With the newly popular hoverboards bursting into flames, safety in batteries has made its way to the public spotlight. To increase lithium ion battery safety, one ECS member is working to develop batteries with built in sensors to warn users of potential problems.

Chao-Yang Wang, 19-year ECS member, is taking on the challenge of making the highly popular lithium ion battery safer in light of demands for smaller, more energy efficient devices.

“Li-ion batteries essentially provide portable power for everything,” says Wang. “Your cell phone charge can now last for a week instead of a day, but it’s still the same size. The battery has a lot more energy density, you are compressing more and more energy into a smaller space, and you have to be careful when you do that. Our job is to come up with solutions to provide safety while at the same time increasing performance.”

While lithium ion batteries are typically safe under normal conditions, the battery’s flammable electrolyte solution could overheat and catch fire if it is punctured or overcharged.

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When we think of energy, often large-scale grid storage or sleek, highly-efficient lithium ion batteries that power most of our electronics are the first things that come to mind. However, for applications such as biomedical or environmental monitoring devices, there could be an alternative way to harness energy without the use of pricy technology.

Researchers have discovered the through harnessing the energy crated by small motions, a small but unlimited power supply could be generated. With electrochemical principals as the backbone of the study, MIT researchers have developed a new way to harvest energy from natural motions and activates, including something as simple as walking.

The system is based on the slight bending of a sandwich of metal and polymer sheets.

This from MIT:

Most previously designed devices for harnessing small motions have been based on the triboelectric effect (essentially friction, like rubbing a balloon against a wool sweater) or piezoelectrics (crystals that produce a small voltage when bent or compressed). These work well for high-frequency sources of motion such as those produced by the vibrations of machinery. But for typical human-scale motions such as walking or exercising, such systems have limits.

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Scientists are teaching old bacterium some new tricks in an effort to advance artificial photosynthesis.

The bacterium Moorella thermoacetica has been trained to perform photosynthesis, even though it is non-photosynthetic. All of this comes with a push to convert sunlight into valuable chemical products for a cleaner, greener energy future.

“We’ve demonstrated the first self-photosensitization of a non-photosynthetic bacterium, M. thermoacetica, with cadmium sulfide nanoparticles to produce acetic acid from carbon dioxide at efficiencies and yield that are comparable to or may even exceed the capabilities of natural photosynthesis,” says Peidong Yang, lead researcher of this work.

Previously, Yang’s work has centered around the development of the artificial “leaf,” which aims to produce natural gas from carbon dioxide. This extension of that work is still in line with the development of a clean energy future.

(MORE: Read more of Yang’s research in the ECS Digital Library.)

“In our latest study, we combined the highly efficient light harvesting of an inorganic semiconductor with the high specificity, low cost, and self-replication and self-repair of a biocatalyst,” Yang says. “By inducing the self-photosensitization of M. thermoacetica with cadmium sulfide nanoparticles, we enabled the photosynthesis of acetic acid from carbon dioxide over several days of light-dark cycles at relatively high quantum yields, demonstrating a self-replicating route toward solar-to-chemical carbon dioxide reduction.”

In order to improve upon existing technology, researchers typically take a deeper look into current generation models to get a deeper understanding of everything that is happening on the small-scale. Answering questions as to why something happens or when it happens could allow researchers to make current technology more efficient.

One of the things that researchers have been working to more fully understand for some time now is that of a chemical reaction. For the first time ever, researchers from MIT have observed the exact moment when a chemical reaction occurs between two substances. From this, the researchers were able to measure the energy of the transition state—something that was previously thought impossible due to the complexity of chemical reactions.

“Your reactants and products are stable valleys on either side of a mountain range, and the transition state is the pass,” said Josh Baraban, lead author of the study. “It’s the most convenient way to get from one to the other. Because it only exists as you go from as one thing to another, it’s never really been thought of as something that you can easily study directly.”

This from IFL Science:

The team studied a chemical process called isomerization. In this reaction, one molecule is transformed into another molecule that has the same atoms but they are arranged in a different way. The researchers looked at acetylene, a molecule formed by two carbon atoms bound to each other, and each bound to a hydrogen atom.

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Bill Gates—tech mogul, business magnate, and philanthropist for all things good—recently spoke to CNN about the newest technology he believes could transform the world’s energy infrastructure: solar fuels.

Solar fuels have the ability to address energy storage intermittency issues, which is currently one of the biggest challenges in sustainable energy technology according to Gates.

Nate Lewis, ECS member since 1982, is one of the leading scientists at the forefront of solar fuel research. Taking inspiration from nature, Lewis and his team aspire to mimic the naturally occurring process of photosynthesis but with higher efficiency levels. Through taking the energy of the sun and storing it in chemical fuels, Lewis and other researchers in the field are propelling the vision of a clean, efficient, and affordable future of energy.

