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Another new battery concept

Schneibster

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A Stanford materials scientist has figured a way to use silicon instead of carbon in Li-ion batteries; silicon is much higher in lithium ion capacity, but expands when it absorbs the lithium ions and fractures, limiting its effective use in the anode. This materials researcher has found a way to use silicon nanowires to hold the lithium ions that allows them to expand without fracturing. The patent is applied for. Read all about it.
 
Ten times! Woohoo!

ETA: Soon notebooks will actually be useful! Yay!
 
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If they don't trip over engineering difficulties bringing this to the market, this will be huge. Turn things upside down huge.
 
Great News,

With electric cars already getting about 250 miles from existing Li ion batteries, this makes their future all the more promising
 
All he has to do now is figure out how to make Li-ion cells 1/10 of the current cost and then he'll be in business! Hopefully, this will occur before his patent runs out.
 
That's not the only one. There's a company out there called EEStorWP (Wikipedia is as good a source as any, the company is very closely held and is very quiet) that's working on ultracapacitors for electric cars- and apparently has a contract with Zenn Motors to provide them for that purpose. It's been quiet for almost a year.
 
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Monday that the search for alternatives to the country's dependence on foreign oil is so urgent that he's willing to throw money at it.

The Arizona senator proposed a $300 million prize for whoever can develop a better automobile battery, and $5,000 tax credits for consumers who buy new zero-emission vehicles. The latest proposal is in addition to his support for overturning the federal ban on offshore oil drilling.
Click to expand...
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5222871

Interesting. Wouldn't Yi Cui already qualify for the prize?
 
I thought about starting a thread about the prize, but is it politics? Technology? The elections? So I just revived this thread.

"In the quest for alternatives to oil, our government has thrown around enough money subsidizing special interests and excusing failure."
John McCain

He sure got that right. Combine good batteries with all the other new advances in technology, and electric cars could rule the roads.
 
The article talks about batteries for small items, like cell phones and laptops. Isn't there a major distinction between those and a car battery? Could someone more knowledgable than I let us know whether this technology can be adapted upwards to car batteries?

Similarly, how about the batteries you charge from solar panels? Could this increase the effectiveness of current solar technology?
 
Solar, Coal and Nuclear energy don't require oil. If we had good batteries to store electricity from these sources, we could drive without gasoline.
 
I read about this a some weeks ago - thought it was very cool. Still do.

Hope they can get it into production within a few years.
 
I hear a new super battery story it seems once or twice a year and I never see them come to market. Should I suspect a conspiracy or an investment scam?

I thought the EEStor batteries were going to change the world and it's been three years since they announced their "breakthrough" and they still haven't produced a single commercially available battery. Their website is a purposely confusing mess bragging about all the vaporware they have unavailable which betrays to me at least their true intentions.
 
I read about this a while back and it's nice to know it's progressing. Only thing is though, I think they have it the wrong way round in all the blurb; I feel that as with the transition to Li-ion batteries, they won't actually increase the usable lifetime of new gadgets, they will either make them smaller or allow them to use more power.
 
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