Battery Metals

It is becoming evident that moving beyond lithium ion batteries is going to require the combined efforts of research labs and battery manufacturers around the world. The extent of such collaboration was made clear in a recent press release from the University of Pennsylvania, detailing research into a solid electrolyte for use in lithium metal batteries.

Presently, commercial lithium ion batteries use a carbon graphite anode electrode and a metal oxide cathode electrode. They are separated by a liquid organic solvent that can pass lithium ions between the electrodes while preventing electrons from making the journey. The organic solvent of the electrolyte is flammable—resulting in a potential for a fire in the event that a lithium ion battery is punctured.

The anode side of a lithium ion battery is made from layers of graphite. Lithium ions are inserted between the material’s layers during charging and are released during discharge. Battery researchers realize that replacing the graphite anode with metallic lithium would allow many more lithium ions to flow during discharge, producing a battery with at least twice the capacity. But during the charging stage of a lithium metal battery, spiky crystalline structures, called dendrites, form on the metal surface. These dendrites can grow through the liquid electrolyte, reaching the cathode and shorting out the battery.

One possibility that has received great attention is the use of an electrolyte made from a polymer material. Such a material is called a solid polymer electrolyte (SPE). This is the approach taken by the research group at the University of Pennsylvania. The starting point for the team was Nafion, a sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene-based copolymer that allows the passage of positive ions (cations) without allowing the transmission of electrons. Nafion is commonly used as a proton exchange membrane (PEM) in hydrogen fuel cells.

“Nafion is something of a fluke,” explained Karen Winey, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, in the press release produced by the university. “Its structure has been the subject of debate for decades, and will likely never be fully understood or controlled,” she added.

Mazelike

Because the polymer Nafion has a structure that is random and disordered, it is difficult to study. It contains side chains that occur randomly and that end in sulfonic acid groups. The sulfonic acid draws in water. This process forms channels through the polymer that allow cations to flow through the material. But the pathways for these positive ions are a convoluted maze. If the path could be made more direct, the transport of lithium ions through the polymer electrolyte could be quicker and more efficient.

Superhighway

That’s where the collaboration came in. The University of Pennsylvania group, under Winey, worked with a group at the University of Florida, under Kenneth Wagener. They have developed a new structure that places sulfonic acid groups at an even spacing along the polymer chain. Their approach results in many parallel acid-lined channels through the polymer, which act like a superhighway for lithium ion flow. The structure was determined from another collaboration—this time with Mark Stevens of Sandia National Laboratories.

The chains in the resulting structure form a series of hairpin shapes with a sulfonic acid group at each turn. This allows the polymer to assemble into orderly layers and results in straight channels, rather than the meandering maze structure of the unmodified Nafion. Cationic transport through the modified material is much faster. “We’re already faster than Nafion by a factor of two, but we could be even faster if we aligned all of those layers straight across the electrolyte membrane,” said Winey in the press release.

Build Us a Village

The goal is a solid electrolyte that will be safer than the flammable electrolytes that are presently used. At the same time, lithium metal batteries with solid polymer electrolytes might be both lighter and thinner. Such batteries would also have twice the capacity and the ability to recharge faster than today’s commercial lithium ion batteries.

Beyond the collaboration with the University of Florida and Sandia, additional contributions from researchers at the French National Center for Scientific Research, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and the Université Grenoble Alpes were noted in the University of Pennsylvania’s press release. The extent of this worldwide collaboration is an indication of how the search for improved battery materials and performance has become global in its scale.

Today, with 3-D printing, you can make almost anything in a matter of hours. However, making sure that part works reliably takes weeks or even months.

Until now.

Sandia National Laboratories has designed and built a six-sided work cell, similar to a circular desk, with a commercial robot at its center that conducts high-throughput testing to quickly determine the performance and properties of the part.

They call this flexible, modular and scalable system Alinstante, Spanish for “in an instant.” Sandia is seeking industry partners to help expand or discover more uses for the new robotic testing system.

The technology to speed up qualification and testing was the result of Sandia materials scientist Brad Boyce’s challenge in the spring of 2015. Boyce was working on a Laboratory Directed Research and Development-funded project to improve the qualification of custom 3-D-printed parts.

“In traditional manufacturing of metals, there’s a lot of experience and finesse in process control to produce metals with uniform properties. When we went to laser manufacturing we had to take a step back and rethink qualification,” he said.

Boyce had already developed a machine for high-throughput tensile testing—pulling on an object until it snaps—but for this project he knew he needed a more general, flexible solution. He turned to Sandia’s robotics group.

