MIT Professor Donald Sadoway talking about revolutionary liquid metal batteries

[Music] do i'd like to now bring up jasmine brown who put this program together she's on our chapter executive committee and she's an mit alum so she knew who to call but uh i'm very happy that yasmin's stepped up and said i'd like to put this program together i think i know a great speaker that at mit and she they're now the ballpark on this one so jason [Applause] well when uh dr hansen said that our speaker was a rock star he really meant that and i agree about two years ago i was on campus and uh i was thinking about let's see with some mit professors that i can get to know a little better and bring them to houston for our mit club of south texas and i got a chance to uh meet uh professor don satterway about two years ago and heard him speak on energy storage and what i liked about him most was not only was he very professional and very uh savvy in terms of his uh area of expertise but he spoke in a way that you could really understand what he was talking about you know mit sometimes has a this sort of a geek mentality right and uh he was very understandable not only that he was had a sense of humor sort of a wiry sense of humor that really appealed to me quite a bit so i'm very very pleased to have all of you here to hear a dynamic speaker i want to just focus on a few things because some of you asked me about him so let me just focus on a few things about his resume he's a john f elliott professor of materials chemistry in the department of materials science and engineering at mit he has joined the faculty of mit in 1978 he's authored over 150 scientific papers and he holds 19 u.s patents what i like about him most he not only mentors undergraduates and graduate students but also students that are working on their doctoral thesis plus the plethora of research that he does so please join me in welcoming our rock star professor donald sadaway [Applause] okay well thank you for the introduction and it's a pleasure to be here it's been very snowy in boston this year even though i i was born and raised in canada so it doesn't bother me but in canada they know how to sweep the snow away in boston they they can't do that anymore because they're crumbling infrastructure so yeah anyway so um this is going to be a little bit awkward for because i'm used to moving around but i'm potted here because of this yeah if you had it because it'll all go all over the place so uh what i'm going to talk about tonight is uh innovation and stationary energy storage and so there's two paths here one is the stationary storage piece but the other is the metaphor for innovation because i think that's something that has a broad applicability whether you care about batteries or not i think one of the things that people find interesting at mit is yeah number nine number nine yeah it works so um does that work it's a little bit softer here well i wanna all right so yeah so this is going to be the two parts so um i was going to start with well it looks like the uh the thing got moved see i'm what's an engineer i'm an engineer i don't i can just touch it and i just fix it if i if if i were a theoretician i'd probably write a script or something a waste of time but uh so what is an engineer because i know there's some mit alums here well according to the oxford english dictionary an engineer is one who contrives designs or invents the invention piece is really critical to engineering this is uh the first uh written reference to engineer it's from 1325 that's old english but i bet you can figure it out a towerful strong that quaintly engineers made quaint used to mean uh very nice execution and then in the 1800s it became sort of uh diminutive uh engineer and genius both have the same root so here's a clear comparison a scientist discovers that which exists an engineer creates that which never was and i'm not disparaging i'm not disparaging scientists i think you know there are there are clear demarcations and and science for science sake is really important and i respect all that but it really troubles me when i'm in the school of engineering that some schools of engineering have the metrics of the school of science you know it really distresses me to go into a faculty meeting have people talking about citations and hersh factors and so on because that you know just because you're quoted a lot doesn't mean you're doing great work it means you're running with the pack if you're ahead of the pack no one knows what you're doing you know but that but they assume that if you're not getting quoted it means that your work isn't any good but they're afraid now here's this one i got from a scientist a scientist converts money into ideas but an engineer converts ideas into money that's the difference dana bookbinder i met at corning last year so the the money thing is an important piece because the subtitle of this really should be cost-based discovery because when it comes to invention at the university because the metrics you know the publication and all that kind of stuff people are really driven to invent the the coolest chemistry and then they just assume that it's going to get into the manufacturing environment and uh the costs will come down but i'm here to tell you that doesn't work in energy because the the scale is so large and it you know it's not like it's not like the smartphone the smartphone had no impediments because it was it was a new functionality had no resistance so you know i don't consider that you know such a a triumph i mean it's fantastic that we have it but it was just when you when it came it was self-authored it was easy but if you're trying to innovate in energy you've got entrenched heavily subsidized existing supply chains and they're going to fight there it's not a case of where they say wow you know i i used to be a phonograph company and now there's audio tape and now there's cds and and now there's this other stuff that's why that's my phone ringing i'm sorry shut that thing off unplanned unplanned yeah that's that's like the the churchill line somebody goes to number 10 downing street and knocks to the door and uh his daughter comes down and he says i'd like to see the prime minister and she says i'm sorry he can't come to the door right now he's upstairs preparing one of his impromptu speeches that was an impromptu thing but if you're if you're going to innovate in energy you're going to have to do something that is uh cost competitive that's the only way you're going to displace existing energy because the existing players are going to fight to keep their territory and the public doesn't want to pay a penny more they'll pay 300 a month for all