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The Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) silver/zinc (Ag/Zn) battery is an 11 cell battery of approximately 30 AH. The Ag/Zn battery is comprised of two 4-cell monoblocks and one 3-cell monoblock. A discussion of a wet-life extension test performed on the battery is given in viewgraph form.
A development program is being conducted at Advanced Thermal Batteries (ATB) to create a low discharge rate, long life, molten salt battery for a NASA Venus surface probe. Battery goals are 60 days continuous operation at +25V +0/-6 volts and -25V +6/-0 Volts under severe environments of 465°C, 92 atm pressure, and corrosive sulfur dioxide in a super critical carbon dioxide atmosphere. Conveniently, molten salt thermal battery electrochemistry starts to operate efficiently at 330°C. However, a major barrier to direct application of existing thermal battery technology is the high self-discharge rate, resulting in lifetimes in only minutes, not days. The best performance to date, which meets the required voltage regulation, has been a lithium silicon (LiSi) alloy anode discharging through all three voltage plateau versus an iron monosulfide (FeS) cathode. In order to perform reproducibly, additional engineering controls within the battery design are required to limit cell–to–cell parasitic discharge mechanisms. Results of these trials have improved the efficiency and manufacturability of the design.
Health management plays an important role in operations of UAV. If there is equipment malfunction on critical components, safe operation of the UAV might possibly be compromised. A technology with particular promise in this arena is equipment prognostics. This technology provides a state assessment of the health of components of interest and, if a degraded state has been found, it estimates how long it will take before the equipment will reach a failure threshold, conditional on assumptions about future operating conditions and future environmental conditions. This chapter explores the technical underpinnings of how to perform prognostics and shows an implementation on the propulsion of an electric UAV. A particle filter is shown as the method of choice in performing state assessment and predicting future degradation. The method is then applied to the batteries that provide power to the propeller motors. An accurate run-time battery life prediction algorithm is of critical importance to ensure the safe operation of the vehicle if one wants to maximize in-air time. Current reliability based techniques turn out to be insufficient to manage the use of such batteries where loads vary frequently in uncertain environments.
The evolution of an advanced Ni-Cd space battery cell design continues to prove very promising. High oxygen/hydrogen gas recombination rates (currently up to a C/5 charge rate) and increased electrolyte activation level tolerance (currently up to 5.6 grams Ah of positive capacity) were demonstrated by test. A superior performance, extended life battery cell offering advantages should soon be available for mission applications
"Whether life exists beyond Earth remains a fundamental question driving our exploration of the Solar System. At Saturn’s moon Enceladus, plumes of oceanic material vented into space allow the investigation of the astrobiological potential of an ocean world, hinted at by Cassini, without the necessity of drilling through kilometers of ice crust. The Enceladus Orbilander is a flagship ($2.56B in fiscal year 2025 dollars) mission concept created for the 2023–2033 Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Orbilander takes full advantage of the opportunity provided by Enceladus’ plumes to search for signs of life. A single spacecraft both orbits and lands, capturing samples from four distinct reservoirs offered by the plumes. These samples, both particulate and vapor, are then analyzed by the Life Detection Suite (LDS), a set of five instruments conducting complementary and orthogonal biosignature-seeking measurements. To provide the context that specifically enhances interpretation of LDS measurements, geochemical and geophysical investigations are conducted both in orbit and on the surface. These reveal the physio-chemical state of the ocean and core as well as the processes involved in ejection of plume material and how these affect the ocean material analyzed by the LDS. The Orbilander can be delivered to the Saturn system via several launch vehicle and trajectory options, including a direct trajectory (7-year cruise), a ∆V-EGA trajectory (9-year cruise) and several options using an inner cruise with Venus and Earth flybys (10-year cruise). Upon Saturn Orbit Insertion, a 4-year moon tour pumps down the Orbilander’s orbit to intercept Enceladus. The most optimal arrival times balance the Jupiter flyby opportunities of the late 2030s and solar illumination at the Enceladus high southern latitudes where plume material is most abundant. This mission concept therefore targets project start in 2030. Upon Enceladus Orbit Insertion, the Orbilander begins a 1.5-year-long campaign of landing site reconnaissance, remote sensing science, and collecting sufficient plume sample to run all but one of the LDS measurements. After