It’s a solar cell! No… it’s a rechargeable lithium-air battery! No… wait… it’s both: It’s the world’s first all-in-one solar battery! This is significant, because one of the biggest problems with wide-scale solar power deployment is that you also need huge banks of batteries to store electricity. An integrated solution is both cheaper and more efficient — about 25% cheaper and 20% more efficient, according to the researchers.
Elon Musk, responding to the only perceived weakness of the Model S — incendiary and explosive lithium-ion batteries — has announced that all cars produced after March 6 will have three new underbody shields, made of aluminium and titanium. Musk says that, while the Model S is already by far the safest car on the road, these new shields will reduce the risk of the car’s batteries being pierced by sharp/heavy road debris to ‘virtually zero.’
Titanium is roughly half the weight of steel and twice the strength of aluminum. The downside is it can cost 10 times as much as aluminum per pound and up to 40 times that of carbon steel. In an effort to find a better way to extract titanium, the US Energy Department has just funded a group at Case Western Reserve (CWR) to the tune of $675,000.
Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.