Earlier this year, we looked at the Israeli start-up company StoreDot’s innovative research in battery technology that could allow a smartphone battery to charge in just 30 seconds.

Now, the same company is taking that same technology and applying it to electric vehicles.

The company is claiming to have tweaked their technology to fully charge an electric car in just five minutes.

According to StoreDot, an array of 7,000 cells could enable electric vehicles to travel up to 300 mile on just a five minute charge.

This from Ecomento:

StoreDot believes it can speed up charging by creating a new variant of the industry-standard lithium-ion chemistry. It uses nanotechnology to make new organic materials that researchers claim have lower resistance than the materials used in current lithium-ion cells. That means electricity can flow through the battery more easily.

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EJ Taylor, ECS Treasurer and Chief Technical Officer at Faraday Technology, recently ran across this article from The Economist discussing an accidental discovery that could yield big results.

Materials scientists Wang Changan of Tsinghua University and Li Ju of MIT may have unintentionally found the answer to developing a battery that can last up to four times longer than the current generation.

Initially, the scientists were simply researching nanoparticles made of aluminum. While these tiny particles are good conductors of electricity, they become less efficient when exposed to air. When air hits these tiny particles, a coating of an oxide film begins to develop, greatly affecting the performance. The research the two scientists were working on was not to create a better battery, but rather to eliminate the oxide that coats the particles.

This from The Economist:

Their method was to soak the particles in a mixture of sulphuric acid and titanium oxysulphate. This replaces the aluminium oxide with titanium oxide, which is more conductive. However, they accidentally left one batch of particles in the acidic mixture for several hours longer than they meant to. As a result, though shells of titanium dioxide did form on them as expected, acid had time to leak through these shells and dissolve away some of the aluminium within. The consequence was nanoparticles that consisted of a titanium dioxide outer layer surrounding a loose kernel of aluminium.

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ECS is excited to announce the launch of a new pilot program for ECS student members at the 228th ECS Meeting in Phoenix, AZ, October 11-15, 2015.

As a student aide you will work closely with the ECS staff and gain first-hand experience in what it takes to execute an ECS biannual meeting. Take advantage of the opportunity to network and engage with meeting attendees, symposium organizers and ECS staff while learning how registration operates, technical sessions run and how major meeting programs are facilitated.

Interested in participating within this program? Click here to fill out your application today!

Please note, the deadline to apply is September 2nd, the selected candidates will notified by September 4th.

Benefits include a unique behind the scenes experience, networking opportunities, discounted Phoenix meeting registration, an ECS shirt and a certificate of participation! For more information or questions regarding the application process please contact beth.fisher@electrochem.org.

We look forward to seeing you in Phoenix!

Yue Kuo’s work in solid state science has yielded many innovations and has made a tremendous mark on the scientific community. Since his arrival at ECS in 1995, Kuo was named an ECS Fellow, was recently named Vice President of the Society, previously served as an associate editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, and is currently one of the technical editors of the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology. Additionally, Kuo received the ECS Gordon E. Moore Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Science and Technology at the 227th ECS Meeting.

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When we think of renewable energy, our minds typically tend toward solar and wind power. However, there are other promising energy sources that commonly fly under the radar. The Guardian recently highlighted five alternative energy sources that have the potential to see great growth in upcoming years and transform the energy landscape as we know it.

Ocean Power
With ocean waters covering more than 70 percent of our plants surface, it only makes sense to harness the energy it naturally produces. Ocean current and waves could be used to drive electric generators and produce an abundant amount of consistent energy. Typically, ocean energy is broken down into four categories: deep water source cooling, tidal power, wave power, and marine current.

The catch? Salt water causes corrosion, which raises an issue when developing a device to capture this energy. The biggest roadblock engineers are currently facing is how to develop an energy harnessing device that makes ocean power commercially viable. With the right scale of development, this from of energy could be at the forefront of a renewable future.

Biomass
Essentially, biomass transforms living things or the waste they produce into electricity. Currently, biomass accounts for 12 percent of the country’s renewable energy generation. While burning the fuel produces CO2, proponents of this source believe it will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to the growth of plants that produce the energy, which remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.

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An article by Theodore R. Beck in the Summer 2014 issue of Interface.

A simultaneous invention of an important industrial electrochemical process by two men on two different continents appears improbable. Yet that is what happened. One was in the United States and the other in France. Each inventor was born in the same year, 1863, and at age 22 each independently developed the same technology to produce aluminum by electrolysis. They were rather different personalities.

Charles Martin Hall was born into an educated family and attended Oberlin College. He was a studious scientist who deliberately, step by step, arrived at his process. The father of Paul Louis Toussaint Héroult was a tanner and Paul Héroult was expected to continue in that business. Instead, he attended a school of mines where he was dismissed after the first year because he spent his time thinking about how to produce aluminum rather than his studies. He was more of an intuitive thinker, and on inspiration, first electrolyzed alumina in molten cryolite in his father’s tannery.

