Nano Liquid Batteries | John Katsoudas | TEDxIIT

[Music] we all know that burning gasoline for transportation contributes significantly to an oncoming global calamity climate change we also know that switching to electric vehicles or EVs can improve the situation and I bet all of you like me care about the environment and most of you like me don't own an electric vehicle I'm pretty confident about this because I know that electric vehicles make up less than a percent of all the automobiles on the road today so unless there is a small fraction of a person out in the audience who owns an electric vehicle I think this is a pretty safe assumption now I have my reasons why I don't own an electric vehicle I live in the city I don't have a garage so I can't charge at home I don't like waiting longer than three minutes at a gas station to refuel I like knowing I can go on long trips I don't want to deal with the logistics of charging stations and owning an electric vehicle right now seems as if I would be paying substantially more for significantly less so if some of my reasons are also some of your reasons why you don't have an electric vehicle it doesn't bode well for the environment because each one of those is a separate issue that is yet to be addressed I've been a research scientist for over 13 years and I have the luxury of imagining possible solutions long before most even get to consider them in fact every moment of the day I think of solutions it's what I do but every now and then I get to experience the completely unexpected and it is extremely refreshing seven years ago I was having a series of conceptual conversations with a colleague of mine about her work in heat transfer nanofluids to explain a nano fluid is a fluid that has billions and billions of nanoparticles mixed into it and these tiny particles can imbue their material properties into the fluid and the fluid in turn can begin to exhibit the material behavior of the salad my colleague was pumping her fluid across a hot surface and the fluid would absorb the heat from this hot surface and by measuring how the fluid would cool down she could determine the effect the nanoparticles were having on the thermal efficiency of the fluid she found in some cases that by adding the nanoparticles to her fluid she could improve its thermal efficiency by 80% which is a lot when you consider that industry typically fights for only 5% incremental improvements in a product's performance and from her results a question arose if the Nano fluid that she was testing was being pumped in her apparatus from a point A to a point B and we know that he is actually just a form of thermal energy were there other forms of energy that could also be transported in this fashion how about electrical energy storage and transport could that be transported from point A to point B in a nano fluid using nanoparticles made from rechargeable battery materials so we formed a research group to investigate battery materials regardless if they make up the positive side or the negative side they experienced a morphological change when they're charged in their discharge when you go home and you plug a battery into your charger an electron is actually physically driven into the material at the atomic level and the atoms in the material they need to separate a little bit they need to adjust to accommodate this electron and one way that we can see this happening is by using x-rays sort of like x-raying your luggage at the airport to see the contents inside but in our case we needed to use a particle accelerator to generate the x-rays and use very specialized techniques to see what was happening at the atomic level so we wrote a series of experimental proposals to use one of the largest x-ray sources in the world utilizing this exact type of experiment and we began pumping our nano fluid with these rechargeable battery particles in it to see if in fact we could charge and discharge those particles and we could and using the x-rays we were able to probe the process in real-time probe the system as it occurred well this was a very exciting result because previously I spoke of transporting thermal energy from point A to point B but here we were transporting electrical energy storage and transport in a fluid from point A to point B and normally when you're transporting electrical energy the way we know it you do it in a wire you don't do it in a fluid there's something subtle unique about this concept and then the unexpected happen with every experiment to follow we actively sought four areas for further development until the potential of liquid energy storage it came into focus for us I want everyone here to consider their cell phones that inside our solid battery material solid constructs and they absorb energy and they extract energy thousands of times over and over and over cycling back and forth back and forth throughout their entire useful life battery store electrical energy you all know this there is nothing new there but there are other types of battery outside of that submit familiar format here this is the battery too even though we identify with the solid battery constructs that are in your cell phones this is a bunch of lemons powering a clock and you know when life serves you lemons you make a battery right there is another type of battery and I'm just going to describe it for you it's called a flow battery and a flow battery is a type of battery that actually has these massive tree trunk size tanks and one tank has got a positive fluid in it and the other tank has a negative fluid in it and there's a reaction chamber that basically sits between them and depending on the way in which you flow it across this reaction chamber will determine whether it's going to store electrical energy or it's going to give up electrical energy and it's utilized to minimize brownout scenarios when everyone comes home in hot summer months everyone turns on their air-conditioner well this sort of level eise's that because if you don't use batteries in this fashion you will waste a lot of energy because you'll get these brown out scenarios and something has to compensate for it now one reason you all aren't walking around with lemons in your pockets connected to your cell phones or you're putting stationary storage flow batteries on the back of trailers hitch to your EVs is they actually don't store a lot of energy and it is only those batteries that you're familiar with that are in your cell phones that have the energy storage and the energy density to actually push an electric vehicle 240 miles per charge so the question actually is is can a format change from those solid battery materials into a liquid one do better and if so what could be accomplished now I want to talk to you a little bit about gasoline gasoline functionally is an amazing thing it is a high energy density liquid fuel transportable from point A to point B via flow and fuel pumps it doesn't freeze it's extremely high energy dense and it's volatile all you need is a spark to get out its energy and it can store a lot of energy in