Zecheng's automated power battery production line has strong technical strength

The power battery production line company has strong technical strength and a R&D team with senior engineers as the core, and is committed to becoming a first-class expert in new energy automation production equipment in the industry.

A US startup called EnerG2 recently established a factory in Oregon, USA, to produce a material that can improve supercapacitors used in batteries and energy storage devices. The US Department of Energy gave the factory $2.13 million in aid, which is part of a $2.4 billion grant project authorized by the 2009 Recovery Act. The grant is intended to accelerate the production and promotion of electric vehicles in the United States. But it is not certain whether power battery production line companies and automakers will use this new material in large quantities in the next few years.

EnerG2 says the material - a type of activated carbon used in electrodes - could improve the performance of supercapacitors. These devices store a fraction of the energy of a battery but can deliver larger bursts of power and endure more charge and discharge cycles. Currently, supercapacitors have applications such as hybrid buses and wind turbines (to adjust the pitch of their blades). EnerG2 has also suggested that the technology could be the key to "phasing out gasoline".

The company is using a new method to make activated carbon materials in supercapacitor electrodes. Currently, commercial supercapacitors are made from organic raw materials, most commonly coconut shells. But organic materials contain impurities, and the production process has allowed the company to change the properties of supercapacitors.

For example, changing the size and shape of the nanoscale pores in the material can increase the surface area, which would increase the energy storage capacity. Or, the company could control how freely charge flows through the material, causing it to deliver varying bursts of power. The fact that the material contains fewer impurities could allow supercapacitor makers to redesign their energy storage devices to run at higher voltages, which could increase energy storage capacity by about 20 percent. Finally, the material could cut the cost per watt-hour of supercapacitors in half. "This is not the kind of nanotechnology that's too expensive to produce commercially," says Rick Luebbe, EnerG2's CEO.

But some supercapacitor makers haven't been convinced, including San Diego-based Maxwell Technologies, which has agreed to test the new materials, said Michael Sund, vice president of communications and investor relations. He said all the synthetic materials tested are significantly more expensive than activated carbon from organic sources, which is still the best material available in terms of sufficient volume, proven performance and cost. When companies consider using supercapacitors in new applications, their biggest concern is cost, he said, "so we will never pay more for carbon to get a small performance improvement."

EnerG2's technology for making activated carbon could prove more efficient, solving some of the key problems that are driving planned advanced battery designs. Lithium-air and lithium-sulfur batteries, while still far less than the energy stored in fuels like gasoline, store more than twice as much energy as today's batteries. Making these batteries practical is extremely challenging. Many test cells stop charging after just a few cycles or fail to approach their theoretical energy storage capacity because of conductivity problems or harmful chemical reactions. Precise control of the pore structure in carbon electrodes could help solve many of these problems.

Researchers at the power battery production line company have demonstrated that well-ordered carbon electrodes - composed of neat rows of carbon nanostructures - can store relatively high amounts of energy in lithium-sulfur batteries by improving conductivity and promoting the required chemical reactions within the limited space in the material. While the technology to make these electrodes would be expensive, EnerG2's method could provide a cheaper way to make such neat carbon structures.