Waste materials: Recycling worn-out batteries from electric cars produces a mix of finely shredded metals, consisting of cobalt, aluminum, nickel, and copper (show on the left), and a slurry that is processed into a cobalt cake (on the right).

As more and more products concern about environment friendly, one of the best energy solutions is using batteries. So the batteries will be used in large-scale now and much more in the future.

Shrewd businessmen will be soon aware of the opportunities inside the implication. Battery recycling industry and battery consumption industry are complementary industries. Experts predict that lithium battery recycling will get a boost. The US Department of Energy has granted $9.5 million to a company in California that plans to build America’s first recycling facility for lithium-ion vehicle batteries.

Experts say that having a recycling infrastructure in place will ease concerns that the adoption of vehicles that use lithium-ion batteries could lead to a shortage of lithium carbonate and a dependence on countries such as China, Russia, and Bolivia, which control the bulk of global lithium reserves. “Right now it hardly pays to recycle lithium, but if demand increases and there are large supplies of used material, the situation could change,” says Linda Gaines, a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory’s Transportation Technology R&D Center.
This can be seen as a beginning, the more action will be taken in the future. If you take the chance, you can make big profits.

Waterproof power: This protective casing envelops a functioning lithium-metal battery electrode, excluding water but letting lithium ions pass. It’s part of a prototype battery made by PolyPlus Battery of Berkeley, CA.

Also good news in battery industry: IBM Research is beginning an ambitious project that it hopes will lead to the commercialization of batteries that store 10 times as much energy as today’s within the next five years. The company will partner with U.S. national labs to develop a promising but controversial technology that uses energy-dense but highly flammable lithium metal to react with oxygen in the air. The payoff, says the company, will be a lightweight, powerful, and rechargeable battery for the electrical grid and the electrification of transportation.

IBM is pursuing the risky technology instead of lithium-ion batteries because it has the potential to reach high enough energy densities to change the transportation system, says Chandrasekhar Narayan, manager of science and technology at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, CA. “With all foreseeable developments, lithium-ion batteries are only going to get about two times better than they are today,” he says. “To really make an impact on transportation and on the grid, you need higher energy density than that.” One of the project’s goals, says Narayan, is a lightweight 500-mile battery for a family car. The Chevy Volt can go 40 miles before using the gas tank, and Tesla Motors’ Model S line can travel up to 300 miles without a recharge.

YOKOSUKA, Japan: Nissan Motor Co. showed off its super-quiet, zero-emission electric car on Monday – a key green offering for Japan’s No. 3 automaker, which has fallen behind in hybrid technology.

Nissan showed the prototype in a Tiida compact that is already on sale.

The platform will be incorporated into a new vehicle body that will be unveiled at the beginning of August. It consists of a highly rigid body (designed to reduce vibrations and increase the car’s durability), an electric motor, and a lithium-ion battery pack built into the floor of the car so that it doesn’t eat into cargo space. The production version of the vehicle will go on sale next year, the company says, and get 160 kilometers–100 miles–on a charge.

Latest Nissan Electrical Car

Nissan said its intention is to create an all-electric vehicle that can be driven “24/7,” and to support that has developed an EV-IT system that connects the vehicle, through an on-board transmitter, to a global data center. Drivers will be able to check the state of charge of their vehicles online and by cell phone, and the car’s navigation center will calculate driving radius and capability of reaching a selected destination based on the current state of charge. It can also tell the driver where the closest charging stations are.

Another interesting function is a remote-controlled timer that lets the air-conditioning be turned on to “precool” the vehicle while it’s plugged in during charging to save battery use. The remote function also lets the driver tell battery charging functions to start and stop at specific times.

More details are expected at the August 2 event.

A hybrid vehicle is a vehicle that uses two or more distinct power sources to move the vehicle. The term most commonly refers to hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), which combine an internal combustion engine and one or more electric motors.

Ford Escape Hybrid the first hybrid electric SUV and first hybrid electric vehicle with a flexible fuel capability to run on E85

A hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is a hybrid vehicle that combines a conventional propulsion system with a rechargeable energy storage system (RESS) to achieve better fuel economy than a conventional vehicle. Its secondary propulsion system, additional to the electric motors, means that it does not require regular visits to a charging unit as a battery electric vehicle (BEV) does.

Toyota Motor Corp.’s hybrids now use nickel-metal hydride batteries. The world’s largest automaker said last month it will use for the first time lithium-ion batteries for its plug-in hybrid cars.

So the question is, what makes these batteries so energetic and so popular?

Lithium-Ionen-Accumulator

Lithium-ion batteries are popular because they have a number of important advantages over competing technologies:

• They’re generally much lighter than other types of rechargeable batteries of the same size. The electrodes of a lithium-ion battery are made of lightweight lithium and carbon. Lithium is also a highly reactive element, meaning that a lot of energy can be stored in its atomic bonds. This translates into a very high energy density for lithium-ion batteries.
• They hold their charge. A lithium-ion battery pack loses only about 5 percent of its charge per month, compared to a 20 percent loss per month for NiMH batteries.
• Lithium-ion batteries can handle hundreds of charge/discharge cycles.

Using a lithium-ion battery will produce more energy, allowing hybrid cars to run more as an electric vehicle, but there have been some technological hurdles.