Battery Materials Made Using Crab Shells

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Battery Materials Made Using Crab Shells

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 20, 2013 @03:54AM from the and-they're-delicious dept.

MTorrice writes "Crab shells usually are just a nuisance that you have to crack and dig through to get the delicious meat inside. But one team of materials scientists thinks the shells could help them fabricate materials for long lasting batteries. The team used the nanostructures (abstract) found in the crustacean shells as templates to make sulfur and silicon electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Sulfur or silicon electrodes have a 10-times greater theoretical energy storage capacity than electrodes used in commercial batteries."

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The Professor and Mary Anne by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-20 04:03 · Score: 5, Funny

Now if we only had a radio made of coconuts.
1. Re:The Professor and Mary Anne by ericloewe · 2013-06-20 04:15 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Coconuts seem to be a reasonable analogue of horses, so you can have a friend bang coconuts together and you'll practically be riding a horse.
Re:Misleading title by mlts · 2013-06-20 04:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

The 10x storage also gets me wondering. Does this mean 10x as much energy density per weight, or per volume? A 5-6 pound car battery is still taking up a lot of space. However, a battery that takes up 1/10 the volume is something that is almost near the level of gasoline for energy density, and has the possibility of completely changing transportation as we know it.
It looks like battery life will be extended by using crab shell designs, which is an important thing.
Soo... by girlintraining · 2013-06-20 04:13 · Score: 4, Informative

So if I understand this correctly, by increasing the surface area of the electrodes, you increase storage density. We already knew that. The problem is those electrodes corrode over time... ions swap between the two plates, which is why we don't go through the effort of manufacturing them with lots of little pits and twists in them, because they'll just corrode that much faster. No pure metal can resist this, and alloys that can generally make poor foundations to build batteries on. Plus there's manufacturing cost. For something like a car battery... that's important. For something like a cell phone, I can see some merit in making batteries with a higher energy density at the tradeoff of shorter life. Of course, they're already pretty short right now...and expensive. :(

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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
1. Re:Soo... by pr0fessor · 2013-06-20 04:37 · Score: 2
  
  According to the article
  
  Cell phone battery electrodes retain about 80% of their capacity after 500 cycles
  and since my battery only requires charging every other day sometimes three days depending on how much I'm using that it is almost 3 years. I have usually dropped my phone a few hundred times by then and am already looking at a new one.
  Silicon sounds like it might be promising if in an actual battery is consistent with the 95% capacity after 200 cycles then the life span may not be shorter.
2. Re:Soo... by wagnerrp · 2013-06-20 05:26 · Score: 2
  
  So if I understand this correctly, by increasing the surface area of the electrodes, you increase storage density. We already knew that.
  We did? I thought increasing the surface area of the electrodes increased the reaction rate, and thus the instantaneous power output. Energy capacity was increased by having more reagent.
Biofactories by gmuslera · 2013-06-20 04:31 · Score: 2

So, how long till the adn of crabs is put into some microbes to industrially make those materials? 25+ years?
Re:Misleading title by thomasw_lrd · 2013-06-20 04:35 · Score: 4, Informative

Dividing both by 1000 gives 1.23 Ah/g and 3.06 Ah/g respectively then multiply by the voltage to get Wh/g. So if you have ~11 volts, you get the density of gas for sulfur, and ~5 volts gives you better than gas for silicon.

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21st Century Renaissance Man
Battery demoed at the sea shore by drainbramage · 2013-06-20 05:46 · Score: 2

My girlfriend got a job demonstrating these down at the beach.
They were using the 'C Cell' size battery and comparing theirs to major brand batteries.
Part of her job was to pull the covers off of the batteries so people wouldn't know which brand they were using.
So....
When people ask me what she does foo a living I say:
She shells C-Cells by the sea shore.
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I know you caught me.
I made up the part about having a girlfriend.

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No brain, no pain.
Re:Misleading title by Dirk+Becher · 2013-06-20 05:46 · Score: 2

Even if they're large and heavy we can still use them to store surplus load of a solar cell and heat out houses instead of oil.
Re:Misleading title by Synerg1y · 2013-06-20 06:36 · Score: 2

Actually, they're using them as templates, so they're not using them directly.