USC Scientists Create New Battery That’s Cheap, Clean, Rechargeable… and Organic

Image: USC professor Sri Narayan's research focuses on the fundamental and applied aspects of electrochemical energy conversion and storage to reduce the carbon footprint of energy use and by providing energy alternatives to fossil fuel, Wednesday, June 10, 2014 in Los Angeles. (USC Photo / Gus Ruelas)

Scientists at USC have developed a water-based organic battery that is long lasting, built from cheap, eco-friendly components.

The new battery – which uses no metals or toxic materials – is intended for use in power plants, where it can make the energy grid more resilient and efficient by creating a large-scale means to store energy for use as needed.

“The batteries last for about 5,000 recharge cycles, giving them an estimated 15-year lifespan,” said Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author of a paper describing the new batteries that was published online by the Journal of the Electrochemical Society on June 20. “Lithium ion batteries degrade after around 1,000 cycles, and cost 10 times more to manufacture.”

Narayan collaborated with Surya Prakash, Prakash, professor of chemistry and director of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, as well as USC’s Bo Yang, Lena Hoober-Burkhardt, and Fang Wang.

“Such organic flow batteries will be game-changers for grid electrical energy storage in terms of simplicity, cost, reliability and sustainability,” said Prakash.

The batteries could pave the way for renewable energy sources to make up a greater share of the nation’s energy generation. Solar panels can only generate power when the sun’s shining, and wind turbines can only generate power when the wind blows. That inherent unreliability makes it difficult for power companies to rely on them to meet customer demand.

With batteries to store surplus energy and then dole it out as needed, that sporadic unreliability could cease to be such an issue.

“‘Mega-scale’ energy storage is a critical problem in the future of the renewable energy, requiring inexpensive and eco-friendly solutions,” Narayan said.

The new battery is based on a redox flow design – similar in design to a fuel cell, with two tanks of electroactive materials dissolved in water. The solutions are pumped into a cell containing a membrane between the two fluids with electrodes on either side, releasing energy.

The design has the advantage of decoupling power from energy. The tanks of electroactive materials can be made as large as needed – increasing total amount of energy the system can store – or the central cell can be tweaked to release that energy faster or slower, altering the amount of power (energy released over time) that the system can generate.

The team’s breakthrough centered around the electroactive materials. While previous battery designs have used metals or toxic chemicals, Narayan and Prakash wanted to find an organic compound that could be dissolved in water. Such a system would create a minimal impact on the environment, and would likely be cheap, they figured.

Through a combination of molecule design and trial-and-error, they found that certain naturally occurring quinones – oxidized organic compounds – fit the bill. Quinones are found in plants, fungi, bacteria, and some animals, and are involved in photosynthesis and cellular respiration.

“These are the types of molecules that nature uses for energy transfer,” Narayan said.

Currently, the quinones needed for the batteries are manufactured from naturally occurring hydrocarbons. In the future, the potential exists to derive them from carbon dioxide, Narayan said.

The team has filed several patents in regards to design of the battery, and next plans to build a larger scale version.

This research was funded by 

• the ARPA-E Open-FOA program (DE-AR0000337), 
• the University of Southern California, and 
• the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.

ORIGINAL: USC

Contact: Robert Perkins at (213) 740-9226 or perkinsr@usc.edu

June 25, 2014

These Harvard researchers are making a new type of battery using the same molecule in rhubarb

photo: Eliza Grinnell, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Summary:

A funky battery that’s made of natural materials and uses liquid tanks is being developed in a lab at Harvard. If the breakthrough makes it to market it could be a low cost energy storage option for clean power.



Rhubarb isn’t just good for baking in pies — turns out the natural molecules found in the plant are being used as the basis for a new type of battery for the power grid, developed by a group of Professors at Harvard.

The Harvard researchers and engineers set out to build a low cost, metal-free flow battery, which is a type of battery that uses separate liquid tanks to store energy. In contrast, the batteries in your laptop and cell phone (and even in an electric car), use chemicals that are adjacent and enclosed in a casing. But by separating the electrolyte out of the battery, flow batteries can easily scale up and down (using larger and smaller tanks) to deliver the capacity needed, and can thus be lower cost than traditional batteries.

