The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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In a move to fund research and build alliances across America's lithium battery supply chain, the U.S. Department of Energy is providing $209 million for 26 new national laboratory research projects focused on electric vehicles and the next generation of advanced batteries that will power them. "President Biden's administration wants to make it easier for millions of American families and businesses to make the switch to electric vehicles," said Secretary of Energy Jennifer...
For years, researchers have sought a viable method for making the common zinc alkaline battery rechargeable. Now, a team of international researchers has developed a technique for doing just that. Prolonged research led the scientists to develop a new electrode design that is set to enable the rechargeability of alkaline zinc, one of the most common types of non-rechargeable batteries used in our daily lives. The technique also sheds light on a potentially wider application of...
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed something many of the most extreme temperate locations in the world have long been waiting for, batteries that perform well in freezing cold and scorching hot weather while maintaining high capacity. Described in a paper published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," UC San Diego researchers were able to accomplish the feat of weatherized batteries by developing an electrolyte that is not only...
With lithium quadrupling in price over the past year, it's a great time to own this mineral, and the good times extend to Canada-based Li-Cycle Holdings Corp., which recycles metals from electronic waste – including nickel, copper and cobalt, but especially the lithium in consumer and electric vehicle batteries. In recognition for its incredible growth and potential, Corporate Knights has selected Li-Cycle as one of Canada's fastest-growing sustainable companies. "We are t...
Lithium-ion battery recycling company Li-Cycle Holdings Corp. has entered into a strategic partnership with Glencore plc, with an initial investment of $200 million toward improving the electric vehicle supply chain. "We are thrilled to have Glencore as a long-term strategic investor and global commercial partner," said Li-Cycle CEO Ajay Kochhar. "Bringing our complementary capabilities together will accelerate the path to a circular economy for critical materials in the...
A leading innovator in metals recycling, Aqua Metals Inc. has achieved a new milestone in proving its recycling technology by plating high-purity nickel metal, one atom at a time, from black mass recovered from a variety of lithium-ion batteries. "The only Li-battery recycling method commercially in use today is smelting, which produces an alloy of the metals that needs multiple pyrometallurgical steps of processing to achieve the product we produce right out of our system," s...
Two research teams, one in the United States and the other in Australia – working on separate projects to improve lithium batteries – have reported significant breakthroughs recently that could make lithium-sulfur batteries a viable option. As interest grows in harnessing green, emissions-free electricity to power everything from personal devices like smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles for consumers and industry, lithium batteries are becoming an important sto...
Two brothers in a Rice University laboratory noticed a fascinating result during the production of the miracle material graphene that could potentially change the way it is manufactured – by listening to the sound it makes. The brothers, John Li, a Rice alumnus now studying at Stanford University, and Victor Li, then a high school student in New York and now a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are co-lead authors of a paper that describes real-time a...
Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that can be woven into fabrics and even washed. This latest innovation could enable a wide variety of wearable electronic devices and might even be used to make 3D-printed batteries in virtually any shape. The team envisions new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary...
Researchers at the University of Sydney have been working toward a new method of telecommunications with a safe and cost-effective technology that could be a wireless internet game-changer for connecting mines, with an industrial long-range Wi-Fi system that transmits signals to hard-to-reach places while maintaining high data rates. Supported by an AUD$800,000 grant from the NSW Physical Sciences Fund, this Wi-Fi system that can send signals several kilometers underground is...
An up to 18-million-pound (US$24 million) investment by global critical metals firm TechMet Ltd. is allowing Cornish Lithium Ltd. to accelerate its mission to provide domestic supplies of lithium and other battery metals from its projects in the United Kingdom's historic Cornwall mining region. "Cornish Lithium has reached an inflexion point in the company's development where larger scale investment is required," said Cornish Lithium CEO Jeremy Wrathall. "This funding...
A team of researchers at the University of Exeter, Minviro, the British Geological Survey, and the Circular Economy Solutions Unit has recently determined the benefits of utilizing a life cycle assessment (LCA) or "cradle to grave" evaluation in the ongoing endeavor to facilitate and improve green mining techniques. Generally used to assess the environmental impacts associated with the life cycle of commercial products, from extraction to the use and disposal of said...
The University of Adelaide July 9 announced its launch of the Australian Research Council Training Centre for Integrated Operations for Complex Resources at its Institute for Mineral Energy Resources, designed to bring together resources and expertise from 20 partners to create the next generation of scientists and engineers. The center has been developed to bring together end-users, translation partners, and researchers to drive productivity in mining; as well as grow...
