transparency,” said Stephen Forrest, the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering, who led the research.
Yongxi Li holds up vials containing the polymers used to make the transparent solar cells. Image credit: Robert Coelius, Michigan Engineering Communications & Marketing
Buildings with glass facades typically have a coating on them that reflects and absorbs some of the light, both in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum, to reduce the brightness and heating inside the building. Rather than throwing that energy away, transparent solar panels could use it to take a bite out of the building’s electricity needs. The transparency of some existing windows is similar to the transparency of the solar cells Forrest’s group reports in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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The color-neutral version of the device was made with an indium tin oxide electrode. A silver electrode improved the efficiency to 10.8%, with 45.8% transparency. However, that version’s slightly greenish tint may not be acceptable in some window applications.
Transparent solar cells are measured by their light utilization efficiency, which describes how much energy from the light hitting the window is available either as electricity or as transmitted light on the interior side. Previous transparent solar cells have light utilization efficiencies of roughly 2-3%, but the indium tin oxide cell is rated at 3.5% and the silver version has a light utilization efficiency of 5%.
Both versions can be manufactured at large scale, using materials that are less toxic than other transparent solar cells. The transparent organic solar cells can also be customized for local latitudes, taking advantage of the fact that they are most efficient when the sun’s rays are hitting them at a perpendicular angle. They can be placed in between the panes of double-glazed windows..
The drop in battery prices is enabling battery integration with renewable systems in two contexts. In one, the battery serves as a short-term power reservoir to smooth over short-term fluctuations in the output of renewable power. In the other, the battery holds the power for when renewable power production stops, as solar power does at night. This works great for off-grid use, but it adds some complications in the form of additional hardware to convert voltages and current.
But there’s actually an additional option, one that merges photovoltaic and battery hardware in a single, unified device that can have extensive storage capacity. The main drawback? The devices have either been unstable or have terrible efficiency. But an international team of researchers has put together a device that’s both stable and has efficiencies competitive with those of silicon panels.
Solar flow batteries
How do you integrate photovoltaic cells and batteries? At its simplest, you make one of the electrodes that pulls power out of the photovoltaic system into the electrode of a battery. Which sounds like a major “well, duh!” But integration is nowhere near that simple. Battery electrodes, after all, have to be compatible with the chemistry of the battery—for lithium-ion batteries, for example, the electrodes end up storing the ions themselves and so have to have a structure that allows that.
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Previous records for a solar flow battery show the tradeoffs these devices have faced. The researchers used a measure of efficiency termed solar-to-output electricity efficiency, or SOEE. The most efficient solar flow devices had hit 14.1 percent but had short lifespans due to reactions between the battery and photovoltaic materials. More stable ones, which had lifespans exceeding 200 hours, only had SOEEs in the area of 5 to 6 percent.
The new material had an SOEE in the area of 21 percent—about the same as solar cells already on the market, and not too far off the efficiency of the photovoltaic hardware of the device on its own. And their performance was stable for over 400 charge/discharge cycles, which means for at least 500 hours. While they might eventually decay, there was no indication of that happening over the time they were tested. Both of those are very, very significant improvements.
Obviously, given that both batteries and photovoltaic cells can potentially last for decades, 500 hours shouldn’t be viewed as a definitive test—especially for a device that’s proposed to enable off-the-grid electrical production. But the demonstration that voltage matching provides such a large efficiency boost should allow researchers to identify a wider range of battery and photovoltaic chemistries that have improved efficiencies. That accomplished, researchers will then be able to search among those for stable configurations. Whether all of that is compatible with low cost and mass production will be the critical question. But, at this stage of the renewable energy revolution, having more options to explore can only be a good thing.
An international team of scientists from NUST MISIS, Russian Academy of Science and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has found that instead of lithium (Li), sodium (Na) “stacked” in a special way can be used for battery production. Sodium batteries would be significantly cheaper and equivalently or even more capacious than existing lithium batteries. The results of the study are published in the journal Nano Energy.
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The most promising replacement for lithium is sodium (Na), since a two-layer arrangement of sodium atoms in bigraphen sandwich demonstrates anode capacity comparable to the capacity of a conventional graphite anode in Li-ion batteries—about 335 mA*h/g against 372 mA*h/g for lithium. However, sodium is much more common than lithium, and therefore cheaper and more easily obtained.
A special way of stacking atoms is actually placing them one above the other. This structure is created by transferring atoms from a piece of metal to the space between two sheets of graphene under high voltage, which simulates the process of charging a battery. In the end, it looks like a sandwich consisting of a layer of carbon, two layers of alkali metal, and another layer of carbon.
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Zakhar Popov, senior researcher at NUST MISIS Laboratory of Inorganic Nanomaterials and RAS, says, “Our simulation shows that lithium atoms bind much more strongly to graphene, but increasing the number of layers of lithium leads to less stability. The opposite trend is observed in the case of sodium—as the number of layers of sodium increases, the stability of such structures increases, so we hope that such materials will be obtained in the experiment.”
The next step of the research team is to create an experimental sample and study it in the laboratory. This will be handled in Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany. If successful, it could lead to a new generation of Na batteries that will be significantly cheaper and equivalently or even more capacious than Li-ion batteries.
scientists in America and China have created a sodium-ion-based battery that can potentially perform at close to the levels of Li-ion, paving the way for a cheaper, commercially viable alternative to lithium.
The key challenge in creating this battery is that sodium-ion cells tend to break down faster than their lithium-ion cousins. Sodium crystals collect on the cathode, made of O3-layered metal oxide, preventing sodium ions from flowing, and thus knackering the operation of the battery.
A solution for this is what the Washington State University-based team – led by Jianming Zheng (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Yuehe Lin (WSU), Pengfei Yan (Beijing University of Technology), and Xiaolin Li (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) – sought to figure out.
They eventually came up with a liquid electrolyte with a high concentration of sodium ions, which prevented the build up of inactive crystals, thus preserving 80 per cent of the cell’s charge capacity after 1,000 cycles.
Not only were the new cells observed as having a higher capacity and better lifespan than older sodium-ion cell designs, but they were able to hit levels closer to those of lithium-ion.
“Our study showed that sodium-ion can be as good as some lithium-ion chemistries and thus make them more competitive and versatile,” The Register was told by Junhua Song, a contributing author to the paper based out of Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
“We are hopeful that a deployable high energy and long cycle life sodium-ion battery can be realised in five years with enough funding resources.”
Song explained that while there could be other advantages to using sodium over lithium other than availability of materials and extraction costs, it is too soon to say that the sodium power cells would be, for example, safer or more environmentally friendly.
“Environmental friendliness relies on many factors because the battery is essentially a complicated system involving more than just electrode materials,” he explained.
“Sodium does provide better environmental benignity due to its resource abundance and accessibility, which might do less harm to the environment during extraction, compared to the geologically constrained lithium counterpart. Similar to environmental friendliness, safety depends on many components (materials, electrolyte, cell architecture, etc), more systematic studies are on the way to tackle the safety aspect of sodium-ion batteries.”
To that end, Song noted that the next steps in development of sodium-ion batteries will involve investigating the cathode and anode materials, and the actual reaction process within the electrolyte.
The team’s paper, “Controlling Surface Phase Transition and Chemical Reactivity of O3-Layered Metal Oxide Cathodes for High-Performance Na-Ion Batteries”, was published in the journal ACS Energy Letters.