successful landing, the Orbilander spends 2 years on the surface conducting multiple LDS measurements with all five instruments on actively and passively collected plume material, as well as seismic investigations. The schedule laid out here is well-defined, but the mission also has operational and resource flexibility should additional reconnaissance be needed. As part of the design study, mission and development risks were identified and mitigation strategies proposed. Technologies key to achieving the life detection science objectives include instrumentation matured under programs like COLDTech and ICEE-2, such as aspects of the sampling system and microfluidic devices, as well as well-known techniques like high-resolution and separation-capable mass spectrometers. Autonomous onboard navigation is planned to maintain a halo orbit around Enceladus to enable passive sampling from orbit as well as reconnaissance measurements for use in site selection and landing. Terrain relative navigation is included to ensure safe landing, given that targeted areas may contain landing hazards. Continued development of radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) technology and long-life batteries is essential for this long duration mission. The Enceladus Orbilander represents an optimal point in the trade space of science value versus cost, taking advantage of the extensive knowledge of Enceladus provided by Cassini, how well Enceladus lends itself to a search for life in material from its ocean, and the flexibility afforded by the innovative design developed by the APL team. By taking full advantage of Enceladus’ plumes both in orbit and on the surface, Orbilander represents a robust search for life with complementary and orthogonal biosignatures as well as contextual geophysical and geochemical measurements, determining not only whether Enceladus is inhabited (at levels up to 500,000× scarcer than in Earth’s oceans) but also why. "
To achieve a truly closed-loop direct recycling process for lithium-ion batteries, all component materials must be recovered. To date, direct recycling method development has primarily focused on the high-value transition-metal cathode materials, while the inherently lower-value graphite has been challenging to recover in a cost-effective manner. However, end-of-life graphite contains a unique engineered value due to the presence of the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI). Growth of the SEI during the cell's active lifetime stabilizes the electronically reactive graphite surface through an irreversible consumption of Li, and thus necessitates both excess lithiation of the cathode and a costly and time-intensive formation procedure during manufacturing. An optimized pre-formed SEI that capitalizes on existing SEI components from end-of-life batteries has the potential to significantly reduce cathode lithiation requirements and eliminate the critical bottleneck of formation cycling during cell remanufacturing. Further, retaining Li at the anode obviates the need for a separate Li leaching and recovery step, improving the overall efficiency of the direct recycling line. In this work, we present a novel approach to "upcycling" spent graphite through use of tailored chemical treatment to remove adverse (i.e., highly resistive and/or poorly passivating) SEI species while retaining beneficially passivating components. We have explored a rational set of solvents spanning a range of polarity, proticity, and molecular size to evaluate structure-property-performance relationships between applied solvent(s), removed and remaining SEI species, and electrochemical response of the resulting graphite product. Further, we have developed and optimized a robust and holistic analysis procedure that couples symmetric-cell electrochemical testing, multi-modal materials characterization, and advanced electrochemical modeling. These analysis results inform a set of correlative metrics for graphite performance relative to both solvent properties and upcycled SEI composition. We demonstrate effective tunability in the residual SEI composition by varying solvent identity and concentration, and report on several promising solvent systems that achieve comparable or performance to pristine graphite.
The United States has identified several lithium-ion battery materials as critical for reaching the national emission reduction targets that have been set in accordance with the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, with few natural resources available domestically, there is a rapidly growing focus on the development of a domestic recycling industry to recover these materials from end-of-life batteries. Here, we use the Lithium-Ion Battery Resources Assessment (LIBRA) system dynamics model to evaluate the impact of automated battery sorting technology in terms of the shares of cobalt and nickel that are recovered through recycling. Findings show that automated sorting has clear benefits over manual sorting methods by helping recyclers selectively process high-cobalt batteries. By maximizing cobalt recovery, recycling becomes more profitable and drives greater investment in recycling capacity, resulting in a higher share of nickel and cobalt recovered from EOL batteries over time.
