The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 27
DOD invests $2.5 million from the 2024 Defense Appropriations Act for research and development. Talon Metals Corp. is being awarded a $2.47 million research and development contract from the Department of Defense's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) through its wholly owned subsidiary Talon Nickel (USA) LLC, to support new approaches for extracting nickel, cobalt, and iron from domestic sulfide ores and tailings. DLA will provide the funding over a 15-month period for Talon to...
The secret to serving up the perfect sodium-ion battery is to slow-cook the cathode and microwave the anode. On the heels of an Argonne National Laboratory discovery that demonstrates slow heating is the secret to more durable and longer-lasting sodium-ion battery cathodes, a research team at the Nano Hybrid Technology Research Center of the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) found that the best way to prepare the anode material is to stick it in the microwave...
Argonne National Lab scientists discover method to prevent cracks in sodium-ion battery cathodes, increasing lifespan. A breakthrough from Argonne National Laboratory may have paved the way for a new era of affordable, sustainable sodium-ion batteries. As the global push for clean energy accelerates, batteries have become essential for powering electric vehicles and storing renewable energy. While lithium-ion batteries remain the standard due to their high energy density and m...
Natron plans to 40X its capacity with a 14 GW sodium-ion battery factory in Southeast U.S. Natron plans to invest nearly $1.4 billion in building a sodium-ion battery factory in North Carolina. The plant is expected to produce 14 gigawatts of sodium-ion batteries per year at full capacity, increasing Natron's production by more than 40 times its current capacity. The factory is part of Natron's strategy to leverage the growing demand for sodium-ion battery storage, according...
International Energy Agency says significant investments are still needed for critical minerals supply to keep pace with clean energy demand. While encouraged by the billions of dollars that has been invested in developing new supplies of the minerals and metals critical to the energy transition, the International Energy Agency (IEA) cautions that the current well-supplied market may not be a good guide for the future of critical minerals. "The world's appetite for...
Auto manufacturers take sides on the question facing the industry – are deep sea resources necessary to compete in the global EV race? A proposal to limit the use of minerals pulled from the seabed has been making its rounds in boardrooms from Tesla to GM, asking big names in the electric vehicle game to commit to a moratorium on minerals sourced from the deep sea. It lost in a landslide, with 78% of Tesla shareholders voting against the proposal and 6% in favor. While c...
And we won't find out how or why until it finally goes out. In a world increasingly obsessed with energy-efficient and long-lasting batteries, a nondescript bell at the University of Oxford's Clarendon Laboratory has been gently chiming since 1840 as one of the world's longest-running battery-powered science experiments. Shortly after America declared independence, electricity was still a largely unknown factor and was considered to have sources in animals, lightning, static,...
Korean researchers present a high-power sodium-ion battery that can be charged in seconds. Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a high-energy and high-power hybrid sodium-ion battery capable of charging within seconds. Interest in developing batteries based on sodium has taken off due to concerns over the sustainability of lithium, as well as safety concerns due to the combustibility of lithium-ion batteries....
Inlyte Energy's endeavors to bring back sodium-metal-halide batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are today's most common energy storage technology, with uses large and small, ranging from smartphones and other electronic devices to electric cars and stationary. But science is far from resting on this standard – battery efficiency and durability are still in high demand. With sodium easier to source and exponentially cheaper than lithium, a redesigned sodium-metal-halide battery m...
Researchers find way to make crack-free nanocellular graphene to upgrade low-cost sodium-ion energy storage systems. Looking to solve a critical failure during the manufacture of nanocellular graphene, researchers from Tohoku University in Japan have discovered that by using this specialized form of graphene in a dealloying process effectively "heals" the cracks formed during its making. Ever since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been revolutionizing the field of...
A new room-temperature liquid-metal battery of the University of Texas may provide more power than lithium-ion batteries while competing with solid-state batteries for their chance under the hood of the electric vehicle of the future. A report published in the journal Advanced Materials, describes a design which combines the strengths of both solid-state and liquid-state batteries while circumventing several of their disadvantages. This new battery has increased energy...
Researchers at MIT have demonstrated a lithium-ion battery cathode made with organic materials, offering a more sustainable way to power electric vehicles, and Lamborghini is all-in. "I think this material could have a big impact because it works really well," said Mircea Dincă, W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper on the findings published in the journal ACS Central Science. "It is already competitive with incumbent technologies, and it can save...