of their smartphone services and cable but if you suggest that maybe their electric bill might go up ten dollars a month to change the nature of the generation they'll howl they won't go they've done they've they've done sensitivity analyses and they found it that the breaking point is about ten dollars a month they might pay five but ten no they say no so so that says to me that i'm not going to whine about it i'm just going to say all right just got to be smarter got to invent cheat and by the way electricity so why do i work on this why did i choose to work in this field so i could have done anything i suppose um growing up in canada uh i i didn't know limits you know i had i had boundless optimism and so uh why i got into this was because uh it's so central to everything that we consider modern you know all the i.t people here you don't have electricity you got nothing you're out of business and you know you're you're tethered in a wireless age i've walked through an airport i just laugh i see all these people panicked they're looking for power outlets and they're like they're like you know little dogs you know you know because you know and you can blame the battery no no it's not the battery it's it's the dependency on these electrical devices so we've got to do something about it but then on top of it you know somebody mentioned moocs and so on you know when you look at this image what you see is uh that there are parts of this that are dark and some of them are dark because nobody lives there but some of them are dark because they haven't been electrified actually you know i can wander off the script here because i remember i'm in i'm in texas and so i remember reading uh robert carroll's biography of lyndon johnson and in lyndon johnson's early days when he was a legislator that he fought for electrification and in parts of texas were among the last to be electrified and there's this chapter in that book about what happens when they you know and the early attempts to electrify were bungled and there was actually a lot of resistance to electrification but then finally they get it through and all of a sudden people just they didn't anticipate that you could read after dark you could read that means education what's your education is the antidote to poverty and by the way you know you mentioned water i mean if you don't have access to electricity you can't use many of the solutions so you go to mit you go to media lab please like that you see all this fantastic stuff going on i just take one look at it i just laugh i say you don't have electricity you're you're dead so so the number one the number one obstacle the progress is electricity if you electrify you know two out of seven people on a planet don't have electricity once they have electricity you get access to purification of water once you get purification of water now you can feed yourself you don't have to spend your whole day wondering if you're going to be able to get get to tomorrow without being diseased and now you can feed yourself now you can on and on and on so that's the ticket the ticket is electricity electrochemistry is the key to world peace that's why i work on it because with an with an invention here i can topple dictators half a global way by the way you know you know this is a collage right most people look at this and they go the world at night no it's not you know because cause because when it's light over here it's dark over here if the world ever looks like this we're in big trouble you are not me because i i i got to figure it out so now let's so so i made the case about so so electricity is so important so why don't we have storage why why are we spending money why where's all the research dollars been going well i can give you a whole treatise on how we've been misspending our research dollars but let me tell you about storage as an enabler and it's not just for renewables it's for today it's for today's grid today's grid is designed for peak load and we hit peak load about one percent of time if you and i started an airline that for 360 days a year 40 of our planes were on the ground and then the other five days they're all up there because they're ready for peak demand you'd say that's a stupid business model i'd say that's called the grid if we designed our highways this way you're you're what's one of your inner states here i don't know any of the numbers 10 imagine 10 is 25 lanes wide in each direction why why why so that anybody can get on that highway at any time and ever have to hit the brakes okay fine fine you know it'll work you can pay for it the estimate is that to electrify the world it's going to take 17 trillion dollars over the next 20 years and if we're designing that with a 40 percent excess that's just sitting there that 7 trillion dollars is being wasted and going to education going to health care and so on so we're wasting a boatload of money so you might say well that's outrageous why don't we do something about it you know why because the way the grid is run is if they screw up and they've got to build another power plant you can't just add another one or two percent you've got to add you know so many gigawatts guess what happens the costs get passed on to you the ratepayer so the system is is self-perpetuating it's a rotten stupid system and that's it furthermore it's fragmented you know if if i were an oil company i can explore drill pump ship refine and sell to the public but in electricity the guys who generate don't transmit the guys who transmit don't sell the rate payers so i come along with the storage solution and we're going to do the most good the first question is where's the where's the market who can make money from this and if they can't they don't just say we're indifferent they say keep that thing away from me so that's that's the problem we're up against it's tough one so it just means it's got to get smarter you gotta outsmart them and then of course as renewables become greater uh percentage renewables are are fine when they're down around two three percent of total generated power but they're not a solution you know why because they're intermittent and intermittent power is useless in fact it's worse than useless it's harmful in fact there's a con there's the concept of dirty wind dirty wind is that me again this is a this is an apple product so you know it's a piece of junk if if gm built a product like that they'd all be in jail today it's unbelievable unbelievable the stuff that they put out like like this the you know this thing here it's got it's got it's got the video output here and the audio output on this side i mean who's who's the brains behind that how many apple engineers does it