News and Information
Chlorophyll, blood, and vitamin B12 are all based on the porphyrin molecule. But porphyrin can also be used as an electrode material where it speeds up the charging process of rechargeable batteries. In the “Angewandte Chemie International Edition” journal, researchers from KIT now present the new material system that could mark the beginning of an era of high-performance energy storage and supercapacitors.
Electric car makers are striking long-term deals with big battery makers, shoring up confidence among tech metal miners.
Some recent deals between car makers and battery suppliers extend as far as 2025.
BMW has locked in contracts with Samsung for products due to be delivered in 2020, Infinity Lithium (ASX:PLH) director Humphrey Hale told the Paydirt Battery Minerals Conference in Perth on Wednesday.
“Those contracts last for three to five years, which has an implication that the chemistry for EVs [electric vehicles] is fairly well set and established up until 2025,” he said.
“So the huge investment that is required to build battery plants and set in place lithium mines, graphite mines, cobalt mines to produce that chemistry is here to stay for the foreseeable future.”
Infinity Lithium, which recently underwent an identity change from Plymouth Minerals, is ramping up its focus on Spanish lithium and divesting its potash projects.
Lithium has become a favoured commodity among Australian explorers, driven by demand from electric car makers which are expected to sell more than 500 million vehicles by 2040 — up from 2 million today.
Energy storage for vehicles is driving global demand for lithium carbonate, which is set to rise to at least 875,000 tonnes per annum by 2025, from 224,000 tonnes per annum in 2017.
“The prediction is that by 2025 we will see cost parity between the internal combustion engine and the battery vehicle with comparable performance, comparable refuelling time and comparable ranges,” Mr Hale said.
“So that’s the tipping point. We’re in a period of time where there’s a huge disruption to the car market.”
Infinity is working to bring its San Jose lithium-tin project in Spain into production.
“This demand uplift is equivalent to 40 San Joses by 2025,” Mr Hale noted. “So we need to get going. There’s a lot of work to do in eight years.”
Vehicle electrification with batteries has seen the automotive industry move from a “headline a year” to a “headline a day” in the car industry, Future Smart Strategies managing director Professor Ray Wills told the conference.
“Beyond the basics of all vehicles going electric, there are so many elements changing in the car industry — part of global mega trends in mobility and connectivity and autonomy and the internet of things,” Professor Wills said.
“From the point of view of minerals for the storage revolution, it is crucial that action is taken quickly so Australia takes a share of the many new jobs (skilled and semi-skilled) in this $2 trillion value chain – an opportunity that might just double Australia’s GDP from a single new industry sector,” he said.
In the emerging field of magnon spintronics, researchers investigate the possibility to transport and process information by means of so-called magnon spin currents. In contrast to electrical currents, on which todays information technology is based, magnon spin currents do not conduct electrical charges but magnetic momenta. These are mediated by magnetic waves, or so-called magnons, which analogous to sound waves propagate through magnetic materials. One fundamental building block of magnon spintronics is magnon logic, which, for instance, allows to perform logic operations and thus information processing by the superposition of spin currents. An international team of physicists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the University of Konstanz in Germany and Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, recently succeeded in adding a further element to the construction set of magnon logic.
In a so-called spin valve structure, which amongst others comprises several ferromagnets, it was possible to demonstrate that the detection efficiency of magnon currents depends on the magnetic configuration of the device. Generally, this allows to control the transmission or blocking of incoming information. The research work has been published in the online journal Nature Communications with a fellow of the JGU-based Graduate School of Excellence Materials Science in Mainz (MAINZ) as first author.
The essential aim of magnon spintronics is to replace the electrical charge as information carrier in information technological concepts by magnons. Among other things, magnons offer the possibility of wave-based computing, which provides more options for logical data processing. Magnons furthermore propagate in magnetic insulators with comparably small losses, which holds out the prospect of the implementation of improved energy efficiency of data processing.
The investigated spin valve structure is a trilayer system comprising the insulating ferromagnet yttrium iron garnet (YIG), the insulating antiferromagnet cobalt(II) oxide (CoO), and the metallic ferromagnet cobalt (Co): YIG/CoO/Co. By means of the oscillating magnetic fields of irradiated microwaves the deliberate rotation of the YIG magnetization is induced, which emits a magnon spin current into the CoO. In the metallic Co layer the magnon spin current gets converted into a charge current due to the so-called inverse spin Hall effect and is thus detected.
Switch-like device forwards or suppresses magnon current as electric signal
The experiment demonstrated that the amplitude of the detected signal strongly depends on the magnetic configuration of the spin valve. In the case of antiparallel alignment of the YIG and Co magnetization, the signal amplitude is approximately 120 percent larger than in the parallel state. The repetitive switching of the Co magnetization further revealed the robustness of the effect and likewise its suitability for long-time operation. “Altogether, this effect to some extent allows the implementation of a switch-like device, which suppresses or forwards the magnon current as an electrical signal,” said Joel Cramer, first author of the article and member of the Graduate School of Excellence Materials Science in Mainz. “The result of our experiment is an effect which might find application in prospective magnon logic operations, thus yielding an essential contribution to the field of magnon spintronic,” Cramer added.
