New restrictions require lithium-ion batteries to be in carry-on luggage

The United States Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are forbidding people from storing lithium ion cells or batteries as cargo on passenger planes the two agencies announced.

Companies are not allowed to ship batteries with more than 30 percent charge on cargo-only planes.

Most consumers will not be directly affected

You will still be able to bring spare batteries and electronic devices aboard in your carry-on bag. However, people who buy batteries online could be affected. Phones, rechargeable batteries, and electronic devices shipped by air will now only arrive not with a full charge but only 30 percent to lessen the risk of any fire or explosion that could damage a plane. You can always charge them after they are received. However, some people may wonder why the new batteries do not last too long before they need to be recharged.

Lithium ion batteries as a fire risk

The Federal Aviation Association in 2017 urged the global airline industry to reconsider allowing lithium ion batteries on flights due to their fire risk. The FAA conducted 10 tests in which it packed a fully-charged laptop into a suitcase and the checked out a number of scenarios in which the battery could catch fire. In one example an aerosol can of dry shampoo was strapped on the laptop. A fire immediately started causing the aerosol can to explode in a mere 40 seconds.

The US Department of Homeland Security banned tablets and laptops from 8 Muslim-majority countries. People were required to check their batteries rather than bring them aboard in carry-ons. The decision was to ensure that there were no explosives making their way on to planes.

Another case of a ban because of possible battery malfunctions is described in a Verge article: "A week after issuing a statement "strongly advising" airline passengers not to use or charge Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 — which has been formally recalled over a series of explosions due to battery malfunctions — the Federal Aviation Administration has officially banned use of the device during flight."

The appended video is from nine months ago so does not discuss the most recent changes.

Previously published in Digital Journal

Silicon anodes will soon improve lithium-ion battery capacity

The main obstacle to producing mass electric cars (EVs) is the price and that is mainly caused by the cost of lithium-ion battery cells.

Some relief has come from the fact that performance of the cells has been improving at the rate of about 7 percent per year either through cost declines or more energy capacity for the same cost. The improvements come from a variety of sources including economies of scale, changes to the battery chemistry, fabrication improvement and higher energy yields.

Silicon Anodes

Battery engineers suggest that double-digit growth in lithium-ion battery capacity through the replacement of the present carbon anodes by silicon anodes could happen by 2020 to 2022. Five years ago the anodes were just being researched in the laboratory but are now much closer to production.

There are two electrodes in every battery the anode being the one that discharges lithium ions which travel through the electrolyte and are absorbed into the other electrolyte, the cathode. In charging the cell, the travel is reversed.

In theory, the silicon anode could absorb and hold many more times the number of atoms as the carbon anode can. However, the process needs to be limited to avoid destroying the anode.

At present, carbon anodes also have small amounts of silicon blended in with the graphite in order to boost range but at most by ten percent and likely less.

Several companies claim to be close to silicon anode production

Angstron Materials, Enovix, Enevate, and Sita Nanotechnologies all claim they are close to production of the silicon anodes.

The trick is to ensure that the lithium ions can be absorbed by the anode without swelling or shattering it. Nanoparticles are used do do this.

A nanoparticle is a very small particle between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.

The companies claim that the new silicone anode batteries will increase the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by 20 to 40 percent over even the best graphite-anode batteries.

The new batteries will appear first in high-end electronic devices

The batteries are already being tested by potential customers but will first appear in smaller devices such as mobile phones. They should appear commercially within a couple of years.

However, before the batteries can be used in electric cars they will need far greater durability and be stress tested. In a mobile phone they need last only a few years but in an EV they should be able to last 10 or 15 years.

BMW hopes to use the batteries in an EV by 2023

BMW says it will use batteries from Sita Nanotechnologies in a plug in electric vehicles by 2023.

The German luxury car makesr intends to invest 200 million euros ($246 million) to staff and an establish its own battery research division for future EVs planned through the 2020s.

Need for safety and reliability may cut down capacity

Producers of the batteries may be too optimistic about the extent of the advantage of silicon-anode batteries over the present graphite ones. It may be necessary to cut down on capacity to ensure safety and durability.

BMW expects that the new batteries will have a 10 to 15 percent increase in capacity over the present graphite anode.

Range of EVs will increase with silicon anode batteries

The silicon-cathode batteries will not only reduce costs of batteries, an EV could have smaller batteries that would have the same range as present ones or alternatively there could a longer range with the same size as now. This gives designers of EVs more flexibility.

Drop in battery prices may increase production of electric vehicles (EVs)

Thanks to a global increase in production of lithium-ion batteries used to power electric vehicles (EVs) their price has dropped significantly. This may encourage the manufacture of more EVs.

Price of lithium-ion battery packs has been declining

The average price of a lithium-ion battery pack is now $209/kilowatt-hour. A Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) survey shows the price dropping to below $100/kWh by 2025.

Analyst James Frith of BNEF claims that the $100/kWh is widely seen as a tipping point that would result in greater adoption of EVs.

The price estimates result from a BNEF survey of more than 50 companies. The rise in numbers of batteries being manufactured have resulted in economies of scale. The larger order volumes for EVs will actually increase prices considerably for batteries of the kind that back-up solar panels since their order volumes will be much lower.

Mitsubishi Electric President also predicts EV batteries to be cheaper

Masaki Sakuyama, president and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric also predicts that prices for the battery-packs that power EVs will become cheaper. He said this will make EV's more competitive with fossil-fuel powered vehicles.

Market watchers say stricter fuel efficiency requirements make gasoline-powered cars more expensive. Some countries are not only imposing stricter fuel efficiency standards but plan to phase out fossil-fueled cars.

