IdeaWave

Turquoise Battery Project - creating superior, economical batteries

Craig Carmichael

In 2008 I decided to try creating a superior but economical battery chemistry. The art of battery making didn’t seem to be very well explored. Especially, salty electrolyte cells had had no real development since the standard dry cell in the 1880s.

What’s in a battery? [show & explain parts]

  • Case
  • Electrode briquettes
  • Current collectors & terminals
  • Electrolyte

But all common metals including nickel corrode in salt anodes. Carbon rods and graphite sheets gave poor results. So I invented ‘grafpoxy’, a conductive mixture of epoxy and graphite to allow coated metal electrode screens and connections. That opens up the whole salty battery field.

Chemicals and reactions also appeared to be almost unexplored for salty electrolyte. I found a number of good substances and reactions.

Positive Electrodes

  • Nickel hydroxides
  • Vanadium oxides
  • Manganese oxides
  • Rare earth perchlorate-chloride

Negative electrodes

  • Nickel
  • Zinc
  • Manganese — the new highest energy electrode

I’ll put instructions for making these batteries into a book on the web.

About Craig Carmichael:

Craig Carmichael is one of Canada’s most experienced inventors, since 2008 tackling several renewable energy, energy storage and electric transport projects concurrently.

I’m sometimes a researcher. I’ve been studying worlds of our solar system whenever data becomes available with special interest in the moons — and planets bigger than Mercury — that orbit Jupiter and Saturn. I have followed Galileo, Huygens and Cassini missions with great attention and have come to see what I feel is the ‘big picture’ of the surface of Titan and several other worlds, avoiding errors of narrow and uncorrelated interpretation of data that space scientists have fallen victim to.

2012 IdeaWave