Batteries are common in the devices we use - everything from electric cars to laptops. Unfortunately the last real breakthrough in battery technology was lithium-ion and it s been 25 years of not much since. We re no longer using a 386 PC but our devices are using that equivalent in battery power.
There are efforts to try and get the most performance out of this legacy technology and one effort is replacing the graphite traditionally used in one of the battery s electrodes with a sponge-like silicon material. Silicon has more than 10 times the energy storage capacity of graphite.
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries have two electrodes: one that s positively charged and made of lithium and another that s negative and typically consists of graphite. Electricity is generated when electrons flow through a wire that connects the two. To control the electrons, positively charged lithium atoms – which scientists call ions - shuffle from one electrode to the other through another pat
Ettringite Cements Its Potential
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PNNL-led team designs highly active cobalt-based PGM-free catalyst for fuel cells
A multi-institutional research team led by materials scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has designed a highly active and durable catalyst that doesn’t rely on costly platinum group metals (PGM) to spur the necessary chemical reaction.
The new catalyst contains cobalt interspersed with nitrogen and carbon. When compared to a similarly structured catalyst made from iron another promising, well-studied platinum substitute the team found that the cobalt catalyst achieved a similar reaction but with four times the durability. The research is published in
Nature Catalysis.
The development of catalysts free of platinum-group metals and with both a high activity and durability for the oxygen reduction reaction in proton exchange membrane fuel cells is a grand challenge. Here we report an atomically dispersed Co and N co-doped carbon (Co–N–C) catalyst with a high catalytic ox