Because they can be inexpensive, power grid operators and utilities are looking at flow batteries carefully as a way to act as energy storage option on the power grid next to a wind or solar farm. These clean power sites generate energy only at certain times of day, and adding energy storage to clean power can make it more effective and economical.

Typical flow batteries use metal liquids like vanadium; or some next-gen ones, like startup EnerVault, are using metals like iron and chromium. The breakthrough with the Harvard researchers is that they’re using non-metal natural substances for the flow battery.

For the first iteration of the flow battery the researchers decided to turn to naturally-occurring organic molecules found in plants, animals and even oil called quinones. The best fit for the battery medium they wanted turned out to be the same quinones found in rhubarb. Go figure.

Harvard SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz with the flow battery tech

The Harvard team discovered the right quinone molecule (out of more than 10,000) using a computing and sophisticated algorithms. Other universities are using computer models to find all sorts of battery breakthroughs.

So far the battery is working as well as the vanadium flow batteries on the market, but it’s much less expensive. The battery is still in the development phase, so a lot of things can change between now and commercialization. A release from Harvard noted that an application somewhere in the future could even be used at a home (say, in a basement), connected to a solar panel roof project.

The battery technology was first published in Nature on Wednesday, and the team received funding from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, which gives small grants to early stage, high risk, research. The Harvard group plans to start commercializing the battery down the road with project developer Sustainable Innovations.

ORIGINAL: GigaOhm
By Katie Fehrenbacher
Jan. 8, 2014 - 12:45 PM PST

How GM plans to out-innovate Tesla: by inventing a better battery

ORIGINAL: Quartz 

By Steve LeVine

If GM cracks the chemistry, Tesla may find itself running to keep up. Reuters/Petar Kujundzic

General Motors is in a race for the electric-car future with showy Tesla. Yesterday the world’s second-largest carmaker announced that it plans to build an electric car to rival the 200-mile (320 km) range of Tesla’s Model S and sell it for $30,000, less than half Tesla’s price. But what’s interesting is that Tesla’s Elon Musk, the pioneer of both space and earthly travel, is relying on old technology while the incumbent, GM, is pushing the boundaries of battery science.

For all its innovation, the Model S uses ordinary commodity batteries produced by Panasonic. On the outside, they resemble the regular cylindrical batteries that you buy in the store, only a little larger. The chemical composition is nickel-cobalt-aluminum, which costs less than many rival chemistries but is ordinarily rejected by carmakers because it easily catches fire. Musk’s team has overcome the safety issue by building a control system that manages the batteries.

GM has gone the other way. It does not dismiss Musk’s success with off-the-shelf batteries. But it is attempting to optimize a lithium-ion battery composition that promises to beat everything else currently out there. Containing nickel, cobalt and manganese (NMC), it was invented at the US-backed Argonne National Laboratory. Scientists think that NMC is potentially more powerful and cheaper than any other lithium-ion chemistry, but it has flaws of physics that no one has yet managed to fix. GM hopes that either NMC or another composition will let it build a long-range car cheaply.

GM already sells two electric cars, the Chevy Volt and the Chevy Spark EV, for around $35,000 and $27,500, and in the US that’s before government tax credits that apply a $7,500 discount to electric cars. But despite costing $71,000 before the tax incentive, Tesla’s Model S has sold more models than the Volt this year. The Model S is unabashedly marketed as a sporty luxury car, but it is also the only all-electric car with a 200-mile range; others clock in at 100 miles or less.

Both manufacturers are planning to attack each others’ markets. GM, conceding that it may have something to learn from Musk, is trotting out an electrified Cadillac and may release $100,000 vehicles that challenge Tesla directly. Musk, for his part, says he plans in the next few years to release a 200-mile Tesla that would cost around $35,000. GM’s Doug Parks wishes Tesla the best of luck. But he is sticking to the bench. “The game is afoot,” Parks told reporters at GM’s expanded new battery lab on Sept. 17. “This is a long race.”

