Lithium News

Autonomous cars need tougher batteries, lithium ion pioneer says

December 29, 2017 By Editor

TOKYO — Battery makers must rethink their technology if predictions for a wave of self-driving vehicles pan out, according to one of the inventors of the lithium ion battery.

In addition to focusing on making batteries more powerful to extend the driving range of single-owner cars, manufacturers will also need to develop devices that can withstand the rigors of near-constant driving and short-range trips from the shared use expected of autonomous vehicles, said Akira Yoshino, who invented a prototype of the lithium ion battery in 1985.

“A car shared by 10 people means it will be running 10 times more,” Yoshino, an honorary fellow at Asahi Kasei Corp., the world’s biggest maker of separators used in batteries, said in an interview at the company headquarters in Tokyo. “Durability will become very important.”

While producers should still focus on improving energy density and lowering costs, they will also need to create batteries using materials that can better withstand constant expansion and contraction, Yoshino said. The task becomes easier if there’s less need to simultaneously boost energy density, which is the biggest factor for driving range, he said. Lithium titanate, for example, can be used in the anode of the battery, where carbon is used commonly now.

“Cars are a completely new application, and we’ll have to wait until we find out what kind of batteries will really be needed,” Yoshino said. “The future of batteries depends on what will happen to the future of the automobile society.”

At Asahi Kasei’s laboratory in the early 1980s, Yoshino began researching polyacetylene, a conducting polymer discovered by the Japanese chemist and Nobel Prize winner Hideki Shirakawa. Although the material could be used in solar panels and semiconductors, Yoshino focused on batteries as a wave of small electronic devices requiring powerful, rechargeable energy sources began hitting the market.

He succeeded in building a lithium ion battery using polyacetylene as the anode, later switching to carbon. But Sony Corp. beat Asahi Kasei in the race to commercialize it for mobile phones in 1991. The following year, Asahi Kasei formed a venture with Toshiba Corp. to make and sell their own batteries.

8mm video

“I thought it would be a boon to tap into the 8 millimeter-video camera market,” Yoshino said, referring to an outdated format. “Mobile phones, laptops, and computers just kept multiplying, but no one was thinking about cars” at that time, he said.

That’s since changed. Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects electric vehicles will account for 54 percent of new car sales by 2040. Highly autonomous cars are expected around 2020, but technical and legal challenges to mass-market use of fully autonomous cars won’t be solved before 2030, BNEF said in a Dec. 1 report.

Yoshino was a recipient with three others of the 2014 Charles Stark Draper Prize for engineering for their contribution in the development of lithium ion battery.

A greener way to get lithium?

December 18, 2017 By Staff Editor

Sorbent could extract the battery material from geothermal power plant brine

These plants pump hot water from deep geothermal deposits and use it to generate electricity, leaving behind a salty solution that can contain hundreds of parts per million lithium—a commodity in demand for lithium-ion batteries. Passing the brine through a sorbent that captures the lithium ions before pumping the brine back underground could collect the metal without the heavy environmental impacts of typical extraction methods, which can generate large amounts of acid or salt waste.

The sorbent in the new study is made out of layers of [LiAl₂(OH)₆]⁺ with chloride ions and water in between them. Voids in the structure can fill with additional lithium ions but are too small to let in competing cations like sodium.

Using a simulated brine solution, Parans Paranthaman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and colleagues captured 91% of the initial lithium in the brine with the improved sorbent and found that the material is strongly selective for lithium over sodium and potassium.

York R. Smith, a metallurgical engineer at the University of Utah, notes that this sorbent has a lower capacity than alternative sorbents that have been tested. He adds, however, that the researchers’ use of lithium chloride to release lithium from the sorbent instead of acid, as is required for other sorbents, is attractive from an environmental perspective.

Trace elements of lithium in drinking water linked to longer life in Alzheimer’s patients

December 11, 2017 By Staff Editor

Trace elements of lithium in drinking water may slow death rates from Alzheimer’s disease, new research suggests. Rates of diabetes and obesity, which are important risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease, also decrease if there is a particular amount of lithium in the water, says the study, published recently in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Postdoctoral fellow Val Fajardo and Rebecca MacPherson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Sciences, collected statistics on various lithium levels in drinking water in 234 counties across Texas.

