These lithium-ion batteries don’t blow… up, that is
Here’s a Wired.com story about Valence Technologies’ lithium-ion battery technology, which uses a different kind of chemistry than rivals to keep the batteries from heating up too much and, well, blowing up.
The secret is to use a phosphate-based chemistry rather than one based on cobalt. Cobalt-based lithium ion batteries are fine when they’re kept fairly small, but as they increase in size the risk of runaway heating becomes a major stumbling block.
If you didn’t already know, Valence’s Saphion batteries are being used in newer versions of the Segway Human Transporter. I wrote about the Valence technology in my recent take on plug-in hybrid vehicles and how improvements in lithium-ion batteries could be the key to the mass-market manufacturing and acceptance of plug-ins. Valence’s batteries, because they tend to heat up less and are less prone to explosion, go a long way in meeting stringent safety requirements for auto manufacturing.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca