Battery Metals Scramble

 Car makers are going mining. 

Tesla, GM Among Carmakers Flocking to Mining Events Amid Battery Metals Scramble

February 24, 2023 Bloomberg      in SupplyBrainChain

Top automakers including Tesla, General Motors, and Ford are heading out on the mining conference circuit as soaring demand for metals used in electric vehicles ignites a scramble to lock in long-term supplies.

Those major U.S. firms, along with Rivian Automotive Inc. and European counterparts Stellantis N.V., Mercedes-Benz Group AG, and Jaguar Land Rover Automotive, will be mingling with the crowds of mining industry executives attending a major metals conference in Florida in early March.

The four-day event is expected to attract almost 1,500 participants to Hollywood, Florida. Bank of Montreal, which is organizing the annual gathering, sees strong interest from several car manufacturers that are seeking to secure supplies of lithium, nickel, graphite and other battery metals.

“There’s an urgency to it now that wasn’t there a few years ago,” said Ilan Bahar, co-head of global metals and mining business at BMO Capital Markets.“If three or four years ago we had invited car companies to our conference, they probably wouldn’t have made it a priority.”

It’s unusual for massive end-users of raw commodities, like auto manufacturers, machinery producers or aerospace companies, to attend large mining conferences. But the huge demand for raw materials to support the electrification of those industries is changing that.

Bahar said a number of automakers are attending, including officials in procurement or corporate development, and are focused on securing supply and investing.

“They’re there as investors,” he said. “They want to meet with companies, and the companies want to meet with investors.”  ... ' 

Solid State Vehicle Batteries

 New directions in battery power for cars,   I have senn nasty examples of flaming wrecks, will ehi remove that danger.

Home/News/The Holy Grail of Electric Vehicles: Solid-State Batteries/Full Text

ACM NEWS

The Holy Grail of Electric Vehicles: Solid-State Batteries, By R. Colin Johnson

Commissioned by CACM Staff, February 7, 2023

Unlike flammable liquid-core Li-ion batteries, Blue Current’s solid-core silicon elastic composite solid-state batteries are smaller, safer, and will last the lifetime of an electric vehicle.

Rechargeable batteries have become the lifeblood of electronics, enabling the mobile revolution. Unfortunately, today's rechargeable batteries incorporate flammable liquid cores. That could change soon, however by switching to rechargeable batteries that have solid cores with nothing to spill, nothing to catch on fire, nothing to potentially explode.

The first rechargeable battery was invented in the mid-19th century, and replaced the crank handle on the front of Model Ts— the lead-acid battery, which is based upon a simple liquid sulfuric acid core. Because of their low cost and relatively large power-to-weight ratio, these batteries still provide the spark that starts today's internal combustion engines (ICEs).

The more advanced liquid-core lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles (EVs) are more expensive than lead-acid batteries, but they are worth it because they are lighter and smaller than lead-acid batteries providing the same amount of power, making them more suitable for mobile devices. Even the flammable liquid cores that make Li-ion batteries less safe than the liquid cores of lead-acid batteries are tolerated because of their reduced size.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), an Energy Innovation Hub led by DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, the Li-ion battery's flammable liquid core is on its way out. Not only is it flammable, but it also creates a toxic-waste disposal problem, introducing increasingly complex manufacturing problems and making the cost of electric vehicles (EVs) almost prohibitively high.

To remedy the problem, Argonne National Labs created JCESR, which designed a new generation of batteries with non-liquid solid cores — in the solid "state"—that are smaller, have higher energy density, and yet promise to return to the safety, ease of manufacturing, and lower cost of lead-acid batteries (once they are in mass production). Solid-state batteries were heralded as the "holy grail of batteries" — their solid-state core is the perfect complement to solid-state electronics — in the Technology Outlook 2030 report by market research firm DNV (Det Norske Veritas, which means "the Norwegian truth"). ... '

GE Invents 'Immortal Battery'

Quite the claim ...  Something we can use!

