flammable

Aluminum In Batteries | Earth Wise

September 1, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Batteries are playing a bigger and bigger role in our lives. Apart from their use in ubiquitous smartphones, laptops, and other devices, millions of electric vehicles are hitting the roads, and utilities are installing giant banks of batteries to store energy generated by wind and solar farms.

The necessary characteristics of batteries are high energy density and stability. The latter is needed so that batteries can be safely and reliably recharged thousands of times. For decades, lithium-ion batteries have been the go-to for all these modern battery applications. And they have gradually gotten better and cheaper all the time. But the improvements are getting smaller, and the price reductions have limits.

For these reasons, researchers are always looking for batteries with higher energy density – so that, for example, electric cars can drive farther on a charge – and that can be made more cheaply, are not flammable, and are very stable.

Since the 1970s, researchers have investigated the use of aluminum for the anode of batteries because its properties would allow more energy to be stored. However, when used in lithium-ion batteries, aluminum developed fractures and failed after a few cycles.

Researchers at Georgia Tech University have developed a type of aluminum foil with small amounts of other materials that create specific microstructures. Used in battery anodes, this material does not degrade and appears to be a path to a better battery. When incorporated into a solid-state battery that does not contain the flammable liquid found in standard lithium-ion batteries, the result is a battery that checks most of the boxes in the search for a better battery.

Much more work is needed to assess the potential for the aluminum-based battery, but it looks very promising.

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Aluminum Materials Show Promising Performance for Safer, Cheaper, More Powerful Batteries

Photo, posted August 27, 2019, courtesy of Marco Verch via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Solid State Batteries For Cars | Earth Wise

January 7, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Today’s electric cars run on lithium-ion batteries, the same sort that power our phones, computers, and many other consumer electronic devices. These batteries are far superior to the batteries of the past, offering long-life, high-energy density, and recyclable components.

Lithium-ion batteries do have their drawbacks. They may be lighter than older battery technologies, but because the electrolytes in the batteries are liquid, they are still fairly heavy. The huge number of them in an electric car adds up to a considerable amount of weight. In addition, the flammability of the electrolytes can lead to explosions or fires if the batteries are damaged or exposed to extreme temperatures.

Solid-state batteries are an alternative technology that contain a solid electrolyte. Such batteries are lighter, have higher energy density, offer more range, and recharge much more quickly than lithium-ion batteries. They have been used for years in some small devices like cardiac pacemakers, RFIDs, and some wearable devices.

For all these benefits, scaling up production to the level needed to be used in cars is an expensive and challenging endeavor. The hope is that with sufficient effort, the result will be smaller, lighter battery packs for cars that can be charged in minutes and provide extended range.

Nissan Motor Company has recently announced that it is investing $17.6 billion over the next five years towards developing solid-state batteries for cars. No doubt other companies will also be working on the technology.

Lithium-ion batteries have proven to be quite practical for powering vehicles. But if solid-state batteries can meet the challenges of scaled up production, the lithium-ion era might end up being a relatively brief one.

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Nissan to Spend $18 Billion Developing a Cheaper, More Powerful EV Battery

Photo, posted November 13, 2018, courtesy of FirstEnergy Corp via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Problem Of Gas Flaring | Earth Wise

January 9, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Gas flaring is the burning off of flammable gas released by pressure relief values during over-pressuring of plant equipment at petroleum refineries, chemical plants, natural gas processing plants, and a variety of oil and gas production plants. Flaring is also used during plant startups and shutdowns.

A new study by Rice University concludes that reducing gas flaring would benefit both the environment and the economy. Flaring and venting of gas in West Texas’s Permian Basin and certain other parts of the U.S. have reached levels that the intended result of burning gas to allow oil extraction now looks more like wasting one resource to produce another.

At current rates, enough gas is flared in the Permian Basin to yield nearly 5 million metric tons of exportable liquid natural gas if it was captured and liquified. At these rates, the wasted gas could fill the largest sized LNG carrier every ten days. If that liquified natural gas was exported to China and used in a power plant, it would displace 440,000 metric tons of coal burned to generate electricity.

Burning natural gas to heat homes, power industrial processes, or generate electricity all emit carbon dioxide, but at least these things also perform valuable functions. Flaring gas produces CO2 as well as other combustion products but doesn’t even do anything useful. The venting of unburned gas, which also takes place with some frequency, is even worse since it is dumping methane directly into the atmosphere.

Across the U.S., some 14.1 billion cubic meters of natural gas was flared in 2018, equivalent to nearly 9 million metric tons per year of LNG. In energy terms, that is equivalent to more than one-third of the total LNG volume U.S. firms actually exported that year.

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Reducing gas flaring will benefit economy and environment, says Baker Institute expert

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Climate-Friendly Refrigerants

March 29, 2017 By EarthWise

In 1988, President Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, which banned CFC refrigerants like Freon in air conditioners and refrigerators. The chlorofluorocarbons were the cause of a giant hole in the ozone layer, which has been shrinking ever since the ban. Unfortunately, the chemicals that replaced CFCs – hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs – have their own major problem: they are a seriously bad greenhouse gas, far worse than carbon dioxide. Last fall, an international agreement was reached by over 170 countries to reduce and eventually replace HFCs, which included 100 developing countries like China and India where air conditioning use is growing fastest.

A Climate-Friendlier Coolant

November 18, 2016 By WAMC WEB

Recently, negotiators from more than 170 countries reached a legally binding accord in Kigali, Rwanda to cut the use of hydroflurocarbons, or HFCs, which are chemical coolants used in air conditioners and refrigerators. HFCs are just a small percentage of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but they are supercharged greenhouse gases that have 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide.