PNNL Researchers Win Two Awards from DOE Vehicle Office
The Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office recently issued two awards to researchers at PNNL for their contributions to areas that are crucial for the expansion of electric vehicles.
New Molecule Design Boosts Performance of Electrolyte for Redox Flow Batteries
PNNL scientists partnered with colleagues at the University of Akron to create a new molecule that could substantially improve the electrochemical stability of redox flow batteries.
The Right Stuff to Find the Right Materials
As he prepares to enter PNNL's Energy Sciences Center later this year, Vijayakumar 'Vijay' Murugesan is among DOE leaders exploring solutions to design and build transformative materials for batteries of the future.
JEOL JSM-IT200LA Scanning Electron Microscope
Advanced Grid Storage Technology Available for Commercial License
Technology designed to bolster the electric grid and store large amounts of energy from renewable sources is available for licensing.
Scientists Widen the Temperature Range for Electric Car Batteries
PNNL researchers have created a chemical cocktail that could help electric cars power their way through extreme temperatures where current lithium-ion batteries don’t operate as efficiently as needed.
Metal Fluoride Electrode Protection Layer and Method of Making Same
The present invention discloses a method to modify the titanium oxide based anode materials by coating a thin layer of AlF3 on the particle surface and the excellent battery performance for the thus obtained surface-modified titanium oxide based materials. This method is simple and cost effective. The key aspect of the present invention is to keep the AlF3 coating at low content particularly between 0.1% and 10% and more particularly between 1% and 5%. The thin AlF3-coating layer significantly improves the power performance, capacity retention at elevated temperatures and long term cycle life of the lithium-ion batteries using these surface-modified anode materials.
Aquatic Organism Tracking Devices, Systems and Associated Methods
Compared with MHK energy, widely-used hydropower have also been facing similar environmental concerns. To help investigate the potential of fish injury and mortality from passage through hydropower turbines, PNNL developed the JSATS. Recent JSATS development included several state-of-the-art acoustic transmitters, such as the injectable transmitter and the juvenile eel/lamprey transmitter. The latter is the world's smallest acoustic tag. Both these small transmitters have been successfully demonstrated in field studies and helped gather information on species of early life stages that had previously been unobtainable. The highly efficient transducer and circuit designs as well as the high-density micro-battery technology specifically developed for these transmitters were the innovations that made these technological advancements possible. The JSATS operates at 416.7 kHz, a relatively high acoustic frequency that works well filtering out acoustic noises in freshwater environments. With hardware and software modifications, these technologies can be readily adopted for a lower-frequency transmitter for use in marine environments. Our feasibility assessment and laboratory benchtop testing of the transmitter concept at three different frequencies around 200 kHz have shown significant improvements (detailed results listed in the attached document).