“Once we committed ourselves to automation, we realized that the barriers could be overcome,” said Boyce. “Yes, we invested some time and money, but the real challenge was getting ourselves out of the mindset of ‘business as usual’ to understanding that we need a faster solution.”

Designing a modular, flexible work cell

The commercial robot sits in the center of the hexagonal work cell with up to six “petal” work stations around it. Each work station can have a different commercial or custom testing systems, and the work stations can be swapped in and out depending on the kind of tests needed. Also, because of the hexagonal shape, multiple petals can be combined in a honeycomb-like structure. That allows handoffs from petal to petal to provide almost limitless testing scalability.

Sandia mechanical engineer Ross Burchard led the design of the work cell. In 2016, Burchard and an intern explored many different physical configurations before settling on the hexagonal petal design.
“My challenge was: How do you come up with a work cell with one robot and multiple testing stations that’s also modular and scalable?” said Burchard. Once the configuration was selected, Burchard and his team built the first work cell. They adapted commercially available hardware wherever possible for efficiency and to save money.

In addition to constructing the hexagonal floor plate and pedestal for the commercial robot, the team installed safety light curtains wherever a person and the robot might interact. The light curtains are set up so that if a person reaches into the work cell, or if the robotic arm reaches out of the work cell, the light beam is broken and the robot automatically stops.

“Safety is always our No. 1 concern,” said Tim Blada, the roboticist who is leading the design of the software interface. “Every line of code we write, every piece of mechanical fixturing we do, is always safety first. ‘How is this safe? Can I do this without risking any injuries?'”

Rapid, automated testing with an easy-to-use modular user interface

By the end of the summer, Blada hopes to have a user interface that will allow a non-expert to place their parts on a tray in the parts rack, select a few tests and get their data automatically. The software architecture also needs to be modular so new modules and tests can be added easily, he said.

The prototype Alinstante work cell only has two testing stations and a rack where users can place their parts. The first station is an off-the-shelf structured light scanner that can convert a scan into a 3-D model for direct quantitative comparison to the original intended design. The second station is a load frame for testing physical properties, such as tensile and compression testing, which is pushing on an object until it crunches.

Next, the team wants to add a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer to Alinstante, said Burchard. This test would be particularly useful for determining the batch-to-batch consistency in the chemical composition of parts in a minimally destructive manner.

“Sandia has testing labs that can perform all of these tests, however it takes a few weeks to schedule each of them, which can add up to one or two months of testing. Alinstante can reduce the scheduling burden for the testing, greatly speeding up the turnaround time,” said Burchard. Alinstante also reduces the chance for human error and produces data that is more consistent and reproducible than human testers.

‘Scratching the surface’ of prototype testing and materials discovery

“Right now, Alinstante is really just scratching the surface of what it could be,” said Boyce. “We could integrate the printer, processing systems—such as a heat-treat oven or a grinder—and many other post-processing tests.”

X-ray tomography, corrosion testing and density measurements are just a few examples of the tests the team would like to add to Alinstante.

Blada added, “Alinstante can be used for rapid prototyping things or for small-batch manufacturing. This would be useful for any small business or industry where they’re making small batch parts and they need to test them or even package them.”

The Alinstante team is looking for partners to support the development of new modules that would meet its rapid testing, prototyping or research and development needs, said Boyce and Blada.

As a roboticist, Blada is looking forward to putting Alinstante’s endurance to the test. “In theory you could run this thing forever, if you had enough parts,” he said.

As a materials scientist, Boyce is looking forward to being able to use Alinstante for rapid materials discovery and for foundational advances in alloy performance and reliability.

But even before this vision becomes reality, Alinstante can provide significant benefits. Boyce said, “Friday afternoon you tell the 3-D printer ‘I want you to print this part 10 different ways and then go test each one.’ You come to come back Monday morning and Alinstante tells you which process was the best. Let the robot do all the logistics work and get the human out of the loop except for making the important engineering decisions.”

In the field of photovoltaic technologies, silicon-based solar cells make up 90 percent of the market. In terms of cost, stability and efficiency (20-22 percent for a typical solar cell on the market), they are well ahead of the competition.

However, after decades of research and investment, silicon-based solar cells are now close to their maximum theoretical efficiency. As a result, new concepts are required to achieve a long-term reduction in solar electricity prices and allow photovoltaic technology to become a more widely adopted way of generating power.

