Re: Battery hacks
Interestingly, this page http://ma.ecsdl.org/content/MA2012-02/8/664.full.pdf details just such a beast.
They are using liquid metal ie indium/calcium alloy electrodes to get around many of the passivation problems, so if the price of indium were to drop or another metal were substituted for indium such as sodium (liquid at high temperature) it should still work.
For certain uses a battery whose electrodes freeze at 5 Celsius wouldn't be a big problem, such as e-bikes where a few minutes use will warm them up nicely.
Worth a look, as copper PCB feedstock could be used as the base plates.
Also viable is to plate a transition layer onto a sheet of glass ie ITO, then vacuum deposit silver or copper over that so all those otherwise useless sheets of glass from broken flat screens could be recycled.
Also worth mentioning is that controllers have moved on a lot since 2012, the advent of single chip 16 pin FPGAs means very complex algorithms can be used to overcome nonlinearity with temperature and charge state and pressure feedback via BMP085 etc.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
