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Posts tagged argonne national laboratory
With Chemical Tweaks, Cement Becomes A Semiconductor
May 31st
With the right chemistry, cement can take on some of the properties of a metal, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Chris Benmore, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, explains why a semiconducting cement might be useful.
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Obama Says U.S. Must Shift Cars, Trucks off Oil
Mar 15th
LEMONT, Ill. (AP) — President Barack Obama says the U.S. must shift its cars and trucks entirely off oil to avoid perpetual fluctuations in gas prices.
He says he expects by the middle of the next decade, Americans will only have to fill up their cars half as often.
Obama is calling on Congress to authorize $200 million a year for research into things like electric car batteries and biofuels that can wean automobiles off oil. He’s proposing an energy security trust that would use revenues from federal leases on offshore drilling.
Obama says during a visit to the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago that American energy provides one of the greatest opportunities for economic growth. He says the U.S. can’t miss opportunities while the rest of the world moves forward.
Article source: Article Source
Report: Obama calls for spending $2 billion in oil lease revenues on clean vehicles
Mar 15th
Filed under: Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in, Hybrid, MPG, Legislation and Policy, USA
President Obama wants to know how many clean cars $2 billion can buy. In an announcement expected later today, the President is expected to ask Congress to use $2 billion that the government has raised from allowing oil and gas exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf to fund clean energy transportation. That means plug-in vehicles, better batteries, biofuels and compressed natural gas vehicles.
Obama will reportedly make the announcement at Argonne National Laboratory, a site already known for automotive innovation, including the development of an omnivorous engine and, with General Motors, improved batteries. The President previously mentioned taking oil and gas money and putting it into an “Energy Security Trust” fund in his State of the Union speech last month. The money would come from offshore oil drilling leases and would be spread out over 10 years. There would not be any expansion of offshore drilling (or a change in the administration’s position on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) to raise the money. The end goal, as we’ve heard so many times before, is to “protect American families from spikes in gas prices and allow us to run our cars and trucks on electricity or homegrown fuels,” according to White House documents.
Of course, just because the President asks for something doesn’t mean Congress will go along. As the The Detroit News notes, the President asked for $650 million for battery and vehicle research last year but Congress only approved $330 million. Also, there are still many billions of Department of Energy loan money left over from the $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan (ATVMP).
Obama calls for spending $2 billion in oil lease revenues on clean vehicles originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Official: DOE’s new Energy Storage Hub a "Manhattan Project" for better batteries
Dec 7th
Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Legislation and Policy, USA
This could be big. The US Department of Energy has announced a five-year, $120-million award for a team of 14 companies, universities and national laboratories led by Argonne National Laboratory that will be charged with creating next-generation batteries for use in vehicles and the grid. In short, a sort of “Manhattan Project” for advanced EV packs.
Officially called the Batteries and Energy Storage Hub, aka the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), was announced by US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu as well as Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. As you might guess for that list, the Argonne National Laboratory is in Illinois.
The state of Illinois is kicking in $5 million to build out the JCESR facility at Argonne in suburban Chicago, while Quinn is trying to work up another $30 million for the building. The battery-specific efforts are centered around improving storage capacity, which will both help automakers get a better single-charge range and communities to add battery-assisted infrastructure. Single-charge range and infrastructure have both been viewed as stumbling blocks in terms of getting faster adoption of EVs.
Other entities in the group include the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Northwestern University and University of Chicago, as well as Dow Chemical Co. and Johnson Controls. The latter company is expected to bid on bankrupt lithium-ion battery producer A123 Systems later this month. Check out the DOE’s release about the Energy Storage Hub below.
Continue reading DOE’s new Energy Storage Hub a “Manhattan Project” for better batteries
DOE’s new Energy Storage Hub a “Manhattan Project” for better batteries originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 08:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Report: How Sandy (may have) set 17 plug-in hybrids on fire
Nov 5th
Filed under: Hybrid, Safety, Technology, Toyota, Fisker, Electric, Luxury
Can Hurricane Sandy’s flood waters be blamed for the fiery destruction of 16 Fisker Karmas and a Toyota Prius? On Halloween we guessed saltwater had somehow led to a short circuit that overheated the cars’ batteries and fire, which may be exactly what happened.
“We can’t be certain exactly what happened at the port,” Russell Datz, a Fisker spokesman, tells the New York Times Wheels blog. “But we think being submerged in 13 feet of saltwater had something to do with it.”
Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight tells Wheels that the Prius likely went pyro because “saltwater got into the electrical system.” Saltwater, as you probably know, is highly conductive and when it comes into contact with something like an electric car’s battery, could cause a short circuit and a fire.
Daniel Abraham, chemical scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, gave the blog a more technical explanation. Salts in the water break into positive and negative ions that act as conductors and could have connected the batteries’ positive and negative terminals. Next came a short circuit and then, possibly, a fire.
No one so far thinks the Karma batteries’ lithium cores were to blame. Even though lithium will burn on contact with water, the metal used in hybrid batteries is pretty well protected and isn’t likely the source of the fires.
So still no official cause of the fires, but an investigation is ongoing.
How Sandy (may have) set 17 plug-in hybrids on fire originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Report: How Sandy (may have) set 17 plug-in hybrids on fire
Nov 5th
Filed under: Hybrid, Safety, Technology, Toyota, Fisker, Electric, Luxury
Can Hurricane Sandy’s flood waters be blamed for the fiery destruction of 16 Fisker Karmas and a Toyota Prius? On Halloween we guessed saltwater had somehow led to a short circuit that overheated the cars’ batteries and fire, which may be exactly what happened.
