glass Archives - A & P Electronic Media

John Goodenough is one of the original developers of the lithium ion battery. Recently, he has been involved in developing some battery technology that has 3-10 times or greater the energy density of lithium ion batteries. And, they’re very safe, non-toxic, and can be charged REALLY fast!

“Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted. We believe our discovery solves many of the problems that are inherent in today’s batteries,” Goodenough said.

These batteries can also be made at a much lower cost since sodium can be used instead of lithium, which is in massive abundance in sea water. The electrolytes in this battery are actually made of a solid GLASS and is changing the way batteries and electricity are looked at.

Read this for more of the story: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/02/28/goodenough-introduces-new-battery-technology

Here is an abstract of the paper that discusses this revolutionary battery technology: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/EE/C6EE02888H#!divAbstract

The U.S. Military patented a very expensive form of transparent aluminum back in 1980. In 1986 in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, Scotty the ship’s Engineer shared a method of creating Transparent Aluminum with a company dealing with polymers. Here is that video clip:

Since then, there have been several varieties of a Transparent Aluminum and this is one of the most popular demonstrations that circulated the Internet:

A research team at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science has created a totally transparent glass, which is as strong as steel! It is much more advanced than what you see in the picture above.

Aluminum is already added to some glass to increase the strength, but the more they add, the more crystallized the glass looks. The breakthrough is that up to 50% aluminum can now be added and the glass is perfectly clear – and is as strong as steel and iron.

Go here for the story by Nature: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15233

Here is a paper on this project by the University (in Japanese): https://www.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/publication/topics/2015/20151016press1.pdf