Lifeboat Foundation

In a significant step toward large-scale hydrogen production, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a low-cost catalyst that can speed up the splitting of water to produce hydrogen gas.

Splitting water using electricity is a widely-explored method to generate hydrogen gas, a long sought-after clean power source for fuel cells, batteries and zero-emission vehicles. One of two major reactions involved in this process—called the Oxygen Evolution Reaction—is notoriously slow, restricting the overall efficiency. Researchers have focused on developing better catalysts — materials that can speed up the reaction while remaining neutral. The most efficient catalysts today are made from precious metals such as ruthenium and platinum, which are both expensive and rare.

An IISc team has now developed a low-cost catalyst by combining cobalt oxide with phosphate salts of sodium. The material cost is over two hundred times less expensive than the current state-of-the-art ruthenium dioxide catalyst, and the reaction rate is also faster, says Ritambhara Gond, PhD student at the Materials Research Centre (MRC), IISc, who is the first author of the paper published in Angewandte Chemie.

Continue reading “A superior, low-cost catalyst for water-splitting” »

Innolith AG, a world leader in rechargeable inorganic battery technology, has announces that it is developing world’s first 1,000 Wh/kg rechargeable battery. Under development in the company’s German laboratory, the new Innolith Energy Battery would be capable of powering an electric vehicle for over 1,000 km on a single charge. The new Innolith battery would also radically reduce costs due to the avoidance of exotic and expensive materials combined with the very high energy density of the system.

In addition to its range and cost advantages, the Innolith battery will be the first non-flammable lithium-based battery for use in electric vehicles. This battery uses a non-flammable inorganic electrolyte, unlike conventional EV batteries that use a flammable organic electrolyte. The switch to non-flammable batteries removes the primary cause of battery fires that have beset the manufacturers of EVs.

Germany spent 84 million euros developing the Siemens-made eHighway and a hybrid truck, which Siemens say will massively lower fuel costs.

Redox flow batteries are attractive for large-scale energy storage due to a combination of high theoretical efficiencies and decoupled power and energy storage capacities. Efforts to significantly increase energy densities by using nonaqueous electrolytes have been impeded by separators with low selectivities. Here, we report nanoporous separators based on aramid nanofibres, which are assembled using a scalable, low cost, spin-assisted layer-by-layer technique. The multilayer structure yields 5 ± 0.5 nm pores, enabling nanofiltration with high selectivity. Further, surface modifications using polyelectrolytes result in enhanced performance. In vanadium acetylacetonate/acetonitrile-based electrolytes, the coated separator exhibits permeabilities an order of magnitude lower and ionic conductivities five times higher than those of a commercial separator. In addition, the coated separators exhibit exceptional stability, showing minimal degradation after more than 100 h of cycling. The low permeability translates into high coulombic efficiency in flow cell charge/discharge experiments performed at cycle times relevant for large-scale applications (5 h).

Reactor designs are inspired by everything from smoke rings to shrimps.

Two California designers have won a $1.5 million prize after building a shipping container that can harvest water from the air. David Hertz and Rich Groden were named the winners of the Water Abundance XPrize for their innovative creation, which can produce enough water to satisfy the needs of 100 people.

The competition, which began in 2016, asked designers to build a device that could extract at least 2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere while only using clean energy and costing no more than 2 cents a liter. Nearly 100 teams entered the challenge, which was eventually whittled down to two finalists. Hertz and Groden’s team, called Skysource/Skywater Alliance, won the prize because their invention “demonstrated the greatest ability to create decentralized access to water,” per a press release.

Giant tanks filled with a liquid solution are offering a novel way to create a battery with unlimited capacity.

To meet the demands of an electric future, new battery technologies will be essential. One option is lithium sulphur batteries, which offer a theoretical energy density more than five times that of lithium ion batteries. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, recently unveiled a promising breakthrough for this type of battery, using a catholyte with the help of a graphene sponge.

The researchers’ novel idea is a porous, sponge-like aerogel made of reduced graphene oxide that acts as a free-standing electrode in the battery cell and allows for better and higher utilisation of sulphur.

A traditional battery consists of four parts. First, there are two supporting electrodes coated with an active substance, which are known as an anode and a cathode. In between them is an electrolyte, generally a liquid, allowing ions to be transferred back and forth. The fourth component is a separator, which acts as a physical barrier, preventing contact between the two electrodes whilst still allowing the transfer of ions.

Continue reading “Graphene sponge helps lithium sulphur batteries reach new potential” »

The latest version of Toyota’s zero-emissions fuel-cell powered tractor truck was unveiled today in Los Angeles. Developed as part of a joint project with the Kenworth Truck Company, the Port of Los Angeles, and the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the Fuel Cell Electric heavy-duty Truck (FCET) that runs on hydrogen and produces only water as waste is intended to meet or exceed the performance of a conventional diesel truck.