Metals Tech

The sustainably powered, electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) into useful chemicals and feedstock could help to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, allowing industries to reuse released CO2 in beneficial ways. Most of the strategies for realizing this introduced so far, however, have notable limitations, including a poor stability over long periods of time. Researchers at […]

A team in Cornell Engineering has created a new lithium battery that can charge in under five minutes—faster than any such battery on the market—while maintaining stable performance over extended cycles of charging and discharging. The breakthrough could alleviate “range anxiety” among drivers who worry electric vehicles cannot travel long distances without a time-consuming recharge. […]

In the hunt for new materials, scientists have traditionally relied on tinkering in the lab, guided by intuition, with a hefty serving of trial and error. But now a new battery material has been discovered by combining two computing superpowers: artificial intelligence and supercomputing. It’s a discovery that highlights the potential for using computers to […]

Fake plants are moving into the 21st century. Researchers developed literal “power plants”—tiny, leaf-shaped generators that create electricity from a blowing breeze or falling raindrops—and described them in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. The team tested the energy harvesters by incorporating them into artificial plants. Electrical energy can be produced by nature in several ways. […]

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Li Xianfeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed a 70 kW-level high-power density vanadium flow battery stack. Compared with the current 30kW-level stack, this stack has a volume power density of 130kW/m3, and the cost is reduced by […]

MIT researchers have developed a battery-free, self-powered sensor that can harvest energy from its environment. Because it requires no battery that must be recharged or replaced, and because it requires no special wiring, such a sensor could be embedded in a hard-to-reach place, like inside the inner workings of a ship’s engine. There, it could […]

A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt. About the size of a standard paperback book, the completely soil-powered technology could fuel underground sensors used in precision agriculture and green infrastructure. This potentially could offer a sustainable, renewable alternative to batteries, which hold […]

The winter freeze is impacting residents across Chicagoland, but some EV drivers are facing an additional handful of problems as they deal with long lines at charging stations and reduced battery life. A station with 20 Tesla Superchargers, off West Touhy Avenue in Skokie, was full almost all day on Monday, with drivers waiting nearby […]

Researchers at Harvard University have developed a new solid state battery that can be recharged in 10 minutes. Harvard’s latest solid-state battery breakthrough The lithium metal battery researchers developed at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) can also be charged and discharged at least 6,000 times — more than […]

Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology have demonstrated that sodium-ion batteries have an equivalent climate impact as their lithium-ion counterparts – but there isn’t a risk of running out of raw materials. “Lithium-ion batteries are becoming a dominant technology in the world and they are better for the climate than fossil-based technology, especially when […]