Nokia Bell Labs and AMBER Research formulate new battery design

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20 June 2019, Espoo, Finland, and Dublin, Ireland: Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs and AMBER, the SFI Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research hosted at Trinity College Dublin, today announced they have created a new, innovative formula for battery composition that makes batteries more powerful by packing 2.5 times the battery life than anything currently on the market. As the world transitions to 5G, ushering in a new era of consumer and industrial Internet of Things (everything from wearable technologies, pervasive sensors, to industrial robots), this new, game-changing battery design has the potential to help power the connected world of the future.
The increasing power requirements of connected devices such as smartphones, drones, electric cars and robots necessitates greater battery performance for both new applications as well as longer battery lifetimes. The new battery design also has far-reaching implications for 4G and 5G networks where conventional power may not be available for network equipment, or where emergency backup battery systems are essential to keep systems running.
"By packing more energy into a smaller space, this new battery technology will have a profound impact on 5G and the entire networked world," said Paul King, one of the lead investigators on the project and Member of the Technical Staff, Nokia Bell Labs. "The combination of Nokia Bell Labs industry and device knowledge and AMBER's materials science expertise allowed us to tackle an extremely difficult problem involving multiple disciplines. Our results were achieved through the deeply collaborative mode in which we work, underscoring the value of engaging with AMBER as part of our global research strategy."

An additional benefit to this new technology is its potential to improve the performance of large-scale energy grids powered by renewable energy. The demand for reliable power relies on storage technologies, such as the battery technology described here, to manage the high fluctuation in energy generation in today's wind and solar renewable technologies. A new study from Wood Mackenzie shows that the energy storage in 100 percent renewable systems will likely be 25 times higher as compared to today's systems. This will pose issues as the need for efficient, fast charging and compact energy storage becomes even more imperative.

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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nokia...182720534.html


Well this be interesting development, especially if can be scaled to EV markets.

Some additional info:

"Ireland Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research, and Nokia Bell Labs have found an inexpensive way to make batteries more compact, scalable for industry, quicker to charge and with 250 per cent more energy density than any other battery on the market."


"Typically, battery storage capacity increases by about 3-5 per cent a year, whereas the AMBER team has gone much further. Their battery’s capacity is not an incremental increase: it’s a massive leap."


"They didn’t need to invent new materials, they explain: they just needed to make better use of what was already there. They used a material called carbon nanotubes – these are strong, durable microscopic carbon tubes that are superb electricity conductors. “We took the lithium material and added a few per cent of carbon nanotubes which gave us a very unusual particle structure,” Coleman says. “This is important because the existing electrodes in your phone or toothbrush, if thicker, can store more charge. We found that adding the nanotubes made sure that the electrodes are stronger.”"


"In addition, our technology takes carbon nanotubes and adds them to lithium-storing material, but it is quite feasible that common, non-toxic silicon could be used in commercial batteries, which would make them cleaner and more sustainable.”"


"Likely customers for this technology include, most obviously, battery manufacturers such as Duracell and Panasonic, car manufacturers and the renewable energy industry. If patented. it could be a good money spinner for Trinity College, CRANN (the Trinity Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) and, potentially, its inventors."


“We haven’t worked on batteries for long and usually have to ramp up the research before achieving a result like this. It’s unusual to have an idea like this which worked so fast.”