Getting the Juice: How About Silicon-Nanotube Electrodes?

Getting the Juice: How About Silicon-Nanotube Electrodes?

It’s just another research initiative … a fond hope, … but it might work yet. Researchers at Stanford University in California, USA and Hanyang University in Ansan, Korea are working to develop silicon nanotube electrodes that might hold more mobile lithium ions in a lithium battery. The result might be a tenfold increase in battery capability per unit of mass.

That could upgrade electric cars from 40-mile range to 400-mile range. The reason Henry Ford politely declined to work for Thomas Alva Edison on the electric car would disappear

The development program was described in the journal Nano Letters, and Technology Review summarized it at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23516/
and it has great possibilities.

However, there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Theoretical possibilities cannot be produced in mass, or the mass production does not drop down to a practical price. Many “inventions” fail during the 80% of the cost phase when the researchers assay to transform them into innovations.

Still, the good news is that nanotube anodes are just part of a robust effort to vastly improve battery capabilities. Some of those efforts—not necessarily this one—must succeed in developing a real product.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Look to the Weeds in Saving the World before Breakfast

  For thousands of years, farmers have wailed on weeds with hoes and plucked bugs off their plants.   They have fought back much more powerfully in the 1900s and 2000s with power weeders, pesticides, and herbicides. But, the pests and weeds need not be problems.   Sometimes, they can be part of the solution in developing a more efficient food-producing system.   That better food production is something humanity will need to feed a bigger population coming and for doing that despite serious global warming that might also be coming.   Hello, I’m Roger Carlson. I wrote the books, Saving the World Before Breakfast: A Better Green New Deal , and Saving the World Before Breakfast: The Earth Alone Can Save Us.   A key theme in those books is transforming problems into parts of the solution.   Let’s start with the so-called weeds and pests that become contributors when associated with one particular tiny fern, azolla. For centuries, East Asian farmers have raised fish along with ric
Read more

Every Little Energy Bit Helps

Every Little Energy Bit Helps…And Every Eccentric Bit…and Every Bottom-Line Bit Every little bit helps! Every little bit helps! That was a line from a new group in the 1970s—the environmentalists. They had big ideas about cleaning all the smoke stacks of America. They also had little ideas. One of the little ideas was a brick in the toilette tank. One brick saved about one quart per flush with the resulting savings in water and water purification chemicals. AND if all the toilettes in America had a brick…. Let’s start with a serious concern about energy. Petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert said that petroleum production is like a bell-shaped curve. Production of oil for our cars goes steeply up to a peak.…. Then, it goes steeply down. In 1956, Hubbert said that oil production in the lower forty-eight states would peak about 1970. People laughed…until 1970 when it happened. Now, other geologists are saying there is a similar curve for world oil production. And that peak might be roughly
Read more

2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: "We’re Winning!" No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win

  2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: "We’re Winning!"   No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win In February, I attended the 2023 Heartland Institute 15th International Conference on Climate Change discussing hardcore skepticism about global warming.   Most of the press and public consider global warming (which they now call climate change) a possible end-of-the-world threat.   Heartland is the foremost exception.   Heartland began in 1984, “… to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”   They soon zeroed in on predictions of catastrophic global warming and have been fiercely skeptical of it ever since.   This year’s 2023 conference continued the tradition.   The conference included high caliber climate scientists, economists, and energy experts, many whom are retired or otherwise insulated from possible loss of government funding. At every Heartland conference, the presentations target fallacies in the theory of a massive
Read more