Over a century ago Thomas Edison was charging
ahead with electric cars. Not for him, the noisy, smelly complicated engines
burning gasoline in controlled explosions running around twenty times a second.
He had a vision of quiet humming efficiency, as we would be whisked around the
streets on Edison Batteries.
Hard
to argue these days with this utopian dream (putting aside looming monopoly
issues at that time) as today we are rushing to embrace electric cars, in part
or in full, but no longer with Edison’s batteries.
Today,
our high tech vehicles are run using lithium ion batteries and we are seeing
charging stations springing up in nice places like restaurant parking lots so
we can put on weight while our electric car gets charged enough to take us home
after we have been charged enough to purchase the road.
The
BBC News/Technology section reports on new versions of the Edison Nickel/Iron
battery (1). One of the problems a century ago was the length of time those batteries
took to charge and the current length of time for us to go in and eat a meal would
be much too short. But nanotech comes to the rescue with a large team led by
Dai at Stanford U (2).
Not
only is the Nickel and Iron very finely divided, but the carbon, which used to
be in chunky rod-form, is down to one molecular layer thick of hexagonally
arranged carbon atoms which can be pulled off a chunk of graphite using
adhesive tape (3) with iron oxide nano crystals on it and using carbon nanotubes with nickel
hydroxide nano crystals decorating them prettily.
In the lab, these are only small batteries, but
they charge up 1,000 times faster than the original Edison units – just right
for today’s fast foods and indigestion pills. So if this works out, we can look
forward to the freedom of the road as we charge ahead with electric cars.
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18674240
- http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/full/ncomms1921.html
- http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200910/physicshistory.cfm