The Illinois Institute of Technology is one of ECS’s newest student chapters, and they held their first event on November 23, 2015. They received an excellent attendance rate of nearly one hundred students in addition to IIT faculty members and faculty from other near by institutions.  This event included the director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS), Dr. Jeffrey Chamberlain, who is also the deputy director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR). Dr. Chamberlain hosted a lecture that included information and a detailed analysis on the innovation of battery technologies.

Following the lecture, a Q&A session was held, which gave the students and faculty in attendance the opportunity to address questions produced from Dr. Chamberlain’s lecture. These questions included the topics of environmental issues, the life cycle of lithium ion batteries, development of lithium-air batteries and even government policy and funding. The formal lecture and Q&A session was followed with refreshments and continued discussion. The IIT student chapter is extremely grateful to Dr. Chamberlain for taking the time out of his very busy schedule to come and interact with the chapter at their first event.

Congratulations, IIT Student Chapter on a very successful kick-off event!

When examining climate change and energy conservation, minds often tend toward large-scale grid technologies. While solar technologies and energy storage systems are big end goals, researcher from Iowa State University state that there are intermittent steps that should be considered.

“Many people consider energy efficiency to be the low-hanging fruit,” says Yu Wang, who studies global energy policy and energy efficiency at Iowa State University. “If you’re facing the target of trying to mitigate climate change, energy efficiency should be the first choice because it’s cheap and easy in comparison with other options.”

Importance of Energy Conservation

For Wang and others, replacing old incandescent bulbs with LED lighting is an important step in energy conservation. While it may seem like a move this small would have no impact on the overall energy consumption of the country, Wang and other researchers estimate the swap could yield an electrical savings of 10.2 percent by 2035.

Another step toward a more energy efficiency society deals with policy at all levels.

“In general [the future of renewable energy] is really up to the politicians to change the energy infrastructure,” says John A. Turner, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “We have pretty much all the technologies we need. We certainly need to be able to upscale them and get things cheaper, but the issue is how do you replace an essentially established infrastructure with a new one? You need political support.”

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The Earth is getting warmer and greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise. With carbon dioxide levels at their highest in 650,000 years, scientists across the global are grappling with the question of how to stop global warming.

For many, alternative energy sources are the answer. While the implementation of this technology is crucial for the development of a carbon-free society, flipping the grid is easier said than done. The U.S. alone is highly dependent on fossil fuels, which emit high level of greenhouse gases. Additionally, transitioning the grid to 100 percent renewables would not fully solve the issue. Emissions will still exist in the atmosphere, with warming happening right now.

“When people emerge from poverty and move toward prosperity, they consume more energy,” said Adam Heller in a recent plenary lecture.

The Need for a Solution

Currently, 13 percent of carbon dioxide emissions stem from two industries: steel and cement. According to Heller, these industry are directly correlated to global wealth—what he deems the driving force of acceleration in climate change. To put that in perspective, the solar energy technology that is currently in place in the U.S. saves only 0.3 percent through the use of solar energy, according to Heller. With carbon dioxide emissions constantly accelerating, increasing by 2 percent every year, scientists are looking for solutions to this pressing issue.

“This will lead to a catastrophe,” Heller said. “The question is, what do we do about this catastrophe?”

For Heller and other scientists, part of the answer lies in solar geoengineering (SGE).

“We need to learn something about geoengineering,” Heller said. “We need to learn something about reflecting light from the sun through aerosols in the atmosphere.”

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In light of U.N. Climate Talks in Paris and the crippling air pollution levels in China, Bill Nye continuing the good fight against climate change with his latest pitch for a solution against the catastrophic force.

His possible solution? Bubbles.

Through a simple experiment, Nye explores the possibility of purposely inducing bubbles to potentially help satisfy water and sanitation demands as well as reflect light into space—helping control the global temperature.

In the full interview with Yahoo! News Live, Nye also discusses a carbon fee, the real threats of climate change, and “climate deniers.” Check out the full video.

PS: Check out what ECS scientists are doing to address climate change!

With energy demands increasing every day, researchers are looking toward the next generation of energy storage technology. While society has depended on the lithium ion battery for these needs for some time, the rarity and expense of the materials needed to produce the battery is beginning to conflict with large-scale storage needs.

To combat this issue, a French team comprised of researchers primarily from CNRS and CEA is making gains in the field of electrochemical energy storage with their new development of an alternative technology for lithium ion batteries in specific sectors.

Beyond Lithium

Instead of the rare and expensive lithium, these researchers are focusing on the use of sodium ions—a more cost efficient and abundant materials. With efficiently levels comparable to that of lithium, many commercial sectors are showing an increasing interest for sodium’s potential in storing renewable energy.

While this development takes the use of sodium to a new level, the idea has been around since the 1980s. However, sodium never took off as the primary battery building material due to low energy densities and short life cycles. It was then that researchers chose to power electronics with lithium for higher efficiency levels.

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