those chemical bonds it's one of those materials that if nature did not supply gasoline for us we would want to invent something this good and just as electrical energy is transported from the generators to the grid to the Transformers to the homes to the outlets gasoline is transported from oil rigs refineries pipelines tanker cars the gas station and then to your pump and the convenience of gasoline cannot be understated overstated it is pumpable it is flowable and for these reasons it occupies a huge space in the US energy portfolio now you'll notice in the red section 71% of petroleum goes towards transportation specifically for those reasons I previously spoke of it's functional it's hard to imagine anything other than the 3-minute refueling it's hard to imagine anything other than gasoline is reliability other than gasoline is relatively low cost there is just one glaring modern 21st century issue and that is burning gasoline for transportation is responsible for 30% of all co2 production and co2 causes climate change now someone could say hey just Electrify transportation you don't have to worry about burning petroleum any more and there's a few points I want to make here the first is this if we were to electrify transportation you can see in the blue section that represents electricity general so most of the red would become blue and what that means is you would be doubling up on the necessity to build more electricity generation that means we would have to double up on the amount of coal plants that we presently use to generate the electricity and burning coal produces one hundred and thirty seven percent more co2 than burning gasoline so that doesn't help that much then there's the question of grid capacity if everyone came home on a hot summer day turned on their air-conditioner open the refrigerator pop the beer turned on their TV turned on the lights and plugged their automobile their electric vehicle in for recharging you would have transformers that would be shutting down everywhere now there is a proposed solution to this issue and it goes something like this if the electric vehicles are capable of talking to the meters at the home and the meters at the home are capable of talking to the Transformers and the Transformers can talk to the grid then the grid can tell the automobile when it's most convenient for it to charge the automobile you would no longer be free to just come home and plug your electric vehicle into charge whenever it was convenient for you this means though there would need to be more infrastructure leading to more cost and the other point I want to make is presently it takes 60 times longer to fully recharge an electric vehicle than it does the three minutes to refuel it right now and that amount of time would be preclusive to meet the local demand in urban areas the aggregate footprint to do that in an urban area would be massive these are some of the issues related to simply electrifying transportation electrification it faces headwinds from infrastructure issues consumer issues and strategy issues however at approximately 8 percent so 8 out of every 100 people if they owned electric vehicles a business argument could be made to produce them and companies would make a profit producing them in order to combat global climate change you need closer to 50% evie penetration 50 out of every 100 people need to be driving an electric vehicle and generation sources need to be created and invented that don't burn fossil fuels in a way to transport energy that won't crash the grid in urban areas can't be precluded because it takes so much longer to charge petroleum companies presently own the transportation market and they're not simply going to give it up to the electric utilities they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep their markets and utility companies presently aren't positioned to take over anyways but climate change it doesn't care about any of this it doesn't care about strategy issues it doesn't care about infrastructure issues it's just going to keep accelerating and keep going forward until until the end now imagine a different possibility where batteries are made of high energy density rechargeable fluids in large tanks can sit at solar farms in wind farms and the fluids could be charged on-site and first transported by tanker car railcar and depots to refilling stations where one can imagine electric vehicles simply pump in fresh charged liquid and pump out the discharged liquid to be recharged at the station or wherever and whenever is most convenient for the infrastructure that we already have does this solve many of those issues there's a format change from a solid into a liquid address this issue does this scenario give oil companies the impetus to pivot because they can hold on to their markets they have the technological advantage already of transporting liquid fuel when we began this work this was not what we were going after we were simply following the breadcrumbs studying the basic nature of this new liquid energy format only after we proved the concepts in our early experiments did we begin to understand the potential of what liquid energy storage actually is can we make a high energy density battery a composite liquid have the same low operational temperatures can we make it flow with pumps and transport it in that fashion yes and we founded the technology and we've shown it in its all its pieces a nano electro fuel flow battery is a stable nanoparticle suspension of the same high energy density material that you are already familiar with that are already in those cellphones they're already in mass production they're already utilized around the world they're already used to combat global climate change enough battery is a type of battery that attempts to merge the solid formats into the flow battery formats into one singular functional form this is how we see it the transportation of electrical energy without a grid in a fluid not only addresses the core issues but it fundamentally occupies the same space as gasoline no longer do grid structures need to be built to the solar farms in the wind farms instead of oil being pumped from the ground and into pipelines wind farms could be pumping energy into pipelines instead of pumping gasoline into the internal combustion engine pumps could be pumping electrified fluid energy storage decouples demand from generation and Neff type of technologies it decouples the energy transport from the grid none of this potential was sought none of this overarching vision was predetermined a simple change of format from those high energy density materials that you are all familiar with into just a liquid nano fluid opened up an entire area of application innovation when we started this work we simply did it because we were curious now now we're going to build it thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 88,114

Rating: 4.5005889 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Environment, Future, Technology

Id: YZuYnX3IQSQ

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2016