Way back in 2008, we reported on Better Place’s partnership with France, Israel and Denmark to install battery swap and charging stations.  The company also partnered with Renault to create electric cars with easily swapped out batteries.  According to Technology Review the company just received the first 100 Renault Fluence Z E (Zero Emission) electric vehicles that will be used in Israel to demonstrate Better Place’s battery swap technology. 

The process works as follows:

1. 1.  A Renault Fluence Z E alerts its driver that the battery is low. 
2. 2.  The driver consults her navigation app that shows where to find the closest battery swap station.
3. 3.  The driver drives to the nearest station and pulls into the battery swap bay.
4. 4.  The used battery is removed and a fully charged battery is installed all from below the vehicle using a robotic process.  It takes about the same amount of time that it takes to fill up a gas tank.
5. 5.  The driver exits the bay and continues on her way.

The battery swap technology makes long trips much easier than having to plug into a charging station every so often for a fifteen minute to four hour charging process.  Instead you pull in for a matter of minutes and continue driving until you need another swap.  Of course there are charging stations available as well that allow for charging overnight and while shopping, working, sightseeing or dining.

The Renault Fluence Z E uses  “225-kilogram lithium-ion batteries with a range of 160 kilometers”(about 100 miles).  The cars will be initially leased only by Better Place employees.  Once the kinks have been worked out of the system, Better Place will offer others the option of leasing a Fluence  through another company and using battery swap technology and charging stations through a subscription service.

Better Place signed a leasing agreement with The Eldan Group, the largest car rental group in Israel, back in December.  Eldan will “acquire hundreds of Renault Fluence Z.E. electric cars from Better Place in 2012.”  Companies and private customers that sign up for electric cars will also sign for a membership subscription with Better Place for use of the charging infrastructure and Customer Care. Fossil Fuels are extremely expensive in Israel, as are taxes on fossil fuel vehicles. So switching to an electric vehicle will be an attractive option for many. 

Better Place is the only company that provides battery swap technology for its customers.  Coulomb, GE and other charging infrastructure companies are building charging stations in various parts of the world, but only Better Place gives you a quick way to simply “swap and go” when needed.

Above Photo from Better Place.

The Commission issued the new standards as a way to save 8,000 gigawatt hours of electricity.  That’s the amount of energy wasted each year by inefficient battery chargers. The monetary savings would be $306 million that California tax payers could keep in their pockets.  According to Energy Star, if everyone in America were to use energy efficient battery chargers, it would “prevent the release of more than one million tons of greenhouse gas emissions – equivalent to the emissions of 150,000 cars.” Another by product of new battery charger standards is that it reduces the need to build more power plants.

Battery charger systems use energy in three modes: (1) energy used to actually charge batteries (charge mode); (2) energy consumed by the battery charger when the battery has been removed or disconnected (no-battery mode); and (3) energy consumed after the battery has been fully charged (battery-maintenance mode).

The proposed standards will eliminate wasted energy by setting a limit on the total electricity consumed by a battery charger in all three modes. Many consumer electronics manufacturers produce chargers that already meet the standards.

Energy efficient charging technology has been around for a while. In March of 2010, AT&T introduced the ZERO charger.  The ZERO charger turned off once the cell phone was charged saving electricity and money for the consumer. Apple has a battery charger that has one of the lowest vampire draws on the market.  According to the company the charger which charges six rechargeable AA batteries only uses 30 mW in standby mode while other battery chargers will use 315 mW.

So California’s new standards aren’t requiring manufacturers to come up with some new technology.  The standards require that charger manufacturers incorporate known technology into the chargers that are being made. The U.S. Department of Energy is also working on energy efficiency standards for battery chargers. 

California has frequently been a forerunner in the areas of energy efficiency and reduced pollution.  Once the makers of battery chargers start manufacturing chargers that meet California standards, the rest of us will benefit as well.  After all, if they have to make more efficient battery chargers for California, might as well make them for the rest of the country.

With all of the gadgets that we have these days that require battery chargers, having more energy efficient ones can only help us all.