Lithium is a water-soluble alkali metal found in igneous rocks and mineral springs. It is commonly used to treat bipolar and other mood disorders, but at much higher doses than what occurs naturally in drinking water.

The research team, which included Associate Professor of Health Sciences Paul LeBlanc, compared lithium levels naturally found in tap water with Alzheimer’s disease mortality rates, along with the incidence of obesity and diabetes, in the Texas counties.

“We found counties that had above the median level of lithium in tap water (40 micrograms per litre) experienced less increases in Alzheimer’s disease mortality over time, whereas counties below that median level had even higher increases in Alzheimer’s deaths over time,” says Fajardo.

The frequency of obesity and Type 2 diabetes also went down when the drinking water contained similar lithium levels, the researchers found.

Fajardo says he and his team focused on Texas because data on lithium levels were “freely available.”

Previous studies have demonstrated lithium’s ability to protect against Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and diabetes.

“However, we are one of the first groups to show that lithium’s potential protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and diabetes may translate to the population setting through very low levels of lithium in tap water,” says Fajardo.

The Brock research comes on the heels of an August study from the University of Copenhagen linking high lithium levels in drinking water to decreases in dementia rates.

But Fajardo warns it’s too early to start advising authorities to add lithium to drinking water.

“There’s so much more research we have to do before policy-makers look at the evidence and say, OK, let’s start supplementing tap water with lithium just like we do in some municipalities with fluoride to prevent tooth decay,” he says.

A greener way to get lithium?

December 11, 2017 By Staff Editor

The lightest metal is in heavy demand, thanks to the ever-growing market for cell phones, electric cars, and other products that rely on lithium-ion batteries. Experts debate whether the supply of lithium can keep up with this demand.

A newly improved sorbent could offer an environmentally friendly way to get lithium from a relatively untapped resource in the U.S.: the brine produced by geothermal power plants (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b03464). These plants pump hot water from deep geothermal deposits and use it to generate electricity, leaving behind a salty solution that can contain hundreds of parts per million lithium. Passing the brine through a sorbent that captures the lithium ions before pumping the brine back underground could collect the metal without the heavy environmental impacts of typical extraction methods.

Brines from salt lakes in South America supply much of the world’s lithium; harvesting it in evaporation ponds can take a year or more, leaving behind lots of salt waste. The element is also extracted from the mineral spodumene, which must be mined, heated at high temperatures, and treated with acid.

Sorbents are a promising alternative for collecting lithium from sources where it is less abundant, like brines. The sorbent in the new study is made by intercalating aluminum hydroxide, or gibbsite, with lithium chloride to produce layers of [LiAl₂(OH)₆]⁺ with chloride ions and water in between them. Voids in the structure can fill with additional lithium ions, but are too small to let in competing cations like sodium—which is about 100 times as abundant as lithium in brines—and potassium.

A now-defunct company called Simbol Materials developed an earlier version of the sorbent about 10 years ago and built a pilot plant based on the technology near California’s Salton Sea geothermal area, which has more than 10 geothermal power plants. Elon Musk’s company Tesla reportedly offered to buy the company for $325 million in 2014, but the deal never went through. Soon afterward, the company shut down operations. Simbol’s assets were purchased by Alger Alternative Energy (AAE) in 2016.

Micrograph showing a sorbent--with thick, flat, rounded flakes--for capturing lithium from geothermal brine. — Aluminum hydroxide intercalated with lithium chloride acts as a sorbent, shown here, that can capture 91% of lithium ions from simulated geothermal power plant brines. Credit: Environ. Sci. Technol

Meanwhile, Parans Paranthaman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and his colleagues, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Critical Materials Institute, have refined the sorbent with Simbol’s former chief technology officer, Stephen Harrison, to improve its capacity and selectivity for lithium.

To test the improved sorbent, the researchers poured a simulated brine solution containing lithium, potassium, sodium, boron, calcium, and manganese through a column containing the sorbent. To collect the lithium trapped on the sorbent, they rinsed it with a dilute solution of lithium chloride. The researchers captured 91% of the initial lithium in the brine. They calculated that the method was 48 and 212 times as selective for lithium as for sodium and potassium, respectively, and could be done in less than two hours on an industrial scale.