GE Research Developing the IMMORTAL Battery and Self-Healing Metals to Expand Operational Lifetime of Critical Military Systems   From Ge.com

Materials

Awarded two projects totaling $11 million through the Defense Advanced Research Agency’s (DARPA) Morphogenic Interfaces (MINT) program

First project involves designing a material for lithium- ion batteries that allows it to last virtually indefinitely

Second project involves the creation of new barriers to enable robust corrosion protection of aluminum metals

GE Research uniquely bringing together deep expertise in metals, biology, chemistry, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and mathematics to make certain metals virtually impenetrable to corrosion and degradation.

Could lead to unprecedented advancements in extending the lifetime and durability of cars, planes, buildings, and other critical infrastructure

NISKAYUNA, NY – January 11, 2023 -  Can certain types of metals self-heal like the human body does from a cut or broken bone?  Could they be engineered to withstand corrosion and never degrade? GE Research has been awarded two projects through DARPA’s visionary MINT program aiming to develop batteries and certain metal materials that may last virtually forever. These efforts are all part of meeting the Agency’s goal of extending the operational life of critical systems and infrastructure.

Introduced last year, DARPA’s MINT program is funding new material innovations that are patterned after how human cells and tissue form in a process known as morphogenesis. It is believed that new materials can be engineered to mimic key characteristics of human tissue such as self-healing to improve their longevity and durability.  GE Research has put together two strong multidisciplinary technical teams that will bridge the worlds of biology and materials science in the effort to create materials that mimic human nature.

The first project, entitled the InterMetallic MORphogen Tailored Activity Lithium (IMMORTAL) Battery, is a $6 million effort to develop a new intermetallic solid/solid charge transfer interface material to improve the performance of lithium- ion batteries and enable them to last virtually forever.  GE Research and its partners, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Michigan, University of California Santa Barbara, and Storagenergy, a leader in advanced lithium battery technologies, will employ AI and machine learning models, mathematics, chemistry, biology, materials science, and deep experience in battery technology to develop and demonstrate an IMMORTAL Battery prototype.  ... ' 

Setting the Internet of Things Free -- of Batteries

Yes, please.

Setting the Internet of Things Free -- of Batteries

By R. Colin Johnson, Commissioned by CACM Staff, November 8, 2022

EnOcean’s wall-mounted pushbuttons harvest the energy from the finger pushing them to generate an RF signal that turns on lights, overhead fans, or any other device that would ordinarily require connection to electrical wiring.

Energy harvesting reaps energy that would otherwise go to waste—from sources ranging from solar rays to vibrations to ambient gradations in heat, ocean waves/tides, wind, and even the metabolisms of living organisms. These sources can be tuned to produce electricity that is safe, sustainable, and deployable in conditions not suited to the use of batteries.

Incorporating such energy harvesting into the Internet of Things (IoT) extends its reach to nearly any place on the globe—not just those that can access power lines or rechargeable batteries.

"Energy harvesting has the potential to expand the capabilities of the Internet of Things to heights previously unattainable without the technology," said ABI Research analyst Taylor Jensen, who is just putting the finishing touches on a study on energy harvesting for IoT applications.

Applications for IoT devices are expanding dramatically, targeting industries including automotive, aerospace, military, transportation, consumer electronics, industrial, buildings, home appliances, environmental monitoring, home automation, healthcare, and other increasingly "green" sectors. Ubiquitous communication standards such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular technologies have opened the door to IoT devices that monitor and manage widespread networks of sensors and actuators. With the addition of energy harvesting to power off-grid IoT devices, there are few corners of the Earth left that are out of reach.

Energy harvesting has matured through the use of a variety of environmental sources, including:

• Light (via photovoltaic cells).

• Wind (which drives turbines that generate electricity).

• Vibration (resonators drive transducers to generate electricity).

• Thermal (temperature differences converted to electrical energy by dipole oscillators)

• Radio Waves (electricity harvested from oscillating electromagnetic fields with antennas and diodes).

Today, IoT devices often depend on just one of the energy harvesting methods above; for example, solar cells work fine on sunny days, but not so well on cloudy days or at night. To compensate, the solar cells charge a battery during the day, then switch to battery back-up systems to provide power at night.

