• US Dept of Energy wants 5x bigger, 5x cheaper batteries within 5 years - launches $120m 'Manhattan P
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[url]http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/energy-department-launches-battery-hub-for-battery-manhattan-project.php[/url] [quote=TPM]Think of it as a Manhattan Project, except instead of secret nuclear bombs, the end result is much better batteries for devices, electric vehicles and the power grid. That’s at least one of the analogies used by the U.S. Department of Energy on Friday when it announced the launch of a new advanced research “Battery Hub,” to the tune of a $120 million, five-year government grant. The Battery Hub, as most of those involved refer to it — officially named the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR, pronounced “J Cesar”) — will be led by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois (outside Chicago), and will include top researchers from a wide swath of some of the most prestigious institutions around the country, among them Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and other universities throughout the state and the Midwest. “We wanted to have an aspirational and ambitious, but concrete, goal,” said Jeff Chamberlain, an Argonne chemist and the Battery Hub’s deputy director. “That goes back to Bell Labs and the Apollo Mission and the Manhattan Project. We set the goal as high as we possibly could.” Check out the following video from Argonne introducing the Battery Hub: [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf9g-Vu26Zo[/media] Specifically, Argonne wants the Battery Hub to be able to make a battery with five times the energy storage capacity as the upper limit of current technologies, at one-fifth the cost, within five years, the so-called “5-5-5” plan. “This is an extremely difficult bill to achieve,” Chamberlain emphasized. “We recognize that.” But Chamberlain was confident that the Hub had assembled all of the right institutions and the right people to make the best possible attempt at attaining such a technological breakthrough in such a tight time frame. Key to this is the fact that the Battery Hub isn’t conducting open-ended research for purely exploratory purposes — rather, the roughly 120 full-time equivalent scientists and engineers involved are working with performance standards that will allocate the Energy Department’s funding toward those projects that demonstrate success, while “de-emphasizing” in Chamberlain’s words, those technologies that don’t produce rapid or demonstrable progress. “The question is: How do we drive toward development of these technologies so that scientists have the freedom to explore and discover but do so toward a specific goal?” Chamberlain asked rhetorically. “And the answer is through performance-based standards.” Indeed, even getting the $120 million grant was based on a competitive process: The Energy Department selected Argonne’s proposal among several other candidates. Argonne’s, and thus the Hub’s focus, is on three specific types of new battery technologies: Multivalent battery systems, chemical transformation of battery reactions, and “flow batteries.” Multivalent battery systems are those that use a different primary material than the common lithium found in lithium ion batteries to carry a charge. Although lithium can only transport one electron in every interaction, other materials, such as magnesium and aluminum, can transport two or three, respectively, dramatically increasing the energy density of the battery. The challenge is that these materials are reactive — in the case of aluminum metal anodes, even explosive — and so no practical commercial batteries have yet been developed from them. Meanwhile, another route that the Battery Hub will be pursuing is employing a completely different way of deriving energy from a battery. Instead of using intercalation — sandwiching molecules between each other in the batteries’ electrodes, this method would rely on “extracting energy through creation and destruction of chemical bonds,” as Chamberlain explained it to TPM. This, too, hasn’t yet been achieved on any significantly stable scale. But while those two methods would be the best ways to optimize electric vehicle batteries or device batteries, Argonne is also pursuing the concept of batteries that could link into the power grid and better support the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, which aren’t always available per weather conditions. Flow batteries separate the components of a battery cell into separate tanks, making them unattractive options for mobile power sources. Argonne notably did not include a target goal for improving the commonly used lithium-ion battery found in most electronics around the globe, from smartphones to tablets to laptops, because, as Chamberlain explained, there is already much work being done in this space by other capable teams, including other researchers at Argonne, and the Battery Hub wants to develop a more futuristic successor to that technology. “We explicitly left lithium ion out of the proposal, there’s a lot of good work going around on lithium ion right now,” Chamberlain explained. “The innovation channel is already filled with lithium ion projects, and we think many will succeed. What’s missing is the front end, what’s next after lithium ion. That’s what we’ve set up with our objectives.” Aside from the academic and government labs involved, the Battery Hub also includes partners from the private sector: Dow Chemical Company, Applied Materials, Inc, Johnson Controls, Inc., and Clean Energy Trust, each of which has made an agreement to support 20 percent of the cost of the specific projects they’re involved in with the Hub, or “skin in the game,” as Chamberlain put it. Ultimately, Chamberlain said that scientists want the center to not only produce new technologies, but new products, jobs and whole spin-off companies. The Hub even has a whole intellectual property pool designed to deal with the patented technologies that it expects to come out of its work. Still, Chamberlain noted that the center’s $120 million grant over five years is subject to continued appropriations from the Energy Department, and thus Congress, which must renew the budget every year, though the state of Illinois has also committed to some $5 million upfront to build a new headquarters for the center at Argonne’s campus, and another $30 million down the road, all on top the federal funding.[/quote]
Holy ambitious batman
Well, you know how the saying goes: "Necessity is the mother of invention." Should be exciting to see how this turns out.
