Showing posts with label Battery tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Battery tech. Show all posts

Friday, June 10, 2022

Friday June 10th, 2022 Yet-Ming Chiang - Batteries and Renewable Energy

MIT Professor Yet-Ming Chiang will speak about Storage to Enable a 100% Renewable Electric Grid. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is a key pathway to mitigation of climate change. Remarkable innovations in and scaled production of Li-ion battery technology over the past two decades could allow hour-to-hour and day-to-night variability in wind and solar generation to be largely accommodated. However, multi-day lulls in renewable generation currently challenge the electric grid’s ability to provide firm (dispatchable and always-available) power. Affordable and reliable long-duration storage is needed. In order to effectively compete on a cost basis with natural gas generation, system-level storage costs will need to be $20 per kilowatt hour or less. This talk will compare performance requirements for long- and short-duration storage applications, including where trades unacceptable at short-durations may be relaxed for long-duration batteries. Consideration of these criteria, alongside the equally important requirement of materials availability and manufacturing scalability that may need to reach installed storage capacity of ~100 TWh worldwide by midcentury, narrows the technological options. Of these, the rechargeable iron-air battery emerges as a promising option, for reasons that will be elaborated in the talk.

Yet-Ming Chiang is the Kyocera Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, where his research focuses on clean energy technologies including non-aqueous and aqueous batteries for transportation and grid-scale storage, and electrochemical production of construction materials. He has brought several laboratory discoveries to commercial implementation, including the development of high-power lithium iron phosphate batteries, a semi-solid electrode approach to low-cost lithium-ion battery manufacturing, and batteries for long-duration grid storage. He has published about 300 scientific articles and holds about 100 issued U.S. patents, of which more than 70 have been licensed to or are held by practicing companies. Chiang is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Ceramic Society, and the National Academy of Inventors. His work in energy has been recognized by the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer Award (2016), the Economist’s Innovation Award (Energy and Environment Category, 2012), The Electrochemical Society Battery Division’s Battery Technology Award (2012), and an R&D 100 Editor’s Choice Award (2006). Chiang has co-founded several companies based on research from his MIT laboratory including American Superconductor Corporation (1987), A123 Systems (2001), 24M Technologies (2010), Desktop Metal (2015), Form Energy (2017), and Sublime Systems (2020). He was co-director of the MIT Future of Energy Storage study (2022) and leads the newly inaugurated Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry at MIT.

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Friday November 12th, 2021 Quinn Horn: How big oil, an industrial accident in India, heavy metal poisoning, and dog food led to the development and commercialization of the lithium-ion battery in Japan.

Get charged up and join us to hear Dr. Quinn Horn on battery technology!

Abstract:

Prior to Alessandro Volta’s invention of the battery in 1799, the only type of electricity known to science was what we now call static electricity. The battery was the first source of reliable direct current electricity, and Volta’s invention ushered in a massive wave of scientific and technical advancements in the 19th century. World changing technologies like the telegraph, the electric motor and the economical extraction of aluminum metal from ore were all enabled by the battery. Fast forward to the end of the 20th century and we see an analogous impact from the commercial introduction of the lithium-ion battery in 1991. We now drive electric vehicles, carry the equivalent of a super computer in our pockets and light our homes at night with the stored energy of the sun, all thanks to lithium-ion batteries. However, despite the fact that for nearly two centuries battery R&D and manufacturing were centered in the US and Europe, the lithium-ion battery was commercialized in a country that as of the late 20th century had virtually no experience with battery technology: Japan. In this presentation we will explore the history of the development of the lithium-ion battery and how geopolitical events, industrial accidents, and a few questionable corporate decisions, led to the rise of Japanese dominance in battery technology.


Bio:

Dr. Quinn Horn obtained his PhD in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from Michigan Technological University. He led the Microscopy and Materials Group at Energizer/Eveready Battery Company prior to joining Exponent, Inc in 2004. At Exponent, Dr. Horn consults on battery technology issues related to performance, reliability, safety and intellectual property.