07.29.08
Good battery news: Lithium iron phosphate
See full article at Treehugger. From it:
… Lithium iron phosphate batteries have many benefits over the lithium cobalt oxide used in current li-ion batteries; iron costs much less than cobalt, they can deliver large bursts of power (useful in hybrids and electric cars), and they are safer (they are used in the One Laptop Per Child project, for example).
But, it’s not all rainbows and puppies. The manufacturing process of iron phosphate batteries is complex and expensive, requiring hours and temperatures as high as 700 °C. That’s where the breakthrough comes in…
Arumugam Manthiram, a professor of materials engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, has shown that a new technique that uses microwaves can reduce both the amount of time it takes, and the temperatures required to make li-iron phosphate batteries.