Driven largely by the increased production of electric vehicles, the demand for lithium has more than doubled since 2015 and is forecast to expand by another seven times to around 2.8 million metric tons per year by 2030. Predicting this soaring demand will exhaust land-based lithium reserves by 2080, researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology in Saudi Arabia have developed a system that has the potential to economically extract high-purity lithium...
While lithium-ion batteries have a major head start when it comes to the storage of renewable electricity, European analysts predict that flow batteries may overtake the stationary power storage market within a decade, and investments by the Biden administration could help make these forecasts a reality. Vanadium redox flow batteries – variably called flow batteries or vanadium redox batteries – are the most common and technologically advanced of the flow batteries. Tak...
Adding an extra layer of tomato on a metaphoric BLT could be the solution to a decades-long problem that has prevented scientists from developing the solid-state lithium batteries that would significantly increase the range and lessen the charging time of electric vehicles. For roughly 40 years, researchers have tried to harness the potential of solid-state, lithium-metal batteries, which hold substantially more energy in the same volume and charge in a fraction of the time...
While it is still several years before any significant quantities of the Ultium batteries going into the next generation of General Motors electric vehicles will reach the end of their lifecycle, the automaker is already establishing lithium-ion battery recycling capabilities at its Ultium battery cell manufacturing mega-factory in Lordstown, Ohio. To establish this capacity, Ultium Cells LLC, a joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solution, has entered into a multi-year con...
TechMet Ltd. continues to build strong financial support for its vision of building a portfolio of world-class projects that produce, process, and recycle technology metals critical to electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and energy storage. "TechMet's mission is to build ethical, independent, and environmentally sound supply chains for the metals that are needed to ensure the success of this 21st-century clean energy and EV revolution," said TechMet Chairman and CEO...
Diamonds are well known as the hardest minerals on earth. The sparkling gemstones also are exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, an international team of researchers says diamonds have yet another distinction – they can exhibit the properties of metals. The discovery, first reported Oct. 5 in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," could write a new chapter in the saga of diamonds used in sophisticated technological and industrial a...
A week after President Donald Trump declared America's heavy reliance on adversarial nations for critical minerals a national emergency, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation invested US$25 million towards development of the Piauí nickel-cobalt mine project in northeastern Brazil. This investment is expected to fund further developments that will help create jobs in one of the poorest regions of Brazil while providing a new source of battery metals vital to...
Nobel Prize winning co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery John Goodenough is teaming up with a new generation of scientists and entrepreneurs at Energy Exploration Technologies, or EnergyX, to make the next world changing battery storage discovery – solid-state lithium-ion batteries. From untethering our phones, computers, and power tools, to ushering in the era of renewable energy and electric vehicles, the rechargeable batteries pioneered by Goodenough and his colleagues h...
The ability to charge an electric vehicle in just 15 seconds would wipe out many of the barriers to EV ownership – slow charging times, battery degradation, and range anxiety. Skeleton Technologies, a global leader in graphene-based ultracapacitor energy storage, believes it is on the verge of such an ultra-fast charging battery breakthrough and has partnered with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to complete the development of SuperBattery, a graphene b...
A hardener of the steels that have been helping to make Fords tough for more than a century and an element with unique properties that make it the key ingredient in enormous batteries to store intermittent wind- and solar-generated electricity, vanadium is a critical metal with many valences. It is vanadium's chemical valences that make this alloying metal an ideal ingredient in the redox flow batteries that scientists and governments see as the ideal large-scale storage...
Reminiscent of America's gilded age, the world is priming itself for a new era of technology and energy centered on the electricity that sparked the imaginations of visionaries such as Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. This new era, however, sets aside more than a century of burning fossil fuels in favor of new clean sources of the electricity that will power human innovation into the 21st century and beyond. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal are but a few of the methods...
Graphene manufacturer and producer of graphene-based batteries Nanotech Energy Inc. reported Aug. 10 it had raised $64 million in funding to be used toward the development of a high-volume graphene manufacturing facility in Reno, Nevada, as well as a potential new headquarters in Amsterdam. Founded in 2015, Nanotech has been researching and developing scalable graphene production and graphene batteries for many years, holding one of the earliest patents for the 2D material...
