Anode sponge

There are so many exciting research projects underway to find that most elusive of holy grails - the perfect battery.

It's clear that many battery start-ups are focused on improving a specific part of the battery.  Some are looking to see if they can find a battery material superior to lithium - if you believe Pellion, that material may be magnesium.  Others are focused on materials to construct the electrodes from - look at the great work that Amprius are doing with silicon nanowires versus Prieto's version using copper.

Another high-profile start-up with its own unique perspective is Xerion Advanced Battery Corp, founded by
University of Illinois science whiz, Dr Paul Braun.

Braun Research Group (Source: otm.illinois edu)

Braun's research group has developed a technology they call StructurePore, which as the name suggests, creates a porous material that behaves like a high-tech sponge.  Like many of these innovations in the battery world, Xerion have come up with a simple but effective method for fabricating their material.  To make their electrode they begin with a template container, which they fill with tiny glass or polymer balls.  Next they pour in liquid metal which sets around the balls.  When the template and balls are removed the remaining electrode is revealed with millions of tiny pores.  The electrode is then filled with conductive metals.  The result is an electrode that allows the ions to move much more quickly than in a conventional one and delivers huge improvements  in charge and discharge rates.

Although the electrode design is all new this technology works well with all the other components of lithium ion and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) designs, so could well be incorporated into existing processes rather than demand a totally new design.

What's particularly exciting about this technology is the speed with which a battery can be recharged.  Xerion believes that a battery for a cellphone, laptop or camera using their design could be re-charged in ONE MINUTE or less.  A heavier duty version for automotive use in hybrid vehicles could be completely recharged in the time it currently takes to stop and refill the petrol tank.

Let's hope that it's not long before dead cellphones and laptop batteries are a thing of the past.

StructurePore cathode technology

Braun Research Group at University of Illinois

Nanowired anode

The Amprius cell is a reality, not vapourware

Here's a battery start-up that has real product in the market.

Amprius, yet another start-up from Stanford University isn't actually making batteries but it is producing vital components for them.  Amprius has developed a very special electrode made from silicon nanowires.  Rather than try raising the huge capital needed to build a manufacturing capability, Amprius has partnered with asian based battery producers.

Source: Amprius Technologies      

As with many of these next generation technologies, actual information about them is scant.  We do know that the nanowire anode can improve energy density by up to 10 times over the current capability of top of the line lithium ion.  This makes them highly desirable in the electrical vehicle sector.  The maximum recharge cycles could also be greatly higher than current technology with a jump from around 500 cycles to 6,000.  This technology will be based on using carbon nanotubes.  The nanotube structure could allow the device to eventually be printed using a special cellulose paper.  It has the potential to give us 'paper batteries'.

Amprius seems to be doing everything right at the moment, having recently raised $25 million from various sources.

Amprius Technologies home

The component market place

Silicon nanotubes in lithium ion batteries

Lighter, turbocharged Lithium

Lithium ion is a battery technology with a huge following, and for good reasons.  Lithium is long lasting, it has great recharge potential and it's not prohibitively expensive.

There is a lot of capital tied up in lithium ion and it's unlikely that any rival technology is ready to knock it off its perch, at least not just yet.

Sila is focused on next generation lithium ion for electric vehicles

A promising looking start-up linked to the next generation Lithium is Sila Nanotechnologies.  Founded at recently as 2011, Sila is a team of Californian entrepreneurs who have partners with the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Yet another battery tech firm owing much of its chemistry and physics know-how to a research focused university).

Information around the net on Sila is currently quite minimal but we do know that they are working to produce lighter, smaller and more powerful lithium ion batteries, specifically targeted at the electric vehicle market.  Their battery may have double the capacity of the current generation of lithium ion.

Sila is backed by a couple of venture capital companies from Silicon Valley, plus they have secured a $1.73 million grant from the US Department of Energy.

I wonder if start-ups like this manage to secure venture capital before they get federal grants or whether the venture capitalists are drawn to companies that have some level of recognition from these research arms of the US government.