take to make a computer that's stupid unbelievable so so let me tell you how the grid works because most people don't know how the grid works it's not like water all right if you want to take a shower you just go and you turn the water on because you got a reservoir all right but the electricity that's powering these lights was generated moments ago and if all of a sudden people turn off their lights we have to turn down the generation capacity supply must be in balance with demand at all times you can tolerate a little bit of mismatch but not much if you get a lot of mismatch first thing that happens is the frequency starts to migrate and you're betting that you got 60 hertz coming out of that socket and it's 60 plus or minus 0.1 percent and one of the things they have you know if you go to places like afghanistan iraq where our troops are it's not that the power is intermittent it's when it's on it's dirty power so it might be in those that part of the world should be 50 hertz but it might be 48 might be 52. can you imagine if every time you had to plug something in you didn't know if you were going to blow the blow the motor so what happens if all of a sudden the wind comes into the grid because of course we have laws that require that if it's renewable it has to get first priority so it comes in and now i gotta i'm the tr i'm the iso so i got to call up a new plant or a gas plant or a coal-fired plant and say ramp down i need i need to drop by five percent okay so they're gonna start dropping down by five percent but it's going to take maybe 10 or 15 minutes meanwhile this wind stuff is just gushing into the grid and then all of a sudden the wind stops blowing now i call them up and say i need another five percent that's the dirty win because you know when you drive your car you get the best fuel economy and the fewest emissions if you get up to highway speed and hold it there and you get the worst fuel economy and you generate the most emissions per unit distance driven in stop and go traffic well that's what this does it makes stop and go traffic and unless you can contribute a base load this is stupid but it's i'm not against it i'm saying renewables without storage is incomplete unless you can deal with their intermittency it's just a headache people think oh if the sun is shining we'll add some like top it up or something but you can't that's that's the way it is so i've made the case that storage would be kind of cool to have and this is installed capacity as a function of uh capital cost and it's a log plot here so what that means is that all of this is essentially nothing it's less than 0.1 percent the only thing that works is pumped hydro and that's geographically constrained because you have to have a difference in elevation you have to have lots of water so i don't you're not going to put pumped hydra in the middle of houston you're going to put pump hydra in the middle of boston and even if you had today you have trouble getting permitted anyways so all these what this graph tells me is that pumped hydro works and all the batteries don't and you you better get down below 500 a kilowatt hour capital cost or it's not going to make any difference so again it's cost driven and it's not battery versus batteries battery versus combustion it's a lot cheaper to go by diesel gen set or a natural gas peaking unit so if i'm going to take them on i got to think differently and today's lithium-ion batteries failed badly so they're just it's a 20-year-old technology and it's way too costly for this market so what's my approach i got two uh planks here first confined chemistry to earth abundant elements this is what i mean cost-based discovery not cost-based engineering cost-based engineering goes without saying i'm saying cost-based discovery earth abundant elements so this is a graph from a government publication and it's also logarithmic and so you see earth abundance is a function of atomic number which is kind of interesting why would you connect the dots uh this is lithium this is beryllium what does it mean to have an atomic number of 3.4 there's no such thing this is stupid but uh so you know i'm always amused when people say let's connect the dots i'm saying you know sometimes you shouldn't be connecting the dots these are discrete values there is nothing between lithium and beryllium but they connected the dots the other thing to take away here these elements are abundant these aren't and the difference is about 1 billion 1 billion and so when i'm dealing with grid level storage i refuse to allow my people to work in this part of the periodic table you're wasting your time because it won't scale this is why you will not see fuel cell vehicles because they have platinum in them the platinum is down here and this is why i don't understand why ge works on cadmium telluride solar cells i don't care what the efficiency is it won't scale there isn't enough tellurium in the earth's crust to to cover anything of of description so why are people working on this it's okay if they want to work on it in science it's fine but it's not going to scale you give me this in the periodic table i can tell you the future right if you want to make a dirt cheap you make it out of dirt and preferably local dirt it doesn't make sense to trade your dependents and imported petroleum for independent for dependence on imported neodymium it doesn't matter it's the same thing so all those wind turbines have magnets in them and the magnets have neodymium and neodymium comes from china so and how much steel goes into one of those and dude i do that and the second thing is it has to be easy to manufacture this is where lithium ion falls down it's if you go to a lithium-ion battery plant you've heard about the gigafactory it's gigafactory because it's going to cost giga dollars 5 billion 5 billion dollars you know i could build for 5 billion i could build a greenfield integrated steel works that would produce 2 million tons of steel a year and when was the last time an integrated steel works was built in the united states 1961. bethlehem steel in baltimore but we're going to build a 5 billion dollar battery to build yesterday's batteries tomorrow good luck so that's the background for the discovery of the liquid metal battery so i started thinking about this about 10 years ago and i'd been working and still do work on metal production by electrochemical means and so i i decided first of all disregard everything you know about batteries because that's not going to take you anywhere because the batteries batteries are all designed for these applications and that won't work on the grid people who think you can start with nano technology and scale it to