concept

A structural battery

October 25, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The size and especially the weight of batteries is a critical factor for most things that use them. Battery weight is a key limitation for computers and cell phones. It is even more of a limitation for electric cars, ships, or planes.

If the battery of a device or vehicle can also function as a load-bearing structure, its weight and energy consumption can be dramatically reduced. This concept of a structural battery is sometimes called massless energy storage. It has the potential to halve the weight of a laptop computer, make cell phones as thin as a credit card, and increase the range of an electric car by as much as 70%.

Researchers at Chalmers University in Sweden have been working on structural battery technology for many years. Their first published results in 2018 showed how stiff, strong carbon fibers could be used for chemical storage of electrical energy.

Since then, they have been creating batteries with increasing energy density. Their latest versions still have only a quarter of the capacity of today’s lithium-ion batteries. But if batteries can be part of the structure of a vehicle, for example, and can be made of lightweight materials like carbon fiber, then the overall weight of the vehicle can be greatly reduced and not nearly as much energy will be needed to power it.

The goal of the Chalmers research is to achieve battery performance that makes it possible to commercialize the technology. There is a lot of engineering work to be done before these structural batteries can go from laboratory proofs of concept to real world use. But the potential is quite promising.

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World’s strongest battery paves way for light, energy-efficient vehicles

Photo, posted August 8, 2024, courtesy of NOI Techpark via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A New Method of Refrigeration | Earth Wise

February 10, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Salting roads before winter storms is a familiar sight in the Northeast. The purpose is to change the temperature at which ice can form on the road. The underlying concept has formed the basis of a new method of refrigeration that has been dubbed “ionocaloric cooling.”

It is described in a paper published in the journal Science by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The method takes advantage of how energy in the form of heat is either stored or released when a material changes phase – such as water changing from ice to liquid and vice versa. Melting absorbs heat from the surroundings while freezing releases heat. An ionocaloric refrigerator makes use of this phase and temperature change using an electrical current to add or remove ions provided from a chemical salt.

The potential is to make use of this refrigeration cycle instead of the vapor compression systems in present-day refrigerators, which make use of refrigerant gases that are greenhouse gases, many of which very powerful ones. The goal is to come up with a system that makes things cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn’t harm the environment.

There are a number of alternative refrigeration systems under development that make use of a variety of mechanisms including magnetism, pressure, physical stretching, and electric fields. Ionocaloric cooling uses ions to drive solid-to-liquid phase changes.

Apart from some very promising theoretical calculations of the system’s potential, the researchers have also demonstrated the technique experimentally. They have received a provisional patent for the technology and are continuing to work on prototypes to demonstrate its capabilities and amenability to scaling up.

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Berkeley Lab Scientists Develop a Cool New Method of Refrigeration

Photo, posted October 29, 2021, courtesy of Branden Frederick via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

The Value Of Biodiversity

July 16, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

It is often said that biodiversity is crucial for staving off extinctions. Ecosystems are complex and are essentially defined by the interdependencies among the various animals and plants. It stands to reason that removing species from an ecosystem can have significant effects up and down the food chain. Extinctions are much more likely when biodiversity diminishes.