Aluminum-sulfur, iron-phosphate, nickel-hydride, solid-state, redox flow, molten-salt, the growing list of potential alternatives to lithium-ion batteries has exploded onto the scene in the past few years as experts quickly determined a single battery technology could not withstand the torrent of technologies vital to power a future of clean, sustainable energy. One of the most promising contenders is sodium-ion batteries, and with support from automaker giant Stellantis, it...
The world's transition away from fossil fuels to sustainable green energy sources is rapidly increasing the demand for economical storage methods that has thus far centered on lithium-ion batteries. The limited availability in the West of lithium and other critical metals, such as cobalt and rare earth elements, raises significant concern about the sustainability of the lithium-ion technology. One potential alternative may be the sodium-ion battery. According to the European...
As 2024 gets underway, the direction of rechargeable battery design continues to have major implications for the mining industry. A range of renewable power technologies are under development and expansion across the globe to replace fossil fuels. These advancements and the continued electric vehicle push driving the need for increased energy storage capacity, continue to add to the world's energy transition minerals shopping list. The numbers are already in – the new mines n...
Each year in Canada, roughly 200 active mines contribute to billions of tons of mining waste. The estimated number of tailing storage facilities surveyed worldwide is over 12,000. While considered industrial waste, these facilities also contain a number of useful minerals at a concentration deemed too low to be worth extracting-until now. Enter biomining, which covers several biological separation technologies offering eco-friendly recovery of valuable and strategic materials...
May be the tech for unifying green energy future and the not-so-often green methods of producing lithium. Researchers at Princeton have developed a surprisingly efficient and environmentally friendly method of extracting lithium from brines and seawater using specialized string. While technologies such as direct extraction from lithium-rich geothermal waters is shaping up to be a way to produce the silvery-white critical mineral necessary for rechargeable batteries without...
While not quite as easy as whipping up a science experiment in the kitchen, a research group from the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Engineering has developed an inexpensive and eco-friendly way to condense various rare earth elements (REEs) from natural water sources using common, food-safe ingredients. The research group, led by Professor Masayuki Azuma and Associate Professor Yoshihiro Ojima, have successfully tested an adsorbent material using dry...
Seeking an affordable and safer alternative to lithium-ion batteries for the storage of intermittent clean energy from wind and solar, a global team of researchers led by an award-winning chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new rechargeable battery made with affordable and readily available materials – aluminum, sulfur, and molten salts. "I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale s...
From flashlights to supercomputers, tin is the glue for an electronic age Lost in the clamor for lithium, nickel and other metals needed for the batteries powering electric vehicles and modern electronics, or the rare earth elements that turn stored energy into motion, is the enormous need for a much more modest metal that is so fundamental to the advancement of technology that it almost goes unseen – tin. While other technology metals are critical to certain products and s...
Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Washington have dicovered a simple way to extract what could be considered one of the most critical minerals to the United States and European Union, magnesium. Since ancient times, Mankind has extracted salts from the ocean. While table salt is the easiest to obtain, seawater is a rich source of different minerals, and scientists have long been exploring the possibility of isolating specific...
MIT develops a wearable sensor able to target any biomarker Using a gold-gallium "band-aid" could prove the next generation of biological monitoring as researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a new kind of wearable sensor capable of communicating wirelessly without the need for microchips or even batteries. Wearable sensors are ubiquitous due to wireless technology, which enables the monitoring of glucose concentrations, blood pressure, heart...
Global mining and metals company Rio Tinto has entered into a strategic partnership that includes a roughly US$10 million (C$12.5 million) investment in Nano One Materials Corp., a British Columbia-based company that has developed a technology equivalent to the "Instant Pot" of lithium battery cathode materials. While there has been a lot of buzz about the hundreds of factories being constructed around the globe to manufacture the lithium batteries needed for the electric...
Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have recently devised a method of using a novel form of the wonder material graphene in sodium-ion batteries, increasing their sustainability and capability, tenfold. Much like today's lithium-ion, sodium-ion batteries function by generating power by shuttling ions between a pair of electrodes in a liquid electrolyte, yet their performance has always left something to be desired. Part of their limitation is due to...
Lithium battery manufacturer Northvolt has partnered up with an unlikely collaborator, Swedish startup Cinis Fertilizer, signing an offtake agreement for sodium sulfate salt to be recovered from battery manufacturing processes and repurposed for commercial use. Aiming to produce the world's most environmentally friendly mineral fertilizer by recycling industrial waste products from the pulp and paper industry, as well as the battery manufacturing industry, Cinis intends to...
