Batteries and New Battery Technologies

I found that line on the 1th page searching for fluorescent globes, all AU results.
Replacing globes with bulbs gives twice the number of hits from the rest of the world.

Conclusion: a bulb becomes a globe on the southern hemisphere......

Do you expect to pass my island after dark Bert?

 

Hi CDK, I have absolute no idee what time we actual will be steaming along the coast of Croatia. We stop on the way to Greece/Turkey at one place and on the way back at another. Sorry it is late and everybody is already gone to bed, Will check it up tomorrow whether I must bring a million candela tourch with me, or that I am able to make a phonecall during the day and say hallo to you. I assume your number is on the website. Have a look at the English dictionary.
Bert

 

Aluminum-Celmet material improves Lithium-Ion

A new material developed by Japanese company Sumitomo Electric could help allay such fears by potentially improving the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by 1.5 to three times, and therefore extending the range of EVs by an extra 50 to 200 percent. That would give a Nissan LEAF a range of up to 109 to 219 miles (175 to 352 km) or a Tesla Roadster a range of up to 366 to 732 miles (589 to 1,178 km) - enough to assuage the range anxiety of the most fretful drivers.

The material in question is called Aluminum-Celmet that features an Aero bar-like, three-dimensional mesh-like structure that forms interconnected, open and spherical pores. Sumitomo Electric had previously been producing its proprietary Celmet material made from nickel or nickel chrome alloy. Its high porosity of up to 98 percent and favorable filling, retaining and current-collecting performance when used with an active material, led to Celmet recently being adopted as a positive electrode current collector in hybrid vehicle nickel-hydrogen batteries. It is also easy to process the porous metal into various shapes by cutting and stamping.

...more HERE
http://www.gizmag.com/aluminum-celmet-boosts-battery-capacity/19246/

 

Nuclear battery the size of a fridge making 25 megawatts.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2050039-1,00.html

do you realize how much power that is?
How about one smaller, the size of a large suitcase, that would be able to push my boat for 20 years at 40 mph.

someday perhaps something like that will be freely available. For now their is so much opposition, I still remember hearing about nuclear power being so cheap dont even measure the power.

they just wont let it happen, even though we have the technology to make it safe and cheap, they just wont, not for us.

If I could make my own nuclear battery and have it work, and someone reported me, My battery would be confiscated, and I would likely be prosecuted.

 

An algae based battery which you grow
Replaces the need for lithium
high power density
fast charging
Non metallic battery

Who would have thought this could have existed?
Lithium has been projected to be a future supply issue.
Algae based battery uses no lithium.

http://gas2.org/2009/09/11/algae-ba...-could-revolutionize-energy-storage-industry/

 

There is something missing in their description of the battery: where does the EMF come from? The cellulose is just an apparently inactive base structure. The polymer is just a conductor (according to the description, anyway), the paper soaked in electrolyte is just a conductor. The two metal strips seem to be of the same type of metal. The construct looks like it is completely symmetrical. What is in there to move electrons? Is this really a capacitor rather than a battery?

 

conductive polymer, called polypyrrole (PPy)
perhaps this is it.
from another article with more understanding
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=12645.php

so perhaps we will see, low cost, high energy capacity, quick charging batteries that use NO lithium. that will be very nice indeed seeing that Bolivia controls significant amounts and likely indigenous people dont want to see the land carved up, as well as not being enough lithium to go around to make the amount of batteries needed to convert much of the world transport to electric vehicles.

 

Ah HAH! It looks like this is just an electrolytic capacitor.

 

Yes, it does look suspiciously like an electrolytic cap, but it could still be a battery.
Two strips of lead with an acid soaked separator make a battery, not a capacitor.

Still I have serious doubts about the direction this research is going. There are indeed conductive polymers, but the degree of conductivity is very poor when compared to most metals. To increase it, stuff like yttrium oxide is added, an element that -like lithium- is not exactly abundant on this planet.

 

Scarcity can be a physical problem, but it is not an economic problem.

 

The isotopes that can be used for significant power have very long half lives AFAIK. The cost of dealing with the waste problems is just too high and it IS NOT being paid when stored on site as we saw with the Japanese nuclear plant. No way to consider all the possible things that could go wrong with an extremely poisonous material that can last essentially longer than man has been around, and if it only happens once in the wrong context out to infinity, you have disaster....

There's the story about the radioactive wrought iron decorative table found at a Los Alamo's Lab employee's home. It was traced back when the radioactive detectors went off when he was going IN to work, surprising everyone! It was eventually traced back to scrap metal medical waste in a device containing a radioactive source which had been melted down without the source being removed....

Porta

 

There will probably be room temperature superconducting polymers before anything else is found. Graphene is just the latest to show possibilities. Polyacetylene batteries made almost entirely out of polymers were demonstrated decades ago...

Porta

 

My first job was working with radioactive materials, for what was then our Atomic Energy Authority. The first big learning curve was realising that naturally occurring radioactive material is actually very widespread and crops up all over the place. Even back in the early 70's there was a very strict safety culture at work, with contamination checks on personnel and the workplace every day.

Once I took a portable Geiger-Muller counter home for a weekend to check things around where my mother lived (West Cornwall, UK), just out of curiosity. I was amazed to find that patches of granite that made up the walls of her farmhouse massively exceeded the legal exposure limit. What was more concerning was that some of the natural granite outcrops in the moorland around her farm were even more radioactive, many were off the highest scale on the counter.

My conclusion was that there is far, far more naturally occurring radioactive material around in our lives, stuff that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years in our everyday environment, than there is man-made (or more accurately man-distributed but naturally occurring) radioactive material.

We have to remember that the vast majority of radioactive material used in power sources etc is stuff that's been dug up from natural deposits in the earth. It's no different in principle from any of the other potentially toxic stuff we dig up from the ground and it isn't something we manufacture, in the main (accepting that very tiny amounts of some isotopes are manufactured, but these generally have a fairly short half-life).

Jeremy

 

Jeremy:
Good points about the radioactive material being all around us, with some pockets exceeding exceeding legal exposure.

There has never been a natural discovery of concentrated power grade radioactive fuel, AFAIK. Even the ores that are very rich to the point of being an extreme hazard must be concentrated through thousands of cycles in centrifuges/gas diffusion. The tolerance for exposure varies tremendously among individuals for the ores, but not for fuel rods.

Porta

 

That would be nice, but I'm impatient because time is running out on me.
Today's superconductors are nothing but exotic lab experiments under non-realistic conditions. Only when available with a 4 digit AWG number, with a durable isolation sheath and on large spools I can imagine useful applications.

I don't see that happen in my lifetime.
But you are probably younger, so in the meanwhile you might start thinking about solder or crimp terminals for 1 micron wires....