grid level uh i don't see it i don't see it at that at all i i see the the path forward is to look big for big not small up to big let me show you what i mean so i looked at the economy of scale of a of an aluminium smelter i'm not saying aluminum smelter i'm saying aluminium smith because this is charles martin hall's patent from 1889 it's aluminium that's the original name it was even in the united states i think somewhere around world war one we started calling it aluminum but the international union of pure and applied chemistry has declared that it will be aluminium so that's what it is yeah okay look at aluminium it wasn't a typo it's everywhere and this is the the he ruled patent from france um yeah so what uh why am i drawing on this for inspiration take bauxite from one corner of the globe carbon that's petroleum coke six and a half kilowatt hours of electricity per pound and the plant probably cost you five thousand dollars an annual ton and you go from dirt to metal for less than 50 cents a pound and that's that's an economic miracle and this thing is an energy hog it drinks huge amounts of electricity i looked at that and i said can i teach that thing how to store electricity and give it back because if i can it's going to be cheap it's going to be really cheap there's a modern aluminum smelter there's about 50 feet across probably goes back about a mile it was invented in 1886 simultaneously by charles martin hall in the united states and paul he rule in france there they are they rule on the left to hall and right they were both born in the same year they both died in the same year and they met once 1911 when hall was given the perkins medal by the american chemical society and a rule came from france and spoken praise they were fierce competitors their patents crossed at the world court cross license and so on but they respected each other they admired each other it's not like you know like the cat fights that go on today and in some of the sciences where people are tearing their hair out and sabotaging each other's data and so on well anyways to go back to the story they were both born in the same year they must have been the same age in 1886 how old were they 22 two 22 year olds changed the world this is the washington monument 1884. it was uh started in 1876 by a group of citizens who wanted to commemorate the centennial of the united states and the idea was to cap it with a precious metal this is 100 ounce pyramid of aluminium which was a metal that cost more than silver at the time but then along came haul and he ruled and with this they dropped the price of aluminum down to that of a common structural metal why because aluminum is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust if they had invented this process for platinum it wouldn't have made any difference and by the way all your mobile devices have silicon in them and it's really our good fortune that mother nature declared silicon to be the semiconductor of preeminence because silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust if our semiconductors were made of rhodium none of you would have a cell phone in his pocket because it'd be too expensive and it wouldn't be scalable even if ge wanted to they couldn't get them to you because it doesn't exist and by the way you know what's coming next since you asked me about the future fiber optics why because silicon is the most second most abundant element in the earth's crust and oxygen is the most abundant element so silicate fibers are going to come because they're going to be abundant and cheap and they can dig them up in the backyard anywhere on the planet so this is 1884. but you know now you have what's tantamount to a beer can on top of the washington post that's pretty cool so i looked at this cell and i said why isn't why maybe the little bit of industry is sitting right on the solution they just didn't do their homework or something so why is an aluminum cell not a battery this is the cell you got an anode at the top the cathode at the bottom you put aluminum oxide in here and you pass current you make aluminum at the bottom you make carbon dioxide at the top and this it's the fugitive emission of the carbon dioxide that makes this thing impossible to run and reverse so i thought about it and thought about eventually figured out that i could make a battery out of this if i could make liquid metals at both electrodes then i'd be able to pool it up and have it on reserve so where am i going to get the metals from well i you know i'm a professor and i was teaching big freshman chemistry class so i always go to the periodic table and the periodic table was enunciated by a professor that's mendeleev he was 35 when he enunciated this and uh interesting story about him he was the the the youngest of uh 13 children uh born poor in siberia and ended up in uh in st petersburg and then uh he was traveling as a professor and he traveled by train he'd sit on his trunk in a train station and he'd play uh cards play uh solitaire so you know they you know they call it patience in the old country but it's solitaire and he he was very interested in the elements and so he had in his breast pocket uh file cards and each file card had the properties of a different element on it so he'd have you know lithium and its mass and sodium and its mass and so on and he kept thinking and thinking you know how to make this into a system and so this is my theory because i i'd read that he he played solitaire so my theory is that he's playing solitaire and he's got the clubs he puts the ace of clubs and the king of clubs and then up cups the ten of clubs he says i can't play the ten because i'm missing the the jack and the queen and then he looks here and he goes i've got aluminum i've got silicon i've got zinc and i've got tin and he just had them in order of atomic mass and all of a sudden the lights come on he says tin tin belongs under silicon and and there's some missing elements here and okay so there were some other people were thinking that he says uh i'm going to predict that there's an element here he called it ika silicon ika is sanskrit for second so he said i'm going to predict and he took the average of the atomic masses of this and said it's going to be 72 and it's going to have tetravalent chlorides and so on and sure enough germanium's got atomic mass of 72.61 so it was the recognition of the missing piece and the prediction the quantitatively verifiable prediction so that's how that started that's mendeleev so so i've i'm looking at this periodic table saying you know i didn't do any quantitative i didn't use a super computer or density functional theory i stood back here because i'm an outsider