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    Decarbonizing heavy industry with thermal batteries

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    Whether you’re manufacturing cement, steel, chemicals, or paper, you need a large amount of heat. Almost without exception, manufacturers around the world create that heat by burning fossil fuels.In an effort to clean up the industrial sector, some startups are changing manufacturing processes for specific materials. Some are even changing the materials themselves. Daniel Stack SM ’17, PhD ’21 is trying to address industrial emissions across the board by replacing the heat source.Since coming to MIT in 2014, Stack has worked to develop thermal batteries that use electricity to heat up a conductive version of ceramic firebricks, which have been used as heat stores and insulators for centuries. In 2021, Stack co-founded Electrified Thermal Solutions, which has since demonstrated that its firebricks can store heat efficiently for hours and discharge it by heating air or gas up to 3,272 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to power the most demanding industrial applications.Achieving temperatures north of 3,000 F represents a breakthrough for the electric heating industry, as it enables some of the world’s hardest-to-decarbonize sectors to utilize renewable energy for the first time. It also unlocks a new, low-cost model for using electricity when it’s at its cheapest and cleanest.“We have a global perspective at Electrified Thermal, but in the U.S. over the last five years, we’ve seen an incredible opportunity emerge in energy prices that favors flexible offtake of electricity,” Stack says. “Throughout the middle of the country, especially in the wind belt, electricity prices in many places are negative for more than 20 percent of the year, and the trend toward decreasing electricity pricing during off-peak hours is a nationwide phenomenon. Technologies like our Joule Hive Thermal Battery will enable us to access this inexpensive, clean electricity and compete head to head with fossil fuels on price for industrial heating needs, without even factoring in the positive climate impact.”A new approach to an old technologyStack’s research plans changed quickly when he joined MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering as a master’s student in 2014.“I went to MIT excited to work on the next generation of nuclear reactors, but what I focused on almost from day one was how to heat up bricks,” Stack says. “It wasn’t what I expected, but when I talked to my advisor, [Principal Research Scientist] Charles Forsberg, about energy storage and why it was valuable to not just nuclear power but the entire energy transition, I realized there was no project I would rather work on.”Firebricks are ubiquitous, inexpensive clay bricks that have been used for millennia in fireplaces and ovens. In 2017, Forsberg and Stack co-authored a paper showing firebricks’ potential to store heat from renewable resources, but the system still used electric resistance heaters — like the metal coils in toasters and space heaters — which limited its temperature output.For his doctoral work, Stack worked with Forsberg to make firebricks that were electrically conductive, replacing the resistance heaters so the bricks produced the heat directly.“Electric heaters are your biggest limiter: They burn out too fast, they break down, they don’t get hot enough,” Stack explains. “The idea was to skip the heaters because firebricks themselves are really cheap, abundant materials that can go to flame-like temperatures and hang out there for days.”Forsberg and Stacks were able to create conductive firebricks by tweaking the chemical composition of traditional firebricks. Electrified Thermal’s bricks are 98 percent similar to existing firebricks and are produced using the same processes, allowing existing manufacturers to make them inexpensively.Toward the end of his PhD program, Stack realized the invention could be commercialized. He started taking classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management and spending time at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He also entered the StartMIT program and the I-Corps program, and received support from the U.S. Department of Energy and MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS).“Through the Boston ecosystem, the MIT ecosystem, and with help from the Department of Energy, we were able to launch this from the lab at MIT,” Stack says. “What we spun out was an electrically conductive firebrick, or what we refer to as an e-Brick.”Electrified Thermal contains its firebrick arrays in insulated, off-the-shelf metal boxes. Although the system is highly configurable depending on the end use, the company’s standard system can collect and release about 5 megawatts of energy and store about 25 megawatt-hours.The company has demonstrated its system’s ability to produce high temperatures and has been cycling its system at its headquarters in Medford, Massachusetts. That work has collectively earned Electrified Thermal $40 million from various the Department of Energy offices to scale the technology and work with manufacturers.“Compared to other electric heating, we can run hotter and last longer than any other solution on the market,” Stack says. “That means replacing fossil fuels at a lot of industrial sites that couldn’t otherwise decarbonize.”Scaling to solve a global problemElectrified Thermal is engaging with hundreds of industrial companies, including manufacturers of cement, steel, glass, basic and specialty chemicals, food and beverage, and pulp and paper.“The industrial heating challenge affects everyone under the sun,” Stack says. “They all have fundamentally the same problem, which is getting their heat in a way that is affordable and zero carbon for the energy transition.”The company is currently building a megawatt-scale commercial version of its system, which it expects to be operational in the next seven months.“Next year will be a huge proof point to the industry,” Stack says. “We’ll be using the commercial system to showcase a variety of operating points that customers need to see, and we’re hoping to be running systems on customer sites by the end of the year. It’ll be a huge achievement and a first for electric heating because no other solution in the market can put out the kind of temperatures that we can put out.”By working with manufacturers to produce its firebricks and casings, Electrified Thermal hopes to be able to deploy its systems rapidly and at low cost across a massive industry.“From the very beginning, we engineered these e-bricks to be rapidly scalable and rapidly producible within existing supply chains and manufacturing processes,” Stack says. “If you want to decarbonize heavy industry, there will be no cheaper way than turning electricity into heat from zero-carbon electricity assets. We’re seeking to be the premier technology that unlocks those capabilities, with double digit percentages of global energy flowing through our system as we accomplish the energy transition.” More

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      A nonflammable battery to power a safer, decarbonized future

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      Lithium-ion batteries are the workhorses of home electronics and are powering an electric revolution in transportation. But they are not suitable for every application.A key drawback is their flammability and toxicity, which make large-scale lithium-ion energy storage a bad fit in densely populated city centers and near metal processing or chemical manufacturing plants.Now Alsym Energy has developed a nonflammable, nontoxic alternative to lithium-ion batteries to help renewables like wind and solar bridge the gap in a broader range of sectors. The company’s electrodes use relatively stable, abundant materials, and its electrolyte is primarily water with some nontoxic add-ons.“Renewables are intermittent, so you need storage, and to really solve the decarbonization problem, we need to be able to make these batteries anywhere at low cost,” says Alsym co-founder and MIT Professor Kripa Varanasi.The company believes its batteries, which are currently being tested by potential customers around the world, hold enormous potential to decarbonize the high-emissions industrial manufacturing sector, and they see other applications ranging from mining to powering data centers, homes, and utilities.“We are enabling a decarbonization of markets that was not possible before,” Alsym co-founder and CEO Mukesh Chatter says. “No chemical or steel plant would dare put a lithium battery close to their premises because of the flammability, and industrial emissions are a much bigger problem than passenger cars. With this approach, we’re able to offer a new path.”Helping 1 billion peopleChatter started a telecommunications company with serial entrepreneurs and longtime members of the MIT community Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58 and Alec Dingee ’52 in 1997. Since the company was acquired in 1999, Chatter and his wife have started other ventures and invested in some startups, but after losing his mother to cancer in 2012, Chatter decided he wanted to maximize his impact by only working on technologies that could reach 1 billion people or more.The problem Chatter decided to focus on was electricity access.“The intent was to light up the homes of at least 1 billion people around the world who either did not have electricity, or only got it part of the time, condemning them basically to a life of poverty in the 19th century,” Chatter says. “When you don’t have access to electricity, you also don’t have the internet, cell phones, education, etc.”To solve the problem, Chatter decided to fund research into a new kind of battery. The battery had to be cheap enough to be adopted in low-resource settings, safe enough to be deployed in crowded areas, and work well enough to support two light bulbs, a fan, a refrigerator, and an internet modem.At first, Chatter was surprised how few takers he had to start the research, even from researchers at the top universities in the world.“It’s a burning problem, but the risk of failure was so high that nobody wanted to take the chance,” Chatter recalls.He finally found his partners in Varanasi, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Nikhil Koratkar and Rensselaer researcher Rahul Mukherjee. Varanasi, who notes he’s been at MIT for 22 years, says the Institute’s culture gave him the confidence to tackle big problems.“My students, postdocs, and colleagues are inspirational to me,” he says. “The MIT ecosystem infuses us with this resolve to go after problems that look insurmountable.”Varanasi leads an interdisciplinary lab at MIT dedicated to understanding physicochemical and biological phenomena. His research has spurred the creation of materials, devices, products, and processes to tackle challenges in energy, agriculture, and other sectors, as well as startup companies to commercialize this work.“Working at the interfaces of matter has unlocked numerous new research pathways across various fields, and MIT has provided me the creative freedom to explore, discover, and learn, and apply that knowledge to solve critical challenges,” he says. “I was able to draw significantly from my learnings as we set out to develop the new battery technology.”Alsym’s founding team began by trying to design a battery from scratch based on new materials that could fit the parameters defined by Chatter. To make it nonflammable and nontoxic, the founders wanted to avoid lithium and cobalt.After evaluating many different chemistries, the founders settled on Alsym’s current approach, which was finalized in 2020.Although the full makeup of Alsym’s battery is still under wraps as the company waits to be granted patents, one of Alsym’s electrodes is made mostly of manganese oxide while the other is primarily made of a metal oxide. The electrolyte is primarily water.There are several advantages to Alsym’s new battery chemistry. Because the battery is inherently safer and more sustainable than lithium-ion, the company doesn’t need the same safety protections or cooling equipment, and it can pack its batteries close to each other without fear of fires or explosions. Varanasi also says the battery can be manufactured in any of today’s lithium-ion plants with minimal changes and at significantly lower operating cost.“We are very excited right now,” Chatter says. “We started out wanting to light up 1 billion people’s homes, and now in addition to the original goal we have a chance to impact the entire globe if we are successful at cutting back industrial emissions.”A new platform for energy storageAlthough the batteries don’t quite reach the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, Varanasi says Alsym is first among alternative chemistries at the system-level. He says 20-foot containers of Alsym’s batteries can provide 1.7 megawatt hours of electricity. The batteries can also fast-charge over four hours and can be configured to discharge over anywhere from two to 110 hours.“We’re highly configurable, and that’s important because depending on where you are, you can sometimes run on two cycles a day with solar, and in combination with wind, you could truly get 24/7 electricity,” Chatter says. “The need to do multiday or long duration storage is a small part of the market, but we support that too.”Alsym has been manufacturing prototypes at a small facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, for the last two years, and early this year it expanded its capacity and began to send samples to customers for field testing.In addition to large utilities, the company is working with municipalities, generator manufacturers, and providers of behind-the-meter power for residential and commercial buildings. The company is also in discussion with a large chemical manufacturers and metal processing plants to provide energy storage system to reduce their carbon footprint, something they say was not feasible with lithium-ion batteries, due to their flammability, or with nonlithium batteries, due to their large space requirements.Another critical area is data centers. With the growth of AI, the demand for data centers — and their energy consumption — is set to surge.“We must power the AI and digitization revolution without compromising our planet,” says Varanasi, adding that lithium batteries are unsuitable for co-location with data centers due to flammability risks. “Alsym batteries are well-positioned to offer a safer, more sustainable alternative. Intermittency is also a key issue for electrolyzers used in green hydrogen production and other markets.”Varanasi sees Alsym as a platform company, and Chatter says Alsym is already working on other battery chemistries that have higher densities and maintain performance at even more extreme temperatures.“When you use a single material in any battery, and the whole world starts to use it, you run out of that material,” Varanasi says. “What we have is a platform that has enabled us to not just to come up with just one chemistry, but at least three or four chemistries targeted at different applications so no one particular set of materials will be stressed in terms of supply.” More

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      in Environment

      Startup turns mining waste into critical metals for the U.S.

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      At the heart of the energy transition is a metal transition. Wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars require many times more copper, zinc, and nickel than their gas-powered alternatives. They also require more exotic metals with unique properties, known as rare earth elements, which are essential for the magnets that go into things like wind turbines and EV motors.Today, China dominates the processing of rare earth elements, refining around 60 percent of those materials for the world. With demand for such materials forecasted to skyrocket, the Biden administration has said the situation poses national and economic security threats.Substantial quantities of rare earth metals are sitting unused in the United States and many other parts of the world today. The catch is they’re mixed with vast quantities of toxic mining waste.Phoenix Tailings is scaling up a process for harvesting materials, including rare earth metals and nickel, from mining waste. The company uses water and recyclable solvents to collect oxidized metal, then puts the metal into a heated molten salt mixture and applies electricity.The company, co-founded by MIT alumni, says its pilot production facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, is the only site in the world producing rare earth metals without toxic byproducts or carbon emissions. The process does use electricity, but Phoenix Tailings currently offsets that with renewable energy contracts.The company expects to produce more than 3,000 tons of the metals by 2026, which would have represented about 7 percent of total U.S. production last year.Now, with support from the Department of Energy, Phoenix Tailings is expanding the list of metals it can produce and accelerating plans to build a second production facility.For the founding team, including MIT graduates Tomás Villalón ’14 and Michelle Chao ’14 along with Nick Myers and Anthony Balladon, the work has implications for geopolitics and the planet.“Being able to make your own materials domestically means that you’re not at the behest of a foreign monopoly,” Villalón says. “We’re focused on creating critical materials for the next generation of technologies. More broadly, we want to get these materials in ways that are sustainable in the long term.”Tackling a global problemVillalón got interested in chemistry and materials science after taking Course 3.091 (Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry) during his first year at MIT. In his senior year, he got a chance to work at Boston Metal, another MIT spinoff that uses an electrochemical process to decarbonize steelmaking at scale. The experience got Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering, thinking about creating more sustainable metallurgical processes.But it took a chance meeting with Myers at a 2018 Bible study for Villalón to act on the idea.“We were discussing some of the major problems in the world when we came to the topic of electrification,” Villalón recalls. “It became a discussion about how the U.S. gets its materials and how we should think about electrifying their production. I was finally like, ‘I’ve been working in the space for a decade, let’s go do something about it.’ Nick agreed, but I thought he just wanted to feel good about himself. Then in July, he randomly called me and said, ‘I’ve got [$7,000]. When do we start?’”Villalón brought in Chao, his former MIT classmate and fellow materials science and engineering major, and Myers brought Balladon, a former co-worker, and the founders started experimenting with new processes for producing rare earth metals.“We went back to the base principles, the thermodynamics I learned with MIT professors Antoine Allanore and Donald Sadoway, and understanding the kinetics of reactions,” Villalón says. “Classes like Course 3.022 (Microstructural Evolution in Materials) and 3.07 (Introduction to Ceramics) were also really useful. I touched on every aspect I studied at MIT.”The founders also received guidance from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) and went through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. Sadoway served as an advisor for the company.After drafting one version of their system design, the founders bought an experimental quantity of mining waste, known as red sludge, and set up a prototype reactor in Villalón’s backyard. The founders ended up with a small amount of product, but they had to scramble to borrow the scientific equipment needed to determine what exactly it was. It turned out to be a small amount of rare earth concentrate along with pure iron.Today, at the company’s refinery in Woburn, Phoenix Tailings puts mining waste rich in rare earth metals into its mixture and heats it to around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. When it applies an electric current to the mixture, pure metal collects on an electrode. The process leaves minimal waste behind.“The key for all of this isn’t just the chemistry, but how everything is linked together, because with rare earths, you have to hit really high purities compared to a conventionally produced metal,” Villalón explains. “As a result, you have to be thinking about the purity of your material the entire way through.”From rare earths to nickel, magnesium, and moreVillalón says the process is economical compared to conventional production methods, produces no toxic byproducts, and is completely carbon free when renewable energy sources are used for electricity.The Woburn facility is currently producing several rare earth elements for customers, including neodymium and dysprosium, which are important in magnets. Customers are using the materials for things likewind turbines, electric cars, and defense applications.The company has also received two grants with the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program totaling more than $2 million. Its 2023 grant supports the development of a system to extract nickel and magnesium from mining waste through a process that uses carbonization and recycled carbon dioxide. Both nickel and magnesium are critical materials for clean energy applications like batteries.The most recent grant will help the company adapt its process to produce iron from mining waste without emissions or toxic byproducts. Phoenix Tailings says its process is compatible with a wide array of ore types and waste materials, and the company has plenty of material to work with: Mining and processing mineral ores generates about 1.8 billion tons of waste in the U.S. each year.“We want to take our knowledge from processing the rare earth metals and slowly move it into other segments,” Villalón explains. “We simply have to refine some of these materials here. There’s no way we can’t. So, what does that look like from a regulatory perspective? How do we create approaches that are economical and environmentally compliant not just now, but 30 years from now?” More

