New Battery Technologies In A Spin

Posted on 13. Mar, 2009 by Ross in Energy News

This week saw a deluge of press releases regarding innovations in lithium battery technology, a massively important cornerstone in the new drive towards electrical car technology. Hybrid cars, purely electrical vehicles and fuel cell cars all require batteries to help store energy which is then ploughed back into the electric motors, and lithium batteries are currently the technology of choice for delivering that performance to the hopes of the ailing global car industry. They also provide the energy for mobile phones, laptops and other power-hungry gadgets which dominate modern life.

Of all the announcements made, perhaps the real show-stopper was made by a team at MIT who have developed battery electrodes which allow the battery to charge 100 times faster than conventional batteries. The battery is also significantly cheaper in terms of material costs than conventional lithium batteries, and with two companies already attempting to commercialise the discovery, batteries in the future could be charged in minutes rather than hours and end up saving money on manufacture.

However, despite all the new press about higher energy yields, cheaper costs and better performance, it is an entirely new discovery which holds the most promise for the future. A collaboration between university researchers at Miami, Tokyo and Tohoku has proven the existence of ’spin-battery’ technology - and it totally surpassed their expectations!

Traditional batteries store energy using electrochemical gradients: essentially forcing charged ions where they don’t want to go during charging, then harnessing the energy of their escape when drawing power. Older batteries used acids as an electrolyte, whereas lithium batteries use a solid-state electrolyte, but they essentially operate in the same way. The spin-battery, by contrast, stores energy not electrochemically but magnetically. Created with a complicated sandwich of semiconductors, the battery is the diameter of a human hair and is ‘wound up’ to a charged energy state using magnetic fields.

“We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected,” said Miami physicist Stewart E. Barnes. With such remarkable performance, the spin battery holds massive potential for energy applications in the future, but lithium batteries are safe… for now!

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