According to Earth 911, reVend Recycling in conjunction with Repant has developed reverse vending machines into which you deposit your batteries and light bulbs.  It is a simple easy solution to a really big problem.  The first such vending machine was installed in a London IKEA.  In exchange for batteries and light bulbs, the machine would issue store credit that could be used on site.  If you did’t want IKEA credit you could donate your recycling funds to one of four charities: “the World Wildlife Fund, Woodland Trust, UNICEF and Save the Children.”

The companies plan to expand their reverse vending machines throughout the world.  Here in the United States, its hard to know what to do with batteries and light bulbs if you don’t live close to a landfill.  Most landfills have areas where you can drop off hazardous household waste and electronics. but most people don’t make regular trips to their local dump.  Recycling generally ends with paper, numbers 1 and 2 plastics and soda cans and bottles. 

It’s especially difficult to know what to do with light bulbs.  Renewables at Home lists the hazardous materials that are contained in even the common incandescent bulb.  Incandescent light bulbs have high levels of lead.  Florescent and compact florescent (CFL) light bulbs have mercury.  Lead can leech into the soil and pollute our waterways and aquifers.  Mercury vapor can cause a variety of ills including:

Mercury vapor is highly dangerous to breathe in, and can cause major damage to the lungs and the nervous system. Mercury will also damage fetuses, genes, livers and kidneys. It may also cause mental illness.

Tossing CFLs in the trash can literally be hazardous to your health. Renewables at Home lists IKEA stores in the US and Europe as places to drop off your used light bulbs.  Other places can be found at Earth 911.

Imagine how much easier it would be to get rid of light bulbs and batteries if reVend and Repant vending machines were in your local grocery store, Wal-Mart and/or hardware store.  Maybe someday….

Harold Kung, professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, led the research which is published in Advanced Energy Materials.  The paper outlines their two major changes to battery technology.

The first change was to increase the capacity of lithium ion batteries by increasing the charge density. The charge density determines how long the battery maintains its charge.  The second change was to the charge rate.  The teams changes allow batteries to be charged in only 15 minutes.

“We have found a way to extend a new lithium-ion battery’s charge life by 10 times,” said Harold H. Kung, lead author of the paper. “Even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today.”

In order to increase the charge density, Kung’s team had to find a way to pack more lithium ions into the same amount of space.  Currently one atom thick graphene sheets are used to store the ions but they are limited to one lithium atom per four carbon atoms.  Silicon will allow four lithium atoms to one silicon atom, but silicon is unstable.

To solve the instability problem with the silicon, the researchers sandwiched layers of silicon between layers of graphene.  That increased the density of the lithium ions thus increasing the battery capacity.

“Now we almost have the best of both worlds,” Kung said. “We have much higher energy density because of the silicon, and the sandwiching reduces the capacity loss caused by the silicon expanding and contracting. Even if the silicon clusters break up, the silicon won’t be lost.”

Improving the charge rate meant decreasing the area that a lithium ion must travel.  Normally a lithium ion has to travel the entire length of a graphene sheet before it can slide between the sheets, so to speak, coming to rest.   Using a “chemical oxidation process” on the graphene sheets created miniscule holes shortening the area that the ion needed to travel and increasing the number of ions that could slip into the silicon at one time.

Those changes would allow lithium ion batteries to stay charged more than a week in smartphones and gadgets and reduces charge time to a mere 15 minutes as opposed to several hours.

Those changes only involved the anode portion of the battery.  Now the scientists will start working on improvements to the cathode in order to further improve battery technology. They also plan to work on a method for making lithium ion batteries safer by using an electrolyte to shut off the battery once it reaches a certain temperature.

Batteries with this technology should be hitting the market within the next three to five years.  Of course there are other battery technologies that may be hitting the market just about the same time.

Stanford’s battery is not quite ready for prime time because there is further research that must be done in materials science before a final version is ready for market.  Still the battery is pretty nifty.

The two scientists working on the battery, Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and graduate student Yuan Yang wanted to develop an invisible battery and for the most part they have.

The two used a three step method that combined a cheap easy to find substance called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS).  It’s rubbery and clear and works as the perfect substrate.  The PDMS is poured into a silicon mold that creates transparent trenches in the material.  Into those trenches are melted a metal film.  On top of the metal conductive layer is poured “a liquid slurry solution containing minuscule, nano-sized active electrode materials.”