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      in Energy

      Study of disordered rock salts leads to battery breakthrough

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      For the past decade, disordered rock salt has been studied as a potential breakthrough cathode material for use in lithium-ion batteries and a key to creating low-cost, high-energy storage for everything from cell phones to electric vehicles to renewable energy storage.A new MIT study is making sure the material fulfills that promise.Led by Ju Li, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, a team of researchers describe a new class of partially disordered rock salt cathode, integrated with polyanions — dubbed disordered rock salt-polyanionic spinel, or DRXPS — that delivers high energy density at high voltages with significantly improved cycling stability.“There is typically a trade-off in cathode materials between energy density and cycling stability … and with this work we aim to push the envelope by designing new cathode chemistries,” says Yimeng Huang, a postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and first author of a paper describing the work published today in Nature Energy. “(This) material family has high energy density and good cycling stability because it integrates two major types of cathode materials, rock salt and polyanionic olivine, so it has the benefits of both.”Importantly, Li adds, the new material family is primarily composed of manganese, an earth-abundant element that is significantly less expensive than elements like nickel and cobalt, which are typically used in cathodes today.“Manganese is at least five times less expensive than nickel, and about 30 times less expensive than cobalt,” Li says. “Manganese is also the one of the keys to achieving higher energy densities, so having that material be much more earth-abundant is a tremendous advantage.”A possible path to renewable energy infrastructureThat advantage will be particularly critical, Li and his co-authors wrote, as the world looks to build the renewable energy infrastructure needed for a low- or no-carbon future.Batteries are a particularly important part of that picture, not only for their potential to decarbonize transportation with electric cars, buses, and trucks, but also because they will be essential to addressing the intermittency issues of wind and solar power by storing excess energy, then feeding it back into the grid at night or on calm days, when renewable generation drops.Given the high cost and relative rarity of materials like cobalt and nickel, they wrote, efforts to rapidly scale up electric storage capacity would likely lead to extreme cost spikes and potentially significant materials shortages.“If we want to have true electrification of energy generation, transportation, and more, we need earth-abundant batteries to store intermittent photovoltaic and wind power,” Li says. “I think this is one of the steps toward that dream.”That sentiment was shared by Gerbrand Ceder, the Samsung Distinguished Chair in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research and a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.“Lithium-ion batteries are a critical part of the clean energy transition,” Ceder says. “Their continued growth and price decrease depends on the development of inexpensive, high-performance cathode materials made from earth-abundant materials, as presented in this work.”Overcoming obstacles in existing materialsThe new study addresses one of the major challenges facing disordered rock salt cathodes — oxygen mobility.While the materials have long been recognized for offering very high capacity — as much as 350 milliampere-hour per gram — as compared to traditional cathode materials, which typically have capacities of between 190 and 200 milliampere-hour per gram, it is not very stable.The high capacity is contributed partially by oxygen redox, which is activated when the cathode is charged to high voltages. But when that happens, oxygen becomes mobile, leading to reactions with the electrolyte and degradation of the material, eventually leaving it effectively useless after prolonged cycling.To overcome those challenges, Huang added another element — phosphorus — that essentially acts like a glue, holding the oxygen in place to mitigate degradation.“The main innovation here, and the theory behind the design, is that Yimeng added just the right amount of phosphorus, formed so-called polyanions with its neighboring oxygen atoms, into a cation-deficient rock salt structure that can pin them down,” Li explains. “That allows us to basically stop the percolating oxygen transport due to strong covalent bonding between phosphorus and oxygen … meaning we can both utilize the oxygen-contributed capacity, but also have good stability as well.”That ability to charge batteries to higher voltages, Li says, is crucial because it allows for simpler systems to manage the energy they store.“You can say the quality of the energy is higher,” he says. “The higher the voltage per cell, then the less you need to connect them in series in the battery pack, and the simpler the battery management system.”Pointing the way to future studiesWhile the cathode material described in the study could have a transformative impact on lithium-ion battery technology, there are still several avenues for study going forward.Among the areas for future study, Huang says, are efforts to explore new ways to fabricate the material, particularly for morphology and scalability considerations.“Right now, we are using high-energy ball milling for mechanochemical synthesis, and … the resulting morphology is non-uniform and has small average particle size (about 150 nanometers). This method is also not quite scalable,” he says. “We are trying to achieve a more uniform morphology with larger particle sizes using some alternate synthesis methods, which would allow us to increase the volumetric energy density of the material and may allow us to explore some coating methods … which could further improve the battery performance. The future methods, of course, should be industrially scalable.”In addition, he says, the disordered rock salt material by itself is not a particularly good conductor, so significant amounts of carbon — as much as 20 weight percent of the cathode paste — were added to boost its conductivity. If the team can reduce the carbon content in the electrode without sacrificing performance, there will be higher active material content in a battery, leading to an increased practical energy density.“In this paper, we just used Super P, a typical conductive carbon consisting of nanospheres, but they’re not very efficient,” Huang says. “We are now exploring using carbon nanotubes, which could reduce the carbon content to just 1 or 2 weight percent, which could allow us to dramatically increase the amount of the active cathode material.”Aside from decreasing carbon content, making thick electrodes, he adds, is yet another way to increase the practical energy density of the battery. This is another area of research that the team is working on.“This is only the beginning of DRXPS research, since we only explored a few chemistries within its vast compositional space,” he continues. “We can play around with different ratios of lithium, manganese, phosphorus, and oxygen, and with various combinations of other polyanion-forming elements such as boron, silicon, and sulfur.”With optimized compositions, more scalable synthesis methods, better morphology that allows for uniform coatings, lower carbon content, and thicker electrodes, he says, the DRXPS cathode family is very promising in applications of electric vehicles and grid storage, and possibly even in consumer electronics, where the volumetric energy density is very important.This work was supported with funding from the Honda Research Institute USA Inc. and the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and used resources of the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.  More

