New method to make sodium ion-based battery cells could lead to better, cheaper batteries for the electrical grid

By adding the right amount of heat, researchers have developed a method that improves the electrical capacity and recharging lifetime of sodium ion rechargeable batteries, which could be a cheaper alternative for large-scale uses such as storing energy on the electrical grid.

To connect solar and wind energy sources to the electrical grid, grid managers require batteries that can store large amounts of energy created at the source. Lithium ion rechargeable batteries -- common in consumer electronics and electric vehicles -- perform well, but are too expensive for widespread use on the grid because many batteries will be needed, and they will likely need to be large. Sodium is the next best choice, but the sodium-sulfur batteries currently in use run at temperatures above 300 degrees Celsius, or three times the temperature of boiling water, making them less energy efficient and safe than batteries that run at ambient temperatures.

Battery developers want the best of both worlds -- to use both inexpensive sodium and use the type of electrodes found in lithium rechargeables. A team of scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and visiting researchers from Wuhan University in Wuhan, China used nanomaterials to make electrodes that can work with sodium, they reported June 3 online in the journal Advanced Materials.

"The sodium-ion battery works at room temperature and uses sodium ions, an ingredient in cooking salt. So it will be much cheaper and safer," said PNNL chemist Jun Liu, who co-led the study with Wuhan University chemist Yuliang Cao.

The electrodes in lithium rechargeables that interest researchers are made of manganese oxide. The atoms in this metal oxide form many holes and tunnels that lithium ions travel through when batteries are being charged or are in use. The free movement of lithium ions allows the battery to hold electricity or release it in a current. But simply replacing the lithium ions with sodium ions is problematic -- sodium ions are 70 percent bigger than lithium ions and don't fit in the crevices as well.

To find a way to make bigger holes in the manganese oxide, PNNL researchers went much much smaller. They turned to nanomaterials -- materials made on the nanometer-sized scale, or about a million times thinner than a dime -- that have surprising properties due to their smallness. For example, the short distances that sodium ions have to travel in nanowires might make the manganese oxide a better electrode in ways unrelated to the size of the tunnels..

To explore, the team mixed two different kinds of manganese oxide atomic building blocks -- one whose atoms arrange themselves in pyramids, and another one whose atoms form an octahedron, a diamond-like structure from two pyramids stuck together at their bases. They expected the final material to have large S-shaped tunnels and smaller five-sided tunnels through which the ions could flow.

After mixing, the team treated the materials with temperatures ranging from 450 to 900 degrees Celsius, then examined the materials and tested which treatment worked best. Using a scanning electron microscope, the team found that different temperatures created material of different quality. Treating the manganese oxide at 750 degrees Celsius created the best crystals: too low and the crystals appeared flakey, too high and the crystals turned into larger flat plates.

Zooming in even more using a transmission electron microscope at EMSL, DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on PNNL's campus, the team saw that manganese oxide heated to 600 degrees had pockmarks in the nanowires that could impede the sodium ions, but the 750 degree-treated wires looked uniform and very crystalline.

But even the best-looking material is just window-dressing if it doesn't perform well. To find out if it lived up to its good looks, the PNNL-Wuhan team dipped the electrode material in electrolyte, the liquid containing sodium ions that will help the manganese oxide electrodes form a current. Then they charged and discharged the experimental battery cells repeatedly.

The team measured peak capacity at 128 milliAmp hours per gram of electrode material as the experimental battery cell discharged. This result surpassed earlier ones taken by other researchers, one of which achieved peak capacity of 80 milliAmp hours per gram for electrodes made from manganese oxide but with a different production method. The researchers think the lower capacity is due to sodium ions causing structural changes in that manganese oxide that do not occur or occur less frequently in the heat-treated nano-sized material.

In addition to high capacity, the material held up well to cycles of charging and discharging, as would occur in consumer use. Again, the material treated at 750 Celsius performed the best: after 100 cycles of charging-discharging, it lost only 7 percent of its capacity. Material treated at 600 Celsius or 900 Celsius lost about 37 percent and 25 percent, respectively.

Even after 1,000 cycles, the capacity of the 750 Celsius-treated electrodes only dropped about 23 percent. The researchers thought the material performed very well, retaining 77 percent of its initial capacity.

Last, the team charged the experimental cell at different speeds to determine how quickly it could take up electricity. The team found that the faster they charged it, the less electricity it could hold. This suggested to the team that the speed with which sodium ions could diffuse into the manganese oxide limited the battery cell's capacity -- when charged fast, the sodium ions couldn't enter the tunnels fast enough to fill them up.

