News

As is often the case with Tesla, the mainstream press has missed the true significance of the company’s latest product. Tesla’s announcement of its new P100D battery pack option focused on the quicker 0-60 time, so that’s what most media outlets wrote about. Everyone other than acceleration junkies greeted it […]

Zinc-air batteries are widely used in devices like hearing aids for their good performance-to-price ratio. The tricky part is of course to make them rechargeable. This is one of two technologies that ZAF Energy Systems has been working on for the last couple of years. [Note that CleanTechnica published an […]

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the US Army Research Lab (ARL) are collaborating on a new type of lithium-ion battery that uses a high concentration of salt in an aqueous electrolyte. They hope to develop a battery that offers greater energy density and better safety than current […]

The MIT spinoff company SolidEnergy Systems is claiming that it can double the battery life of regular lithium-ion batteries and reduce battery sizes though the use of its new lithium-metal technology. More specifically, the company is claiming that its battery technology allows for energy densities of 400 Wh/kg. The technology […]

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to improve the performance of lithium-rich cathode materials by creating oxygen vacancies at the material’s surface. In “Gas-solid interfacial modification of oxygen activity in layered oxide cathodes for lithium-ion batteries,” published in Nature Communications, Minghao Zhang and colleagues explain the […]

The unprecedented demand for the upcoming Model 3 presents major opportunities not only for Tesla, but for its partners. Panasonic, which will be the exclusive supplier of batteries for Model 3, expects its annual sales of automotive batteries to more than double in three years. Kenji Tamura, the head of […]

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich in Switzerland have developed a simple procedure that they say can enhance the performance of Li-ion batteries by improving the design of the electrodes without changing the underlying chemistry. In “Magnetically aligned graphite electrodes for high rate performance Li-ion batteries,” published […]

Powin Energy, a maker of stationary storage systems, has been awarded a patent for its Battery Pack Operating System (bp-OS). The bp-OS uses an algorithm to actively and passively balance batteries down to the cell level, and also offers a picture of battery health through real-time monitoring, state-of-charge management and […]

Battery manufacturer Amprius has demonstrated a new system for inline, continuous, and roll-to-roll production of three-dimensional silicon nanowire anodes that it says will enable it to scale up manufacturing more quickly. Silicon is widely considered to be the next big thing in anode technology – battery-builders and automakers (including Tesla) […]

Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a flexible, solid-state, ion-conducting membrane based on a 3D Li-ion conducting ceramic nanofiber network. In “Flexible, solid-state, ion-conducting membrane with 3D garnet nanofiber networks for lithium batteries,” published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists describe a hybrid […]

The United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC) has awarded a $4-million contract toSiNode Systems for the development of advanced anode materials for automotive lithium-ion batteries. The 30-month program will focus on the development of silicon-graphene anode material for vehicle applications, and the development and scale-up of pouch cells. SiNode’s technology […]

Kreisel is an Austrian battery pack manufacturer that has been making battery packs for electric vehicle applications. The company website describes it this way: “The company was founded by brothers Johann, Markus and Philipp Kreisel in 2014 as a small, independent start-up with solid technical know-how and plenty of passion.” The Kreisel pack […]