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      in Energy

      MIT engineers design tiny batteries for powering cell-sized robots

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      A tiny battery designed by MIT engineers could enable the deployment of cell-sized, autonomous robots for drug delivery within in the human body, as well as other applications such as locating leaks in gas pipelines.The new battery, which is 0.1 millimeters long and 0.002 millimeters thick — roughly the thickness of a human hair — can capture oxygen from air and use it to oxidize zinc, creating a current of up to 1 volt. That is enough to power a small circuit, sensor, or actuator, the researchers showed.“We think this is going to be very enabling for robotics,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study. “We’re building robotic functions onto the battery and starting to put these components together into devices.”Ge Zhang PhD ’22 and Sungyun Yang, an MIT graduate student, are the lead author of the paper, which appears in Science Robotics.Powered by batteriesFor several years, Strano’s lab has been working on tiny robots that can sense and respond to stimuli in their environment. One of the major challenges in developing such tiny robots is making sure that they have enough power.Other researchers have shown that they can power microscale devices using solar power, but the limitation to that approach is that the robots must have a laser or another light source pointed at them at all times. Such devices are known as “marionettes” because they are controlled by an external power source. Putting a power source such as a battery inside these tiny devices could free them to roam much farther.“The marionette systems don’t really need a battery because they’re getting all the energy they need from outside,” Strano says. “But if you want a small robot to be able to get into spaces that you couldn’t access otherwise, it needs to have a greater level of autonomy. A battery is essential for something that’s not going to be tethered to the outside world.”To create robots that could become more autonomous, Strano’s lab decided to use a type of battery known as a zinc-air battery. These batteries, which have a longer lifespan than many other types of batteries due to their high energy density, are often used in hearing aids.The battery that they designed consists of a zinc electrode connected to a platinum electrode, embedded into a strip of a polymer called SU-8, which is commonly used for microelectronics. When these electrodes interact with oxygen molecules from the air, the zinc becomes oxidized and releases electrons that flow to the platinum electrode, creating a current.In this study, the researchers showed that this battery could provide enough energy to power an actuator — in this case, a robotic arm that can be raised and lowered. The battery could also power a memristor, an electrical component that can store memories of events by changing its electrical resistance, and a clock circuit, which allows robotic devices to keep track of time.The battery also provides enough power to run two different types of sensors that change their electrical resistance when they encounter chemicals in the environment. One of the sensors is made from atomically thin molybdenum disulfide and the other from carbon nanotubes.“We’re making the basic building blocks in order to build up functions at the cellular level,” Strano says.Robotic swarmsIn this study, the researchers used a wire to connect their battery to an external device, but in future work they plan to build robots in which the battery is incorporated into a device.“This is going to form the core of a lot of our robotic efforts,” Strano says. “You can build a robot around an energy source, sort of like you can build an electric car around the battery.”One of those efforts revolves around designing tiny robots that could be injected into the human body, where they could seek out a target site and then release a drug such as insulin. For use in the human body, the researchers envision that the devices would be made of biocompatible materials that would break apart once they were no longer needed.The researchers are also working on increasing the voltage of the battery, which may enable additional applications.The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and a MathWorks Engineering Fellowship. More

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      in Environment

      MIT announces 2024 Bose Grants

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      MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart announced four Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants to support bold research projects across diverse areas of study, including a way to generate clean hydrogen from deep in the Earth, build an environmentally friendly house of basalt, design maternity clothing that monitors fetal health, and recruit sharks as ocean oxygen monitors.

      This year’s recipients are Iwnetim Abate, assistant professor of materials science and engineering; Andrew Babbin, the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Yoel Fink, professor of materials science and engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science; and Skylar Tibbits, associate professor of design research in the Department of Architecture.

      The program was named for the visionary founder of the Bose Corporation and MIT alumnus Amar G. Bose ’51, SM ’52, ScD ’56. After gaining admission to MIT, Bose became a top math student and a Fulbright Scholarship recipient. He spent 46 years as a professor at MIT, led innovations in sound design, and founded the Bose Corp. in 1964. MIT launched the Bose grant program 11 years ago to provide funding over a three-year period to MIT faculty who propose original, cross-disciplinary, and often risky research projects that would likely not be funded by conventional sources.

      “The promise of the Bose Fellowship is to help bold, daring ideas become realities, an approach that honors Amar Bose’s legacy,” says Barnhart. “Thanks to support from this program, these talented faculty members have the freedom to explore their bold and innovative ideas.”

      Deep and clean hydrogen futures

      A green energy future will depend on harnessing hydrogen as a clean energy source, sequestering polluting carbon dioxide, and mining the minerals essential to building clean energy technologies such as advanced batteries. Iwnetim Abate thinks he has a solution for all three challenges: an innovative hydrogen reactor.

      He plans to build a reactor that will create natural hydrogen from ultramafic mineral rocks in the crust. “The Earth is literally a giant hydrogen factory waiting to be tapped,” Abate explains. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation for the first seven kilometers of the Earth’s crust estimates that there is enough ultramafic rock to produce hydrogen for 250,000 years.”

      The reactor envisioned by Abate injects water to create a reaction that releases hydrogen, while also supporting the injection of climate-altering carbon dioxide into the rock, providing a global carbon capacity of 100 trillion tons. At the same time, the reactor process could provide essential elements such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt — some of the most important raw materials used in advanced batteries and electronics.

      “Ultimately, our goal is to design and develop a scalable reactor for simultaneously tapping into the trifecta from the Earth’s subsurface,” Abate says.

      Sharks as oceanographers

      If we want to understand more about how oxygen levels in the world’s seas are disturbed by human activities and climate change, we should turn to a sensing platform “that has been honed by 400 million years of evolution to perfectly sample the ocean: sharks,” says Andrew Babbin.

      As the planet warms, oceans are projected to contain less dissolved oxygen, with impacts on the productivity of global fisheries, natural carbon sequestration, and the flux of climate-altering greenhouse gasses from the ocean to the air. While scientists know dissolved oxygen is important, it has proved difficult to track over seasons, decades, and underexplored regions both shallow and deep.

      Babbin’s goal is to develop a low-cost sensor for dissolved oxygen that can be integrated with preexisting electronic shark tags used by marine biologists. “This fleet of sharks … will finally enable us to measure the extent of the low-oxygen zones of the ocean, how they change seasonally and with El Niño/La Niña oscillation, and how they expand or contract into the future.”

      The partnership with sharks will also spotlight the importance of these often-maligned animals for global marine and fisheries health, Babbin says. “We hope in pursuing this work marrying microscopic and macroscopic life we will inspire future oceanographers and conservationists, and lead to a better appreciation for the chemistry that underlies global habitability.”

      Maternity wear that monitors fetal health

      There are 2 million stillbirths around the world each year, and in the United States alone, 21,000 families suffer this terrible loss. In many cases, mothers and their doctors had no warning of any abnormalities or changes in fetal health leading up to these deaths. Yoel Fink and colleagues are looking for a better way to monitor fetal health and provide proactive treatment.

      Fink is building on years of research on acoustic fabrics to design an affordable shirt for mothers that would monitor and communicate important details of fetal health. His team’s original research drew inspiration from the function of the eardrum, designing a fiber that could be woven into other fabrics to create a kind of fabric microphone.