from outside because i i was a metallurgist from canada i was teaching freshman chemistry chemistry department hated me because what was he doing he's got no right to be teaching a freshman chemistry class now mit fortunately has poorest boundaries and so i was allowed to do that but i i had to i had to put myself in the mind of a first-time learner 18 year old otherwise very smart but and through teaching that freshman chemistry class that's informed my ability to invent i'm not inventing great stuff because i took all these advanced graduate classes no it's you retreat to the fundamentals so anyway so i'm you know i'm teaching all these freshmen and i go back to my office i'm thinking how am i going to invent this battery and i think well i need a big electronegativity difference so these are the most electro-positive metals so i'm going to take something from the northwest part of the periodic table and these are the most electronegative metals these are even more electronegative but they're non-metals if i use one of these i'm going to make gas i want to make both so this is the weakest metal and that's the strongest metal this is the staircase see the red staircase that's the semi-metals so i just just a little bit metallic from there it was that simple so this was it the liquid metal battery so magnesium on the top and ammonia on the bottom and a molten salt in between and magnesium liquid magnesium is less dense it's got a density less than two this density greater than six is density about four magnesium is insoluble in salt salts and soluble and animals so they face separate like salad oil and vinegar so there's no membranes no separators no nothing easy to build you just shovel it in turn it on where it goes and then when when the thing wants to discharge because magnesium wants to alloy with animony but it can't the only way it can alloy is to become magnesium ion sends electrons through the external circuit and then alloys this layer gets thinner this layer gets thicker so i don't have any of the degradation mechanisms in a lithium-ion battery and then to charge it i force current through an electro refined the magnesium back and purify the contents so every time i charge the battery i essentially remake the contents and the passage of current generates heat which on the 787 flame liner is the cause of fires right so whereas this here i capture that heat i capture that heat and use it to keep this thing at temperatures it's running at about 700 degrees celsius so this easy to manufacture self-assembly and it's self-heating at commercial scale you you put proper insulation this is schematic of course but i mean but now i want you to please pay attention at this point because people say oh he's running at high temperature this thing is going to be terribly inefficient no my round-trip efficiency is greater than 70 is on the order of 75 which is greater than that of pumped hydro even allowing for the thermal losses round trip efficiency 75 percent because pumped hydro it's it's hydroelectric but don't forget you start with electricity you pump water up so that's electrical to mechanical engine energy and then the water falls down and now mechanical energy goes back to electrical energy these are terribly inefficient systems it's immunothermal runaway and a lithium-ion battery that's why lithium-ion will not scale because if you take a battery of this size it's no problem it won't overheat won't overheat rarely usually if a lithium-ion battery catches fire it was because it was a malfunctioning of the charger but it's thin and it the front face you're the cooling fin you know right you got it in your pocket okay but if you put a whole bunch of these together in a big aggregate now the distance from the center to the outside is great and now that heat will build up and it's got a flammable volatile electrolyte inside if i came to unison i got this really cool new battery but actually the the electrolyte will burn you'd throw me out of your office well that's lithium-ion battery by the way you cannot ship lithium-ion batteries by air they come from china on a boat and then by truck or by rail it is forbidden although you mark my words i've seen the manifest of the mh-370 the malaysia airliner 2 400 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries were on that plane it's the one they never found so we've been to the department of transportation to ask could we ship these by air and they said well tell me what's the threat at room temperature well you got solid metal and solid salt no problem send these anywhere and cost competitive well we'll see oh yes yeah oh you can't hear i don't have sound yeah forget it he's going to say the t1000 it's a polymeric alloy what do you mean it's liquid metal so this is my team i had a tiny amount of research funding it was very hard to get funding all right so here it is just one student david bradwell he was also from camp we were both born in toronto different years and uh so yeah we're looking at an early prototype he looks really worried you know he's worried that this thing might not work and uh i didn't tell him i wasn't sure it was going to work either but i mentored him you know how you met him said no it's going to work and then we the american chemical society wanted to uh do a profile on me and they asked me for an image so i sent him this picture and they refused to publish it because we weren't wearing safety glasses and i said it's just a it's just a staged thing no we will not publish an image showing people unprofessionally dressed in the laboratory and i said well just take out a sharpie and put the thing on and they said no so i had to find another image but so what's the thing david was a bachelor's uh holder from queen's university in kingston ontario he did not know electrochemistry so he was the outsider just as i was so this and i didn't look to battery experts at all in fact i've never had battery experts work with me because they they're going to take me down the same path to the same dead end so i'm going to tell you something and it's even more true today than it was 37 years ago when it first came to this country you know 37 years ago we still had big corporate research labs you know ge and schenectady bell labs and so on they're all gone bell labs gone because of break up a telecom ge jack welsh destroyed the ge labs and schenectady and so now what do you got you got national labs forget it the innovation site is the university and let's not forget where electrochemistry came from it came from the university university of ottawa professor voldem there's the first battery right here silver and zinc coins with cardboard soaked in brine in between