Potatoes are great in many forms: mashed, baked, roasted, electrochemical energy source… Most people have seen or experienced the potato battery experiment in a chemistry class, but BatteryBox is taking this exercise to a whole new level.
As you know, one or two potatoes produce enough energy to power a small digital clock. But how much energy would 110 pound of potatoes produce? Enough to charge a smartphone?
For this experiment, the team at BatteryBox cut up and boiled the potatoes to increase the energy transfer. This allows for the harnessing of the full power of the potato.
Essentially, the team combined the 110 pounds of potatoes to create a galvanic cell.
PS: Check out some more practical applications of electrochemical energy at the 228th ECS Meeting.
The batteries have the ability to be integrated into the surface of the objects, making it seem like seem like there is no battery at all.
A new development out of the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has yielded a new technique that could make it possible to print batteries on any surface.
With recent interests in flexible electronics—such as bendable screen displays—researchers globally have been investing research efforts into developing printable functional materials for both electronic and energy applications. With this, many researchers predict the future of the li-ion battery as one with far less size and shape restrictions, having the ability to be printed in its entirety anywhere.
The research team from UNIST, led by ECS member Sang-Young Lee, is setting that prediction on the track to reality. Their new paper published in the journal Nano Lettersdetails the printable li-ion battery that can exist on almost any surface.
Lithium-air batteries are—in theory—an extremely attractive alternative for affordable, efficient energy storage for electric vehicles. However, as researchers explore this technology, they are met with many critical challenges. If researchers can overcome these challenges, there is a great likelihood that the lithium-air battery will surpass the energy density of today’s lithium-ion battery.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkley feel like they may have part of the answer to this critical challenge, which could propel the practicality of the lithium-air battery. The team, which included researchers from Bryan McCloskey and Venkat Viswanathan‘s laboratories, has found a way to both increase the capacity while preserving the recharge ability of the lithium-air battery by blending different types within the battery’s electrolytes.
“The electrolytes used in batteries are just like Gatorade electrolytes,” says Venkat Viswanathan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Every electrolyte has a solvent and a salt. So if you take Gatorade, the solvent would be water and the salt would be something like sodium chloride, for instance. However, in a lithium air battery, the solvent is dimethoxyethane and the salt is something like lithium hexafluorophosphate.”
Printing technologies in an atmospheric environment offer the potential for low-cost and materials-efficient alternatives for manufacturing electronics and energy devices such as luminescent displays, thin-film transistors, sensors, thin-film photovoltaics, fuel cells, capacitors, and batteries. Significant progress has been made in the area of printable functional organic and inorganic materials including conductors, semiconductors, and dielectric and luminescent materials.
These new printable functional materials have and will continue to enable exciting advances in printed electronics and energy devices. Some examples are printed amorphous oxide semiconductors, organic conductors and semiconductors, inorganic semiconductor nanomaterials, silicon, chalcogenide semiconductors, ceramics, metals, intercalation compounds, and carbon-based materials.
A special focus issue of the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology was created about the publication of state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to printable functional materials and device. This focus issue, consisting of a total of 15 papers, includes both invited and contributed papers reflecting recent achievements in printable functional materials and devices.
The topics of these papers span several key ECS technical areas, including batteries, sensors, fuel cells, carbon nanostructures and devices, electronic and photonic devices, and display materials, devices, and processing. The overall collection of this focus issue covers an impressive scope from fundamental science and engineering of printing process, ink chemistry and ink conversion processes, printed devices, and characterizations to the future outlook for printable functional materials and devices.
The video below demonstrates Printed Metal Oxide Thin-Film Transistors by J. Gorecki, K. Eyerly, C.-H. Choi, and C.-H. Chang, School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, Oregon State University.
Researchers believe that as work continues in relation to this study, battery technology will accelerate forward. Image: Stony Brook University
A collaborative group of six researchers from Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory are using pioneering x-ray techniques to build a better and more efficient battery.
The researchers—four of whom are active ECS members, including Esther Takeuchi, Kenneth Takeuchi, Amy Marschilok, and Kevin Kirshenbaum—have recently published their internal mapping of atomic transformations of the highly conductive silver matrix formation within lithium-based batteries in the journal Science.
(PS: You can find more of these scientists’ cutting-edge research by attending the 228th ECS Meeting in Phoenix, where they will be giving presentations. Also, Esther Takeuchi will be giving a talk at this years Electrochemical Energy Summit.)
This from Stony Brook University:
In a promising lithium-based battery, the formation of a silver matrix transforms a material otherwise plagued by low conductivity. To optimize these multi-metallic batteries—and enhance the flow of electricity—scientists need a way to see where, when, and how these silver, nanoscale “bridges” emerge. In the research paper, the Stony Brook and Brookhaven Lab team successfully mapped this changing atomic architecture and revealed its link to the battery’s rate of discharge. The study shows that a slow discharge rate early in the battery’s life creates a more uniform and expansive conductive network, suggesting new design approaches and optimization techniques.
The new structure has high mobility of Na+ ions and a robust framework. Image: Nature Communications
With the demand for hand-held electronics at an all-time high, the costs of the materials used to make them are also rising. That includes materials used to make lithium batteries, which is a cause for concern when projecting the development of large-scale grid storage.
In order to find an alternative solution to the high material costs connected with lithium batteries, the researchers at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing have begun focusing their attention on sodium-ion batteries.