With the emerging dominance of electric vehicles (EV) in the transportation sector, recycling or upcycling spent battery materials will be required to reduce EV costs, lessen waste, and ease critical material supply chain issues for EV batteries. Here, motivated by work in the literature describing the exfoliation of layered oxides, first‐principles calculations are performed to show that Li x CoO 2 , if exfoliated into nanosheets, can readily undergo transition metal cation exchange in aqueous media. The substitution of Co 3+ or Co 4+ cations inside the sheet by Ni 2+ is associated with modest reaction barriers (Δ G* ≈ 0.3–0.7 eV) and is at most mildly endothermic (Δ G ≈ 0.2–0.3 eV). In contrast, previous battery degradation studies have shown that Co 3+ diffusion is strongly inhibited inside bulk layered oxides. This suggests that processing spent layered oxides as nanosheets can provide a potentially low‐energy‐cost pathway to altering the transition metal and/or dopant stoichiometry, which can be used toward developing new room‐temperature upcycling routes for cathodes from end‐of‐life batteries.
The search for life signs and potentially habitable bodies in our solar system and beyond is one of NASA’s top priorities. The prime destinations for such exploration are bodies containing liquid water, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Initial missions to these “ocean worlds” will be robotic, and because of long communication lags and blackouts, harsh environments, and limited battery life, a high degree of onboard autonomy will be required. To this end NASA has developed the Ocean Worlds Autonomy Testbed for Exploration, Research, and Simulation (OceanWATERS), a software testbed for surface mission autonomy. Under grants from NASA’s Autonomous Robotics Research for Ocean Worlds (ARROW) and Concepts for Ocean worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) programs, collectively 6 research teams at universities and companies across the United States have developed autonomy solutions using OceanWATERS, tackling a variety of surface mission challenges and employing state-of-the-art AI-based solutions. This paper provides a self-contained high-level description of OceanWATERS while detailing enhancements made since its 2020 release. It provides a high-level summary of the projects undertaken by participants in the ARROW and COLDTech programs and how these efforts have helped shape OceanWATERS. Finally, potential future work and directions for the testbed are listed.
Through advanced autonomy testbed programs, NASA is setting the groundwork for one of its top priorities—the search for signs of life and potentially habitable bodies in our solar system and beyond. The prime destinations for such exploration are bodies containing liquid water, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Initial missions to these “ocean worlds” will be robotic and require a high degree of onboard autonomy due to long Earth-communication lags and blackouts, harsh surface environments, and limited battery life.
The demand for higher energy density batteries increases as the demand for portable electronic devices and electric automotive increases, as well as a variety of other applications requiring substantially higher power and energy than attainable with current lithium-ion capabilities which includes the areas of high performance vehicles, military applications, and electric aviation. However, the improvement of energy density is insufficient alone for enabling electric aviation when considering the high flammability and risk of thermal runaway inherent in current state-of-the-art liquid electrolytes. The development of high energy, high power, and safe batteries are required to enable hybrid and fully electric aircraft. Next generation chemistries such as lithium-sulfur provide high theoretical specific energy density suitable for electric aviation without as strict of volumetric requirements observed in the automotive industry. However, due to the phase transition during discharge where sulfur generates a series of soluble intermediate polysulfides, which are lost to the liquid electrolyte, cause detrimental side effects, and severely limit cycle life battery performance is severely reduced. Additionally, the low electrical conductivity of sulfur requires a large amount of inactive carbon dramatically increasing parasitic mass. The dissolution issue make sulfur a desirable candidate to pair with a solid-state electrolyte in order to avoid polysulfide dissolution and shuttling. In addition, inorganic solid-electrolytes have low flammability providing the improved safety required. Combining this chemistry with a solid-state electrolyte provides a path for achieving the energy and safety required for electric aviation. The development of scalable thin solid-state electrolytes paired with lithium-sulfur chemistry will be discussed and how their development will aid in enabling a unique application.
