New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt

A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make “refueling” such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car. The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system. In this design, the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — are composed of particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane. The work was carried out by Mihai Duduta ’10 and graduate student Bryan Ho, under the leadership of professors of materials science W. The team set out to “reinvent the rechargeable battery,” Chiang says.

Grid energy storage Simplified electrical grid with energy storage. Simplified grid energy flow with and without idealized energy storage for the course of one day. As of March 2012, pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH) is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available; the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) reports that PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk storage capacity worldwide, around 127,000 MW.[1] PSH energy efficiency varies in practice between 70% to 75%.[1] An alternate approach to achieve the same effect as grid energy storage is to use a smart grid communication infrastructure to enable Demand response (DR). The core effect of both of these technologies is to shift energy usage and production on the grid from one time to another. Forms[edit] Air[edit] Compressed air[edit] 60 - 90% efficient[3] Another grid energy storage method is to use off-peak or renewably generated electricity to compress air, which is usually stored in an old mine or some other kind of geological feature.

Forget batteries: future devices could store power in wires Batteries have always been one of the biggest problems when developing small lightweight electronic devices. They're big and bulky, taking up a serious chunk of the real estate inside your smartphone or tablet. So imagine if they could be dispensed with, and replaced by a new type of internal wiring that can actually store power inside the body of the wire itself. That's the goal of a team of nanotechnology researchers at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Professor Jayan Thomas and Ph.D. student Zenan Yu have developed a way to cover copper wires with a sheath made from alloy nanowhiskers, which then become one of the two electrodes needed to create a supercapacitor. Dr. University of Central Florida, via Treehugger