Yet batteries are not the long-term power solution for the IoT, according to Pat Pannuto, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

"Every device with a battery is a device with a lifetime, and a short one at that," said Pannuto. "Today, we already average 10 or more connected devices per person in many parts of the world. Now imagine the transition from today's Internet of Things to tomorrow's Internet of Everything, a future with as many as a trillion connected devices; that is, hundreds of devices per person on the planet. We cannot become a world of battery-tenders; self-sufficient devices are fundamental to scale."

One answer available today has been demonstrated by Ji Li, a senior data and applied science manager at Microsoft. Li says 24/7/365 battery-free always-on IoT devices merely need to include multiple energy harvesters. Rather than using a single-source harvester that stores energy in a battery for times of darkness, no wind, etc., Li has demonstrated a method that combines several energy sources that together can provide the power requirements of an IoT device all day, every day, without the need for batteries.

According to Li, battery-free IoT devices require the use of machine learning (ML) to intelligently switch between multiple energy sources customized to provide the most efficient and most stable power supply for a particular application. For instance, managing the switch among thermal, kinetic, and photovoltaic energy sources with algorithms that compensate for the intermittent nature of each individual energy source allows ML to inform task-scheduler software that automatically switches among power sources.

"Batteries are the limiting factor in the lifetime of today's electronic devices. To extend service lifetime, devices must be able to obtain energy from their deployment context," said Pannuto. "That means scavenging energy from the nearby environment. As we push into more diverse environments, this also means scavenging from new and novel sources. In the future, intelligent instrumented systems will run on energy found wherever they are deployed. For instance, sensors embedded in concrete can harvest from the corrosion of the rebar. Sensors buried underground can harvest from electrogenic bacteria in the soil."  ... ' 

Battery Supply Chain Comes to the US

Supply Chain elements.

The EV Battery Supply Chain Is Coming to America

Close-up of a mechanic's hands disassembling an electric car battery on top of a trailer inside a mechanic shop

November 16, 2022  Bloomberg

It’s official: the supply chain for electric vehicle batteries is coming to America.  

Redwood Materials Inc., the battery recycling company created by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel, said it has reached a deal to supply Panasonic with billions of dollars in critical battery components that will be produced in the U.S. for the first time.  

The agreement marks the first major contract for domestically processed cathode material, a substance that’s responsible for more than one third of the expense of a finished battery pack. The material will supply Panasonic’s new battery plant in Kansas City, Kansas, when mass production begins there in 2025. The plant is expected to produce cells primarily for Tesla electric vehicles.

“Panasonic has been a partner for many years, but this is very significant,” Straubel said in an interview. “This is a large portion of their cathode supply. It’s such an impactful announcement for the U.S. supply chain in general — and of course for us as a company.”

Straubel declined to specify the amounts of material to be supplied or the specific price structure, other than to say that it would total billions of dollars over several years.

A New U.S. Industry

Straubel left Tesla in 2019 after he grew concerned about a widening gap between electric vehicle demand and the availability of materials needed to make them. Redwood quickly rose to become the biggest lithium-ion battery recycler in the U.S., before branching out into anode and cathode production.

Every battery has two electrodes — a cathode and an anode — between which trillions of charged lithium atoms travel. It’s the cathode that largely determines a battery’s performance, cost and environmental footprint. Cathode today is produced almost entirely in Asia.

Straubel says the materials in Redwood’s cathode will help electric vehicles qualify for new $7,500 federal tax incentives available under stringent guidelines that will take effect between now and 2024.

To qualify for the full incentive under President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, half of a battery’s minerals (by cost) must either be recycled in North America or mined from a country with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement. The cathode Redwood plans to provide Panasonic will be made with 100% recycled cobalt and 25% to 30% recycled nickel and lithium, Straubel said. He declined to say where the company would procure the remaining mineral supplies.

“We were already going at supersonic speeds,” Straubel said, but the manufacturing provisions in Biden’s climate plan were “like what happens if you attach a rocket engine to supersonic airplane.”