Other lithium-harvesting sorbents that have been tested include delithiated manganese oxides and layered hydrogen titanates. York R. Smith, a metallurgical engineer at the University of Utah who was not involved in the study, says some of the highest performing ones adsorb 30 to 90 mg Li/g sorbent; the ORNL team’s sorbent has a capacity of about 6 mg Li/g sorbent, Paranthaman says. However, these other sorbents usually require acid treatment to release the sorbed lithium, generating waste. Smith says the researchers’ use of lithium chloride instead of acid is very attractive from an environmental perspective.

The process still needs to be refined to produce commercial-grade lithium chloride that is free of impurities, Paranthaman says. And for use in batteries, that lithium chloride must be turned into lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate.

AAE, which plans to soon change its name to MEK Lithium, is designing a commercial lithium extraction facility that will use the sorbent near the Salton Sea, with the goal of producing 15,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent per year by 2020, Harrison says. Global production of lithium carbonate is approximately 186,000 tons per year, and the entire Salton Sea geothermal area could produce up to 120,000 tons per year of lithium carbonate equivalent, the researchers estimate.

Ask the Captain: Safety risks from lithium ion batteries

December 11, 2017 By Staff Editor

Question: Battery issues on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner were in the news a few years ago, but there has been little information on the changes that were made and why Boeing now feels the problems have been addressed. What are your thoughts on the safety of the lithium battery and the Boeing Dreamliner?

— submitted by reader Rob C., Mich.

Answer: Boeing, working with the NTSB and safety certification firm UL, did extensive testing on the Dreamliner battery. Many changes were made in the manufacturing process in an effort to improve reliability and safety of the battery.

Boeing, wisely, decided to improve the failure tolerance of a battery in thermal runaway in the 787, in addition to the improvements in the battery manufacturing. If a battery thermal runaway does occur, it is contained within the battery box and the vapor is vented overboard.

Lithium batteries provide a lot of power for their weight; consequently, they are the battery used in most electronic devices. The 787 uses lithium batteries for the same reason.

But Lithium batteries can spontaneously overheat and have a thermal runaway. This is not common but does happen. This requires safety mitigations to bring the risk to an acceptable level. Boeing’s improvements to the 787 appear to have been successful, although there was another battery event in November 2017.

Lithium batteries present a risk. We are going to have to monitor them very carefully to maintain the necessary level of safety. Keeping them out of the cargo holds is a good idea.

As for the safety of the 787, I have no question it is a safe airplane. I would fly on it without a second thought.

Q: Captain Cox, I understand that lithium batteries are only permitted in carry-on luggage. What if someone accidentally left one in their checked luggage? Are checked bags scanned for these lithium batteries before loaded?

— Dan K., Va.

A: The bags are scanned for security, not specifically for lithium batteries. If you leave a lithium battery in your bag it will travel with you. It is safer for the battery to be in the cabin so that if a thermal runaway occurs the cabin crew can deal with it. This is why some airlines have recently instituted bans on so-called “smart bags” in checked luggage, as they contain lithium ion batteries.

Q: How dangerous is old wiring? And also how dangerous are the lithium ion batteries? It scares me, keeps me from flying.

— Nessie, Belgium

A: Aging wiring is an issue the industry has faced for many years. The maintenance and inspection of wiring has improved in the last decade. I would not say that wiring in older airplanes is dangerous, however it does require careful inspection and maintenance.

Lithium batteries are an increasing problem. The proliferation of these powerful batteries in so many devices guarantees that there will be thermal runaway events on airplanes, as happened with a certain model of smartphone last year. Flight crews are trained but this training should be improved. The essential factors are how can the device be captured without endangering the crewmember and how can it be contained. Better guidance and tools are needed for flight crewmembers.

I respect your fears, but please remember flying is the safest means of transportation. I encourage you to fly when you want to travel; it is safe and getting safer.

John Cox is a retired airline captain with US Airways and runs his own aviation safety consulting company, Safety Operating Systems.