Air battery to let electric cars outlast gas guzzlers - lithium air battery
Duncan Graham
One of the biggest downsides of having an electric vehicle (EV) is Mileage anxiety-drivers are worried that battery charging won't get them to their destination.
Now IBM claims to have solved a basic problem that could lead to 800-kilometre (500-
Mileage) makes it possible for electric vehicles to compete with most gasoline engines for the first time.
Lithium for standard electric vehiclesion (Li-
Ion) the battery is huge and rarely provides 160 kilometers (100 miles) of driving time before it runs out.
A new type called lithium-
The air battery is more attractive because its theoretical energy density is more than 1000 times larger than that of Li-
The ion type makes it almost the same as gasoline.
Lithium-instead of using metal oxide in the positive
The air battery uses carbon, which is lighter and reacts with oxygen in the surrounding air to generate current.
But there's a problem.
Chemical instability limits the life of them when they charge, making their use on cars impractical, says Winfried Wilcke, a physicist at IBM Almaden Labs in San Jose, California.
Thus, Wilcke studied the potential chemistry of these cells using one mass spectrometry.
He found that oxygen not only reacts with a well-known carbon electrode, but also with an electrolytic solvent-carrying a conductive solution of lithium ion between the electrodes.
Heavy metal is not used-
Oxide, the carbon electrode of the battery reacts with oxygen in the air. However, if the Electrolyte reacts with oxygen when the car is in use, it will eventually run out.
So Wilcke worked with his colleague Alessandro Curioni at IBM Zurich Research lab in Switzerland to run extremely detailed reaction models using a Blue Gene supercomputer looking for alternative electrolyte.
Curioni says this includes a form of modeling from atomic to component quantum mechanics.
"We have one that looks very promising right now," Wilcke said . ".
He won't reveal what material it is, but he says several research prototypes have been shown.
As part of IBM's Battery 500
An alliance of four national laboratories and business partners in the United States, hoping to have a complete
A prototype of scale will be ready by 2013, and commercial batteries will follow about 2020.
If it works this will solve a major obstacle to lithium
Air Battery, Phil batlitt says he is the head of the Department of the electrochemistry at the University of Southampton, England.
There are other practical problems that need to be addressed, such as enabling the battery to cope with wet air.
"Lithium in the water will automatically catch fire," he said . "