Cobalt is one of the most expensive and controversial ingredients for batteries. The majority of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where allegations of human rights abuses in the mining industry have been common. The reason Redwood has such a large amount to recycle is that it’s used in much higher concentrations for batteries that power consumer electronics than for those used in EVs. For example, it would take 6,147 recycled iPhone batteries to provide enough lithium for a Tesla Model Y, but only 166 iPhones to provide enough cobalt, according to BloombergNEF data.

For now, most battery recycling consists of consumer electronics and scrap material from factories. That’s expected to change dramatically as the first fleets of mass-produced EVs continues to age.  

Panasonic’s new Kansas City plant will be the company’s second major battery factory in the U.S., after the Nevada Gigafactory it jointly operates with Tesla. Straubel said the $4 billion Kansas City plant is likely to eventually exceed Nevada production. Redwood already recycles the scrap materials produced at Panasonic’s Nevada factory, and in turn will supply that factory with refined materials, including anode copper foil, by the end of this year.

Enough for One Million Cars  .... ' 

Batteries Could be 3D Printed

 Evolving battery tech

The future of solid-state batteries could be 3D-printed  in TheVerge

That means batteries could have customized shapes

By LIZZIE PHILIP, Oct 28, 2022, 9:00 AM  

The race to create a solid-state battery that could compete with today’s lithium-ion cells is heating up. Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere: in your phone, car, camera, and more. Since their debut in the 1990s, they’ve become a leader in energy storage. But they have one major flaw: safety. Lithium-ion batteries have a tendency to catch fire, especially when damaged or at high temperatures.

Solid-state batteries replace a flammable liquid electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries with a more stable solid one. They also could have more power, faster charging, and a longer lifespan. Right now, lots of startups are trying to get their first batteries out of the lab and into a factory and hope to prove that solid-state batteries can be commercially viable. 

One of those companies is California-based startup Sakuu, and it’s taking on an even bigger task: 3D-printing these next-gen batteries. Sakuu claims that 3D printing allows it to fit more battery layers in the same amount of space, boosting the capacity of its batteries compared to those made by traditional manufacturing. In theory, the batteries could take on more customized shapes, which could change how batteries are integrated into product design. But the company has yet to 3D-print a full battery using its prototype. Check out our video to learn more about how this new technology could reinvent the way batteries  ... ' 

New rechargeable Lithium ION Batteries

Batteries have become everything, in providing IOT, clothing  and beyond.

Engineers Produce 140m Flexible Rechargeable Battery

By MIT News

December 22, 2021

Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. The battery could enable a wide variety of wearable electronic devices, and might even be used to make 3D-printed batteries in virtually any shape.

The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts.

In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced a flexible fiber battery 140 meters long to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described in "Thermally Drawn Rechargeable Battery Fiber Enables Pervasive Power," published in the journal Materials Today.

The system embeds the lithium and other materials inside the fiber, with a protective outside coating, thus making the version stable and waterproof.

From MIT News

View Full Article  

Towards a Battery Free Internet of Things

Some notes about how this might work.  Think its inevitable that we will have many kinds of IOTs  delivering AI.   Further how we can ensure these devices getting security updates.

A Battery-Free Internet of Things,  By Esther Shein

Communications of the ACM, July 2021, Vol. 64 No. 7, Pages 16-18  10.1145/3464937

Introductory video:  https://youtu.be/gX9cbxLSOkE 

When NVIDIA purchased mobile-chip designer Arm Holdings from SoftBank last year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made the bold prediction that in the years ahead, there will be trillions of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Regardless of whether that holds true, it is safe to say the growth of IoT devices is exploding. All those devices will require power sources, and the way Josiah Hester sees it, that's problematic for the environment and society.

"When I see the 'trillion' number, I see a trillion dead batteries, basically," says Hester, an assistant professor of computer engineering at Northwestern University. "There's piles of batteries in landfills in China and elsewhere sitting there unrecycled; or they're put in furnaces and melted down, which is not a carbon-neutral event."

As a native Hawaiian, Hester also is concerned about the impact of micro-plastics and dead batteries turning up in oceans, and about lithium mining, which uses water supplies that people depend on to live. That got him thinking about how to design computer systems without batteries that instead harvest energy, thus reducing their carbon footprint and the impact on the environment.

