Edited and compressed frfom the New York Times:
John B. Goodenough, Oldest Nobel-Prize Winner, Cr eator of the Lithium-Ion Battery, dies at age 100, Sunday, June 26th.. He won the prize in 2019 at age 97. Dr. Goodenough was relatively unknown until he won the prize. In 1980 at the University of Oxford, where he created the battery that is powering smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, lifesaving medical devices, and plug-in vehicles, including Teslas. The powerful, lightweight, rechargeable lithium-ion battery was developed by the efforts of scientists, lab technicians and commercial interests over decades, but Dr. Goodenough’s contribution is regarded as the crucial link in its development, a combination of molecular chemistry, physics and engineering.
In 2019, He shared the $900,000 Nobel Prize award with two others who made major contributions to the battery’s development: M. Stanley Whittingham, a professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Akira Yoshino, an honorary fellow for the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan.
Dr. Goodenough received no royalties for his battery work, only a salary for six decades as a scientist and professor at the MIT, Oxford, and the University of Texas. Austin. He shared patents with colleagues and donated stipends that came with his awards to research and scholarships.
Before his passing, he was working on a superbattery that he said might someday store and transport wind, solar and nuclear energy, transforming the national electric grid and optimizing electric cars, with far greater travel ranges and recharging in minutes.
An Episcopalian, Dr. Goodenough a tapestry of the Last Supper was on the wall of his laboratory, with the Apostles in fervent conversation, like scientists in discussion, to him, a reminder of a divine power that had propelled him from a life that had begun with little promise to success vbeyond his dreams.
He hyad written in a memoir that he was the unwanted child of an agnostic Yale University professor of religion and a mother with whom he never bonded, lonely and dyslexic in an emotionally distant household. At 12 he was sent to a boarding school and rarely heard from his parents.
With patience, counseling and intense struggles for self-improvement, he studied Latin and Greek at Groton, Mathematics at Yale, Meteorology in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and physics under Clarence Zener, Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in 1952.
At M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s and ’60s, he helped develop random-access memory (RAM) in computers and plans for the USA’s first air defense system. In 1976, he moved to Oxford to teach and manage a chemistry lab, leading to the battery invention.
The first true battery was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, disks of copper and zinc and linked with a cloth soaked in salty water. With wires connected to discs on both ends, the battery produced a stable current. Early car batteries were mostly lead-acid and bulky, capable of running ignitions and accessories, like lights, but not powerful enough to drive engines. Consumer electronics used zinc-carbon or nickel-cadmium batteries.
Exxon patented a battery by British Chemist, Dr. Whittingham, for the first rechargeable Lithium battery, using Lithium for its negative electrode, and Titanium Disulfide for its positive electrode. It worked at room temperature. but was impractical, since if overcharged or repeatedly recharged, it caught fire or exploded.
Seeking to improve on the design, Dr. Goodenough also used lithium ions but with two postdoctoral assistants, used a cathode with layers of lithium and cobalt oxide, creating pockets for the lithium ions. The arrangement also produced a higher voltage and made the battery far less volatile.
“It was the first lithium-ion cathode with the capacity, when installed in a battery, to power both compact and relatively large devices, a quality that would make it far superior to anything on the market,” Steve LeVine wrote in “The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World” (2015).
Tried editing a 2nd time and the update button isn't working for me
at the moment
John Goodenough was one of the great treasures at UT.
I believe the 'superbattery' mentioned is the construction using Braga's glass electrolyte, which permits the anode to be metallic lithium (the direction of electron flow appearing to preclude dendrite formation from metallic lithium).
Keep in mind that Goodenough is responsible not only for intercalated LiCoO2, but for LiMn2O4 and LiFePO4. If anyone had a leg up on a suitable cathode construction, it would either be he or someone known to him...
I still think sodium/sulfur with multiple shields and nanoinsulation, using appropriate NaK for both process heating and cooling, is going to be a major 'player' in dedicated batteries for locomotive propulsion. But RPS (among others) thinks a major part of the 'solution' involves rebuilt BEV cells and assemblies, and a suitable cathode is apparently the only bar to much better low-temperature-tolerant high-energy-density frequently-reversible chemical storage.
The initial poosting has been repaired. Thanks for your patience, And apokloigies.
Now all that has to be done is to keep them from exploding and setting fire to the surrounding areas.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.