Collaboration of internationally leading research teams in the field of spintronics
“Our collaboration with internationally leading groups within the field of spin transport in insulators follows a long tradition, especially in the Collaborative Research Center Spin-X, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). With the support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the MAINZ Graduate School, this collaboration could even be extended to long-term stays of guest students from Japan here in Mainz and vice versa,” said Professor Mathias Kläui, Director of MAINZ. “The work now published in Nature Communications was mainly performed during a guest stay of two of our students and myself in Japan. I enjoyed it very much to be closer to the experiment and to even contribute to the measurements. Hence, I would like to thank the group of Professor Saitoh and the Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University for their hospitality and the excellent collaboration,” added Kläui.
The theory for this work was jointly developed by the groups in Mainz and Konstanz. There is a particularly strong, long, and fruitful collaboration with the Magnetic Materials group of Professor Ulrich Nowak at the University of Konstanz. “Now that our third joint project proposal was evaluated positively, I am looking forward to further intense collective work,” added Kläui.
The MAINZ Graduate School of Excellence was approved through the German Federal and State Excellence Initiative in 2007 and received a five-year funding extension in the second round in 2012. It consists of work groups from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, TU Kaiserslautern, and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and offers excellent national and international doctoral candidates in natural science disciplines an exceptional training in materials science. One of its focal research areas is spintronics, where cooperation with leading international partners plays an important role.
Problems of spin transport and the creation and detection of spin currents are investigated within MAINZ as part of the CRC/Transregio 173: Spin+X, which has been funded by the German Research Foundation since 2016.
The world’s first rechargeable proton battery has been created and demonstrated by a team of researchers in Australia. The current battery, which is now just a prototype to prove that the mechanism works, is a big step towards a more environmentally sound energy storage system.
Unlike current lithium-ion designs that use rare materials, the prototype battery uses carbon and water to store electrical charge. The proof-of-concept was created by a team at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, as announced by the university on social media on Wednesday, March 7.
“Carbon, which is the primary resource used in our proton battery, is abundant and cheap compared to both metal hydrogen-storage alloys and the lithium needed for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries,” lead researcher Professor John Andrews explained to Fairfax Media via The Age Australia.
With the world now rapidly moving towards electric-based transportation, there is now a need to come up with rechargeable batteries that are more environment-friendly to produce and dispose of.
“Our latest advance is a crucial step towards cheap, sustainable proton batteries that can help meet our future energy needs without further damaging our already fragile environment,” Andrews noted.
Andrews and his team are now working to improve the capacity of the proton battery, which works by having the carbon at the battery terminals taking up the protons released when the water is split into Hydrogen and Oxygen ions during charging.
During discharge, the positively-charged Hydrogen atoms, which are basically protons in this state, return to a reversible fuel cell to combine with oxygen from the surrounding air to re-form into water. The entire process produces no emissions, too.
Professor Andrews estimates that the proton battery could be commercially viable within five to ten years, and has the potential to compete with the Tesla Powerwall or even bigger applications.
The power company, which recently placed bids to build the largest battery energy storage project in the world, has connected a 74.5 MW PV project with a 10 MW/40 MWh storage facility, in the United States.
NextEra is one of the world’s largest owners of renewable energy, and they’re taking steps to be in the same position in the energy storage market. The company was recently discovered, per a tip from one of pv magazine’s readers, to be behind the largest energy storage bids yet received globally – and now they’re announcing the nation’s largest solar+battery storage project connected to the power grid.
FPL, a NextEra subsidiary that serves 50% of the Florida electricity market, has connected a DC-coupled 10MW/40MWh battery to their 74.5 MW-AC Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center. The solar park is located on 440 acres in central Florida and is being built in a partnership with the Babcock Ranch – a 100% renewable powered development..
The factsheet for the Babcock Solar Ranch can be found here(PDF).
The energy storage project, on its own, is not the largest in the United States. Currently, a 100 MWh project in Southern California Edison territory holds that honor. Other solar+storage projects that are larger have been announced. Among these, TEP announced record-setting pricing with a 100 MW solar + 30 MW/120 MW energy storage project.
The solar plant is part of a series of 74.5 MW solar plants being built to serve the Florida market. The plants are being built under the moniker of ‘Sanctuary Solar’, with support from the Audubon Society. The sites of these facility are being designed to allow a significant amount of the land to be planted with native grasses, trees, shrubs and vines. Plants are being chosen to provide food for birds and pollinators. Quality wetlands are being preserved, which also provide habitat for birds.
Panasonic Corporation has begun mass production of prismatic-type automotive lithium-ion batteries at its factory in Dalian, China, and held a ceremony to mark the first shipment on Monday.
The market for eco-conscious vehicles, including hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and electric vehicles, is growing every year thanks to the increase in environmental awareness in recent years. To respond to the market demand, Panasonic has been gearing up to start production at this factory, which is its first production site for prismatic-type automotive lithium-ion batteries in China.
Amidst expectations of expanding demand for automotive lithium-ion batteries, Panasonic manufactures high-capacity and high-safety prismatic-type batteries at this factory and ships them to the North American and Chinese markets. Shipments will be expanded in the future to reach more destinations, helping to drive the spread of eco-conscious vehicles.
With the beginning of mass production shipments of automobile lithium-ion batteries from this factory, Panasonic now has a production system covering Japan, United States, and China, three key global locations.
By strengthening the global competitiveness of its automotive batteries with these sites, Panasonic will further expand its automobile battery business in the future.