Hester and other researchers at Northwestern designed a battery-free Nintendo Game Boy that is powered by button presses and sunlight, harvesting energy from the movement of tiny magnets and through tightly wound coils every time a user presses a button.

Now, the team is working on smart face masks that are powered by a person's breathing or movement, that will be able to capture heart or respiration rates, and also to determine whether the person is wearing the mask correctly.   ... ' 

Wheelchairs with Smarter Voice Controls

Seems a very natural solution.  Especially for integrating with chair and smartphone and other aids. Incudes data important to data and operator.

Permobil Connects Electric Wheelchair App to Alexa and Google Assistant   By Eric Hal Schwartz

Electric wheelchair manufacturer Permobil has released voice apps connecting Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa to its MyPermobil mobile app. Permobil owners can now get access to the current status of their wheelchair with voice commands.

WHEELED VOICE

The MyPermobil app collects real-time information about the wheelchair’s battery charge, how far it can travel before running out, and the distance it has already traveled since it was last plugged in. The app also gathers a report on the previous week and month’s use of the power seating feature of Permobil wheelchairs, which adjusts the position of the seat and legs to prevent the person in the wheelchair from being in one position for too long. Now, Permobil owners can now connect the app to Google Assistant or Alexa and ask the voice assistants to pull up all of that information without needing to take out their smartphone. Plenty of wheelchair users are not able to reach or control their smartphones very easily or at all. The option to interact with the app using voice commands is their first opportunity to access crucial information about their wheelchair.  ... "

A Technical Introduction to the Concept and Value of Batteries

What has kept us fluidly moving around, in all sorts of contexts,  by storing energy and providing it as needed to an increasing number of devices, large and small?  What are they now, and how will they progress?     Start with a Battery Day

Battery Day   By Jessie Frazelle   ACM

Communications of the ACM, May 2021, Vol. 64 No. 5, Pages 52-59 10.1145/3434222

Tesla held its first Battery Day on September 22, 2020. What a fantastic world we live in that we can witness the first Applelike keynote for batteries. Batteries are a part of everyday life; without them, the world would be a much different place. Your cellphone, flashlight, tablet, laptops, drones, cars, and other devices would not be portable and operational without batteries.

At the heart of it, batteries store chemical energy and convert it into electrical energy. The chemical reaction in a battery involves the flow of electrons from one electrode to another. When a battery is discharging, electrons flow from the anode, or negative electrode, to the cathode, or positive electrode. This flow of electrons provides an electric current that can be used to power devices. Electrons have a negative charge; therefore, as the flow of negative electrons moves from one electrode to another, an electrolyte is used to balance the charge by being the route for charge-balancing positive ions to flow.

Let's break this down a bit and uncover the chemical reactions at play within batteries. An electrical current requires a flow of electrons. Where do those electrons come from?  ... " 

Quantum Computing for Chemical Characteristics

An local example of the use of quantum simulation.

UC Chemists Use Supercomputers to Understand Solvents

University of Cincinnati News, Michael Miller, March 19, 2021

University of Cincinnati (UC) chemists Thomas Beck and Andrew Eisenhart used a supercomputer to understand the basic characteristics of an industrial solvent via quantum simulation. The researchers employed the university’s Advanced Research Computing Center and the Ohio Supercomputer Center to investigate glycerol carbonate. Said Eisenhart, "Quantum simulations have been around for quite a while. But the hardware that's been evolving recently—things like graphics processing units and their acceleration when applied to these problems—creates the ability to study larger systems than we could in the past." Eisenhart said the analysis provided insights into how small modifications to molecular structure can have larger effects on the solvent overall, "and how these small changes make its interactions with very important things like ions and can have an effect on things like battery performance."

AI Finds Battery Materials

More detail about the method at the link.

Using AI to Find Essential Battery Materials

As battery demand soars, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence for more effective and sustainable methods    By Maria Gallucci in IEEE Spectrum

Demand for battery-making metals is projected to soar as more of the world’s cars, buses, and ships run on electricity. The coming mining boom is raising concerns of environmental damage and labor abuses—and it’s driving a search for more sustainable ways of making batteries and cutting-edge electronics.