To compensate for the slow sodium ions, the researchers suggest in the future they make even smaller nanowires to speed up charging and discharging. Grid batteries need fast charging so they can collect as much newly made energy coming from renewable sources as possible. And they need to discharge fast when demands shoots up as consumers turn on their air conditioners and television sets, and plug in their electric vehicles at home.

Such high performing batteries could take the heat off an already taxed electrical power grid.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations) from materials provided by DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Journal Reference:

Yuliang Cao, Lifen Xiao, Wei Wang, Daiwon Choi, Zimin Nie, Jianguo Yu, Laxmikant V. Saraf, Zhenguo Yang, Jun Liu. Reversible Sodium Ion Insertion in Single Crystalline Manganese Oxide Nanowires with Long Cycle Life. Advanced Materials, 2011; DOI: 10.1002/adma.201100904

Physicists store antimatter atoms for 1,000 seconds -- and still counting

The ALPHA Collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has created and stored a total of 309 antihydrogen atoms, some for up to 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes), with an indication of much longer storage time as well.

ALPHA announced in November, 2010, that they had succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for the first time ever, having captured 38 atoms of antihydrogen and storing each for a sixth of a second. In the weeks following, ALPHA continued to collect anti-atoms and hold them for longer and longer times.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, including Joel Fajans and Jonathan Wurtele of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD), both UC Berkeley physics professors, are members of the ALPHA Collaboration.

Says Fajans, "Perhaps the most important aspect of this result is that after just one second these antihydrogen atoms had surely already decayed to ground state. These were likely the first ground state anti-atoms ever made." Since almost all precision measurements require atoms in the ground state, ALPHA's achievement opens a path to new experiments with antimatter.

A principal component of ALPHA's atom trap is a superconducting octupole magnet proposed and prototyped in Berkeley Lab's AFRD. It takes ALPHA about 15 minutes to make and capture atoms of antihydrogen in their magnetic trap.

"So far, the only way we know whether we've caught an anti-atom is to turn off the magnet," says Fajans. "When the anti-atom hits the wall of the trap it annihilates, which tells us that we got one. In the beginning we were turning off our trap as soon as possible after each attempt to make anti-atoms, so as not to miss any."

Says Wurtele, "At first we needed to demonstrate that we could trap antihydrogen. Once we proved that, we started optimizing the system and made rapid progress, a real qualitative change."

Initially ALPHA caught only about one anti-atom in every 10 tries, but Fajans notes that at its best the ALPHA apparatus trapped one anti-atom with nearly every attempt.

Although the physical set-ups are different, ALPHA's ability to hold anti-atoms in a magnetic trap for 1,000 seconds, and presumably longer, compares well to the length of time ordinary atoms can be magnetically confined.

"A thousand seconds is more than enough time to perform measurements on a confined anti-atom," says Fajans. "For instance, it's enough time for the anti-atoms to interact with laser beams or microwaves." He jokes that, at CERN, "it's even enough time to go for coffee."

The ALPHA Collaboration not only made and stored the long-lived antihydrogen atoms, it was able to measure their energy distribution.

"It may not sound exciting, but it's the first experiment done on trapped antihydrogen atoms," Wurtele says. "This summer we're planning more experiments, with microwaves. Hopefully we will measure microwave-induced changes of the atomic state of the anti-atoms." With these and other experiments the ALPHA Collaboration aims to determine the properties of antihydrogen and measure matter-antimatter asymmetry with precision.

A program of upgrades is being planned that will allow experiments not possible with the current ALPHA apparatus. At present the experimenters don't have laser access to the trap. Lasers are essential for performing spectroscopy and for "cooling" the antihydrogen atoms (reducing their energy and slowing them down) to perform other experiments.

Fajans says, "We hope to have laser access by 2012. We're clearly ready to move to the next level."

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations) from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Journal Reference:

ALPHA Collaboration: G. B. Andresen, M. D. Ashkezari, M. Baquero-Ruiz, W. Bertsche, P. D. Bowe, E. Butler, C. L. Cesar, M. Charlton, A. Deller, S. Eriksson, J. Fajans, T. Friesen, M. C. Fujiwara, D. R. Gill, A. Gutierrez, J. S. Hangst, W. N. Hardy, R. S. Hayano, M. E. Hayden, A. J. Humphries, R. Hydomako, S. Jonsell, S. L. Kemp, L. Kurchaninov, N. Madsen, S. Menary, P. Nolan, K. Olchanski, A. Olin, P. Pusa, C. O. Rasmussen, F. Robicheaux, E. Sarid, D. M. Silveira, C. So, J. W. Storey, R. I. Thompson, D. P. van der Werf, J. S. Wurtele, Y. Yamazaki. Confinement of antihydrogen for 1,000 seconds. Nature Physics, 2011; DOI: 10.1038/nphys2025

Mercachem announces appointment of Dr. Gerhard Müller as Senior Vice President for Medicinal Chemistry

 Mercachem announced that Dr. Gerhard Müller has joined the management team of Mercachem as Senior Vice President Medicinal Chemistry thus supporting the strong growth of the medicinal chemistry services and projects. Gerhard will be responsible for expanding Mercachem’s activities in Medicinal Chemistry.

Gerhard Müller joins Mercachem from Proteros fragments GmbH, where he had, for the last three years the position of Managing Director and Chief Scientific Officer and he was instrumental in establishing the integrated lead discovery business. Before his step into the contract services industry, Gerhard had the position of Vice President Drug Discovery at GPC Biotech AG, a Munich-based oncology company. Additionally, Gerhard has built a successful track record in lead finding and optimization campaigns at Glaxo, Bayer AG and N.V. Organon, yielding several small molecule development candidates. He gained valuable managerial expertise running entire pre-clinical research departments and having project portfolio management responsibilities. Furthermore, Gerhard developed impressive entrepreneurial skills during the time when he held the position of Chief Scientific Officer at Axxima Pharmceuticals AG in Munich, a company dedicated to protein kinase inhibitor research.

In his career Gerhard has been working on a wide range of different target classes from numerous disease areas, always emphasizing target family-centric medicinal chemistry approaches. Over the last 10 years he specialized in kinase inhibitor research establishing novel design paradigms, proven by numerous peer-reviewed publications. With Gerhard joining Mercachem, the company has relevant industrial expertise within all important drug target classes. Furthermore, Gerhard’s in-depth knowledge on structure-based lead discovery, especially in fragment-based lead generation is a viable addition to the breath of hit and lead finding expertise at Mercachem.

Gerhard will use his experience with multidisciplinary research projects to further expand Mercachem’s capabilities to perform fully integrated drug discovery projects from hit finding over lead discovery and lead optimization to IND-enabling studies. Combining Mercachem’s excellent chemistry expertise and project management with specialized CROs for in vitro, in vivo and safety pharmacology has proven to be successful to successfully customize a discovery project for the sponsor.

Gerhard received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1992 from the Technical University of Munich, working with Prof. Dr. Horst Kessler on anti-adhesive integrin antagonists.

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Finding answers century-old questions about platinum's catalytic properties

Researchers now understand more about why platinum is so efficient at producing power in hydrogen fuel cells.

"Understanding platinum's properties for speeding up chemical reactions will potentially enable scientists to create significantly cheaper synthetic or metal alloy alternatives for use in sustainable devices like fuel cells," says Gregory Jerkiewicz, a professor in the Department of Chemistry who led the groundbreaking study, published in the journal Langmuir.

Dr. Jerkiewicz's research team has found that when platinum is used in reactions involving hydrogen it develops an embedded layer of hydrogen just one atom thick. This gives the platinum hydrophobic or water-repelling qualities, meaning that stray water molecules inside the fuel cell cannot bond strongly with the surface of the platinum.

The water-repelling nature of the modified platinum means that incoming hydrogen molecules can easily attach to the surface of the platinum and separate into smaller particles without requiring additional energy to displace any water molecules that are in the way.

The reduction in the energy required for hydrogen molecules to attach to the surface of the platinum means that the process is fast and efficient and the fuel cell can deliver a lot of power.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations ) from materials provided by Queen's University.

Journal Reference:

Gregory Jerkiewicz, Gholamreza Vatankhah, Shin-ichi Tanaka, Jean Lessard. Discovery of the Potential of Minimum Mass for Platinum Electrodes. Langmuir, 2011; 27 (7): 4220 DOI: 10.1021/la200153n

BASF to build world’s largest single-train TDI plant in Europe

 BASF will build the world’s largest single-train TDI (toluene diisocyanate) plant in Europe. The plant will have a capacity of 300,000 metric tons per year and will be fully integrated with precursor production. The TDI plant will be located at one of the company’s integrated Verbund sites in Antwerp, Belgium or Ludwigshafen, Germany and will start production in 2014. Engineering is underway and the final site selection will be announced shortly. TDI is a key component used for polyurethane foams.

Dr. Martin Brudermüller, Vice Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of BASF SE and responsible for the Plastics segment, said: “This new investment supports BASF’s growth strategy, underlines our leading position as the largest TDI producer and reinforces our strong commitment to the TDI market. BASF will have the ability to serve its customers’ demand through local world-scale production in the largest markets North America, Europe and Asia, in particular China. We have a superior technology and outstanding safety procedures. Moreover, our unique Verbund concept provides us with excellent cost structures."

“With this new plant, we will complement our strong global network of integrated world-scale TDI facilities to serve our customers’ growing demand,” said Wayne T. Smith, President of BASF’s Polyurethanes division. “We expect the global TDI market to grow faster than GDP in the coming years, with strong contribution from Central and Eastern
Europe, Middle East and Africa. This growth is driven by ongoing urbanization and increasing standards of living.”

TDI is a key component for the polyurethanes industry. To a large extent it is used in the automotive industry (e.g. seating cushion and interior applications) as well as in the furniture segment (e.g. flexible foams for mattresses, cushions or wood coating).

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CAS REGISTRY Keeps Pace with Rapid Growth of Chemical Research, Registers 60 Millionth Substance

 Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) announced that a patent application claiming compounds with potential therapeutic activity submitted to the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) included the 60 millionth substance recorded in CAS REGISTRY.

CAS observed in 2009 that China surpassed all other nations as the top producer of chemical patent applications. China still maintains the lead today, and finding that the 60 millionth substance registered is from a SIPO application reconfirms that observation.

Coming less than two years after CAS REGISTRY crossed the 50 million mark, this second major milestone shows the continued acceleration of chemical and scientific output across the globe. CAS scientists keep up with this growth daily, by analyzing, organizing, and curating the output of worldwide research in their native languages to maintain the completeness and quality of CAS’ premier substance collection.

The 60 millionth substance, a potential antiviral compound, was assigned the CAS Registry Number® 1298016-92-8. The substance was discovered by the Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, which is one of the key drug research institutions in China. In the patent application, a team of inventors prepared derivatives of 2-amino-1,3,4-thiadiazine.

“Our organization relies on CAS’ research tool, SciFinder®, as a critical asset to our research team, helping to educate our R&D teams along every step of the research process,” said Pei Cheng Zhang, a professor at Materia Medica. “Its database’s rapid growth demonstrates its leadership within the industry and breadth of coverage, making it paramount to our success.”

“It seems fitting that the 60 millionth substance in CAS REGISTRY would originate from within an Asian country, given the region’s growing and significant impact on scientific discovery in recent years,” said Christine McCue, Vice President of Marketing at CAS. “This growth is illustrated not only in the patent arena, but also with respect to journal literature, and led CAS to expand coverage of Asian chemistry through the analysis of more than 300 additional journal titles in the past three years from China, Japan, and Korea alone.”

 

Revealing the inner workings of cells with newly developed Raman microscopy technique

Living cells are virtuosos of chemistry. At any one time, countless chemical reactions are taking place within each cell. For researchers trying to understand how cells function, unraveling this complex chemistry is an ongoing challenge. The process, however, could soon become a little more straightforward. Mikiko Sodeoka and colleagues at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute at Wako, in collaboration with a team led by Katsumasa Fujita and Satoshi Kawata at Osaka University, have demonstrated how to tag molecules in a way that promises to be much more versatile than current methods.

Traditionally, researchers looking to study the role of a particular small molecule within a cell have tagged it with a fluorescent marker. Using a fluorescence microscope, the tagged substance can be followed as it moves around the cell. However, fluorescent tags are bulky, and so can disrupt the molecule’s normal cellular interactions. To get around this problem, molecules can sometimes be tagged after reaching their destination within the cell, but this technique only works in a limited number of cases.

Sodeoka and her team have now shown that a simple chemical substituent called an alkyne, which consists of just two carbon atoms joined together by a triple bond, can replace the bulky fluorescent tag. Their imaging technique relies on the fact that alkynes scatter a particular wavelength of light when irradiated with a laser—a process known as Raman scattering—which can be detected using a Raman microscope. No other cellular components scatter light at this wavelength, giving a clear picture of the molecule within the cell.

To demonstrate the potential of their technique, the researchers used an alkyne-tagged component of DNA known as EdU. They then used a Raman microscope developed by Fujita and his team to follow a group of replicating cells as they incorporated EdU into their DNA (Fig. 1). The technique took some work to optimize, says Sodeoka. “We were very happy when we could finally see the time-series pictures of the incorporation of EdU into DNA.”

The EdU experiment is just a proof of principle, Sodeoka adds. “At this point, the sensitivity of the alkyne tag using Raman microscopy is lower than fluorescent imaging,” she says. To improve the sensitivity, the team is working to optimize the attachment of the alkyne tag, and also to improve the Raman microscope itself. “If the sensitivity problem is solved, Raman imaging using alkynes as a small tag could become a powerful tool,” she concludes.

More information: Yamakoshi, H., et al. Imaging of EdU, an alkyne-tagged cell proliferation probe, by Raman microscopy. Journal of the American Chemical Society 133, 6102–6105 (2011).

Provided by RIKEN (news : web)