The technology of these two inventors is now known as the Hall-Héroult Process. Hall and Héroult were among the earliest members of ECS, then named “The American Electrochemical Society.”

Charles Martin Hall was born on December 6, 1863 in Thompson, Ohio. His parents were Herman Bassett Hall and Sophronia H. Brooks. His father graduated from Oberlin College in 1847 and studied for three years at the Oberlin Theological Seminary. After ten years doing missionary work the family returned to Ohio in 1860 and to Oberlin in 1873.

Read the rest.

Check out what’s trending in electrochemical and solid state technology! Read some of the most exciting and innovative papers that have been recently published in ECS’s journals.

The articles highlighted below are free! Follow the links to get the full-text version.

Development of Hybrid Electro-Electroless Deposit (HEED) Coatings and Applications
Electrodeposition can be achieved via electroplating, whereby current is applied to the work piece serving as the cathode, or by using an electroless deposition process, wherein the reductant is a co-dissolved species in the plating solution. Researchers in Canada have developed a combined deposition process, termed hybrid electro-electroless deposition (HEED) to deposit two metals. Read the rest.

“Time of Flight” Electrochemistry
Measurement of molecular diffusion coefficients is important in understanding and determining the kinetics of physical and chemical processes. Among the measurement techniques employed are those based on pulsed field gradient nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, field flow fractionation, and electrochemistry. Read the rest.

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Thanks to a team of Australian researchers, we can now get a detailed idea of what is happening on the deep ocean floor. The first digital map of the seafloor has been created to let us know what’s happening under 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Not only does this give us a new understanding of the oceanic environment, it will also help scientists see how the waters are reacting to climate change.

“Our new map brings out the enormous ecological and geological complexity of the seafloor that before we had no idea about,” said Dr. Dietmar Muller, a geophysicist at the University of Sydney in Australia and co-author of a paper.

When analyzing the findings, researchers found that the majority of the deep ocean floor is littered with the remains of phytoplankton. Due to the warming ocean temperatures, these phytoplankton have declined by 40 percent since the 1950s. Due to the difficulty in studying organisms on the ocean floor, the reasons for these happenings have only been theoretical. However, it has caused great concern due to the sea creatures’ essential role in providing vital support to the marine ecosystem. Due to the new research, scientists can now examine the composition of the remains and see how the ocean responded to and will continue responding to climate change.

“In order to understand environmental change in the oceans we need to better understand what is preserved in the geological record in the seabed,” says lead researcher Dr. Adriana Dutkiewicz from the University of Sydney.

PS: Head over to the Digital Library to read more on climate change!

ECS staff recently analyzed membership data to determine which organizations had the largest presence within the society. Here is what we discovered:

1.)             Argonne National Laboratory (35)                           

 ∗ 2.)     Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  (29)              Member Since: 2004

∗ 3.)                  IBM Corporation (21)                                     Member Since: 1957

∗ 3.)            Industrie De Nora S.p.A. (21)                                  Member Since: 1983

∗ 3.)                    Medtronic Inc. (21)                                         Member Since: 1980

∗ 6.)      Sandia National Laboratories (20)                                  Member Since: 1997

7.)                                   IMEC (17)                                           

∗ 8.)           Bio-Logic USA/Bio-Logic SAS (16)                           Member Since: 2008

∗ 9.)    Toyota Research Institute of North America (15)         Member Since: 2008

∗ 9.)              Nissan Motor Co Ltd. (15)                                   Member Since: 2007

9.)           National Renewable Energy Laboratory (15)            

∗ 9.)                        Panasonic (15)                                             Member Since: 1994

9.)                      Paul Scherrer Institut (15)                              

∗The total amount of members can be found next to each organization’s name.
The names in green with an asterisk indicate organizations that have an institutional membership.

ECS is grateful for the continued support from each of these important partners, particularly those that have committed to an institutional membership. If your organization might be interested in an institutional membership, please review the options online or contact the ECS development office at development@electrochem.org.

This is the latest Websites of Note, a regular feature in the ECS magazine Interface researched by Zoltan Nagy, a semi-retired electrochemist.

Fuel Cells — Green Power
Although fuel cells have been around since 1839, it took 120 years until NASA demonstrated some of their potential applications in providing power during space flight. As a result of these successes, in the 1960s, industry began to recognize the commercial potential of fuel cells, but encountered technical barriers and high investment costs — fuel cells were not economically competitive with existing energy technologies. Since 1984, the Office of Transportation Technologies at the U.S. Department of Energy has been supporting research and development of fuel cell technology, and as a result, hundreds of companies around the world are now working towards making fuel cell technology pay off. Just as in the commercialization of the electric light bulb nearly one hundred years ago, today’s companies are being driven by technical, economic, and social forces such as high performance characteristics, reliability, durability, low cost, and environmental benefits.

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