Researchers create edible battery

ORIGINAL: Energy Harvesting Journal

Stimulating damaged tissue, bio-sensing gastric health, targeting drug delivery and more could soon be as easy as popping your morning multivitamin — thanks to the joint work of Carnegie Mellon University's Christopher Bettinger and Jay Whitacre. The two cutting-edge researchers have combined forces to develop edible electronic devices — no larger than ordinary pills — to improve medical care.

Bettinger has been developing pioneering biodegradable electronic materials for medical use, but had a few nagging concerns. "Two questions kept coming up," he explained. "First, how were we going to power these devices? Second, if they're degradable and temporary, then what was the best way to integrate them with the human body?"

Whitacre, associate professor of materials science and engineering and engineering and public policy, had created a revolutionary low-cost, non-toxic sodium ion battery. "I had claimed my device was so non-toxic that you 'could eat the battery,'" explained Whitacre. "Chris came into my office and asked, 'Can you really eat it?' The answer is yes and the rest is history — my edible battery chemistry with his need for low level power in a digestible form were a great match."

"We thought the innovation from that battery could be a great segue to medical materials," added Bettinger. "So we leveraged its advantages in a different setting."

With post-doctoral researchers Young Jo Kim and Sang-Eun Chun as part of the team, they devised a tiny, biocompatible battery in edible form that a patient could 'take' once a day.

The shape-memory polymer conceived in Bettinger's lab starts small when swallowed, then expands in the body where needed. The battery materials created in Whitacre's lab are commonly available and inexpensive — necessary for a daily device. The battery materials pass right through the system while the binding materials naturally biodegrade.

Unlike an implanted device, it's minimally invasive, and as with any orally-taken 'pill,' doesn't require sterilization. And if that weren't enough, the battery activates itself when wet, so the casing can be designed to absorb water at a pre-determined rate meaning "actual initiation would be passively engineered in the device itself," says Bettinger. While specific applications are still in the future, it's a remarkable way to "lay the groundwork."

Source and top image showing a graphic demonstration of the device: Carnegie Mellon University

For more read Energy Harvesting and Storage for Electronic Devices 2012-2022

New Battery Design Could Help Solar and Wind Power the Grid

ORIGINAL: SLAC

April 24, 2013

Menlo Park, Calif. — Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.

"For solar and wind power to be used in a significant way, we need a battery made of economical materials that are easy to scale and still efficient," said Yi Cui, a Stanford associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a SLAC/Stanford joint institute. "We believe our new battery may be the best yet designed to regulate the natural fluctuations of these alternative energies."

Yi Cui is an associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a SLAC/Stanford joint institute. (Credit: Matt Beardsley/SLAC)

Professor Yi Cui holds a lab demonstration of his group's new lithium-polysulfide flow battery contained in a simple flask. The design could serve as a model for a low-cost, long-life battery that enables solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid. (Credit: Matt Beardsley/SLAC)

Cui and colleagues report their research results, some of the earliest supported by the DOE's new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research battery hub, in the May issue of Energy & Environmental Science.

Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery Demonstration (Video)

In this video, Stanford graduate student Wesley Zhang demonstrates the new low-cost, long-lived flow battery he helped create. The researchers created this miniature system using simple glassware. Adding a lithium polysulfide solution to the flask immediately produces electricity that lights an LED. A utility version of the new battery would be scaled up to store many megawatt-hours of energy.

Currently the electrical grid cannot tolerate large and sudden power fluctuations caused by wide swings in sunlight and wind. As solar and wind's combined contributions to an electrical grid approach 20 percent, energy storage systems must be available to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this "intermittent" power – storing excess energy and discharging when input drops.

Among the most promising batteries for intermittent grid storage today are "flow" batteries, because it's relatively simple to scale their tanks, pumps and pipes to the sizes needed to handle large capacities of energy. The new flow battery developed by Cui's group has a simplified, less expensive design that presents a potentially viable solution for large-scale production.