We face the grand challenge of a growing number of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries over the upcoming years. A recent Cell Reports Sustainability article presents a model for effective end-of-life battery management in China for rural electrification. Here, we emphasize the need for incorporating various stakeholders early in the design phase to remove the barriers to the reuse of retired batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are central to the urgent societal need to decarbonize both transportation and energy storage on the grid. Unfortunately, despite their attractive energy/power density, as well as high coulombic and energy efficiencies, further improvement of this technology – especially their durability – is desperately needed. To support these efforts, our study focuses on fundamental understanding of the decomposition pathways for LIB electrolytes at the cathode–electrolyte interface (CEI), as the nature of these reactions directly controls the extent to which cell capacity and voltage decays in these systems. In this study, we employ electrochemical methods, coupled with product analysis using NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, to determine the decomposition mechanisms in both model and technologically relevant electrolytes. Remarkably, we discovered the electrochemical formation of protons with high chemical activity, comparable to known superacids, at potentials relevant to practical Li-ion batteries. Their reactivity toward every individual component of the CEI provides a unified thermochemical origin for a myriad of side reactions that are commonly associated with the electrochemical reaction. In particular, electrochemically generated protons react with intact EC molecules to form CO 2 and other short and long chain ethers. They also undergo an acid–base reaction with LiPF 6 , to form the weaker acid HF, and with the cathode active material, leaching transition metals into the electrolyte. Collectively, the results of this study all point to the urgent need to either mitigate this proton formation or introduce benign harvesting additives via new electrolyte design strategies.
We report charging lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) in 10 to 15 min via extreme fast-charging (XFC) is important for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Lately, the battery research community has focused on identifying XFC bottlenecks and determining novel design solutions. Like other LiB components, cathodes can present XFC bottlenecks, especially when considering long-term battery life. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive understanding of how XFC conditions degrade LiB cathodes. The present article reviews relevant cathode-focused studies and summarizes the current understanding regarding cathode performance and aging issues under XFC conditions. Dominant aging modes and mechanisms are identified at different length-scales with electrochemical correlations for LiNi x Mn y Co z O 2 (NMC)-based cathodes. A range of electrochemical techniques and models provide key insights into cathode performance and life issues. A suite of multimodal and multiscale microscopy and X-ray techniques is surveyed to quantify chemical, structural, and crystallographic NMC-cathode degradation. Cathode cycle-life is scaled to equivalent EV miles to illustrate how cathode degradation translates to real-world scenarios and quantifies cathode-related bottlenecks that hinder XFC adoption. Finally, the article discusses several cathode cycle-life aging mitigation strategies with example case studies and identifies remaining challenges.
As NASA embarks upon developing the Next-Generation Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) Radio for deep space exploration, the demands on EVA battery life will substantially increase. The number of modes and frequency bands required will continue to grow in order to enable efficient and complex multi-mode operations including communications, navigation, and tracking applications. Whether conducting astronaut excursions, communicating to soldiers, or first responders responding to emergency hazards, NASA has developed an innovative, affordable, miniaturized, power-efficient software defined radio that offers unprecedented power-efficient flexibility. This lightweight, programmable, S-band, multi-service, frequency- agile EVA software defined radio (SDR) supports data, telemetry, voice, and both standard and high-definition video. Features include a modular design, an easily scalable architecture, and the EVA SDR allows for both stationary and mobile battery powered handheld operations. Currently, the radio is equipped with an S-band RF section. However, its scalable architecture can accommodate multiple RF sections simultaneously to cover multiple frequency bands. The EVA SDR also supports multiple network protocols. It currently implements a Hybrid Mesh Network based on the 802.11s open standard protocol. The radio targets RF channel data rates up to 20 Mbps and can be equipped with a real-time operating system (RTOS) that can be switched off for power-aware applications. The EVA SDR's modular design permits implementation of the same hardware at all Network Nodes concept. This approach assures the portability of the same software into any radio in the system. It also brings several benefits to the entire system including reducing system maintenance, system complexity, and development cost.
