Batteries & battery technology
Looking at battery technology and developments.
An hour long video (58:32min) from Michigan Engineering; looking at batteries of the future. It is a series of lectures centred round the physical chemistry of the various battery types and how this affects their future development and usefulness.
It discusses the Lithium-Oxygen / Lithium-Air battery which, if it is ever realised promises great things but, it has some serious problems. IBM are part of a consortium involved in their development with the 'Battery 500' project; the aim, to develop a Lithium-Air battery with a range of 500 miles between charges. (February 2013) |
Hopes are riding on electric motors to power the cars of the future. Their Achilles heel is the batteries. They're too heavy, too short-lived and take too long to re-charge.
Now researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are working on a new type of battery that doesn't employ either lead or lithium. They're using metal fluoride to store three times the charge of current in state-of-the-art batteries. (February 2012) |