Most of the cost of EV's is in the batteries. Sakuyama said: "The cost of battery is now dropping very rapidly, so in the near future, the cost of the electric vehicle will be comparable to the conventional cars."

EV market becomes more competitive

Mitsubishi Motors, partly owned by Nissan and part of the Renault-Nissan-Mitusbishi alliance already produces a hatchback EV called the i-MiEV that runs on a 330 volt, 16kWh lithium-ion battery pack.

While Elon Musk's Tesla remains the leader in EVs both Toyota and Nissan now have purely battery-powered EVs in their lineups. Toyota recently issued an EV with an improved driving range plus autonomous driving features that starts off at $5,000 less than Tesla's new mass market Model 3 whose prices starts at about $35,000.

Major auto producers such as GM, Ford, and Volkswagen are introducing electric models with some making major investments in EV. China is fast becoming a huge market for EVs and is encouraging their use to help solve pollution problems.

Many problems with EV's remain

There needs to be a huge development in a charging infrastructure as well as lessening the length of time taken to charge an EV.

The types of promises made by Elon Musk about his new semi-truck and roadster require enormous advances in battery technology as well as reduction in price as discussed in a recent Digital Journal article.

Bloomberg itself notes that the price of batteries needs to drop by more than half before they will be competitive with cars powered by internal combustion engines. However they expect this to happen by around 2026.

As shown in the appended video Toyota intends to produce an EV using only solid-state batteries.

Previously published in Digital Journal

US Jet Blue flight diverted after battery fire

(May 31)Jet Blue flight 915 from JFK airport in New York to San Francisco was diverted after a battery in a laptop caused a fire in a passenger's backpack and started emitting a great deal of smoke.

The backpack was in the rear of the plane when it started to belch out smoke passengers said. One passenger said: “We’re at 35,000 feet and all of a sudden we hear an announcement and we look back in row 25 and we saw everybody standing up and smoke coming around and we didn’t know what was going on.” Kat Honniball, another passenger on the flight said that people began to smell smoke and saw it was coming from a backpack: "I was stunned — I knew something was going to happen because, you know, lithium batteries catching on fire when you're up at 38,000 feet you can't help but think you've got to do something." He said that passengers and crew remained calm during the incident. Although the fire was put out, the plane was diverted to Grand Rapids Michigan where it sat for three hours while emergency crews removed the battery from the plane and inspected it. There was no damage. The plane then continued its flight to San Franciso. The plane was carrying 158 people. The actual battery was not a laptop battery. Grand Rapids Ford Airport spokeswoman Tara Hernandez confirmed that a lithium battery started smoldering, but said that it was not a laptop battery. There was a laptop in the bag with it though, she said.

Only a very small percentage of lithium-ion batteries ever catch fire or explode but as more and more devices contain them the probability of more incidents such as this increases. Last year, Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smart phones were banned from US and Canadian flight last year after several instances of fires and explosions.

There have been 12 instances of battery-related fires on aircraft already this year. Some airlines even stock fire-proof bags for the express purpose of extinguishing any battery fires although Jet Blue did not have any. These incidents show that the banning of laptops from the aircraft cabin may be a bad idea:The potential flammability of laptop batteries is also one concern experts have voiced over the potential expansion of a laptop ban on international flights into the U.S.: a battery fire in the passenger cabin can be quickly spotted and contained, but one in the baggage hold could do significantly more damage.

The US which already bans laptops on direct flights to the US from several Muslim-majority countries but may extend the ban to all aircraft coming into or out of the company. The move is sad to be for security reasons but it could result in planes crashing because of fires in the cargo part of the aircraft caused by fires or explosions of lithium batteries.

New battery can be charged more than 200,000 times with no loss of power

Researchers at the University of California Irvine have developed a nanowire-based battery material that can recharged several hundred thousand times without breakdown or loss of energy.

Nanotechnology is described as follows:

Nanotechnology ("nanotech") is manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale.The earliest, widespread description of nanotechnology[1][2] referred to the particular technological goal of precisely manipulating atoms and molecules for fabrication of macroscale products, also now referred to as molecular nanotechnology.The field may result in many new materials that can be used in such new areas as nanomedicine, nanoelectronics, as well as energy production, and consumer products. Some analysts worry about the toxicity of new nanomaterials and their possible effects on the environment. A nanometer is a metric measure, one billionth of a meter.

A nanowire is thousands of times thinner than a human hair. It is highly conductive of electricity and also has a large area of its surface capable of storage and transfer of electrons. Batteries with the new nanowire could lead to commercial batteries that will have greatly increased lifespans, in computers, smartphones, appliances, cars, and even spacecraft.

Scientists have long been using the nanowires in batteries. However, the wires are very fragile and cannot stand up after repeated charging and recharging or cycling as it is called. In a typical lithium-ion battery they expand and eventually grow brittle and crack. The University of California Irvine (UCI) researchers were able to solve this problem "by coating a gold nanowires in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electoryte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The leader of the researchers doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai recharged the electrode up to 200,000 times without any detectable loss of capacity or power. The nanowires did not fracture either.

As well as hard work, the discovery depended in part on accident. According to the senior author of the study, Reginald Penner, chair of the UCI chemistry department: "Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it, She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity."Penner noted that usually the devices fail after 5 to 7 thousand cycles at most. The researchers think that the gel gives the metal oxide in the battery more flexibility. Thai said: "The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option. This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."Much work is being done to improve lithium ion batteries. Using silicon-based rather than a carbon base can double or even triple the storage capacity of the batteries.