and that gave birth to a new field electrochemistry and immediately uh spread into the market and gave us electroplating and electro forming and served the basis for electro winning metallurgy but volta's discovery the battery also demonstrated something else for the first time it demonstrated the utility of a professor before volta nobody imagined a professor could be of any use but volta showed if you let a professor do some good work leave him alone come up with new technology so i'm telling you if when when congress becomes uh miserly with research funding and some congressmen find examples there's always going with enough money there's going to be some projects to get funded that can't stand up to the scrutiny of the public all right but believe me you're cutting off the engine of innovation if you cut this off purely electrochemical clearly yes so so i didn't have any money i just had this flimsy little uh grant thank goodness that there was a little bit of money at campus and then uh with the mit energy initiative i there's this whole story about how i ran into people at total they were interested in solar they they didn't see themselves like kodak kodak saw themselves as a film company not an image company and and and they just stayed the course until they were destroyed total sees itself as an energy company today gas oil but maybe tomorrow something else and they realize solar without storage is incomplete so i got funding there and then i was a winner in the first round rp competition so now this is my team summary it's 20 people and again this is the only one that really was steeped in electrochemistry the rest of these people were newcomers and some grads some undergrads some postdocs and multinationals she's from spain from korea china france trinidad he's from tahiti french polynesia with a phd in high energy physics in paris she's from poland david and i both from canada he's smiling now uh and i hired a few americans i figured i had to make sure that i showed some generosity and this other point 20 times 3 is greater than 3 times 20. these 20 people working together for three years work miracles if i had that same amount of money dribbling over 20 years i wouldn't be standing here right now you know we gotta we gotta fund our research in the physical sciences like this because we're doing this in the in the life sciences but we're not doing the physical sciences and believe me as of 2013 with sequestration we've done great harm to this infrastructure the most powerful resource this country has is this university system there's nothing on the planet that can rival it yeah there's some good schools in the uk and there's some good schools germany whatever but as a set as an integrated set you can't touch it there's and you know disney nobody could rebuild it you know when you you go to campuses you see people from all over the world coming here why and they say oh americans should be traveling more abroad yeah they should but boy if you want to get an education you get your education here because that's where the powerhouse is the intellectual powerhouse is here so don't squander it but you can squander it's like a when i used to teach in 10 250 we had these old sodium vapor lamps when you first turned the lights on it took about five minutes before they got hot enough and the light came on but then when you went to shut them off you shut them off instantly i once asked the architect why do you put the they don't go on for five minutes a professor never says anything important in the first five minutes but it's a metaphor it's a metaphor for research that i can kill research like that but then if all of a sudden somebody calls me up and says i've got 13 million dollars for you i'm not going to get that group of 20. it will take years to craft that so this is some of the images this is the i call this the shot glass it's one watt hour two centimeters it's just steel this is rusty it's not glam tech i had a hard time getting students 10 years ago because everybody want to work in nano in bio in it and i'd say batteries they go i'm looking at them everything you're working on is powered by electricity but anyway i'm patient very patient the hockey puck everybody knows hockey puck is three inches in diameter so that's the 20 watt hour and then the saucer so we were also looking at scalability 1 to 20 to 200. so there's a there's a section of one of the cells this is magnesium on the top uh salt and antimony so their face separate and so on and when they're small it balls up and some of you are old enough to remember playing with mercury when you were young the mercury balls up so does this but in large amounts it's flat how do i know because all the window glass is made by pouring borosilicate glass on top of molten tin and it is absolutely flat and this is jocelyn one of my students who was one of my american students and that's steve chu who was the secretary of energy he came to see us in june of 2012. that's sal behind i'm sorry that he just got sal interesting guy california son of migrant farm workers first generation to go to college graduated top of his class in physics at berkeley after going to a community college because he couldn't get into school and steve chu autographed our glove box and i made sure we wore glasses for the picture so i can show this in mixed company so where are we we've we've tested over a thousand cells we're looking at different chemistries different alloys different salts we have a number of these that are below 100 a kilowatt hour for the electrodes and the electrolyte and this is an edisonian when someone says edisonian to me that says that's empirical thrashing that's a negative to me edison was a mean sob who abused his people and just worked really really hard but there was no thought sorry to burst your bubble so this is not at esonian this and you know i don't care i have tenure means never having to say you're sorry so i don't care i don't care about publishing but i have to publish in order to launch the careers of the young people who work with me and i'm really proud that this past fall one of our chemistries was published in nature nature is the pre-eminent journal science is okay it's kind of nice but nature is it nature is the gateway to the nobel prize it's not for me but i'm saying that's that's the thing this is nature science or nature chemistry and nature communications this is nature these these this is the testimony to my my team they're fantastic and they wanted an image so felice frankel who is a published uh photographer uh made this image for me and uh so obviously we couldn't make an image of our cell it's operating at 450 degrees celsius so you can see