Sila sounds like one to watch.  There's great interest in hybrid vehicles now so any technology that could potentially make them lighter and with a longer range on their electric cells, is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Sila Nanotechnologies

Starts ups with DoE funding

Water battery

Future is wet for grid power storage

Sometimes technology advance has a very simple goal.  It may not be to do things faster or longer, it may be just to do them as cheaply as possible.

 Current changes the colour of Prussian blue dye          

In the arena of grid power storage, cost control is paramount.  Traditionally we don't store generated electricity because it is too expensive to be cost effective.  However, if we had a large capacity battery that was a cheap as chips to make and run, power storage could become viable.

Take solar or wind or any other renewable source where the generator is at the mercy of the weather elements.  During the day solar panels can harness all that sunshine to turn into electricity but at night when the sun disappears over the horizon that power generation capability is lost.  Day time sunshine yields far more power than we could use locally but come night time, when the lights go on and the power consumption goes up, demand cries out for the power we didn't need before.

One Stanford PhD student surveyed this landscape for his thesis and set out to design and build a battery that is so cheap, it could be viable for power storage.  (Have you noticed how it's US based university boffins that seem to be having most of the good ideas in the battery technology field recently?)

Colin Wessels formed a start-up, Alveo Energy to pursue this dream.  His technology uses copper, iron, water and some electrochromic prussian blue dye to create a simple battery.  It's a large unit, the size of about four car batteries and it's heavy too.  Size and weight are not such an issue when a battery is intended for fixed rather than portable usage.  This prototype one is a 50 kg 1 kWh battery.

On the face of it, not a particularly exciting project but cost-wise, this is very exciting indeed.  Wessels reckons his battery can be constructed for less than $100 per kilowatt hour.  Lead batteries are $150 to $200 per kWh and lithium is way more expensive and cost-wise, not really even in the running for use in power storage.

Clearly the US government sees great promise in the Alveo Energy project as they have invested $4 million via an ARPA-E grant (one of the larger grants so far allocated to battery projects).

The ARPA-E project description summarises the goal of the venture:

Open Framework Electrode Batteries for Cost-Effective Energy Storage
Alveo Energy will develop a grid-scale storage battery using Prussian Blue dye as the basis for active material within the battery. Prussian Blue is inexpensive, readily available, and most commonly known for its application in blueprint documents. Alveo will repurpose this inexpensive dye for a new battery that can endure more charges under more extreme circumstances without suffering internal damage, helping to facilitate the adoption and deployment of renewable energy technology.


It will be 2016 before Alveo has a demonstrable prototype but this will certainly be one to watch.

The bottleneck of battery storage for renewable energy (Wired)

$4 million ARPA-E grant for Alveo water based battery

Rapid charger

Rapid charging and longer lasting lithium battery technology

Amy Prieto with her 3D 'sponge' battery

American universities are very good at launching start up commercial ventures for the many exciting technology developments coming out of their labs.

Colorado State chemistry professor, Amy Prieto is the brains behind Prieto Battery.  Amy's technology is a lithium ion battery with an anode (positive electrode) comprising copper nanowires.

The Prieto battery is not like the conventional battery made up of anode and cathode, separated by a liquid electrolyte.  Instead the electrolyte is a solid polymer.  By creating an anode from millions of nanowires this electrode has a much greater surface area than a conventional one, meaning it can store many more lithium ions.

The electrodes are intertwined (or interdigitated) in a 3 dimensional array that greatly increases the power density.  There is almost instant recharge capability at just 5 minutes and the batteries should last 5 times longer than traditional lithium ion.   For a cleaner, greener advantage the solid polymer electrolyte means that the toxic elements found in conventional batteries are largely eliminated.

Prieto is not alone in the use of nanowire and nanotube technology for the electrodes but their technology, and their ability to raise the millions needed for research, means that they are getting much closer to producing the highly anticipated prototype.

Interdigitated (intertwined) electrodes in Prieto Li-Ion battery

Links to Prieto battery technology

Prieto battery home

How the Prieto lithium battery works

The Prieto battery technology (youTube)

Battery sponges (Discovery)

The search for a better battery

Pellion's proving ground

It's just chemistry

How does a chemist improve battery technology?  In the case of Pellion Technologies, they conducted around 10,000 separate experiments to find the ultimate materials for their electrodes.   The answer to their quest lay in magnesium.

