Amy Prieto and colleagues are developing a lightweight lithium-ion battery characterized by an unprecedented power density, capable of charging and discharging power rapidly over an extended lifetime while exhibiting dramatically low capacity loss over thousands of cycles.

The time required to completely charge/discharge the battery is expected to be only a few minutes - a virtually unheard of charge/discharge rate made possible by this nanometer-scale design. Best of all, these performance advantages will not decrease over repeated charge/discharge cycles.

Prieto and her team are working closely with the Clean Energy Supercluster and its business arm, Cenergy, as well as the Colorado State University Research Foundation to help with potential intellectual property and commercialization efforts of this new battery technology.

The powerful lithium-based batteries used in electric vehicle systems, laptops and cell phones are prone to overheating and even blowing up, but adding less than a gram of a new substance could keep both temperatures and costs down, federal researchers say.

The powerful lithium-based batteries used in electric vehicle systems, laptops and cell phones are prone to overheating and even blowing up, but adding less than a gram of a new substance could keep both temperatures and costs down, federal researchers say.

In the lab, Amine and Chen discovered they could make a molecule based on boron and fluorine and add a tiny amount of it to each cell to control charging. When the cell exceeds the safe voltage level, Amine explained, the molecule picks up electrons and keeps the cell charge from going up.

Amine said the new approach offers several advantages over current technologies. In addition to the lower cost, the molecule is more reliable, he said. Other systems that use some kind of molecule in a similar way cannot control more than one overheating cycle, he said, while his molecule will soak up extra voltage through 500 or more cycles.

A new breed of rechargeable zinc-air batteries is soon to be available, and may replace lithium-ion batteries in cell phones, laptops and other consumer items. Lithium-ion batteries store only a third of the energy and cost around twice as much as the new batteries.

The Swiss company ReVolt, from Staefa, plans to release the new batteries next year, initially as small batteries for use in hearing aids, and later for cell phones. Eventually much larger batteries are planned for electric vehicles.

The new battery was developed in Trondheim in Norway by the SINTEF Group, the largest independent research institution in Scandinavia, and ReVolt was formed to market the device.

Zinc-air batteries need oxygen from the air to generate the current. They are safer than lithium-ion batteries because they do not contain volatile materials, and therefore do not catch fire. Non-rechargeable zinc-air batteries have been available for some time, but rechargeable versions have proved more difficult to develop.

Of course it will be more believable if the DoD starts adopting these, and subjects them to real abuse tests, like firing bullets and missiles at these things. Then deploys them into one of those areas like Iraq/Afghanistan (hopefully before they withdraw completely). Then when they come back and stamp a "Combat Proven" onto these things, maybe more people would be convinced