Battery Manufactory

When it is cold in winter, cars tend to have starting problems. This is not much better with electric cars, which inevitably lose capacity of their rechargeable lithium-ion batteries at freezing temperatures. Now, Chinese scientists have offered a strategy to avoid plunging battery kinetics. In a study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they designed a battery system with a cold-enduring hard-carbon anode and a powerful lithium-rich cathode, with the important initial lithiation step integrated. "Non-graphitizable" or "hard" carbon is a promising, low-cost anode material in battery technology. Even at low temperatures, it exhibits fast intercalation kinetics of lithium ions. During charging/discharging of a battery cell, lithium ions migrate from the cathode through an electrolyte to the anode and vice versa. If the anodic material, which is often graphite, contains prestored lithium, the volume change by the incoming lithium ions is...

PR blasts about supposed innovation in battery design pour into ET’s mailbox like water into the Titanic, but a recent story about an MIT grad who founded a battery company is worth paying attention to. Qichao Hu is the CEO of SolidEnergy, a company that’s been working to improve lithium-ion energy density for the past five years. The problem with lithium-ion is that whether you measure by energy per kilogram or energy per unit weight,   Li-ion batteries   aren’t very good. The graph below also illustrates why fossil fuels are so difficult to replace. It’s not just because they pack a relatively high amount of energy — though they do — but because fuels like ethanol, kerosene, gasoline, and diesel are stable at room temperature and pressure (even if you need to keep a lid on them) and don’t require specialized storage or pumping procedures. Lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile, are the tiny dot at the bottom-left side of the graph. Anything that can bump them up...

Apple has always taken software optimization and user experience seriously on iOS, but it keeps technical details quiet. It’s a hassle even to find out at what frequency Apple’s custom CPU cores run. It looks like Apple’s commitment to delivering “the best experience to customers” has taken a rather ridiculous turn. The company now admits that recent reports about throttling the CPU speed on older iPhones are true. If your iPhone feels slower, that might be thanks to Apple and its desire to offer you “the best experience.” This controversy began percolating on the internet about a year ago, when iOS 10.2.1 rolled out to phones. Some owners of the iPhone 6 and 6s noticed their phones became noticeably sluggish after the update, but it wasn’t until the last few weeks that a “fix” was discovered. It turned out replacing the battery would alleviate the slowdowns. Benchmarking firm Geekbench decided to look into the claims, eventually finding very strong evidence iOS 10.2...

There’s a lot of research going on around battery technology as devices as diverse as smartphones and cars are increasingly held back by limited energy storage. Naturally, we report on interesting advancements in batteries frequently. There are lithium-air batteries, aluminum-graphite batteries, and even bacterial batteries. Rarely do we have to dredge up one of those old posts to talk about the next step toward commercialization because there isn’t one. Most battery technologies fade away before they reach the point any of us will benefit from them. As MIT Technology Review points out, there are a variety of reason for this, but it often comes down to a lack of funding and focus. There are uncountable companies attempting to develop more compact battery technologies — the US government’s ARPA-E department tracks over 75 of them. Some of them even have compelling technologies that show strong results in a laboratory setting. When you improve one aspect of tradit...

With the EV market about to explode and the European Union planning a battery-making consortium to bring the continent onto the global EV battery scene, Stanford researchers released a paper claiming their sodium battery could compete with the lithium-ion market leader. New battery development has been fairly slow against the backdrop of the projected electric car market size, and so far no innovation has proved to be as economical as lithium-ion. The Stanford battery uses sodium—a cheaper, more abundant material than lithium—and is still in the development stages. Sodium makes up the Stanford battery’s cathode, and the anode is made from phosphorus, with the addition of a compound called myo-inositol, which can be derived from rice bran or corn. According to the researchers, this chemical combination yields efficiency rates comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries at a lower cost—a much lower cost. But there’s always a but. First, even the leader of the S...

Lithium-ion battery characteristics A. High energy density The weight of lithium-ion battery is the same Capacity of nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride batteries half, the volume is 40-50% of nickel-cadmium, nickel-hydrogen of 20-30%. B. High voltage A lithium-ion cell operating voltage of 3.7V (average), equivalent to three series of nickel-cadmium or nickel metal hydride batteries. C. No pollution Lithium-ion batteries do not contain harmful metals such as cadmium, lead and mercury. D. Does not contain metallic lithium Lithium-ion batteries contain no metallic lithium and are therefore not subject to the restrictions imposed by aircraft transport on the prohibition of carrying lithium batteries in passenger aircraft. E. Cycle life is high Under normal conditions, lithium-ion battery charge-discharge cycle can be more than 500 times. F. No memory effect The memory effect refers to the phenomenon that the capacity of the battery is reduced during the...

1. Definition of Lithium battery Definition: Lithium-ion battery is the use of lithium compounds as a positive electrode, graphite as a negative electrode, the positive and negative electrodes separated by electrolyte, through the conversion of electrical energy and chemical energy storage and release of electrical energy to achieve the role of the device. 2. Lithium battery classification 1) According to the battery positive chemical composition       Lithium manganate cylindrical battery (LiMn2O4)       Lithium cobalt oxide cylindrical battery (LiCoO2)       Lithium iron phosphate cylindrical battery (LiFePO4)       Ternary battery (Li-Co-Mn-Ni-O) 2) According to the battery discharge rate classification Magnified battery (power cell) Capacity battery (energy battery energy cell) 3 lithium battery applications 1) Portable communication devices: cell ph...