One solution is to place two different types of solar cells on top of each other to maximize the conversion of light rays into electrical power. These “double-junction” cells are being widely researched in the scientific community, but are expensive to make. Now, research teams in Neuchâtel—from EPFL’s Photovoltaics Laboratory and the CSEM PV-center—have developed an economically competitive solution. They have integrated a perovskite cell directly on top of a standard silicon-based cell, obtaining a record efficiency of 25.2 percent. Their production method is promising, because it would add only a few extra steps to the current silicon-cell production process, and the cost would be reasonable. Their research has been published in Nature Materials.

Perovskite-on-silicon: a nanometric sandwich

Perovskite’s unique properties have prompted a great deal of research into its use in solar cells over the last few years. In the space of nine years, the efficiency of these cells has risen by a factor of six. Perovskite allows high conversion efficiency to be achieved at a potentially limited production cost.

In tandem cells, perovskite complements silicon. It converts blue and green light more efficiently, while silicon is better at converting red and infra-red light. “By combining the two materials, we can maximize the use of the solar spectrum and increase the amount of power generated. The calculations and work we have done show that a 30 percent efficiency should soon be possible,” say the study’s main authors Florent Sahli and Jérémie Werner.

However, creating an effective tandem structure by superposing the two materials is no easy task. “Silicon’s surface consists of a series of pyramids measuring around 5 microns, which trap light and prevent it from being reflected. However, the surface texture makes it hard to deposit a homogeneous film of perovskite,” explains Quentin Jeangros, who co-authored the paper.

When the perovskite is deposited in liquid form, as it usually is, it accumulates in the valleys between the pyramids while leaving the peaks uncovered, leading to short circuits.

A key layer ensuring an optimal microstructure

Scientists at EPFL and CSEM have gotten around that problem by using evaporation methods to form an inorganic base layer that fully covers the pyramids. That layer is porous, enabling it to retain the liquid organic solution that is then added using a thin-film deposition technique called spin-coating. The researchers subsequently heat the substrate to a relatively low temperature of 150°C to crystallize a homogeneous film of perovskite on top of the silicon pyramids.

“Until now, the standard approach for making a perovskite/silicon tandem cell was to level off the pyramids of the silicon cell, which decreased its optical properties and therefore its performance, before depositing the perovskite cell on top of it. It also added steps to the manufacturing process,” says Florent Sahli.

Updating existing technologies

The new type of tandem cell is highly efficient and directly compatible with monocrystalline silicon-based technologies, which benefit from long-standing industrial expertise and are already being produced profitably. “We are proposing to use equipment that is already in use, just adding a few specific stages. Manufacturers won’t be adopting a whole new solar technology, but simply updating the production lines they are already using for silicon-based cells,” explains Christophe Ballif, head of EPFL’s Photovoltaics Laboratory and CSEM’s PV-Center.

At the moment, research is continuing in order to increase efficiency further and give the perovskite film more long-term stability. Although the team has made a breakthrough, there is still work to be done before their technology can be adopted commercially.

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Europe will implement counter-measures against U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum just like Canada, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday, voicing regret about President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw support for a G7 communique.

Trump’s announcement on Twitter, after leaving the Group of Seven summit in Canada early, that he was backing out of the joint communique torpedoed what appeared to be a fragile consensus on a trade dispute between Washington and its top allies.

“The withdrawal, so to speak, via tweet is of course … sobering and a bit depressing,” Merkel said in an ARD television interview following the G7 summit.

The summit did not mark the end of the transatlantic partnership between Europe and the U.S., Merkel said. But she repeated that Europe could no longer rely on its ally and should take its fate into its own hands.

Like Canada, the European Union is preparing counter-measures against U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, in line with World Trade Organisation rules, Merkel said.

“So we won’t let ourselves be ripped off again and again. Instead, we act then too,” Merkel said in an unusually combative tone.

Asked if she was concerned that Trump could retaliate against EU counter-measures by imposing tariffs on cars, Merkel said: “First of all, we’ll try and see if we can prevent this… And then hope that the EU will respond again in the same unity.”

Merkel said the G7 leaders had agreed to review their trade ties and assess the scope of existing tariffs in order to avoid further trade barriers.

The center-right leader said a tariff-free area among G7 allies would be an ideal outcome, but she made clear that any talks about such a trade bloc would have to include non-tariff barriers to trade as well as free access to public tenders.

Turning to Russia, Merkel said she could imagine Moscow re-joining the G7 format at some point, but there first had to be progress in the implementation of the peace plan for Ukraine.

Russia was pushed out of what was then the G8 after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Merkel said she expected Italy’s new coalition government to vote for the extension of European sanctions against Russia.