at the top here this is a it's square walled cuvette and so for the bottom metal we used mercury you can see the meniscus on each side and for the electrolyte we used an aqueous solution and the top is a ferro nickel that is the current collector for the upper metal and you can see that the electrolyte has an upper meniscus whereas the liquid metals it's just really cool it's nice this is beautiful but this is the thing that really makes this thing hum never mind that its capital cost is competitively low this you know remember i told you i said when you recharge the battery you rebuild the constituents am i right these are fade rates this was a cell that was operated at 600 milliamps per square centimeter that's about 50 times the current density in a lithium-ion battery and it's 100 depth of discharge that means full charge to full discharge so there's no game plan this isn't like a prius prius goes between 60 and 40. this is 100 to zero the most severe stress test you can give so the fade rate is 0.002 percent per cycle what does that mean means if i were to cycle this thing once a day every day for 10 years i'd retain over 99 of its nameplate capacity there's no battery technology that can do that that by the way the typical metric is how long does it take before you drop to 80 percent answer 305 years which ought to take care of pretty much everybody in this room okay now that's different so david and i and louis ortiz decided it's a long way from the lab bench to the market and there's a whole bunch of other ancillary things like power management systems inverters all that other stuff so we have to do that off campus so we started a company and all the cool names were taken so we called it the liquid metal battery corporation so i can't get worse than that you someone see me at a party so what are you working on batteries i hear you have a startup liquid metal battery corporation i'd clear a room you know but then we changed the name to ambry because it was easy to pronounce i was a five-letter domain name that was still available and how to and how did i choose it because i invented the battery in cambridge well that's how we got the name so my first funding came from bill gates thought i'm you know everything's unusual here so i'm from canada so i'm very polite so i wouldn't dare approach bill gates he came to me i'm like forrest gump i just sit in my office and wait wait wait for things to happen so why did he come to me it's a really great story i'm teaching this big freshman class and back in 2004 mit puts my lectures online and open courseware forget the moocs books is recent stuff this is going back all he did was just video me and put the lectures up online because the class was too big to hold all the students so they would they would digitize it and put it on and people could watch it off off asynchronously and um so bill started watching these evidently i got an email at around seven eight years ago from some guy who had been at the annual microsoft big powwow they have and bill gave his address and in the middle of this address he starts saying you know you really should watch these chemistry lectures so this guy wrote me and said oh you should feel honored bill gates is watching her chemistry lectures and i said all right fine i filed that away so now it's uh august of 2009 and i get an email from a woman who says she's his secretary he says he's coming to boston and september would like to meet me but i have 90 minutes so i ignored the email because i thought the students had hacked into my email i said this this is crazy so i just didn't do anything and then uh she wrote me again said perhaps you didn't see my email but mr gates would really like to see you and so i said well maybe this is real so anyways yeah he came we sat in my office for 90 minutes we talked about open courseware distance learning engineering education then we migrated over to batteries i told them about liquid metal batteries in 2009's before the big funding we had nothing david's early experiments were unsuccessful we were still learning and um but bill bill understood the concept he says you know if you ever decide to spin on a company let me know i'd be willing to put some money into it so a year later we went to see him he was our first investor and then total put money in to match his so total put one placement on campus and a different placement in the company and then subsequently vinod vinod saw my ted talk and pulled me aside and then there's a whole story how we met michael vlock who's married to karen pritzker i don't know if you know karen pritzker but maybe heard of the hyatt hotels that's the pritzker family so these people are you know they're doing unusual things so it's quite an unusual group that's karen pritzker's husband and i give a talk in barron switzerland and this swiss insurance company want to put some money in and so we've also opened a manufacturing facility in marlborough massachusetts this is november 2013. that's phil gedici who is our ceo he was under secretary of energy for four years under then governor deval patrick and that's david he's smiling this woman here is the commander of the joint base cape cod where we're going to have our first installation in about a year's time and uh so what was that all about well this is this is what it's about we hired somebody uh who had worked at ford not to build cars but to build the robots to build the cars and through his knowledge of the supply chain in michigan we've designed and built and commissioned this device that robotically builds ourselves grabs a can puts in this metal puts in the saw tig welds the top and so on 10 million dollar capital investment 130 megawatt hours a year and all this is the you know the ancillary stuff and then you know i talk to people like uh i saw everybody i saw ge i saw schneider electric abb uh siemens all these people they all saw me and i said look why don't you help me there's all this other engineering to be done i'm an electrochemist but that's not a turnkey operation for a customer nobody would help nobody would help so we hired our own people that's what we've been doing in the company so this is this is an animation that shows you these are four inch square cells now so this is what we have to do with the company so that's 700 watt hours that's a 12 pack the size of a case of beer and then you put these together there's two kilowatt hours and then put those together yeah so that's that's 25 kilowatt hours that'll handle more than a home it's about uh side of the large refrigerator one meter by one meter by two meters 25 kilowatt hours 25 kilowatt hours over four hours so 100 100 kilowatts and now if you put two