Today's flow batteries pump two different liquids through an interaction chamber where dissolved molecules undergo chemical reactions that store or give up energy. The chamber contains a membrane that only allows ions not involved in reactions to pass between the liquids while keeping the active ions physically separated. This battery design has two major drawbacks: the high cost of liquids containing rare materials such as vanadium – especially in the huge quantities needed for grid storage – and the membrane, which is also very expensive and requires frequent maintenance.

These diagrams compare Stanford/SLAC's new lithium-polysulfide flow battery design with conventional "redox" flow batteries. The new flow battery uses only one tank and pump and uses a simple coating instead of an expensive membrane to separate the anode and cathode. (Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC)

The new Stanford/SLAC battery design uses only one stream of molecules and does not need a membrane at all. Its molecules mostly consist of the relatively inexpensive elements lithium and sulfur, which interact with a piece of lithium metal coated with a barrier that permits electrons to pass without degrading the metal. When discharging, the molecules, called lithium polysulfides, absorb lithium ions; when charging, they lose them back into the liquid. The entire molecular stream is dissolved in an organic solvent, which doesn't have the corrosion issues of water-based flow batteries.

"In initial lab tests, the new battery also retained excellent energy-storage performance through more than 2,000 charges and discharges, equivalent to more than 5.5 years of daily cycles," Cui said.

To demonstrate their concept, the researchers created a miniature system using simple glassware. Adding a lithium polysulfide solution to the flask immediately produces electricity that lights an LED.

A utility version of the new battery would be scaled up to store many megawatt-hours of energy.

In the future, Cui's group plans to make a laboratory-scale system to optimize its energy storage process and identify potential engineering issues, and to start discussions with potential hosts for a full-scale field-demonstration unit.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. To learn more, please visitwww.slac.stanford.edu.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Citation: Yuan Yang, Guangyuan Zheng and Yi Cui, Energy Environ. Sci., 2013 (10.1039/C3EE00072A)

Press Office Contact: 

Andy Freeberg, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory: afreeberg@slac.stanford.edu, (650) 926-4359

Scientist Contact:

Yi Cui, SLAC / Stanford University: yicui@stanford.edu, (650) 723-4613

Also on the Web:

The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research home page

The Yi Cui Lab home page

The Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Sciences (SIMES) home page

Microbatteries Offer A Boost For Electronics

ORIGINAL: 33rdSquare

April 18, 2013

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that is 2,000 times more powerful than comparable batteries. According to the researchers, this is not simply an evolutionary step in battery tech, “It’s a new enabling technology… it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It’s allowing us to do different, new things.” 

The results of the study were published recently in the journal Nature Communications and was led by William P. King, professor of mechanical science and engineering, the researchers.

“This is a whole new way to think about batteries,” King said. “A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it.”

With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly.

“There’s a sacrifice,” said James Pikul, a graduate student and first author of the paper. “If you want high energy you can’t get high power; if you want high power it’s very difficult to get high energy. But for very interesting applications, especially modern applications, you really need both. That’s what our batteries are starting to do. We’re really pushing into an area in the energy storage design space that is not currently available with technologies today.”

The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale.

The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance.

With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available.

“Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now,” King said. “Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it’s connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny.”

Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

“Now we can think outside of the box,” Pikul said. “It’s a new enabling technology. It’s not a progressive improvement over previous technologies; it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It’s allowing us to do different, new things.” 

SOURCE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

By 33rd Square Subscribe to 33rd Square

Tags: battery, microbatteries, technology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Snail's Teeth Could Help Develop Future Battery Tech--No, Really

ORIGINAL: GreenCarReports

BY ANTONY INGRAM

Mar 13, 2013

Chiton marine snail could inspire improved battery and solar cell development (Wikimedia Commons)

We often cover the progress of battery technologies here on Green Car Reports, and while always of interest, few new discoveries are really that surprising.

The potential of a biomineral found in the teeth of a marine snail isn't one of those unsurprising discoveries.

Studies at the University of California, Riverside, suggest future batteries and solar cells could use materials formed in a process found in the gumboot chiton snail, reports Wards Auto.

The large sea snail features a conveyor belt-like arrangement of teeth in its mouth, used to rasp algae from rocks on the sea bed. Grinding away at rocks wears the teeth down, but they're constantly replaced by further rows. Even so, the teeth are very hardy--containing the hardest-known biomineral, magnetite. As its name suggests, this substance is also magnetic.

Assistant Professor at the university, David Kisailus, has studied chitons for many years and says he has discovered how this hard, magnetic layer of teeth forms--the full details of which are revealed in theAdvanced Functional Materials journal.

According to Wards, the process is as follows:

"Hydrated iron-oxide (ferrihydrite) crystals first nucleate on a fiber-like chitinous (complex sugar) organic template. These nanocrystalline ferrihydrite particles convert to a magnetic iron oxide (magnetite) through a solid-state transformation."

The particles grow along the organic fibers, forming parallel rods within the teeth that make them as hard as they are.

Sounds complex, but the upside to this process is that it takes place at room temperature and in what Kisailus describes as "benign environmental conditions".

To simplify that further, it means a similar process could be used to grow minerals used in lithium-ion batteries and in solar cells, without the same intensive energy normally required. Reduce the heat needed to form certain nanocrystals, and you reduce both energy use and cost.

Cost is key for both battery and solar cell production, but there are other benefits too.

Using this growing process used by the snail, the size and shape of nanomaterials could be used to improve a battery's energy storage and recharging rates, and capture sunlight more efficiently in solar cells.

This potential hasn't yet been tested, but it shows that battery advancements could come from the most unlikely of places.

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Stretchy battery drawn to three times its size

ORIGINAL: BBC

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The team tested their battery 

by stretching it 300% while 

it powered an LED lamp

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Researchers have demonstrated a flat, "stretchy" battery that can be pulled to three times its size without a loss in performance.

While flexible and stretchable electronics have been on the rise, powering them with equally stretchy energy sources has been problematic.

The new idea in Nature Communications uses small "islands" of energy-storing materials dotted on a stretchy polymer.

The study also suggests the batteries can be recharged wirelessly.

In a sense, the battery is a latecomer to the push toward flexible, stretchable electronics. A number of applications have been envisioned for flexible devices, from implantable health monitors to roll-up displays.

But consumer products that fit the bendy, stretchy description are still very few - in part, because there have been no equally stretchy, rechargeable power sources for them.

"Batteries are particularly challenging because, unlike electronics, it's difficult to scale down their dimensions without significantly reducing performance," said senior author of the study John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. S for stretch

"We have explored various methods, ranging from radio frequency energy harvesting to solar power," he told BBC News.

In recent years, Prof Rogers worked with colleagues at Northwestern University, focusing on stretchy electronics of various sorts made using what they termed a "pop-up" architecture. The idea uses tiny, widely spaced tiny circuit elements embedded within a stretchy polymer and connected with wires that "popped up" as the polymer was stretched.
The new work hinges on "self-similar", serpentine wires between the battery elements

But batteries do not lend themselves to this idea; traditionally they are much larger than other circuit elements. They could be made from smaller elements wired together, but to create a small battery with sufficient power, the elements must be spaced more closely than those of the pop-up circuits.

The team's new idea was to use "serpentine" connections - wires that loop back on themselves in a repeating S shape, with that string of loops itself looped into an S shape.

Stretching out the polymer in which the tiny solar cells were embedded first stretches out the larger S; as it is stretched further, the smaller turns straighten - but do not become taut, even as the polymer was stretched to three times its normal size.

The team says the stretchy battery can be charged "inductively" - that is, wirelessly over a short distance. Prof Rogers said that the uses for such batteries and the stretchy circuits they power were myriad.

"The most important applications will be those that involve devices integrated with the outside of the body, on the skin, for health, wellness and performance monitoring," he explained.

However, the prototype batteries described in the paper were only run through 20 charge/discharge cycles, and Prof Rogers said that "additional development efforts to improve the lifetime will be required for commercialisation".