      “Given the sensitivity of the acoustic fabrics in sensing these nanometer-scale vibrations, could a mother’s clothing transcend its conventional role and become a health monitor, picking up on the acoustic signals and subsequent vibrations that arise from her unborn baby’s heartbeat and motion?” Fink says. “Could a simple and affordable worn fabric allow an expecting mom to sleep better, knowing that her fetus is being listened to continuously?”

      The proposed maternity shirt could measure fetal heart and breathing rate, and might be able to give an indication of the fetal body position, he says. In the final stages of development, he and his colleagues hope to develop machine learning approaches that would identify abnormal fetal heart rate and motion and deliver real-time alerts.

      A basalt house in Iceland

      In the land of volcanoes, Skylar Tibbits wants to build a case-study home almost entirely from the basalt rock that makes up the Icelandic landscape.

      Architects are increasingly interested in building using one natural material — creating a monomaterial structure — that can be easily recycled. At the moment, the building industry represents 40 percent of carbon emissions worldwide, and consists of many materials and structures, from metal to plastics to concrete, that can’t be easily disassembled or reused.

      The proposed basalt house in Iceland, a project co-led by J. Jih, associate professor of the practice in the Department of Architecture, is “an architecture that would be fully composed of the surrounding earth, that melts back into that surrounding earth at the end of its lifespan, and that can be recycled infinitely,” Tibbits explains.

      Basalt, the most common rock form in the Earth’s crust, can be spun into fibers for insulation and rebar. Basalt fiber performs as well as glass and carbon fibers at a lower cost in some applications, although it is not widely used in architecture. In cast form, it can make corrosion- and heat-resistant plumbing, cladding and flooring.

      “A monomaterial architecture is both a simple and radical proposal that unfortunately falls outside of traditional funding avenues,” says Tibbits. “The Bose grant is the perfect and perhaps the only option for our research, which we see as a uniquely achievable moonshot with transformative potential for the entire built environment.” More

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      Power when the sun doesn’t shine

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      In 2016, at the huge Houston energy conference CERAWeek, MIT materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang found himself talking to a Tesla executive about a thorny problem: how to store the output of solar panels and wind turbines for long durations.        

      Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Mateo Jaramillo, a vice president at Tesla, knew that utilities lacked a cost-effective way to store renewable energy to cover peak levels of demand and to bridge the gaps during windless and cloudy days. They also knew that the scarcity of raw materials used in conventional energy storage devices needed to be addressed if renewables were ever going to displace fossil fuels on the grid at scale.

      Energy storage technologies can facilitate access to renewable energy sources, boost the stability and reliability of power grids, and ultimately accelerate grid decarbonization. The global market for these systems — essentially large batteries — is expected to grow tremendously in the coming years. A study by the nonprofit LDES (Long Duration Energy Storage) Council pegs the long-duration energy storage market at between 80 and 140 terawatt-hours by 2040. “That’s a really big number,” Chiang notes. “Every 10 people on the planet will need access to the equivalent of one EV [electric vehicle] battery to support their energy needs.”

      In 2017, one year after they met in Houston, Chiang and Jaramillo joined forces to co-found Form Energy in Somerville, Massachusetts, with MIT graduates Marco Ferrara SM ’06, PhD ’08 and William Woodford PhD ’13, and energy storage veteran Ted Wiley.

      “There is a burgeoning market for electrical energy storage because we want to achieve decarbonization as fast and as cost-effectively as possible,” says Ferrara, Form’s senior vice president in charge of software and analytics.

      Investors agreed. Over the next six years, Form Energy would raise more than $800 million in venture capital.

      Bridging gaps

      The simplest battery consists of an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. During discharge, with the help of the electrolyte, electrons flow from the negative anode to the positive cathode. During charge, external voltage reverses the process. The anode becomes the positive terminal, the cathode becomes the negative terminal, and electrons move back to where they started. Materials used for the anode, cathode, and electrolyte determine the battery’s weight, power, and cost “entitlement,” which is the total cost at the component level.

      During the 1980s and 1990s, the use of lithium revolutionized batteries, making them smaller, lighter, and able to hold a charge for longer. The storage devices Form Energy has devised are rechargeable batteries based on iron, which has several advantages over lithium. A big one is cost.

      Chiang once declared to the MIT Club of Northern California, “I love lithium-ion.” Two of the four MIT spinoffs Chiang founded center on innovative lithium-ion batteries. But at hundreds of dollars a kilowatt-hour (kWh) and with a storage capacity typically measured in hours, lithium-ion was ill-suited for the use he now had in mind.

      The approach Chiang envisioned had to be cost-effective enough to boost the attractiveness of renewables. Making solar and wind energy reliable enough for millions of customers meant storing it long enough to fill the gaps created by extreme weather conditions, grid outages, and when there is a lull in the wind or a few days of clouds.

      To be competitive with legacy power plants, Chiang’s method had to come in at around $20 per kilowatt-hour of stored energy — one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion battery storage.

      But how to transition from expensive batteries that store and discharge over a couple of hours to some as-yet-undefined, cheap, longer-duration technology?

      “One big ball of iron”

      That’s where Ferrara comes in. Ferrara has a PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of L’Aquila in his native Italy. In 2017, as a research affiliate at the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, he worked with Chiang to model the grid’s need to manage renewables’ intermittency.

      How intermittent depends on where you are. In the United States, for instance, there’s the windy Great Plains; the sun-drenched, relatively low-wind deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada; and the often-cloudy Pacific Northwest.

      Ferrara, in collaboration with Professor Jessika Trancik of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and her MIT team, modeled four representative locations in the United States and concluded that energy storage with capacity costs below roughly $20/kWh and discharge durations of multiple days would allow a wind-solar mix to provide cost-competitive, firm electricity in resource-abundant locations.

      Now that they had a time frame, they turned their attention to materials. At the price point Form Energy was aiming for, lithium was out of the question. Chiang looked at plentiful and cheap sulfur. But a sulfur, sodium, water, and air battery had technical challenges.

      Thomas Edison once used iron as an electrode, and iron-air batteries were first studied in the 1960s. They were too heavy to make good transportation batteries. But this time, Chiang and team were looking at a battery that sat on the ground, so weight didn’t matter. Their priorities were cost and availability.

