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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 25 2015, @11:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the cheaper-charge dept.

Flexible, more resilient, easier to recycle, greater energy density, and all at a lower cost. You know the drill:

An advanced manufacturing approach for lithium-ion batteries, developed by researchers at MIT and at a spinoff company called 24M, promises to significantly slash the cost of the most widely used type of rechargeable batteries while also improving their performance and making them easier to recycle. "We've reinvented the process," says Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT and a co-founder of 24M (and previously a co-founder of battery company A123). The existing process for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, he says, has hardly changed in the two decades since the technology was invented, and is inefficient, with more steps and components than are really needed.

The new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and conventional solid ones: In this version, while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles. Chiang and Carter refer to this as a "semisolid battery."

Instead of the standard method of applying liquid coatings to a roll of backing material, and then having to wait for that material to dry before it can move to the next manufacturing step, the new process keeps the electrode material in a liquid state and requires no drying stage at all. Using fewer, thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture's number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent. Having the electrode in the form of tiny suspended particles instead of consolidated slabs greatly reduces the path length for charged particles as they move through the material — a property known as "tortuosity." A less tortuous path makes it possible to use thicker electrodes, which, in turn, simplifies production and lowers cost.

The company has so far made about 10,000 batteries on its prototype assembly lines, most of which are undergoing testing by three industrial partners, including an oil company in Thailand and Japanese heavy-equipment manufacturer IHI Corp. The process has received eight patents and has 75 additional patents under review; 24M has raised $50 million in financing from venture capital firms and a U.S. Department of Energy grant.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:39PM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:39PM (#201191) Journal

    This is a difficult discussion.

    No, its not. A patent in the public domain has never held up the use of one invention in this country.

    Everybody points to troll-ish cases in medicine, but the deeper you dig, the more you find it is just not true.
    There is no risk here, any more than putting round tires on your freshly designed car prevents patenting the car's design. All engineered products these days include prior discoveries.

    Allowing Universities to double dip government research grants and patent licensing is fundamental mistake. Unless the university can prove that no tax money went into the patent, it should automatically become public domain.

    At the very least FRAND principals must apply.

    Your weak attempt to make excuses just isn't convincing.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
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