'Cambridge crude' could revolutionize batteries

They call it “Cambridge crude,” and it could revolutionize how we store energy.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new type of battery that uses an oozy black goo to store and discharge electrical energy. It’s a battery design that’s radically different from those in use today, and — if developed commercially — could lead to much cheaper and smaller energy storage options for electric cars and the power grid.

The people behind the creation of the so-called semi-solid flow cell have already licensed the technology to a startup calls 24M Technologies, which was founded in 2010 by MIT materials science professors Yet-Ming Chiang and W. Craig Carter and by entreprenur Throop Wilder, who’s the company’s president. The firm is already backed with more than $16 million in venture capital and federal research funding.

The new battery design has “tremendous importance for the future of energy production and storage,” says Yury Gogotsi, distinguished university professor at Drexel University and director of Drexel’s Nanotechnology Institute.

Unlike current liquid flow batteries, the MIT innovation uses a high-energy-density goo of solid particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. Two different suspensions in the same system function as the battery’s cathode and anode.

What makes the design particularly promising for the future of electric cars is that the goo could be pumped out and replaced to recharge the battery, making it possible to “fill up” a plug-in vehicle at a fueling station almost as simple as pumping gas. We’re not anywhere close to being able to do that yet, but it’s an exciting idea.

“(D)eveloping working systems that can compete with currently available batteries in terms of cost and performance may take years,” Gogotsi says. However, he notes, “I don’t see fundamental problems that cannot be addressed — those are primarily engineering issues.”