Despite advances in lithium-ion battery technology, critical challenges remain that must be addressed to accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption and global energy transformation. Significantly improved battery thermal management (BTM) is key to overcoming these challenges. BTM approaches focus on increasing heat transfer coefficients via air, liquid, or refrigerant cooling, but less attention is given to reducing the battery's thermal resistance, a major bottleneck for heat transfer. This work introduces a novel approach to reduce battery thermal resistance by integrating in-plane heat transfer with optimized cell geometry, minimized thermal resistances, and reduced interfacial resistances, representing a departure from previous methods. The standard prismatic can cell incorporating this technology is referred to as the high heat transfer (HHT) battery. An equivalent resistance battery thermal model is developed for speed and accuracy, validated against experimental data in the literature, demonstrating strong correlation and ensuring reliable predictions for real-world performance. Thermal performance metrics of the conventional and HHT batteries are compared using a parametric study with air, liquid, and refrigerant boundary conditions across a range of aspect ratios. The HHT battery shows a heat removal rate up to 20 times higher than a conventional battery. These findings suggest that HHT technology could be transformative for EV battery performance, enabling fast charging, mitigating thermal runaway, extending battery life, reducing cold-weather power loss, increasing reliability, lowering costs, and enabling higher energy density, all critical for EV adoption and energy transformation. Future work will focus on prototyping and real-world testing to refine these findings for commercial-scale applications.
Abstract Acoustic telemetry studies often rely on the assumption that premature tag failure does not affect the validity of inferences. However, in some cases this assumption is possibly or likely invalid and it is necessary to apply a correction to estimation procedures. The question of which approaches and specific models are best suited to modeling acoustic tag failures has received little research attention. In this short communication, we present a meta-analysis of 42 acoustic tag-life studies, originally used to correct survival studies involving outmigrating juvenile salmonids in the Columbia/Snake river basin. We compare the performance of nine alternative parametric models including common failure–time/survival models and the vitality models of Li and Anderson Theor Popul Biol 76:118–131, (2009) and Demogr Res 28:341–372, (2013). The tag-life studies used acoustic tags from three different tag manufacturers, had expected lifetimes between 12 and 61 days, and had dry weights ranging from 0.22 to 1.65 g. In 57% of the cases, the vitality models of Li and Anderson Theor Popul Biol 76:118–131, (2009) and Demogr Res 28:341–372, (2013) fit the tag-failure times best. The vitality models were also the second-best choices in 17% of the cases. Together, the vitality models, log-logistic, (19%), and gamma models (14%) accounted for 90% of the models selected. Unlike more traditional failure–time models (e.g., Weibull, Gompertz, gamma, and log-logistic), the vitality models are capable of characterizing both the early onset of tag failure due to manufacturing errors and the anticipated battery life. We provide further guidance on appropriate sample sizes (50–100 tags) and procedures to be considered when applying precise tag-life corrections in release–recapture survival studies.
With increased energy density and cost advantage, ultrahigh-nickel layered oxides (LiNi x M 1-x O 2 , x = 0.9 - 1.0) are becoming front-runner as cathodes for next-generation lithium-based batteries, yet their commercialization is blocked both by severe capacity fade and exponentially aggravated air degradation. Thus, it is imperative to find effective solutions to address these issues simultaneously. Here, a significant enhancement in both the cycling and air storage stability of the ultrahigh-Ni cathode LiNi 0.94 Co 0.06 O 2 is achieved via a distinctive phosphoric acid treatment strategy. The modified cathode displays remarkably improved capacity retention (from 36 % to 80 % after 1,000 cycles) and rate capability (from 0 to 105 mA h g -1 at 30C rate) in pouch cells. Impressively, the modified cathode, after air storage for 450 days, maintains the morphology and 92% of the initial capacity of the fresh sample with excellent cyclability. Comprehensive interphase and structural analyses reveal that the enhanced electrochemical performance is due to a highly stabilized electrode/electrolyte interphase that suppresses electrode corrosion and lattice reconstruction. The excellent air stability results from an adsorption-buffering effect enabled by phosphoric acid to air attack. Finally, the study demonstrates an engineering pathway to improve the cycling and air stability, facilitating the practical viability of high-capacity, affordable, ultrahigh-Ni cathodes in lithium-based batteries.