The science around sodium-ion batteries dates back to the 1980s, but the technology never took off due to resulting low energy densities and short life cycles.
However, the new research looks to combat those issues by improving the properties of a class of electrode materials by manipulating their electron structure in the sodium-ion battery.
“My nature is curiosity and The Electrochemical Society has gone a long way to satisfy my curiosity…” — A. Salkind
About two years ago, ECS began a conversation with Prof. Salkind about his proposal for a revised edition of Alkaline Storage Batteries. In the proposal we presented to John A. Wiley & Sons (our partner in publishing monographs), I said it was from “one of the ECS ‘giants’.”
That was quite true about Dr. Salkind. When I first met him (and ever after), I was engaged by his tremendous intellect, his wide-ranging curiosity, and his still being very much involved with his science.
Prof. Salkind was an emeritus member of ECS, having joined in 1952 as a student. He served the Society very well — as a Chair of our Battery Division and on an innovative committee called the New Technology Subcommittee. He became an ECS Fellow only in 2014, but over the course of his many years of involvement with ECS, he organized symposia, edited proceedings volumes, and chaired many committees.
Cover of the Alkaline Storage Batteries book from 1969
In conjunction with developing a new edition of the Alkaline Storage Batteries book, Prof. Salkind began visiting ECS headquarters. We were immediately drawn in by his still-vibrant enthusiasm for the field and his fascinating anecdotes about other ECS notables in the field: Vladimir Bagotsky, Ernest Yeager, and Vittorio de Nora, among others. He was always willing to teach and to share. We were very fortunate to be able to “capture” Prof. Salkind in a very recent interview at the HQ office.
Professor Salkind generously considered ECS his technological home and brought his important monograph to be published by ECS. ECS is grateful to Dr. Salkind for his years of service to the Society and his contributions to the entire battery community; and we thank his family for supporting this remarkable person and sharing him with ECS.
PNNL scientist Jian Zhi Hu shows a tiny experimental battery mounted in NMR apparatus. Image: PNNL
While working on a unique lithium-germanide battery, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers knew something was happening inside the battery to dramatically increase its energy storage capacity, but they couldn’t see it. With no way to analyze the reaction occurring, the researchers could not understand the process. In order to solve the problem, the researchers developed a novel nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique to allow insight and understanding of the electrochemical reactions taking place in the battery. Essentially, they have developed an NMR “camera.”
In the end, this leaves the scientists with not only a novel lithium-germanide battery with a distinctly high energy density, but also an NMR device that can be used to examine reactions as they happen inside the battery.
This from PNNL:
By using the NMR process to look inside the battery and observe this reaction as it happened, the scientists found a way to protect the germanium from expanding and becoming ineffective after it takes on lithium. The secret proved to be forming the germanium into tiny “wires” and encasing them in small, protective carbon tubes to limit the expansion. This technique significantly stabilizes battery performance. Without embedding germanium in carbon tubes, a battery performs well for a few charging-discharging cycles, but fades rapidly after that. Using the “core-shell” structure, however, the battery can be discharged and charged thousands of times.
Recently, scientists have been looking at the Japanese paper-folding art of origami as inspiration for novel flexible energy-storage technologies. While there have been breakthroughs in battery flexibility, there has yet to be a successful development of stretchable batteries. Now, researchers from Arizona State University have unveiled a way to make batteries stretch, yielding big potential outcomes for wearable electronics.
The Arizona State University research team includes ECS member and advisor of the ECS Valley of the Sun student chapter, Candace K. Chan. Chan and the rest of the team were inspired by a variation of origami called kirigami when developing this new generation of lithium-ion batteries.
According to the researchers, the new battery can be stretched more than 150 percent of its original size and still maintain full functionality.
Printing technologies in an atmospheric environment offer the potential for low-cost and materials-efficient alternatives for manufacturing electronics and energy devices such as luminescent displays, thin-film transistors, sensors, thin-film photovoltaics, fuel cells, capacitors, and batteries. Significant progress has been made in the area of printable functional organic and inorganic materials including conductors, semiconductors, and dielectric and luminescent materials.
These new printable functional materials have and will continue to enable exciting advances in printed electronics and energy devices. Some examples are printed amorphous oxide semiconductors, organic conductors and semiconductors, inorganic semiconductor nanomaterials, silicon, chalcogenide semiconductors, ceramics, metals, intercalation compounds, and carbon-based materials.
A special focus issue of the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology was created about the publication of state-of-the-art efforts that address a variety of approaches to printable functional materials and device. This focus issue, consisting of a total of 15 papers, includes both invited and contributed papers reflecting recent achievements in printable functional materials and devices.
The topics of these papers span several key ECS technical areas, including batteries, sensors, fuel cells, carbon nanostructures and devices, electronic and photonic devices, and display materials, devices, and processing. The overall collection of this focus issue covers an impressive scope from fundamental science and engineering of printing process, ink chemistry and ink conversion processes, printed devices, and characterizations to the future outlook for printable functional materials and devices.
The video below show demonstrates Inkjet Printed Conductive Tracks for Printed Electronic conducted by S.-P. Chen, H.-L. Chiu, P.-H. Wang, and Y.-C. Liao, Department of Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1 Sec. 4 Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
Step-by-step explanation of the video:
For printed electronic devices, metal thin film patterns with great conductivities are required. Three major ways to produce inkjet-printed metal tracks will be shown in this video.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
