Better batteries are on their way | Batteries now included | The Economist - The Diigo Meta page

• 24 Apr 09
  

  Colin Bennett

  What Dr Ceder and Mr Kang have done is create electrodes that are made of two different materials, one of which is good at storing ions while the other is good at conducting them. The two substances themselves are arranged in tiny spheres less than 50 billionths of a metre across. The core of each sphere is a crystal of lithium iron phosphate. This acts as a standard battery material. The surface, however, is made of a glassy (ie, non-crystalline) form of lithium phosphate. This lithium-phosphate glass is good at conducting lithium ions, though it cannot actually store many. It thus acts as a supercapacitor. The result is that any ion arriving at a sphere is quickly conducted around the surface by the supercapacitor phase until it finds its way to the right place to enter the battery phase in the core—or, if the battery in question is being charged, the other way round.

  battery

• 19 Apr 09
  

  Adam Bohannon
  • Broadly speaking, there are two ways of storing electrical energy in a chemical system. One is a standard battery, in which the whole material of the electrodes acts as a storage medium. That allows lots of energy to be squirrelled away, but makes it relatively hard to get at—and so it can be released or put back in only slowly. The other way is called a supercapacitor. This stores energy only at the surface of the electrode. It is quick to charge and discharge, but cannot hold much energy. The great prize in the battery world has thus been a material that can both store a lot and discharge rapidly, and it is this that Dr Ceder and Mr Kang think they have come up with.
• 23 Mar 09
  

  Max Kaehn

  What Dr Ceder and Mr Kang have done is create electrodes that are made of two different materials, one of which is good at storing ions while the other is good at conducting them. Part acts as a standard battery material and part acts as a supercapacitor.

  energy_storage

• 16 Mar 09
  

  Arne Løining

  infrastructure technology

• 

  simon Ye
  • jigsaw
  • nifty
  • open-top sports job
  • Plugged in overnight
  • refuelled
  • lithium-ion
  • cramp
  • Cannes
  • take the waiting out of wanting
  • electrodes
  • squirrelled
  • supercapacitor
  • Lithium
  • phosphate
  • graphite
  • electrolyte
  • penetrated
  • egress
  • one of which is good at storing ions while the other is good at conducting them
  • metre acros
  • in question
  • In the future, therefore, that weekend in the south of France need not be interrupted by running out of juice

  20 more annotations...

• 15 Mar 09
  
• 14 Mar 09
  

  raman srinivasan

  print lion

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