Touching the thorny issue of Germany’s relatively low defense spending, Merkel acknowledged that Trump’s criticism was partly correct and that Berlin had to do more to reach NATO’s goal of spending to 2 percent of economic output on defense.

“Trump is in a way right. And that’s why we need to increase our defense spending,” Merkel said.

You’ve pulled your bike out of storage and you’re riding to work or to dinner with your family and buddies. But as soon as bikes come out, so do bike thieves. Instead of relying on your old, worn-out lock, make sure your set of wheels stays where you left it with these bike locks. Choose the right one for you based on the level of security you need.

Kryptonite Fahgettaboudit Chain

With a security rating of 10/10, there’s probably no more secure way to lock your bike than Kryptonite’s Fahgettaboudit Chain. The chain is 14mm six-sided chain links made of hardened manganese steel with a nylon cover to protect your frame. It secures with a reinforced padlock-style 15mm shackle lock with a hardened steel crossbar and high security disc cylinder that’s been reinforced to resist drilling. At over 15 pounds, you won’t “fahgettaboud” this chain and lock being in your bag. But you will leave your locked bike with confidence it’ll be there when you return. A sliding dustcover keeps city grime out of the lock’s inner workings. The lock comes with three keys, including one with a built-in LED to make opening it in the dark easy. The brand will reimburse you up to $5,000 if your secured bike gets stolen.

Tapplock1

Never worry about finding your key or remembering your combo again. Tapplock is a padlock with a fingerprint sensor similar to what you’d find on an iPhone. Press your thumb on the sensor, and it reads your personal signature and unlocks in under a second. Don’t worry if you’re not the only one who needs access. The lock stores up to 500 prints, which you can manage with the app for permanent or temporary access. It’s functional down to 14°F, and the battery lasts for a year and up to 3,500 unlocks per charge.

Otto Designworks Ottolock

Lighter than a U-lock and tougher than a cable lock, the coiling Ottolock secures your bike with multiple layers of steel and Kevlar. Locks are 18”, 30”, or 60”, and weigh 4 oz.–8 oz., but roll small to stash in your saddle bag, pocket, or pack. Each cut-resistant zip tie-style 0.7-inch security strap is coated in plastic to keep it from scuffing or chipping your frame. And the three-digit combination lock comes resettable. It’ll resist wire and bolt cutters, but it’s not designed for maximum security. Because it’s flexible and low profile, we also used it to lock a canoe to a roof rack, and it kept roommates from “borrowing” our bike without asking.

Abus Bordo 6000 Alarm

A folding lock with a built-in alarm, the Abus Bordo 6000 Alarm draws attention to any thief messing with your bike. Once the Bordo 6000 is locked, the alarm is engaged. If your bike or the lock gets jostled, the Bordo sounds an annoying, not deafening, 100-decibel alarm designed to spook a potential burglar. The bike-mounted lock is made from frame-protecting, silicone-coated 5.5mm steel bars in a hardened steel case. The 3.2 pound, 35.5 inches cable folds to make it easy to carry. But remember to take it off your bike before you load your bike on a car and drive away, which can also activate the alarm. If you’re already using other Abus locks, order this one keyed the same.

Seatylock Foldy Compact

The lightest folding lock you can buy, the 33.5-inch Seatylock Foldylock Compact is made from hardened steel bars and protected rivets so that it has plenty of length and flexibility for locking your bike. But it packs up small, making it easy to transport. Like a U-lock, it rates high for protection against hacksaw and hammers with chisels. And the lock cylinder is designed to resist drilling. Plastic coated links not only protect your frame, but work with the case to make sure this lock doesn’t rattle while you’re riding.

Kryptonite Evolution Mini with Flex

A combo vinyl U-lock and 4-foot cable lock, Kryptonite thwarts robbers who might settle for just stealing your wheels with this two-piece security system. Made from 13mm hardened bolt-cutter resistant steel, the U-lock portion of this device has a patented “double deadbolt” to protect against twisting breaches. Use the U to secure your frame, then thread the tough cable through your wheels. During our testing, a sliding dustcover kept out water and grime, and a mount secured it to the bike. It comes with three keys—one with a LED to light the keyhole at night. Register this lock, and if a thief outsmarts it, Kryptonite will reimburse you up to $2,500 for your stolen bike.

Hiplok Z-Lok Combo

More like a reusable tie than what we normally think of as a bike lock, this three-number combination lock strap is small and light, and an excellent deterrent when you’re grabbing a coffee or have your bike on a roof rack. Its steel core is reinforced with nylon, which also keeps it from scratching your ride. And, it’s small enough to stuff in your pocket.