Reporting for Scientific American, Cynthia Graber examines how MIT researchers have developed a battery coating that reduces the risk of injury if swallowed. Inside the coating, “microparticles of conductive metal are suspended in an insulating layer,” Graber explains.
BBC News reporter Jonathan Webb writes that researchers from MIT have created child-safe batteries by developing a coating that allows batteries to conduct electricity only when squeezed. The “pressure-sensitive design makes use of a property called quantum tunneling, which is also used in touch pads and screens,” writes Webb.
Alison Bruzek of NPR reports that MIT researchers have developed a shield that can prevent the electrical currents in a battery from damaging the esophagus. The material used to create the shield is already commercially available, NPR reports, making the coating a cheap solution to the issue of children swallowing batteries.
Pilita Clark of the Financial Times writes about the battery developed by Dr. Qichao Hu and Professor Donald Sadoway that can extend the driving range and lower the cost of an electric car. The new battery can store “twice as much energy as conventional [battery] cells,” Clark reports.
Forbes reporter Bill Tucker writes about battery innovation, highlighting a liquid battery system developed by MIT researchers. The proposed system would operate at dramatically lower temperatures and would allow renewable energy sources to compete with conventional power plants, reports Tucker.
“A team of MIT researchers has built an all-liquid battery prototype that's designed to store excess energy from solar and wind power plants,” writes Francie Diep for Popular Science. “[F]uture versions of this battery could release energy captured during more productive times into nations' power grids.”
Mark Peplow writes for Nature about a new molten-metal battery designed by Professor Donald Sadoway’s team: “A battery made of molten metals could help to make sources of renewable energy more viable by storing the excess electricity generated by these intermittent sources.”
Professor Donald Sadoway’s team has designed a battery that makes use of molten metals, which could allow for large-scale power storage, reports Jonathan Webb for the BBC. “Previous battery designs have largely been too expensive to help store energy on the scale of a national power grid,” writes Webb.
MIT scientists have shown recycled lead can be used in solar cells, reports Popular Science’s Emily Gertz. “The group's work demonstrates that the perovskite created from the lead in just one old car battery could provide materials for 30 households-worth of solar energy cells,” writes Gertz.
Martin LaMonica writes for IEEE Spectrum about how MIT researchers have developed a system that uses car batteries to produce solar cells. “The beauty is that this new process is pretty interchangeable with the current production method,” says Prof. Angela Belcher.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Feltman writes that MIT engineers have developed a system that recycles batteries into solar cells. “We think it could be a competitor that’s easy to process, has rapidly increasing efficiency, and can be made in an environmentally friendly way,” says Prof. Angela Belcher.
Umair Irfan and ClimateWire report on new research that helps explain how lithium batteries operate. The findings could lead to new methods for optimizing battery performance.