Artificial intelligence could help improve the way battery metals are mined, or replace them altogether. KoBold Metals is developing an AI agent to find the most desirable ore deposits in the least problematic locations. IBM Research, meanwhile, is harnessing AI techniques to identify alternative materials that already exist and also develop new chemistries.

KoBold, a mining exploration startup, says its technology could reduce the need for costly and invasive exploration missions, which often involve scouring the Earth many times over to find rare, high-quality reserves. 

“All the stuff poking out of the ground has already been found,” said Kurt House, co-founder and CEO of the San Francisco Bay area company. “At the same time, we’ve realized we need to massively change the energy system, which requires all these new minerals.”

KoBold is partnering with Stanford University’s Center for Earth Resource Forecasting to develop an AI agent that can make decisions about how and where explorers should focus their work. The startup is mainly looking for copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium—metals key to making electric vehicle batteries as well as solar panels, smartphones, and many other devices.... " 

IBM and Daimler using Quantum Computer

Continued advances of the use of quantum computing to model lithium molecules to get closer to lithium Sulphur  batteries that would be longer lasting and cheaper.

 IBM and Daimler use quantum computer to develop next-gen batteries

January 8, 2020 | Written by: Jeannette Garcia  in ACM

Categorized: Quantum Computing

Electric vehicles have an Achilles heel: the capacity and speed-of-charging of their batteries. A quantum computing breakthrough by researchers at IBM and Daimler AG, the parent company of  Mercedes-Benz, could help tackle this challenge. We used a quantum computer to model the dipole moment of three lithium-containing molecules, which brings us one step closer the next-generation lithium sulfur (Li-S) batteries that would be more powerful, longer lasting and cheaper than today’s widely used lithium ion batteries.

Simulating molecules is extremely difficult but modeling them precisely is crucial to discover new drugs and materials. In the research paper “Quantum Chemistry Simulations of Dominant Products in Lithium-Sulfur Batteries,” we simulated the ground state energies and the dipole moments of the molecules that could form in lithium-sulfur batteries during operation: lithium hydride (LiH), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), lithium hydrogen sulfide (LiSH), and the desired product, lithium sulfide (Li2S). In addition, and for the first time ever on quantum hardware, we demonstrated that we can calculate the dipole moment for LiH using 4 qubits on IBM Q Valencia, a premium-access 5-qubit quantum computer. ... ' 

A Look at What Makes us Run: Batteries

Battery Day.  What they are and where they are going.    In some ways such a primitive thing, but still very essential to make things work and be portable.  .  

A closer look at the technology that makes portable electronics possible

By Jessie Frazelle  in Queue ACM.

Tesla held its first Battery Day on September 22, 2020 [tesla.com]. What a fantastic world we live in that we can witness the first Apple-like keynote for batteries. Batteries are a part of everyday life; without them, the world would be a much different place. Your cellphone, flashlight, tablet, laptops, drones, cars, and other devices would not be portable and operational without batteries.

At the heart of it, batteries store chemical energy and convert it into electrical energy. The chemical reaction in a battery involves the flow of electrons from one electrode to another. When a battery is discharging, electrons flow from the anode, or negative electrode, to the cathode, or positive electrode. This flow of electrons provides an electric current that can be used to power devices. Electrons have a negative charge; therefore, as the flow of negative electrons moves from one electrode to another, an electrolyte is used to balance the charge by being the route for charge-balancing positive ions to flow.

Let's break this down a bit and uncover the chemical reactions at play within batteries. An electrical current requires a flow of electrons. Where do those electrons come from?

Electrons in the anode are produced by a chemical reaction between the anode and the electrolyte. Simultaneously, another chemical reaction occurs in the cathode, enabling it to accept electrons. These chemical reactions create the flow of electrons, resulting in an electric current.

A chemical reaction that involves the exchange of electrons is known as a reduction-oxidation reaction, or redox reaction.

