Revolutionary Lithium Ion battery research now funded by Saudis

Stan Beer
Friday, 18 April 2008 18:58

Opinion and Analysis

In January this year, the news broke that an assistant Professor and his team at Stanford University had invented a revolutionary battery technology capable of holding ten times the energy of existing Lithium Ion batteries. Now the Professor's ongoing research is being funded to the tune of $10 million by a startup university in Saudi Arabia and conspiracy theories are flowing as thickly as oil.

Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Yi Cui, has succeeded in developing a novel type of Lithium Ion battery that has an order of magnitude greater energy storage using silicon nanowires at the anode. The amount of lithium stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper, is much greater than can be stored by the carbon in current Lithium Ion batteries.

Lithium Ion batteries, widely used in mobile phones, cameras and laptop computers have been touted as the most promising near term storage technology for electric cars and a potential replacement for petroleum based transport. However, the storage capability of the current generation of batteries still falls well short of gasoline. Silicon nanowire batteries could be the tipping point that makes long range electric cars a reality.

When announcing the breakthrough technology in January, Professor CUi described it as a revolutionary development.

"Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly," Cui said at the time.

Cui, a native of China's Guangxi province, also said that a patent application has been filed and that he was considering formation of a company or an agreement with a battery maker.

However, a new announcement out of Stanford has put a new slant on Professor Cui's research effort. Professor Cui has accepted a whopping $10 million grant from recently formed King Abulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST) to continue his research. CONTINUED page 2