Boosting Battery Storage With Seaweed

New submitter cartman writes "A substance found in brown algae, 'including the type which forms forests of giant kelp,' could be used to increase the storage capacity of batteries, according to scientists at Georgia Tech (abstract). The substance, called alginate, allows silicon particles in the anode to swell without damaging the anode, thereby increasing storage capacity of batteries by up to a factor of 10. 'The full potential of a silicon anode can't be exploited until researchers develop a matching cathode capable of handling the same amount of lithium ions. But even with existing cathodes, alginate-silicon anodes could increase the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by 30 to 40 percent, according to Yushin.'"

Comments

I still don't believe it.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

After all, for the past 10 years, slashdot has been predicting that we'll be using bacteria, vodka, and other primitive elements to power our laptops non-stop for days.

http://slashdot.org/story/01/11/15/1914208/Methanol-Fuel-Cell-Battery-For-Your-Laptop
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/10/17/1630245/Fuel-Cell-Laptop-announced-by-Toshiba
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/03/25/0056230/Enzyme-Bio-Battery-Runs-on-Ethanol
http://slashdot.org/story/03/06/07/2110231/DoCoMo-Will-Launch-Fuel-Cell-Mobile-Phones-By-2005
http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/09/08/113239/Bacteria-Powered-Batteries
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/06/03/11/1745258/Laptop-Fuel-Cells-Coming-Soon
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/20/0110232/Potato-Powered-Batteries-Debut

As with the "Year of the Linux Desktop", I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:I still don't believe it.

[tp1024]

But where is the Virus battery? I mean, WE HAVE BEEN PROMISED they'd be around.

Re:I still don't believe it.

[im_thatoneguy]

Ummm, this is completely different in every single way. Those are all fuel cells. This is just a better lithium-ion battery.

Up to 10x more ... must be a fraud

[tp1024]

C'mon. How often did we read this stuff? How often will we keep reading it again?

For over 100 years now, miracle batteries for electric cars have been supposed to be just around the corner.

I'll quote from the link I gave:

"A large number of people interested in stored power are looking forward to a revolution in the generating power of storage batteries, and it is the opinion of many that the long-looked-for, light weight, high capacity battery will soon be discovered." (source, 1901).

"The demand for a proper automobile storage battery is so crying that it soon must result in the appearance of the desired accumulator [battery]. Everywhere in the history of industrial progress, invention has followed close in the wake of necessity" (Electrical Review, 1901).

Can't just finally file them right next to the perpetuum mobile cranks and move on until somebody actually delivers on those stupid promises?

Re:Up to 10x more ... must be a fraud

[Brian_Ellenberger]

C'mon. How often did we read this stuff? How often will we keep reading it again?

For over 100 years now, miracle batteries for electric cars have been supposed to be just around the corner.

Can't just finally file them right next to the perpetuum mobile cranks and move on until somebody actually delivers on those stupid promises?

From the article:
"If you were to put the lithium-ion battery of the Nissan Leaf in the 1908 Fritchle, the vehicle would have a range of about 644 km (400 miles). "

Don't be so negative. It hasn't that battery tech hasn't advanced in 100 years, it's that it hasn't kept pace with the demand for faster, safer, bigger vehicles. The advancement in any technology is rarely a big bang. Take the lithium-ion battery in this laptop I am typing on for example, and look at the series of advanced necessary to give me a 6 hour battery in a high performance laptop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#History. From wikipedia:

"In 1979, John Goodenough demonstrated a rechargeable cell with high cell voltage in the 4V range using lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2) as the positive electrode and lithium metal as the negative electrode."

"In 1991, Sony and Asahi Kasei released the first commercial lithium-ion battery."

It took 12 years from discovery to the first commercial battery, and another 5 to 10 years for them to be widely used. Yet on a supposed "tech" site all I read about are people critiquing any battery tech discovery as lame if it doesn't allow for a plug-in to be driven 500 miles on a charge. This discovery may turn out to not be practical, or may turn out to be THE discovery that leads to a battery revolution.

And even if we didn't get a 500 mile per charge battery, but instead got some tech that allowed the Volt to be at the same price point as a current Prius? Or even got it from 40 miles to 60 miles in a charge. These relatively modest advancements could start a major revolution where liquid fuels are only used for long-haul travel.

Re:if we see this...

[russotto]

Li-Ion cells explode when you charge them too much, and die when drained completely. Li-Ion charging circuitry basically charges a bank of cells to about 80%, thn trickle charges to about 90%, then tops off. The charger knows the array is "full" when it sees it's not holding any more juice. This happens when some of the cells burst. So every charge is actually decreasing your Li-Ion's capacity.

No cells burst during normal charging of Li-Ion batteries.

NiMH has lower energy density, lower power density, lower charge efficiency, and higher storage losses. It's just inferior.

This is actually useful research

[Jack Malmostoso]

Silicon anodes have been under study for many years now, and most researchers gave up when they figured out that the usual binder used in Li-ion batteries (poly vinilene difluoride, PVDF) did not work well with silicon. A couple of years ago people found out that using carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) actually allowed to cycle silicon for hundreds of charges/discharges without significant capacity fading, so the research in the field boomed again and now Sony is commercializing the first examples of batteries with Si as negative electrode.
It's all about the engineering, and since silicon has proved that the binder is a more important piece of the Li-ion technology than previously expected, these news are actually very welcome.