Reduction refers to a gain of electrons. Thus, half of this reaction—the reduction—occurs at the cathode because it gains electrons. Oxidation refers to a loss of electrons. Therefore, the other half of this reaction—oxidation—occurs at the anode because it loses electrons to the cathode. Each of these reactions has a particular electric potential. An electrochemical cell can be made up of any two conducting materials that have reactions with different standard potentials, since the more robust material, which makes up the cathode, will gain electrons from the weaker material, which makes up the anode.

Batteries can be made up of one or more electrochemical cells, each cell consisting of one anode, one cathode, and an electrolyte, as described earlier. The electrodes and electrolyte are generally made up of different types of metals or other chemical compounds. Different materials for the electrodes and electrolyte produce different chemical reactions that affect how the battery works, how much energy it can store, and its voltage.  .. " 

Towards Battery Free IOT

A particular challenge for IOT devices.

Battery-Free IoT: These Tiny Printable Computers Harvest Energy From Radio Waves

In Forbes by John Koetsier

The Wiliot Internet of Things (IoT) tag is a printable chip with random-access memory, read-only memory, onboard sensors, certified Bluetooth, an ARM central-processing unit, flash memory, and secure communications. The chip, made by fabless semiconductor company Wiliot, is battery-free, harvesting energy from ambient radio waves; it can be glued onto antennas, with input supplied from sensors for temperature or motion or even chemical changes, and output in encrypted Bluetooth-based communications. Without a battery, the device is smaller, more environmentally friendly, and less expensive. The tag is expected to eventually cost just pennies, but Wiliot's Stephen Statler said the real advance is lowering the cost of sensing infrastructure, which is critical to realizing a ubiquitous IoT.

GM Can Manage an EV's Batteries Wirelessly and Remotely

Seems quite a considerable improvement of automotive battery use and management for electric vehicles.

Exclusive: GM Can Manage an EV's Batteries Wirelessly—and Remotely

The new system eliminates the rat's nest of wiring and collects information that can be used to design better batteries.   By Lawrence Ulrich

When the battery dies in your smartphone, what do you do? You complain bitterly about its too-short lifespan, even as you shell out big bucks for a new device. 

Electric vehicles can’t work that way: Cars need batteries that last as long as the vehicles do. One way of getting to that goal is by keeping close tabs on every battery in every EV, both to extend a battery’s life and to learn how to design longer-lived successors.

IEEE Spectrum got an exclusive look at General Motors’ wireless battery management system. It’s a first in any EV anywhere (not even Tesla has one). The wireless technology, created with Analog Devices, Inc., will be standard on a full range of GM EVs, with the company aiming for at least 1 million global sales by mid-decade. 

Those vehicles will be powered by GM’s proprietary Ultium batteries, produced at a new US $2.3 billion plant in Ohio, in partnership with South Korea’s LG Chem.    ... " 

Batteries Determining their own State

 Was of interest to us when we were making batteries.

Commercial battery cells that can monitor their own chemical and thermal state  by Ingrid Fadelli , in TechExplore

Battery technology can sometimes be unstable and volatile, two characteristics that impair its safety and reliability. Actively monitoring the chemical and thermal state of battery cells over time could help to detect changes that may cause incidents or malfunctions, giving users the chance to intervene before a problem arises.

Researchers at Collège de France and Hong Kong Polytechnic University have recently designed a Na(Li)-ion battery that can monitor its own chemical and thermal state via a series of optical sensors integrated in its cells. This unique self-monitoring battery, presented in a paper published in Nature Energy, could provide greater safety and a more sustained efficiency compared to conventional battery technologies. .... '

Partnership that Revolutionized Battery Research at Argonne

Big believed in partnerships.   Some recent conversations have further strengthened that.   My company used to be a big maker of batteries, but it seems never took them much further.

The historical partnership that revolutionized battery research at Argonne
by Joan Koka, Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne scientists Jason Croy, Manar Ishwait and Michael Murphy assemble lithium-ion battery electrodes for testing. Credit: Mark Lopez / Argonne National Laboratory
Researchers around the world are on the hunt to find cheaper, better lithium-ion battery materials to power large scale machines, such as electric vehicles. One of their goals is to find alternative lithium-metal-oxide electrodes to those containing cobalt, an element common within phone and laptop batteries but too expensive and short on capacity to propel electric vehicles over long distances.