The resulting battery is transparent since the grid pattern (trenches) are only 35 microns wide.  Our eyes consider anything under 50 microns to be clear.  A gel electrolyte is then sandwiched between the two PDMS electrodes.  Unfortunately, the resulting battery when it is comparably sized to current batteries, only carries half the power.  That is where future research in materials science comes in.  They expect better materials to be discovered that will still allow their battery to be transparent while making it more powerful.

Closer to production is the battery from the University of Leeds.  A new polymer gel would replace the liquid electrolytes currently found in lithium-ion batteries.  It also eliminates the need for a separator like the gel separator used in the Stanford battery.  Like the battery developed by Cui and Yang, the University of Leeds battery uses inexpensive easy to find materials.

Professor Ian Ward FRS, a Research Professor of Physics at the University of Leeds and his team have also “developed a patented manufacturing process called extrusion/lamination”.  This process “sandwiches the gel between an anode and cathode at high speed (10m per minute) to create a highly-conductive strip that is just nanometres thick.”

"The polymer gel looks like a solid film, but it actually contains about 70% liquid electrolyte" said Professor Ward. "It’s made using the same principles as making a jelly: you add lots of hot water to ‘gelatine’ – in this case there is a polymer and electrolyte mix – and as it cools it sets to form a solid but flexible mass".

The battery cell created can be cut to size, bent and shaped so that bendable cell phones like the prototype that Nokia developed back in 2008 could actually become a reality.  Unlike other lithium-ion batteries, these don’t have any excess flammable solvent and are damage tolerant.  In other words these batteries are safe to put into electronics without the fear of possible fires.

One of the best things about Professor Ward’s battery is that the technology has already been licensed to a company. 

The technology . . . has been licensed to the American company Polystor Energy Corporation, which is conducting trials to commercialise cells for portable consumer electronics. 

Unlike Stanford’s transparent battery, this is one new innovative battery that might actually make it to market within a year or two and could very possibly change the design of the electronics of which we have become so fond.  The predicted reduction in the cost of these batteries could also reduce the final cost of future devices. 

Above image of the Nokia Morph from Nokia.

According to The Royal Society of Chemistry Yanbiao Liu and fellow scientists developed the photocatalytic fuel cells using a “TiO₂-nanotube-array (TNA) anode and a platinum-based cathode.  Light causes the organic compounds in waste water to breakdown resulting in chemical energy that is transformed into electrical energy at the platinum cathode. 

The team used the cell to clear aromatics, azo dyes, pharmaceuticals, personal care products and endocrine-disrupting compounds from wastewater samples. They found that all of these compounds were degraded by the cell to generate energy.

In other words, the fuel cell cleans waste water while producing electricity similar to a process developed at Oregon State University.

Oregon State uses microbial cells rather than light to breakdown sewage.  Scientists there found that a gold coating on graphite anodes produced the most energy with their system but they were still experimenting with different coatings for the anode.

Both of these systems could conceivably be used at waste treatment plants.  While cleaning the water they would also be providing the energy needed to run the waste water treatment plant.  Engineer Frank Chaplen, an associate professor of biological and ecological engineering at Oregon State University had this to say:

"Five percent of the nation’s electricity is currently used to treat water or waste water so anything we can do to reuse electricity demand and reduce our dependence of foreign oil would be a good thing."

Various companies are already using a system that cleans up waste water while also providing energy.  A biodigester is used at Ben & Jerry’s ice cream plant in the Netherlands.  The biodigester turns fat and other organic waste in the discarded water into biogas that is then used to make ice cream.

A variety of breweries are also using different methods to clean up their waste water and a few have found ways of generating different forms of energy while doing so.  For example, Anheuser-Busch has a bio-energy recovery system (BERS) that produces methane gas.  The methane gas is used by the brewery and the cleaner waste water uses less energy to clean at the waste water plant.

New Belgium brewery also uses its waste water to produce energy.  In a similar process to Anheuser-Busch, New Belgium uses aerobic and anaerobic microbes to clean up the waste water.  The process also produces methane gas that is used at the plant.

