Archive : 17 April 2015 год

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago say they have taken a significant step toward the development of a battery technology that could outperform lithium-ion technology.

According to the team, lithium ions – which carry a single positive charge can be replaced with magnesium ions, which have a plus two charge.

"Because magnesium ions carry two positive charges, every time we introduce a magnesium ion in the structure of the battery material, we can move twice as many electrons," says Jordi Cabana, pictured, assistant professor of chemistry and principal investigator.

"We hope that this work will open a credible design path for a new class of high voltage, high energy batteries," he added.

Every battery consists of a positive and negative electrode, which exchange ions through an electrolyte and electrons through an external circuit which provides power.

Cabana said: "We want to maximise the number of electrons moved per ion, because ions distort the structure of the electrode material when they go in or leave. The more the structure is distorted, the greater the energy cost of moving the ions back, the harder it becomes to recharge the battery."

Having established that magnesium can be inserted reversibly into electrode material's structure is said to move the work one step closer to a prototype. "It's not a battery yet," said Cabana, "it's piece of a battery, but with the same reaction you would find in the final device."

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Looking to take advantage of the rapidly growing demand for industrial networking spawned by IoT applications, Microchip has launched the LAN9252, a standalone EtherCAT slave controller featuring two 10/100 PHYs. 

Looking to take advantage of the rapidly growing demand for industrial networking spawned by IoT applications, Microchip has launched the LAN9252, a standalone EtherCAT slave controller featuring two 10/100 PHYs.

Supporting fibre and copper based communications, along with cable diagnostics capabilities, the LAN9252 features traditional Host Bus and SPI/SQI communication, along with standalone digital I/O interfaces. This, says the company, provides system designers with the flexibility to select from a wide range of microcontrollers when implementing EtherCAT based communications. The device is also said to reduce system complexity and cost for those developing factory automation, process control, motor/motion control and IoT applications based on Ethernet.

The part boasts 4kbyte of dual port RAM and three Fieldbus Memory Management Units. It also features cable diagnostics support that allows rapid diagnosis of line faults.

This controller is available in commercial, industrial and extended industrial temperature ranges and in a choice of QFN and QFP-EP packages.

The launch of the LAN9252 is supported by two evaluation boards and a software development kit.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk