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CU scientists: New battery extends range and safety of electric-powered vehicles
Sep 22nd
“This new, low-cost chemistry has a capacity that’s nearly 10 times greater than state-of-the-art cathodes.”
A cutting-edge battery technology developed at the University of Colorado Boulder that could allow tomorrow’s electric vehicles to travel twice as far on a charge is now closer to becoming a commercial reality.
CU’s Technology Transfer Office has completed an agreement with Solid Power LLC—a CU-Boulder spinoff company founded by Se-Hee Lee and Conrad Stoldt, both associate professors of mechanical engineering—for the development and commercialization of an innovative solid-state rechargeable battery. Solid Power also was recently awarded a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy for the purpose of creating a battery that can improve electric vehicle driving range.
The rechargeable batteries that are standard in today’s electric vehicles—as well as in a host of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops—are lithium-ion batteries, which generate electricity when lithium ions move back and forth between electrodes in a liquid electrolyte solution.
Engineers and chemists have long known that using lithium metal as the anode in a rechargeable battery—as opposed to the conventional carbon materials that are used as the anode in conventional lithium-ion batteries—can dramatically increase its energy density. But using lithium metal, a highly reactive solid, in conjunction with a liquid electrolyte is extremely hazardous because it increases the chance of a thermal runaway reaction that can result in a fire or an explosion.
Fire fighters try to douse the flames after a fire broke out in the plane’s batteries.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries require a bulky amount of devices to protect and cool the batteries. A fire onboard a Boeing Dreamliner in January that temporarily grounded the new class of plane was linked to its onboard lithium-ion battery.
Lee and Stoldt solved the safety concerns around using lithium metal by eliminating the liquid electrolyte. Instead, the pair built an entirely solid-state battery that uses a ceramic electrolyte to separate the lithium metal anode from the cathode. Because the solid-state battery is far safer, it requires less protective packaging, which in turn could reduce the weight of the battery system in electric vehicles and help extend their range.
Research into the development of solid-state batteries has gone on for a couple of decades, but it has been difficult to create a solid electrolyte that allowed the ions to pass through it as easily as a liquid electrolyte.
“The problem has always been that solid electrolytes had very poor performance making their use in rechargeable batteries impractical,” Stoldt said. “However, the last decade has seen a resurgence in the development of new solid electrolytes with ionic conductivities that rival their liquid counterparts.”
The critical innovation added by Lee and Stoldt that allows their solid-state lithium battery to out-perform standard lithium-ion batteries is the construction of the cathode, the part of the battery that attracts the positively charged lithium ions once they’re discharged from the lithium metal. Instead of using a solid mass of material, Lee and Stoldt created a “composite cathode,” essentially small particles of cathode material held together with solid electrolyte and infused with an additive that increases its electrical conductivity. This configuration allows ions and electrons to move more easily within the cathode.
“The real innovation is an all-solid composite cathode that is based upon an iron-sulfur chemistry that we developed at CU,” Stoldt said. “This new, low-cost chemistry has a capacity that’s nearly 10 times greater than state-of-the-art cathodes.”
Last year, Lee and Stoldt partnered with Douglas Campbell, a small-business and early-stage product development veteran, to spin out Solid Power.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to achieve commercial success for the all solid-state rechargeable battery,” said Campbell, Solid Power’s president. “We’re actively engaging industrial commercial partners to assist in commercialization and expect to have prototype products ready for in-field testing within 18 to 24 months.” Important to the early success of the company has been its incubation within CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science’s applied energy storage research center, a part of the college’s energy systems and environmental sustainability initiative.
Tesla’s cars are all electric powered
Solid Power is a member of Rocky Mountain Innosphere, a nonprofit technology incubator headquartered in Fort Collins, Colo., with a mission to accelerate the development and success of high-impact scientific and technology startup companies.
“We’re very excited to be working with Solid Power’s team to get them to the next level,” said Mike Freeman, Innosphere’s CEO. “This is a big deal to Colorado’s clean-tech space. Solid Power’s batteries will have a huge impact in the EV market, and they have a potential $20 billion market for their technology.”
Learn more about Solid Power at http://www.solidpowerbattery.com.
-CU-
Boulder New Tech Meetup hosts 2 days of Techstars
Aug 3rd
Announcements:
- Happy Birthday New Tech – 7 years ago this month 40+ people got together at the Me.dium offices on Pearl street in Boulder.
- Membership is now 9,614
- We’ve had 141 New Tech meetings
- We host 3 meetings a month (Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins)
- Over 700 companies are mapped at bdnt.org (if you’re not on the map, shame on you, go do it now)
- We help 100’s of companies find employees up and down the front range
Wish yourself a Happy Birthday fellow New Tech member, you are AMAZING.
- August in Boulder means TechStars and we have 2 nights of presentations. August 5 and 6. Monday the 5th is oversold, but Tuesday the 6th has a few open seats. (http://bdnt.org)
- September 16-21 is Denver Startup Week ( a celebration of all things startup) and New Tech has decided to blow it up and I mean blow itttttttt up. Stay tuned as our New Tech hosts plan the biggest New Tech Ever and celebrate, shall i say it, 10,000 members.
- We get tons of requests from the community every month, but these 3 always outnumber the rest:
- How do I present my company (fill out this form)
- Do you know where i can find a full time developer/designer/admin/BD/sales (http://bdnt.org/hiring)
- Do you know where I can find a freelance developer/designer (I am so excited to announce our Freelancer Availability Search Engine, stay tuned and constantly refresh your browser at http://bdnt.org for more details….)
Job highlights from the job board (to see more jobs: http://bdnt.org/hiring):
- Web Stack Hacker
- Data Science Engineer
- Front-End Engineer & Craftsman
New Tech Colorado Resources
- A hitchhikers Guide to Boulder
- Boulder Startup Center
- Startup Colorado
Blog of the month
http://www.siliconflatirons.com/
We love our sponsors: thank you
SpotXchange (http://www.spotxchange.com/spx_about_careers.html)
With more than 400 million auctions per day, SpotXchange is the largest global marketplace of video ad inventory reaching 120 million unique visitors in more than 50 countries each month. The leading platform for programmatic buying and selling of digital video, SpotXchange connects thousands of publishers with advertisers, agencies, trading desks, DSPs and ad networks, running top brand campaigns through its IAB-certified marketplace. SpotXchange shows premium publishers and more than 1,000 world class advertisers that there is a better way to buy and sell digital video — with solutions that guarantee total transparency, brand safety and real-time control in either a private or public marketplace.
AlchemyAPI (http://www.alchemyapi.com)
The product of over 50 person years of engineering effort, AlchemyAPI is a cloud-based text mining platform providing the most comprehensive set of semantic analysis capabilities in the natural language processing field. Used over 3 billion times per month by 23,000+ developers, AlchemyAPI enables customers to perform large-scale social media monitoring, target advertisements more effectively, track influencers and sentiment within the media, automate content aggregation and recommendation, make more accurate stock trading decisions, enhance business and government intelligence systems, and create smarter applications and services.
Technical Integrity (http://technicalintegrity.com/)
We’ve created a better way to help employers and highly skilled technologists connect. It involves critical elements that so many people forget: a focus on a two-way cultural matching for both our clients and candidates, as well as engaging with and giving back to the community. This is part of our DNA, and as a result we’ve changed the way technical placements are done. We are highly selective and only work with the most interesting and well-respected startups and mid-size employers in Boulder, Denver, and around the nation. These are companies who treat their employees with respect, have fun, and understand that valued employees = happy employees . We also take pride in representing only the best Engineers and Executives. We emphasize quality, honesty, and integrity in everything we do. Over the past two years we have given back more than $20,000 to charities and non-profits in Boulder and beyond as we believe it’s the right thing to do. We are proud to be sponsoring Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. Additionally, over the past few years we’ve helped our community bring together like-minded folks regularly at Ignite Boulder and BoulderBeta and various Women in Technology groups, to name a few. Please drop us a line to say hello and let us know how we can be of assistance to you or your organization.
Silicon Flatirons (http://www.silicon-flatirons.org)
CU-Boulder’s Silicon Flatirons Center is a donor-supported entity which helps connect the fabric of the Front Range’s software, Internet, and telecom entrepreneurship scene. SFC’s objective is to help catalyze startups by connecting CU to the Mile High Tech emerging company community. In addition to the Meetup, SFC’s Entrepreneurship Initiative includes the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, Crash Courses on entrepreneurship, and our annual March entrepreneurship conference. SFC additionally works closely with partners across the CU campus to present the New Venture Challenge. SFC is delighted to serve as a Meetup sponsor since 2007.
Mode Set (http://www.modeset.com)
More than just developers, we want to understand your business model, your risks, blockers, opportunities, and market advantages. We’re here to build you a viable, releasable product you can take to customers, investors, and stakeholders. Whether that product is a web application, mobile application or social application, or purely architecture, infrastructure or optimization, we can help. We bring with us extensive knowledge and years of experience working with clients ranging from early-stage startups to large global brands.
SOURCE : Robert Reich
Quickbooks Connect Boulder, May 21st 2015
May 26th
Quickbooks Connect Local comes to Boulder and Boulder Channel 1 visits this exciting event to talk with some of the big stars of the show including Bill Rancic an American Entrepreneur who won the first season of the Apprentice, Al Ko the Vice President of Product Management at Intuit and Heather McLellan the Vice President at Intuit. The show was to help connect local entrepreneurs and start-ups in Boulder, as well as introduce some new features and apps that help make quickbooks even better. We also feature the special presentation of Cash Mobs where Bill Rancic visits local businesses and buys out a large amount of their inventory to help support local and startup businesses.