While the breweries and other companies use different methods to clean up their water and generate energy it isn’t as efficient as what the scientists in China or at Oregon State are developing.  The current biodigester or BERS system produces cleaner water and a portion of the energy needed to run the plants.  The more advanced systems actually use the organic waste to power what is essentially a fuel cell or battery.  The water is much cleaner and a great deal more energy is generated.

Hopefully both systems will be optimized quickly so that municipalities can start implementing them.  As Chaplen said, we can reduce our national energy consumption simply by using systems like these.

According to PhysOrg scientists at Nanotek Instruments Inc. and Angstron Materials in Dayton, Ohio, have developed a new energy storage device called ‘"graphene surface-enabled lithium ion-exchanging cells," or more simply, "surface-mediated cells" (SMCs)’.  These devices can transfer massive amounts of lithium ions between electrodes.  The electrodes have huge graphene surfaces.

Graphene has several properties that have made it the “go to” material for future batteries, supercapcitors, and transistors.  Ron Beech, director of marketing for Angstron Materials, outlined several of them in the peer review journal, Nanotechnology Law and Business. 

• The highest known conductivity today (up to ~ 5,300 W/(mK), five times that of copper, a capability that provides faster thermal dissipation;⁵
• Electrical conductivity similar to copper, yet the graphene’s density is four times lower resulting in lighter weight components;
• Many times stronger than steel with a surface area twice that of carbon nanotubes;⁶
• Ultra-high Young’s modulus (approximately 1,000 GPa) and highest intrinsic strength (~130 GPa estimated);⁷
• High specific surface area (~ 2,675 m²/g);⁸
• Low density;⁹ and
• Outstanding resistance to gas permutation.¹⁰

Angstron scientists still need to optimize device “materials and configurations” but it already outperforms both batteries and supercapcitors.  The new SMCs have a power density “100 times higher than that of commercial Li-ion batteries and 10 times higher than that of supercapacitors.”  It’s storage density is the equivalent of commercial Li-ion batteries and 30 times higher than supercapcitors.

If the unoptimized SMCs were used in place of Li-ion batteries, EVs would get the same range and they would also be able to recharge in minutes maybe less than a minute.  That is a far cry from the charging times of Li-ion batteries that require several hours for a full charge.  Optimized SMCs could do even better.

SMCs seem to provide the benefits of both batteries and supercapcitors without the downsides of either.  If so, EVs will become a lot more popular and recharging stations may be placed alongside gas pumps.  Charging your EV would be faster than pumping gas and cheaper too.

Photo from Angstron Materials. 

Researchers at Monash University have been working with graphene which is known to be “strong, chemically stable, an excellent conductor of electricity and, importantly, has an extremely high surface area.”  Over the past several years graphene has been shown to be better than silicon for circuits, a great base for supercapacitors, and a method for saving Moore’s law. 

Now according to Dr Dan Li, of the Monash University Department of Materials Engineering, and his research team, graphene has the potential to create “energy storage” that is cheap and much quicker to recharge than current such systems.  According to them, a graphene and water battery would be “on par with lithium ion batteries, but recharge in a matter of seconds and have an almost indefinite lifespan.” Rather than spending an hour or more to charge your electronics, it could take mere seconds.

Still as simple as the idea sounds there are complications.  It is the thin one atom thick layers that are able to store energy in appreciable amounts, but when the layers are put into proximity with each other, they snap back together into graphite which is worthless unless you need a pencil. 

The scientists discovered that if you put the graphene layers in water as a gel, rather than snapping back together, the layers are actually repelled allowing the atom thin layers to hold energy. 

When used in energy devices, graphene gel significantly outperforms current carbon-based technology, both in terms of the amount of charge stored and how fast the charges can be delivered.

The materials are abundant and inexpensive and the process is easy to scale up meaning mass manufacture could be put in place quickly.

Li feels that once the process and materials are perfected, that this new type of storage system will be the key to making hybrids and electric vehicles more attractive than fossil fuel cars.  Right now it takes several hours to recharge a plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle.  A perfected graphene battery might take seconds or possibly a few minutes. 

