.gif)
.gif)
Industry News
June 29, 2012
Stanford Researchers Develop Fast Nickel-iron Battery
Hongjie Dai, professor of chemistry at Stanford University, and his colleagues have created an ultrafast nickel-iron battery that can be fully charged in about 2 minutes and discharged in less than 30 seconds.
Recommended: DOE Selects Consortium to Develop Next-Generation Batteries for Automobiles
Graduate student Hailiang Wang, lead author of the study, said the team managed to increase the charging and discharging rate by nearly 1,000 times. The high-performance, low-cost battery could someday be used to help power electric vehicles.
Thomas Edison created the nickel-iron battery as an inexpensive alternative to corrosive lead-acid batteries. Its basic design consists of two electrodes – a cathode made of nickel and an anode made of iron – bathed in an alkaline solution.
"Importantly, both nickel and iron are abundant elements on Earth and relatively nontoxic," Dai noted.
Carbon has long been used to enhance electrical conductivity in electrodes. To improve the Edison battery’s performance, the Stanford team used graphene – nanosized sheets of carbon that are only 1-atom thick – and multi-walled carbon nanotubes, each consisting of about 10 concentric graphene sheets rolled together.
"In conventional electrodes, people randomly mix iron and nickel materials with conductive carbon," Wang explained. "Instead, we grew nanocrystals of iron oxide onto graphene, and nanocrystals of nickel hydroxide onto carbon nanotubes."
This technique produced strong chemical bonding between the metal particles and the carbon nanomaterials, which had a dramatic effect on performance.
"Coupling the nickel and iron particles to the carbon substrate allows electrical charges to move quickly between the electrodes and the outside circuit," Dai said. "The result is an ultrafast version of the nickel-iron battery that’s capable of charging and discharging in seconds."
The 1-volt prototype battery developed in Dai’s lab has just enough power to operate a flashlight. The researchers’ goal is to make a bigger battery that could be used for the electrical grid or transportation.
Most electric cars, such as the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, run on lithium-ion batteries, which can store a lot of energy but typically take hours to charge.
"Our battery probably won’t be able to power an electric car by itself because the energy density is not ideal," Wang said. "But it could assist lithium-ion batteries by giving them a real power boost for faster acceleration and regenerative braking."
The enhanced Edison battery might be especially useful in emergency situations, Dai added. "There may be applications for the military, for example, where you have to charge something very quickly," he said.
"It’s definitely scalable," Wang said. "Nickel, iron and carbon are relatively inexpensive. And the electrolyte is just water with potassium hydroxide, which is also very cheap and safe. It won’t blow up in a car."
The prototype battery has one key drawback – the ability to hold a charge over time. "It doesn’t have the charge-discharge cycling stability that we would like," Dai said. "Right now it decays by about 20 percent over 800 cycles. That’s about the same as a lithium-ion battery. But our battery is really fast, so we’d be using it more often. Ideally, we don’t want it to decay at all."
Dai said the use of strongly coupled nanomaterials represents a very exciting approach to making electrodes.
"It’s different from traditional methods, where you simply mix materials together. I think Thomas Edison would be happy to see this progress," he said.
This work was supported by Intel, a Stinehart/Reed Award from the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford and a Stanford Graduate Fellowship.
More news and information regarding the latest developments in Smart Grid electronics can be found at Darnell’s SmartGridElectronics.Net.
Share this story
Send via E-mail
Post to Twitter
On the Web:
White Papers
March 11, 2013
Power Modules for Charger Applications
Sponsored by Vincotech
February 27, 2013
The Adaptive Cell Converter Topology Enables Constant Efficiency Over Universal Input AC Line in Front-End, High-Density Power Factor Correction Applications
Sponsored by Vicor Corp.
February 27, 2013
From 48 V direct to Intel VR12.0: Saving "Big Data" $500,000 per datacenter, per year
Sponsored by Vicor Corp.
More White Papers
- Altera Acquires Enpirion for $140 Million, Forms Power Business Unit
- Ericsson Saves Board Space with Surface-Mount Digital Bus Converter
- SiC Modules, IGBTs and Super-Junction MOSFETs Introduced on Day One of PCIM
- PowerbyProxi Joins Wireless Power Consortium
- SiC and GaN Again a Major Focus at PCIM Europe
- Vincotech and Infineon Introduce New Packaging Options at PCIM Europe
- Bosch Claims First Sub-$450 240V EV Charging Station
- DOE Selects Consortium to Develop Next-Generation Batteries for Automobiles
- Gate Drive Optocouplers for High-Speed SiC FETs Deliver up to 2.5A
- Dana Receives Grant from NRCan to Improve Thermal Management for EV Battery Packs
- Power-One Gets $1 Billion – ABB Gets Inverters
- Renesas Adds IGBT Drivers with Micro-Isolator for Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Inverters
- Bosch Claims First Sub-$450 240V EV Charging Station
- Eltek Signs Agreement with Caterpillar on Telecom Hybrid Systems
- Altera Acquires Enpirion for $140 Million, Forms Power Business Unit
- LED Lighting Power & Dimming Controls Introduced by Phihong
- SL Packs 60 Watts of Industrial-Grade AC-DC Power in Small and Robust Package
- Eltek's New Rectifier Delivers 97.2% Efficiency for Data Center and Server Powering
- Fairchild's Integrated Low-Side Gate Driver Incorporates 3.3-V LDO in 5-Lead SOT-23
- Vicor Reports Reduced Q1 Results – Anticipates a Brighter Future
- Green Building Power Forum 2010: Fujitsu Components America
- Darnell's Digital Power Forum 2009: CUI Incorporated
- Green Building Power Forum 2010: EMerge Alliance
- Green Building Power Forum 2010: Anderson Power Products
- Green Building Power Forum 2009: Independence Station
- Darnell's Digital Power Forum 2009: Coilcraft
- Darnell's Digital Power Forum 2009: Champs Technologies
- Darnell's Digital Power Forum 2009: EXAR Corporation
- Darnell's Digital Power Forum 2009: PMBus
- Darnell's Digital Power Forum 2009: Power Plaza
Design Features
October 22, 2012
Energy Efficiency with Class D Amplifier Modules
Class-D switching amplifiers are helping audio designers create personal multimedia devices and home audio/visual systems that demonstrate how compact and stylish equipment can also deliver high sound quality and high audio output power. The key to this breakthrough, providing freedom from the large and bulky boxes housing traditional audio products, lies in the class-D amplifier’s high energy efficiency, which is typically around 90%. This allows designers to reduce or eliminate heatsinks as well as using smaller-sized PCBs and smaller components such as transformers, connectors and power supplies.
Design Features
October 8, 2012
The Role of Hall Effect Sensors in Power Distribution Infrastructure
Power distribution units (PDUs) form an essential part of modern computing and data communications hardware. They provide multiple outputs for transferring electrical power with maximum efficiency, controlling the power capacity and safeguarding against the possible causes of supply interruption. With an ever increasing need from tech savvy consumers for higher data throughput and greater quantities of data storage capacity, as well as tough international legislation now governing CO&sub2; emissions, the demands being placed on these units are proving challenging for engineering teams to satisfy.
Product Focus
August 13, 2012
The Year in AC-DC Power Supply Technology
The past year witnessed significant new product releases, technological developments, and industry news related to the field of AC-DC Power Supply technology.