By Pamela Mansfield, JEOL USA  As the market for renewable energy sources and electric vehicles grows, the need for reliable, high-capacity energy storage is increasing too. Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) fit the bill in many ways, but plenty of challenges remain ahead, such as understanding their microstructure. This article describes how scanning electron microscopy (SEM) can…

Leland Teschler • Executive Editor If you wandered around the Society of Automotive Engineers’ annual trade show earlier this year, you would have seen a number of ideas aimed at cutting power consumption in electric vehicles. One development in that category was from a company called BetterFrost. It devised a more energy efficient windshield defroster.…

A battery is not an ideal finite power supply. The energy stored in a fully charged battery cannot be supplied to the digital circuitry to its full extent because the amount of energy a battery can provide depends on the current drawn from the battery itself. In other words, the higher the discharge current, the…

Texas Instruments introduced a new bidirectional buck/boost converter with an ultra-low quiescent current (IQ) of 60 nA – one-third the IQ of competing boost converters. The TPS61094 buck/boost converter integrates a buck mode for supercapacitor charging while providing ultra-low IQ, enabling engineers to extend battery life by as much as 20% when compared to commonly used hybrid-layer […]

Leland Teschler • Executive Editor lteschler@wtwhmedia.com On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler The latest figures from the National Fire Protection Association show that only about 20% of all vehicle fires arise from problems in the vehicle electrical system—most fires have something to do with the fuel system. Seeing as electric vehicles will do away with problematic petrol, […]

Metal-hydrogen battery company EnerVenue announced today it has raised $100 million in Series A funding that it will use to build a gigawatt-scale factory in the United States, accelerate R&D efforts and expand its salesforce. Schlumberger New Energy led the round, accompanied by Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures and others including Stanford University. EnerVenue has also…

A group of researchers hailing from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have devised stretchable silver electrodes whose conductivity can be enhanced by human sweat. The stretchable electrodes were fabricated by directly printing an ink composed of conductive silver flakes and specially designed elastic binder called hydrophilic poly(urethane-acrylate) (HPUA) on hydrophilic textiles. Researchers say the HPUA…

DIN rail-mounted industrial power supplies feed dc power to industrial components for industrial control, assembly, testing, and monitoring tasks — as well as other automation equipment that uses dc power. These power supplies are usually found in electrical cabinets and control panels connected to elaborate power and communication networks involving myriad components. Outside control cabinets,…

Engineers strive to design smartphones with longer-lasting batteries, electric vehicles that can drive for hundreds of miles on a single charge, and a reliable power grid that can store renewable energy for future use. Each of these technologies is within reach — that is, if scientists can build better cathode materials. To date, the typical…