Pellion believes the future of batteries is magnesium

Pellion Technologies is a spin-off company from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has the backing of US government research agency, ARPA-E and venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.

Pellion reckons that their low cost magnesium ion batteries will perform better with a higher energy density than existing top-of -the-range lithium ones and they'll be cheaper too.  So, higher power and cheaper?  If their claims are true they could be on to a real winner.

Abundant and cheap Magnesium

Related links

Moving beyond Lithium (Pellion whte paper)

Computer modelling a better battery (GigaOm)

Exploring alternatives to Lithium

Magnesium rather than Lithium for rechargeable car batteries

Power stores of the future

Ambri's prototype liquid metal battery

Ambri's liquid metal battery

Ambri is one of those tiny start-ups with a potentially dazzling future.  It's the brainchild of two MIT researchers, Donald Sadoway and David Bradwell.  They're looking to address one of the major issues with the power industry - inadequate ways to store electricity once it has been generated.

On their website Ambri talks about electricity being "the largest supply chain in the world with no warehouse". Typically, electricity is generated as it is needed - we don't have the capacity to store it en masse for later like we do with water, gas, oil or anything else that we pipe to a destination.

Batteries intended for storage of generated power are not bound by the same physical and practical constraints as those harnessed for mobile use.  We don't need to make them light or small.  Indeed, the Ambri batteries are likely to be as big as a 40-foot shipping container and weigh many tons.  The bigger they are, the more energy they are able to store.  Given that Ambri intends these their batteries for in situ placement at power generation facilities stations, their storage capacity rather than their physical dimensions is the more important consideration.

Sadoway has a background in metallurgy and he hit on the idea of his battery whilst observing how an aluminium smelter works.  He marvelled at the huge amount of power in the liquid metal smelter and he started thinking how he could use this principle for making a large battery.

Like many practical processes this one is pretty straightforward.  Ambri recognises that if industry is going to embrace their product, it needs to be cost effective.  Consequently they have settled on using materials that are cheap, abundant and reliable.

Even though this liquid metal colossus is massive, it is at heart just a battery.  There are electrodes - an anode (positive) and a cathode (negative) kept apart by an electrolyte.  Ambri uses magnesium for the anode, antimony for the cathode and a pile of liquid salts for the electrolyte.

However, unlike a traditional battery where the electrodes are solid, these melt when the battery is heated to its operating temperature of 500 degrees centigrade.  As the battery charges, the liquid magnesium flows through the electrolyte to be re-deposited on the anode.

The battery is actually a whole load of smaller units stacked like ice hockey pucks and wired together in series.  The team hope to have a fully working prototype by 2014, capable of storing 2 megawatt hours of electricity (or enough to power 70 homes for a whole day).

Ambri attracted the attention of some big players and obtained seed money from Bill Gates and the energy giant, Total.  That's a great start for a small company.

They have high hopes that these massive batteries will find a home storing energy produced via renewable options, such as wind and solar farms.  As long as they can get the pricing right for the batteries that future looks very bright indeed.

Links to Ambri liquid metal battery technology

Magnesium, liquid salts and antimony in the Ambri battery

Ambri home

Ambri's grid battery (Technology Review)

Renamed Liquid Metal Battery (GigaOm)

Liquid metal battery is on its way

A convenient foil

Zinc based foil batteries are light, very thin and safer than lithium

Foil battery is ultra-thin and flexible

Imprint Energy has an ambitious mission - to reshape the battery landscape.  As their website proclaims they are "rethinking the battery".

Most of the batteries that power our high consumption smartphones, laptops and tablets are lithium-ion, treasured for it's capacity and rechargeability.  Unfortunately Li-ion needs a lot of packaging around it to keep the highly volatile lithium electrolyte from getting out of control - it explodes in air and water.  Regardless of how thin and light we can make our devices, the lithium batteries add significant weight and bulk to the package.

Recognising that lithium is not going to cut it in the light and portable stakes, Californian start-up Imprint Energy is working with using zinc rather than lithium in their ultra-thin flexible batteries.  Zinc has previously been rejected as a rechargeable battery component because when it is combined with a traditional liquid electrolyte there is a tendency for undesirable crystals of dendrite to form but Imprint has overcome this issue  by using a solid polymer in place of the liquid.

