Archives for July 2013

BESTAR Staff win RD100 Awards

Gao Liu and Mike Tucker from EETD win R& D 100 Awards

(Stories from the Berkeley Lab Newscenter)

Better Batteries with a Conducting Polymer Binder

In an effort to make smaller, lighter, and cheaper batteries, a team led by Berkeley Lab scientist Gao Liu focused on improving the negative electrode, or anode. Their invention, the Conducting Polymer Binder, is a new material for use in rechargeable batteries. It can boost power storage capacity by 30 percent, a dramatic improvement in a field marked by little progress for more than a decade. The binder is literally a kind of flexible plastic glue that holds electrode materials together while facilitating the shuttling of electrons and positively charged lithium ions.

The new binder is unusually attractive for battery designers: it is strong, elastic, porous, and highly conductive. The elastic material stretches during the expansion of silicon particles as the battery charges, and contracts during discharge — giving silicon anodes the flexibility to “breathe.” The team used a soft X-ray beamline at the Advanced Light Source to analyze materials. Liu worked with Berkeley Lab scientists Wanli Yang, Lin-Wang Wang, and Vincent Battaglia and postdoctoral fellows Sang-Jae Park, Mingyan Wu, and Shidi Xun.

Cheap, Rugged Fuel Cells Can Provide Electricity Where None Exists

Point Source Power and Berkeley Lab won an R&D 100 award for the company’s Voto product. The innovative device is based on a solid oxide fuel cell that is powered by burning charcoal, wood or other types of biomass—even cow dung—the types of fuel that many in the developing world use for cooking. The fuel cell sits in the fire and is attached to circuitry in a handle that is charged as the fuel cell heats up to temperatures of 700 to 800 degrees Celsius. The handle, which contains an LED bulb, can then be detached and used for lighting or to charge a phone.

Craig Jacobson, CEO and co-founder of Point Source Power, based in Alameda, California, co-invented the fuel cell in his 13 years as a materials scientist at Berkeley Lab. Working with Steve Visco, Mike Tucker and Lutgard DeJonghe, all still affiliated with the Lab, their breakthrough was in finding a way to replace most of the ceramics in the fuel cell with stainless steel, a far cheaper and more durable material.

Fuel Cell Work in BESTAR

Fuel cells may become the energy-delivery devices of the 21^st century. Although there are many types of fuel cells, polymer-electrolyte fuel cells are receiving the most attention for automotive and small stationary applications. In a polymer-electrolyte fuel cell, a fuel (e.g., hydrogen) and oxidant (e.g., oxygen) are combined electrochemically to produce water, electricity, and some waste heat. By reacting electrochemically, one can obtain efficiencies higher than those limited by thermal combustion, i.e., Carnot efficiency. Some other advantageous versus engines include quiet operation, modular design, and relatively clean emissions depending on the source of hydrogen. Fuel cell applications include transportation, commercial and residential stationary, materials handling, and even physiological.

At Berkeley Lab, we utilize a core team of electrochemists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, theorists, material scientists, and organic chemists. leverage LBNL facilities and core competencies and collaborate extensively with labs, industry, and academia thru CalCharge to focus on

Modeling of the underlying physics at the cell and component level

Synthesis and advanced diagnostics of fuel-cell components including membranes and diffusion media
Analysis of total costs of ownership of stationary and early market fuel-cell devices

This work is coordinated by Adam Weber.

The Materials Project of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and MIT highlighted at the White House

On June 24, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy highlighted the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a public-private endeavor launched by the President which aims to cut in half the time it takes to develop novel materials that can fuel advanced manufacturing and bolster the 21^st century American economy. The Materials Project – an open-access Google-like data base for materials research — was co-founded by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Project was recently awarded one of the DOE-funded MGI Centers to include several new partner institutions and broaden its scope.

The Materials Project relies on the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Berkeley Lab to perform high-throughput calculations and determine state-of-the-art electronic structures, as well as use novel data-mining algorithms to predict surface, defect, electronic and finite temperature properties of tens of thousands of inorganic compounds.

The project is unique in its ambition to computationally determine the properties of all known inorganic compounds, deliver the data to the Materials community, and to enable improved materials and design. The Materials Project currently features over 30,000 materials in its data base and now has over 4,000 users from industry, government and academia. What used to require days or weeks of scouring journal articles or performing custom calculations can now be achieved at the click of a mouse.

For more information:

www.materialsproject.org

or contact Dr. Kristin Persson at kapersson@lbl.gov