“We can’t be certain exactly what happened at the port,” Russell Datz, a Fisker spokesman, tells the New York Times Wheels blog. “But we think being submerged in 13 feet of saltwater had something to do with it.”
Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight tells Wheels that the Prius likely went pyro because “saltwater got into the electrical system.” Saltwater, as you probably know, is highly conductive and when it comes into contact with something like an electric car’s battery, could cause a short circuit and a fire.
Daniel Abraham, chemical scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, gave the blog a more technical explanation. Salts in the water break into positive and negative ions that act as conductors and could have connected the batteries’ positive and negative terminals. Next came a short circuit and then, possibly, a fire.
No one so far thinks the Karma batteries’ lithium cores were to blame. Even though lithium will burn on contact with water, the metal used in hybrid batteries is pretty well protected and isn’t likely the source of the fires.
So still no official cause of the fires, but an investigation is ongoing.
How Sandy (may have) set 17 plug-in hybrids on fire originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microbial music: Using sound to represent data from the deep blue sea
Oct 2nd
Science and music, many would say opposite sides of the same coin. Unless you’re DOE biologist Peter Larsen at the Argonne National Laboratory, who would probably argue your legal tender has been double-headed all along. While Larsen is more likely to be studying the intricacies of microbes than Miles Davis, his latest work puts the two of them closer than ever before. Faced with the task of studying vast amounts of microbial data gathered from the English Channel, the biologist explored alternative ways of making sense of it all. While he could have made a spiffy set of charts, Larsen claims that there are certain parameters, like sunlight and temperature, that give the data a structure that lends itself to musical representation.
While classical music might seem the typical choice, due to the irregular nature of the data, the result is more free-form jazz, yet still surprisingly musical. If you were wondering if there is something particularly groovy about the microbes in the English Channel, there isn’t. Larsen and his colleagues used a similar idea in previous work looking at the relationship between a plant and a fungus. While these are natural processes that might initially seem to have no relation to music, rhythm and melody, they actually highlight the patterns in natural phenomena. Want to get down to the microbial beat? You can hear a sample at the more coverage link.
[Image Credit: Argonne National Laboratory]
Microbial music: Using sound to represent data from the deep blue sea originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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IBM’s Mira supercomputer tasked with simulating an entire universe in a fortnight
Sep 26th
A universe that only exists in the mind of a supercomputer sounds a little far fetched, but one is going to come to live at the Argonne National Laboratory in October. A team of cosmologists is using IBM’s Blue Gene/Q “Mira” supercomputer, the third fastest in the world, to run a simulation through the first 13 billion years after the big bang. It’ll work by tracking the movement of trillions of particles as they collide and interact with each other, forming structures that could then transform into galaxies. As the project’s only scheduled to last a fortnight, we’re hoping it doesn’t create any sentient characters clamoring for extra life, we’ve seen Blade Runner enough times to know it won’t end well.
IBM’s Mira supercomputer tasked with simulating an entire universe in a fortnight originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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New metal mix could lead to cheap, plentiful sodium-ion batteries in gadgets
May 5th
Lithium batteries very frequently power our gadgets, but the material itself isn’t common and, by extension, isn’t cheap. Researchers at the Tokyo University of Science aim to solve that through sodium-ion batteries using a new electrode material. By mixing together oxides of iron, manganese and sodium, Shinichi Komaba and team have managed to get a sodium battery’s electrode holding a charge closer to that of a lithium-ion battery while using a much more abundant material. Having just 30 total charges means this simplest form of sodium-ion battery technology could be years away from finding a home in your next smartphone or EV, although it’s not the only option. Argonne National Laboratory‘s Chris Johnson has co-developed a more exotic vanadium pentoxide electrode that could produce 200 charges while keeping the battery itself made out of an ingredient you more often find in your table salt than your mobile gear.
[Image credit: Hi-Res Images of Chemical Elements]
New metal mix could lead to cheap, plentiful sodium-ion batteries in gadgets originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 May 2012 06:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Obama calls for spending $2 billion in oil lease revenues on clean vehicles
Mar 15th
Posted by michael in Automobiles
No comments
Filed under: Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in, Hybrid, MPG, Legislation and Policy, USA
President Obama wants to know how many clean cars $2 billion can buy. In an announcement expected later today, the President is expected to ask Congress to use $2 billion that the government has raised from allowing oil and gas exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf to fund clean energy transportation. That means plug-in vehicles, better batteries, biofuels and compressed natural gas vehicles.
Obama will reportedly make the announcement at Argonne National Laboratory, a site already known for automotive innovation, including the development of an omnivorous engine and, with General Motors, improved batteries. The President previously mentioned taking oil and gas money and putting it into an “Energy Security Trust” fund in his State of the Union speech last month. The money would come from offshore oil drilling leases and would be spread out over 10 years. There would not be any expansion of offshore drilling (or a change in the administration’s position on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) to raise the money. The end goal, as we’ve heard so many times before, is to “protect American families from spikes in gas prices and allow us to run our cars and trucks on electricity or homegrown fuels,” according to White House documents.
Of course, just because the President asks for something doesn’t mean Congress will go along. As the The Detroit News notes, the President asked for $650 million for battery and vehicle research last year but Congress only approved $330 million. Also, there are still many billions of Department of Energy loan money left over from the $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan (ATVMP).
Obama calls for spending $2 billion in oil lease revenues on clean vehicles originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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