With zinc being much more stable in normal environmental conditions the bulky packaging required with Li-ion can be abandoned, meaning the batteries using this technology can be very, very thin - just the thickness of a couple of human hairs.  They have high hopes that wearable tech and digital smart labels on packaging will be able to make good use of this technology.

Imprint Energy is certainly making people sit up and take notice. They are already churning out small volumes of batteries via a revolutionary printing technique.  The batteries are printed in much the same way as traditional screen printing so the design and shape can be customised to suit virtually whatever the customer wants.  The current production capability is tiny but this could be scaled up massively simply by partnering with a large battery producer.

Let's hope that they can quickly turn this exciting technology into a lucrative commercial reality.

Imprint Energy batteries bring hope for wearable tech (GigaOm)

Imprint Energy home

Back from the dead

Dead or just in need of resuscitating? Single use batteries can live again  

Not all research needs to be frontier type, cutting edge stuff to be worthwhile.

Improving the longevity, durability and useful lifespan of existing products is also very useful - making a good thing better.

That seems to be the philosophy of a group at the National Synchotron Light Source (NSLS) lab in Brookhaven, New York, where they are testing the limits of alkaline batteries.

There is incredible wastage in batteries that are sadly filling up our landfills at an ever increasing rate.  Many have been discarded well before their power producing capability is exhausted.  Judging by what these guys are finding, the industry and the general public don't really appreciate what can be achieved with these mainstream power sources.

The team is looking at how existing batteries (such as the D size alkaline) could be linked together in series to produce a much larger battery.  They're working with so-called 'single use' batteries and finding that they can be re-charged many times to provide considerably more use than the manufacturer intended.  Although everyone seems entranced by the much sexier and more expensive lithium-ion, these manganese and zinc batteries are much cheaper and abundant.

The team is charging and discharging test batteries to the point of exhaustion and they are studying what actually happens within the battery as they degrade.  As they understand more about the chemical reactions and changing properties as they degrade they hope to find ways to get even more juice out of them.

Brookhaven team testing the limits of alkaline batteries

The research is particularly focused on finding workable solutions for storage of electricity generated by the
power grid and the experiments on small, cheap  batteries will hopefully be the forerunner for something much bigger.   Large-scale storage capability that is cheap and readily available could have a huge impact in avoiding the wastage of generated power that currently isn't worth storing.

Brookhaven media release (BNL)

NSLS research hopes to solve electricity storage challenges

How do alkaline batteries work?  (Energizer)

Brain clarity

Rodent brain with fluorescently-labelled proteins

Researchers at Stanford University have pioneered a technique that will greatly enhance our understanding of the structure of the human brain.

In the past scientists have relied on the slicing technique to build a 3 dimensional view of the brain.  Although this is a great improvement on previous post-mortem study it is still ultimately very destructive.  The slicing operation destroys intricate structures before they can be studied.

The Stanford research project, code named CLARITY keeps the entire organ intact.  Previous work that sought to remove the lipids (fatty molecules) from the brain was fraught with problems as the structures literally fell apart as the lipids were drained.  CLARITY submerges the post-mortem brain in a hydrogel solution that penetrates every nook and cranny of the organ to preserves the delicate brain structure.  When the hydrogel is raised to normal body temperatures it sets to form a fine mesh that reveals the intricate structures in all their glory.  A technique called electrophoresis (separation using electrically charged particles) is employed to rapidly remove the fatty molecules once the mesh has formed.

The technique is so good that individual neural connections are kept intact, allowing for an unprecedented level of detailed study to take place.

Fluorescent antibodies provide amazing clarity of the organ

With the brain preserved by the hydrogel mesh the real magic can now begin.  Using antibodies with fluorescent properties that attach to specific structures the scientists can illuminate the area with an unbelievable level of clarity.

To date the research has focused on rodent and fish brains with some human samples also tested but the team hope to test the technique on a whole human brain in the near future.

This is certainly a project to watch with great interest.

Read the full paper in Nature or check out the Stanford media release.

Clearer views of the brain (Guardian UK)

See through brains (PopSci)