      “Iron is produced, mined, and processed on every continent,” Chiang says. “The Earth is one big ball of iron. We wouldn’t ever have to worry about even the most ambitious projections of how much storage that the world might use by mid-century.” If Form ever moves into the residential market, “it’ll be the safest battery you’ve ever parked at your house,” Chiang laughs. “Just iron, air, and water.”

      Scientists call it reversible rusting. While discharging, the battery takes in oxygen and converts iron to rust. Applying an electrical current converts the rusty pellets back to iron, and the battery “breathes out” oxygen as it charges. “In chemical terms, you have iron, and it becomes iron hydroxide,” Chiang says. “That means electrons were extracted. You get those electrons to go through the external circuit, and now you have a battery.”

      Form Energy’s battery modules are approximately the size of a washer-and-dryer unit. They are stacked in 40-foot containers, and several containers are electrically connected with power conversion systems to build storage plants that can cover several acres.

      The right place at the right time

      The modules don’t look or act like anything utilities have contracted for before.

      That’s one of Form’s key challenges. “There is not widespread knowledge of needing these new tools for decarbonized grids,” Ferrara says. “That’s not the way utilities have typically planned. They’re looking at all the tools in the toolkit that exist today, which may not contemplate a multi-day energy storage asset.”

      Form Energy’s customers are largely traditional power companies seeking to expand their portfolios of renewable electricity. Some are in the process of decommissioning coal plants and shifting to renewables.

      Ferrara’s research pinpointing the need for very low-cost multi-day storage provides key data for power suppliers seeking to determine the most cost-effective way to integrate more renewable energy.

      Using the same modeling techniques, Ferrara and team show potential customers how the technology fits in with their existing system, how it competes with other technologies, and how, in some cases, it can operate synergistically with other storage technologies.

      “They may need a portfolio of storage technologies to fully balance renewables on different timescales of intermittency,” he says. But other than the technology developed at Form, “there isn’t much out there, certainly not within the cost entitlement of what we’re bringing to market.”  Thanks to Chiang and Jaramillo’s chance encounter in Houston, Form has a several-year lead on other companies working to address this challenge. 

      In June 2023, Form Energy closed its biggest deal to date for a single project: Georgia Power’s order for a 15-megawatt/1,500-megawatt-hour system. That order brings Form’s total amount of energy storage under contracts with utility customers to 40 megawatts/4 gigawatt-hours. To meet the demand, Form is building a new commercial-scale battery manufacturing facility in West Virginia.

      The fact that Form Energy is creating jobs in an area that lost more than 10,000 steel jobs over the past decade is not lost on Chiang. “And these new jobs are in clean tech. It’s super exciting to me personally to be doing something that benefits communities outside of our traditional technology centers.

      “This is the right time for so many reasons,” Chiang says. He says he and his Form Energy co-founders feel “tremendous urgency to get these batteries out into the world.”

      This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      Cobalt-free batteries could power cars of the future

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      Many electric vehicles are powered by batteries that contain cobalt — a metal that carries high financial, environmental, and social costs.

      MIT researchers have now designed a battery material that could offer a more sustainable way to power electric cars. The new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials, instead of cobalt or nickel (another metal often used in lithium-ion batteries).

      In a new study, the researchers showed that this material, which could be produced at much lower cost than cobalt-containing batteries, can conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. The new battery also has comparable storage capacity and can be charged up faster than cobalt batteries, the researchers report.

      “I think this material could have a big impact because it works really well,” says Mircea Dincă, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT. “It is already competitive with incumbent technologies, and it can save a lot of the cost and pain and environmental issues related to mining the metals that currently go into batteries.”

      Dincă is the senior author of the study, which appears today in the journal ACS Central Science. Tianyang Chen PhD ’23 and Harish Banda, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper. Other authors include Jiande Wang, an MIT postdoc; Julius Oppenheim, an MIT graduate student; and Alessandro Franceschi, a research fellow at the University of Bologna.

      Alternatives to cobalt

      Most electric cars are powered by lithium-ion batteries, a type of battery that is recharged when lithium ions flow from a positively charged electrode, called a cathode, to a negatively electrode, called an anode. In most lithium-ion batteries, the cathode contains cobalt, a metal that offers high stability and energy density.

      However, cobalt has significant downsides. A scarce metal, its price can fluctuate dramatically, and much of the world’s cobalt deposits are located in politically unstable countries. Cobalt extraction creates hazardous working conditions and generates toxic waste that contaminates land, air, and water surrounding the mines.

      “Cobalt batteries can store a lot of energy, and they have all of features that people care about in terms of performance, but they have the issue of not being widely available, and the cost fluctuates broadly with commodity prices. And, as you transition to a much higher proportion of electrified vehicles in the consumer market, it’s certainly going to get more expensive,” Dincă says.

      Because of the many drawbacks to cobalt, a great deal of research has gone into trying to develop alternative battery materials. One such material is lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP), which some car manufacturers are beginning to use in electric vehicles. Although still practically useful, LFP has only about half the energy density of cobalt and nickel batteries.

      Another appealing option are organic materials, but so far most of these materials have not been able to match the conductivity, storage capacity, and lifetime of cobalt-containing batteries. Because of their low conductivity, such materials typically need to be mixed with binders such as polymers, which help them maintain a conductive network. These binders, which make up at least 50 percent of the overall material, bring down the battery’s storage capacity.

      About six years ago, Dincă’s lab began working on a project, funded by Lamborghini, to develop an organic battery that could be used to power electric cars. While working on porous materials that were partly organic and partly inorganic, Dincă and his students realized that a fully organic material they had made appeared that it might be a strong conductor.

      This material consists of many layers of TAQ (bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone), an organic small molecule that contains three fused hexagonal rings. These layers can extend outward in every direction, forming a structure similar to graphite. Within the molecules are chemical groups called quinones, which are the electron reservoirs, and amines, which help the material to form strong hydrogen bonds.