Well I'm exited because I've always wanted to get a Telsa S. Which uses thousands small AA like fuel cells.
I hope they charge 5 times as fast too
120 million is a fuckton but isn't it a bit too small of a prize for such an ambitious undertaking?
'Manhattan' project, eh? [img_thumb]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090109150531/watchmen/images/2/2b/Doctor_Manhattan_(Movie).jpg[/img_thumb] Let's just hope that it ends up being used for energy and not [sp]nuking the shit out of everything[/sp]
Neat. And even if it doesn't work out to their exact goals, we're still bound to get some shiny progress out of it
Incoming lawsuit from dominoes for using their 555 deal.
the result is a fission/fussion/buzzword battery and then we have energy weapons and hovercars
Extremely efficient batteries with a massive number of charge/discharge cycles would be excellent for the power grid. It would make wind and solar power much more effective.
[quote]Specifically, Argonne wants the Battery Hub to be able to make a battery with five times the energy storage capacity as the upper limit of current technologies, at one-fifth the cost, within five years, the so-called[b] “5-5-5” plan.[/b][/quote] Communist Obongo is at it again with those five-year-plans!!!!
This is actually a good project. Battery technology right now is really inefficient compared to everything else we've advanced in.
Hmm. I remember reading about how it's almost impossible to innovate/come up with better batteries due to all sorts of shenanigans involved. Maybe that was wrong and we can get something awesome out of it.
Make micro arc reactors
[QUOTE=Zakkin;38666805]'Manhattan' project, eh? [img_thumb]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090109150531/watchmen/images/2/2b/Doctor_Manhattan_(Movie).jpg[/img_thumb] Let's just hope that it ends up being used for energy and not [sp]nuking the shit out of everything[/sp][/QUOTE] I love it when people read the article
I want ultracapacitor tech to improve, higher capacitance, and the battery problem would be pretty much solved. You could have a mass driver powered by an ultracapacitor bank, that would charge fast enough to launch several payloads into orbit an hour. There's a screwdriver on the market that has an ultracap instead of a battery, it works for 60 seconds, and recharges in 2 minutes.
Only $120mn? If it was me I'd be spending $120bn.
[quote]the end result is much better batteries for devices, [B]electric vehicles[/B] and the power grid.[/quote] This is good. The main problem with electric cars (other than the fact that most of them look retarded) is that they're more of a novelty than a practicality. The lack of any sufficient power storage means they really aren't as effective as they could be. Hopefully new developments via this project will mean much better range and efficiency, and make them a more plausible alternative. Also maybe my phone won't be almost dead by the time I get home anymore.
And then, out of nowhere, batteries that are 5x bigger and cheaper, and also double as small nuclear bombs. Huh, why does that remind me of Fallout and it's nuclear energy powered vehicles?
The leader of Dept of Energy probably just has some teenage son at home who won't shut the fuck up so the dad got the world's scientists together to create a longer lasting battery for his xbox controller.
[QUOTE=Fatfatfatty;38666650]I hope they charge 5 times as fast too[/QUOTE] I don't think that's doable, since the amount of power a given power line can supply is constant. You can make a bigger bucket, but you can't make it fill faster from your sink unless you change the sink itself.
[QUOTE=Zakkin;38666805]'Manhattan' project, eh? [img_thumb]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090109150531/watchmen/images/2/2b/Doctor_Manhattan_(Movie).jpg[/img_thumb] Let's just hope that it ends up being used for energy and not [sp]nuking the shit out of everything[/sp][/QUOTE] [IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Little_boy.jpg/300px-Little_boy.jpg[/IMG]?
I hope what they come up with is a bit safer than LiPo batteries [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixIOEPnsgbI[/media]
[QUOTE=Cmx;38668977]I hope what they come up with is a bit safer than LiPo batteries [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixIOEPnsgbI[/media][/QUOTE] I'd be reluctant to declare anything unsafe based on a video of someone intentionally destroying it. You can find videos of people microwaving metal objects and destroying their microwaves. Ban microwaves?
[QUOTE=Cmx;38668977]I hope what they come up with is a bit safer than LiPo batteries [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixIOEPnsgbI[/media][/QUOTE] That dude could have cut out the first half of the video and you would have missed nothing.
The Manhattan Project comparison is laughable, $120 million over five years is a pittance compared to what we invested in building the atomic bomb.
Finally some good news out of our government's endeavours for christ's sake.
[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;38669728]That dude could have cut out the first half of the video and you would have missed nothing.[/QUOTE] add &wadsworth=1 at the end of any video to have it start 30% in
The secret is really blue penis.
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