He also sees graphene batteries as a better energy storage device for solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.  While MIT has found a great way to store solar thermal energy, Monash may have found a better way to store solar energy as electricity.

Let’s hope that this technology can be perfected and make it to market soon.  We could use batteries that are quickly recharged for just about all of the portable electronics in our lives, including our cars.

Graphene sheets illustration above. Credit: Gengping Jiang

According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Grossman and postdoc Alexie Kolpak published their findings in Nano Letters.  The azobenzene carbon nanotubes are able to store solar energy in a stable chemical form until needed.  It also is able to store about 10,000 times more energy in the same amount of space than fulvalene diruthenium would use.

Thermo-chemical storage of solar energy uses a molecule whose structure changes when exposed to sunlight, and can remain stable in that form indefinitely. Then, when nudged by a stimulus — a catalyst, a small temperature change, a flash of light — it can quickly snap back to its other form, releasing its stored energy in a burst of heat. Grossman describes it as creating a rechargeable heat battery with a long shelf life, like a conventional battery.

Another positive aspect of the azobenzene carbon nanotubes is that they can work as both a solar energy harvester and a storage system, a one step process.  Unfortunately, if you want to turn the energy into electricity and not heat, you have to add another step to the system.   You can either use the heat to produce steam to run a generator or you have to use a “thermoelectric device”.

Grossman and Kopak’s discovery is more than just finding that carbon nanotubes and azobenzene will work well for solar energy storage, they developed a concept that can be used to turn other materials into chemical energy storage batteries.  Some of those materials have been synthesized by other scientists.

In order for solar thermal storage to work, the proper energy barrier has to be found.  The energy barrier has to provide enough of a block to allow long term storage while also allowing an easy method for release of the energy in the right amount at the right time.  As ‘Grossman says, “The barrier has to be optimized.”’

The search for new materials is underway.  While the current azobenzene carbon nanotubes are a breakthrough, there may be better materials for solar thermal batteries or for use with other types of chemical energy storage and unless they keep looking, they will never know.  Who knows they may come up with storage that doesn’t require a thermoelectric device to turn it into electricity.

According to PolyZion a variety of institutions and organizations are collaborating on the PolyZion battery project: “University of Leicester, C-Tech Innovation, Fundacion CIDETEC, Celaya Emparanza y Galdos SA (Cegasa), University of Porto, KEMA Nederland BV, AE Favorsky Irkutsk Institute of Chemistry, Institute de Recherche d’Hydro-Québec, Rescoll.”

The University of Leicester is “spearheading the development” of the PolyZion project.  The EU Seventh Framework Programme is funding the €3.5 million research project involving all the above partners.  Research into different components of the battery including “ionic liquids, conducting plastics, zinc deposition, pulse charging and batteries”  is being conducted.  Since the market for hybrids and electric vehicles is expected to exceed $2 billion within four years, this project stands to provide an excellent return on investment.

The project combines a new low-cost, air and moisture insensitive and environmentally sustainable class of electrolytes (ionic liquids) together with nano-structured zinc deposits and novel ultra-fast charging conducting polymers.

Or as Claire Fullarton, postgraduate researcher with the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leicester has said, "“This research involves the development of a new class of fast rechargeable batteries based on a zinc-plastic system incorporating a novel, inexpensive, environmentally sustainable solvent.”

If the PolyZion project wants part of the market in 2015, it’s going to need a miracle to make it.  Eestor was supposed to revolutionize battery technology.  It was expected to be in the Chevy Volt that hit the market late last year.  Instead, EEstor appears to be nothing but a vanishing dream.  In 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a battery that used a virus to produce energy.  It hasn’t made it to market.  Last December, scientists at Case Western improved the storage capacity of capacitors by as much as 1,000 fold but there is no word on when it will be commercially available.

So many promising technologies either don’t make it out of the laboratory because development stalls before a marketable version is realized or the costs become prohibitive.  Hopefully, PolyZion will will not be one of the failures but will actually make it to market as the lightweight, low cost, long lived, environmentally friendly battery that researchers expect.