lithium-ion battery

Hybrid Humvee coming up over the horizon

Lithium-ion battery manufacturer EnerDel has signed an 18-month, $1.29 million contract with the U.S. Army to design and test hybrid battery options for the Humvee.

Trying to power the iconic fuel-guzzling High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV aka Humvee) with a battery, may seem like trying to put out a fire with a garden hose. But a lithium-ion battery system can deliver a lot of power from a battery quickly, giving a truck like the Humvee the thrust it requires.

EnerDel, a subsidiary of Ener1, will collaborate with the U.S. Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development, and … Read more

Lithium ion battery industry to boom with wind, solar power

Lithium ion batteries used as energy storage for utilities will be a $1 billion industry by 2018, according to a report released Wednesday by Pike Research called "Energy Storage Technology Markets."

Much of the lithium ion battery development has been geared toward perfecting the batteries as power sources for electronics, and in recent years, cars. But the alternative energy industry is going to benefit from that research, too. Once that happens, there will be a surge in the sales of industrial-scale lithium ion batteries for power utilities, according to Pike research.

"Utilities will be the downstream beneficiaries … Read more

Battery maker A123 Systems charged from IPO

Lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems had a rousing debut on the public stock market on Thursday, giving some good news to legions of energy investors and entrepreneurs.

The Watertown, Mass.-based company, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, saw its share prices rise over 50 percent from its offering price to close at over $20.

Through the initial public offering, the company is expected to raise over $400 million, Reuters reported. It had initially hoped to net $250 million but adjusted its offering price to raise more.

A123 Systems' IPO has been closely watched in … Read more

Volvo developing its first all-electric car

Volvo Cars has announced that, in addition to developing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, it has an all-electric version of the C30 hatchback in the works. The electric variant will be called the C30 BEV (battery electric vehicle) and will be the automaker's first all-electric vehicle.

The C30 BEV will replace the internal-combustion engine with an electric motor of indeterminate output. Meanwhile, the gasoline tank will be dropped in favor of a lithium ion battery pack. Volvo states that it is still working on the best placement of the 24 kWh battery pack, but has stated that the center … Read more

The end of battery-backed cache?

Adaptec has announced the immediate availability of a Series 5Z Unified Serial (SATA/SAS) RAID controller family with "Zero Maintenance Cache Protection." It's designed to replace the current generation of RAID controllers that use lithium ion batteries to protect data in cache memory.

This announcement is significant for two reasons. First, its shows the expanding role of NAND flash. Recently, NAND flash has been associated with the second coming of solid state disk (SSD) in enterprise disk arrays. In spite of reliability issues (the more flash memory is written to, the less reliable it becomes over time), … Read more

BYD may supply VW with batteries for plug-ins

Volkswagen may be late to the gate with hybrids and electric cars, but its recent partnership with Chinese automaker and lithium ion battery producer BYD shows that the German car company is a serious contender in the race to supply the masses with an electric car.

Volkswagen has already signed letters of intent with Sanyo and Toshiba as suppliers for electric batteries, and the company is currently exploring an arrangement with BYD to supply VW with lithium ion batteries for its upcoming plug-in and all electric vehicles, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

BYD is one of the largest manufacturers of lithium ion batteries. High demand and cost has made these batteries one of the road blocks to building affordable plug-in and electric vehicles.

However, the battery-maker-turned-car-manufacturer has been able to make stable and durable lithium ion batteries at half the cost of batteries produced in the west and Japan due to its safer, most cost-effective iron-phosphate-based lithium-ion technology. … Read more

Scientists use virus to help build battery

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have demonstrated how a genetically modified virus can be used to construct both the cathode and anode of a lithium ion battery.

Virus-built rechargeable batteries would have the same power capacity as the batteries used to power hybrid cars, project leader professor Angela Belcher said in an MIT press statement on Thursday.

In a paper published in the journal Science, the research team explained that it manipulated two genes of the M13 virus to equip the bacteriophage with peptide groups that attract single-walled carbon nanotubes at one end, while the other end of … Read more

MIT chips away at lithium ion barrier

Engineers at MIT have made a breakthrough that could translate into smaller, lighter, and faster-charging lithium ion batteries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Wednesday.

Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT; aided by Byoungwoo Kang, a graduate student in materials science and engineering, have made a small battery that can be fully charged or discharged in 10 to 20 seconds.

A detailed explanation on how they did this has been published in the March 12 issue of Nature, but here is a brief recap of what they essentially accomplished.

While lithium ion … Read more

'BusinessWeek' ponders lithium ion market war

"Should Uncle Sam provide billions in loans and grants to a promising but unproven business? Or should the government wait for the market to sort things out before it backs a U.S. company?"

Those are questions posed in a BusinessWeek article last week. However, the questions are largely rhetorical: the U.S. Department of Energy already has a $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, and many car and battery companies are counting on these loans to aid their development and production of lithium ion batteries.

So it's not a question of "should," it's a question of "how?"

Lithium ion batteries will add at least $8,000 to the price of a production plug-in hybrid vehicle, according to BusinessWeek. However, that amount is probably on the low side when you consider that the Chevy Volt is predicted to cost a bit less than $40,000, a good portion of that price being the battery. Another manufacturer representative estimated that a lithium ion battery currently costs approximately $22,000, effectively putting the electric car out of reach to all but the well-heeled greenies. … Read more