rows of 10 of those that'll give you two megawatt hours and this is about the size now this is our power electronics which we're working on as well we've designed our boards everything zero help all all done are by ourselves this is about the size of a 50-foot 53-foot trailer on an 18-wheeler so that's the footprint all right and of course it's all about the cost but it's silent gas-fired peaking unit diesel gen set very noisy very filthy this is emissions-free there's no moving parts pumped hydro pumped and it's remotely controlled so this thing can act as both a a source and a sink you know so sometimes if the wind comes in then the remedy for that is not a battery the remedy for that is a load you've got to dump it i mean you've had that here in in texas where they call you up and say please turn on your machinery we need to balance the grid well this thing in one millisecond can take a signal and turn from a a source to a load we've run these cells at a thousand milliamps per square centimeter which is 30 percent higher than the current through an aluminum smelter for 200 cycles you know thousand in thousand out thousand and thousand out and then gone back to the normal and they're fine you do that with lithium-ion you can do it once or twice but then you just they'll decrepitate in a positive electrode and we're designing these to point price point of the electricity market not when oil is 250 a barrel not when 200 a ton carbon tax or not win the subsidy just get it under the price point and blow the other guys away so where are we well obviously the first one's way over here because it's got all the amortization just like the first cell phones the first remember the first vcr the betamax three thousand dollars was its price right three thousand dollars in 1975 and by the time we did away with vcrs they were less than a hundred dollars so we're way over here but our cost models indicate we're going to be below 500 if we're below 500 we'll be up there so what are the next steps we continue to do basic research i'm not just flogging a dead horse i'm you know it's not more and more about less and less um yeah there's some really good stuff the rpe research is complete but there's a new rpe uh flow out and we're hoping to get some what do i want to do with that this is a chemistry that one of my students is working on right now it operates at 260 degrees celsius the other ones are 500. so this is a steel clamp that's a polymer can that's really cool a liquid metal battery at 260 degrees and then this is this is the the next one this is big so this is charging right i got the magnesium down here and i want to bring it back up i said to the guys push this thing hard i want to see what happens in an overcharged condition because that's when the lithium-ion battery fires start they overcharge and they put lithium on the negative electrode so it's a overcharge this way so you start bringing the magnesium out goes up and it goes into the top and so on and so forth it's about a 0.6 volt system it's really it's it's very low voltage system but you know we put them together and they work it doesn't matter what the voltage is if i give you a 5 volt system at 2 000 a kilowatt hour you won't buy it if i give you a 0.6 volt system at 100 a kilowatt hour you'll buy it so don't get drawn into the wrong metrics but i said keep driving this thing what happens at some point the animony starts going into solution and when the animal he starts going into solution this thing's turns into a 1.8 volt system the voltage goes up 3x so for the same capital cost i just got a 3x improvement so this is sort of like a zebra battery but um much much more versatile so i call it zebra unchained zebra was zeolite battery research south africa that's where it came from it wasn't zeolite it was a sodium beta aluminum but anyways so this is this is a battery that's running alloying d alloys that's discharge that's charge but when i run it in the displacement mode it jumps up by 3x and i get all of this energy instead of that that's what we're working on next so if that thing comes into being that's where we go and if we get down to that number that's below a kilowatt hour you know what that means that's automotive that's automotive so if i if i had if i could get to 100 a kilowatt hour with a battery that's running at about 250 degrees celsius i mean that's colder than the combustion chamber of the car so don't tell me about high-temperature batteries i mean people say oh it was 450 degrees so i'll wrap it up so what have i learned from all this heterodoxies so uh everybody says you got to keep the temperature low for safety reasons and for energy efficiency and i said no you make the temperature high you get a higher energy density everybody says to scale you build a giga factory you get you get cheaper by building money i said no no you get cheaper by building fewer they make them bigger and everybody says human resources hire battery experts i says no i hired novices they're smart but they're new and they they have on unfettered minds i taught them electrochemistry to see the problem through my eyes and then turn them loose that's the power of the university so why do they work it's science and service to society that's it yeah it's higher sense of purpose because they figured out that nano and bio are are really great for career building but this has the greatest impact and i can't resist you know i'm in houston so i gotta i'm reminded of uh president kennedy's speech at rice university in september 1962 where he's justifying the decision to put a man on the moon and uh it's fantastic speech i mean it was his name sorensen his his speech writer was positively brilliant and so that um but you know when viewed as a metaphor that that speech is not just about space travel it's about big technological challenges just make it as a metaphor and my favorite line in that speech is where i'm coming to my favorite line in that speech is uh and i'm paraphrasing here a little bit it says we choose to work on the big problems not because it is easy but because it is hard that's why these kids come to work for me because it's a hard problem it's not an easy problem because i can give you a battery that will meet all these requirements to a nasa price point but now you've got the cost constraint and that just changes everything so we choose to work on the big problems not because it is easy but because it is hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept unwilling to postpone and one that we intend to win thank you [Music] you

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Length: 68min 19sec (4099 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020