      Those hydrogen bonds make the material highly stable and also very insoluble. That insolubility is important because it prevents the material from dissolving into the battery electrolyte, as some organic battery materials do, thereby extending its lifetime.

      “One of the main methods of degradation for organic materials is that they simply dissolve into the battery electrolyte and cross over to the other side of the battery, essentially creating a short circuit. If you make the material completely insoluble, that process doesn’t happen, so we can go to over 2,000 charge cycles with minimal degradation,” Dincă says.

      Strong performance

      Tests of this material showed that its conductivity and storage capacity were comparable to that of traditional cobalt-containing batteries. Also, batteries with a TAQ cathode can be charged and discharged faster than existing batteries, which could speed up the charging rate for electric vehicles.

      To stabilize the organic material and increase its ability to adhere to the battery’s current collector, which is made of copper or aluminum, the researchers added filler materials such as cellulose and rubber. These fillers make up less than one-tenth of the overall cathode composite, so they don’t significantly reduce the battery’s storage capacity.

      These fillers also extend the lifetime of the battery cathode by preventing it from cracking when lithium ions flow into the cathode as the battery charges.

      The primary materials needed to manufacture this type of cathode are a quinone precursor and an amine precursor, which are already commercially available and produced in large quantities as commodity chemicals. The researchers estimate that the material cost of assembling these organic batteries could be about one-third to one-half the cost of cobalt batteries.

      Lamborghini has licensed the patent on the technology. Dincă’s lab plans to continue developing alternative battery materials and is exploring possible replacement of lithium with sodium or magnesium, which are cheaper and more abundant than lithium. More

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      Angela Belcher delivers 2023 Dresselhaus Lecture on evolving organisms for new nanomaterials

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      “How do we get to making nanomaterials that haven’t been evolved before?” asked Angela Belcher at the 2023 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov. 20. “We can use elements that biology has already given us.”

      The combined in-person and virtual audience of over 300 was treated to a light-up, 3D model of M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only infects bacteria, complete with a pull-out strand of DNA. Belcher used the feather-boa-like model to show how her research group modifies the M13’s genes to add new DNA and peptide sequences to template inorganic materials.

      “I love controlling materials at the nanoscale using biology,” said Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering, materials science professor, and of the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. “We all know if you control materials at the nanoscale and you can start to tune them, then you can have all kinds of different applications.” And the opportunities are indeed vast — from building batteries, fuel cells, and solar cells to carbon sequestration and storage, environmental remediation, catalysis, and medical diagnostics and imaging.

      Belcher sprinkled her talk with models and props, lined up on a table at the front of the 10-250 lecture hall, to demonstrate a wide variety of concepts and projects made possible by the intersection of biology and nanotechnology.

      Play video

      2023 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture: Angela BelcherVideo: MIT.nano

      Energy storage and environment

      “How do you go from a DNA sequence to a functioning battery?” posed Belcher. Grabbing a model of a large carbon nanotube, she explained how her group engineered a phage to pick up carbon nanotubes that would wind all the way around the virus and then fill in with different cathode or anode materials to make nanowires for battery electrodes.

      How about using the M13 bacteriophage to improve the environment? Belcher referred to a project by former student Geran Zhang PhD ’19 that proved the virus can be modified for this context, too. He used the phage to template high-surface-area, carbon-based materials that can grab small molecules and break them down, Belcher said, opening a realm of possibilities from cleaning up rivers to developing chemical warfare agents to combating smog.

      Belcher’s lab worked with the U.S. Army to produce protective clothing and masks made of these carbon-based virus nanofibers. “We went from five liters in our lab to a thousand liters, then 10,000 liters in the army labs where we’re able to make kilograms of the material,” Belcher said, stressing the importance of being able to test and prototype at scale.

      Imaging tools and therapeutics in cancer

      In the area of biomedical imaging, Belcher explained, a lot less is known in near-infrared imaging — imaging in wavelengths above 1,000 nanometers — than other imaging techniques, yet with near-infrared scientists can see much deeper inside the body. Belcher’s lab built their own systems to image at these wavelengths. The third generation of this system provides real-time, sub-millimeter optical imaging for guided surgery.

      Working with Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Engineering, Belcher used carbon nanotubes to build imaging tools that find tiny tumors during surgery that doctors otherwise would not be able to see. The tool is actually a virus engineered to carry with it a fluorescent, single-walled carbon nanotube as it seeks out the tumors.

      Nearing the end of her talk, Belcher presented a goal: to develop an accessible detection and diagnostic technology for ovarian cancer in five to 10 years.

      “We think that we can do it,” Belcher said. She described her students’ work developing a way to scan an entire fallopian tube, as opposed to just one small portion, to find pre-cancer lesions, and talked about the team of MIT faculty, doctors, and researchers working collectively toward this goal.

      “Part of the secret of life and the meaning of life is helping other people enjoy the passage of time,” said Belcher in her closing remarks. “I think that we can all do that by working to solve some of the biggest issues on the planet, including helping to diagnose and treat ovarian cancer early so people have more time to spend with their family.”

      Honoring Mildred S. Dresselhaus

      Belcher was the fifth speaker to deliver the Dresselhaus Lecture, an annual event organized by MIT.nano to honor the late MIT physics and electrical engineering Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus. The lecture features a speaker from anywhere in the world whose leadership and impact echo Dresselhaus’s life, accomplishments, and values.

      “Millie was and is a huge hero of mine,” said Belcher. “Giving a lecture in Millie’s name is just the greatest honor.”

      Belcher dedicated the talk to Dresselhaus, whom she described with an array of accolades — a trailblazer, a genius, an amazing mentor, teacher, and inventor. “Just knowing her was such a privilege,” she said.

      Belcher also dedicated her talk to her own grandmother and mother, both of whom passed away from cancer, as well as late MIT professors Susan Lindquist and Angelika Amon, who both died of ovarian cancer.

      “I’ve been so fortunate to work with just the most talented and dedicated graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, and researchers,” concluded Belcher. “It has been a pure joy to be in partnership with all of you to solve these very daunting problems.” More