For decades, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have taken part in the pursuit to uncover battery materials that perform as well as, if not better than, the ones we use today. Among the materials they're investigating are manganese-rich compounds, because manganese is abundant and inexpensive; lithium-manganese oxides are also thermally safer to use, but not as energy dense as their cobalt counterparts.

The laboratory's study of manganese-rich materials is shaped by the work that Argonne Emeritus Fellow Michael Thackeray has been doing since the early 1980s. While a postdoc at Oxford University in 1981-1982, Thackeray worked alongside battery scientist John Goodenough, one of the Nobel-prize winning architects of the modern lithium-cobalt-oxide battery.The historical partnership that revolutionized battery research at Argonne
by Joan Koka, Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne scientists Jason Croy, Manar Ishwait and Michael Murphy assemble lithium-ion battery electrodes for testing. Credit: Mark Lopez / Argonne National Laboratory

Researchers around the world are on the hunt to find cheaper, better lithium-ion battery materials to power large scale machines, such as electric vehicles. One of their goals is to find alternative lithium-metal-oxide electrodes to those containing cobalt, an element common within phone and laptop batteries but too expensive and short on capacity to propel electric vehicles over long distances.

For decades, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have taken part in the pursuit to uncover battery materials that perform as well as, if not better than, the ones we use today. Among the materials they're investigating are manganese-rich compounds, because manganese is abundant and inexpensive; lithium-manganese oxides are also thermally safer to use, but not as energy dense as their cobalt counterparts.

The laboratory's study of manganese-rich materials is shaped by the work that Argonne Emeritus Fellow Michael Thackeray has been doing since the early 1980s. While a postdoc at Oxford University in 1981-1982, Thackeray worked alongside battery scientist John Goodenough, one of the Nobel-prize winning architects of the modern lithium-cobalt-oxide battery.... "

Extending Battery Life for IOT

Waking up your IOT device when needed.

Chips for IOT Battery Life
UC San Diego News Center
Liezel Labios

University of California, San Diego (UCSD) researchers have developed a power-saving chip that could significantly reduce or eliminate the need to replace batteries in Internet of Things (IoT) device and wearables. The new chip wakes a device only when it needs to communicate and perform its function, allowing it to stay dormant the rest of the time and reduce power use. The wake-up receiver is an ultra-low power chip that continuously looks for a specific radio signal, known as a wake-up signature, that tells it when to wake up the main device. Said UCSD’s Patrick Mercier, “By adding a wake-up receiver, we could improve the battery life of small IoT devices from months to years.”... "

Technical Look at Electric Aircraft

A somewhat technical outline view of the challenges involved:

Why don't we have electric aircraft?     by Dries Verstraete, The Conversation in TechXplore

Electric cars, trains, trams and boats already exist. That logically leads to the question: why are we not seeing large electric aircraft? And will we see them any time soon?

Why do we have electric cars and trains, but few electric planes? The main reason is that it's much simpler to radically modify a car or train, even if they look very similar to traditional fossil-fuel vehicles on the outside.

Land vehicles can easily cope with the extra mass from electricity storage or electrical propulsion systems, but aircraft are much more sensitive.

For instance, increasing the mass of a car by 35% leads to an increase in energy use of 13-20%. But for a plane, energy use is directly proportional to mass: increasing its mass by 35% means it needs 35% more energy (all other things being equal).

But that is only part of the story. Aircraft also travel much further than ground vehicles, which means a flight requires far more energy than an average road trip. Aircraft must store onboard all the energy needed to move its mass for each flight (unlike a train connected to an electrical grid). Using a heavy energy source thus means more energy is needed for a flight, which leads to extra mass, and so on and on.

For an aircraft, mass is crucial, which is why airlines fastidiously weigh luggage. Electric planes need batteries with enough energy per kilogram of battery, or the mass penalty means they simply can't fly long distances.  ... "