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Recycling spent lithium-ion batteries plays a significant role in alleviating the shorting of raw materials and environmental problems. However, recycled materials are deemed inferior to commercial materials, preventing the industry from adopting recycled materials in new batteries.

Now, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts have demonstrated that the recycled materials from used lithium-ion batteries can outperform new commercial materials, making the recycled materials a potentially green and profitable resource for battery producers. Led by Yan Wang, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, the team of researchers used physical tests, imaging, and computer simulations to compare new cathode materials recovered from old electric vehicle batteries through a recycling process, which is being commercialized by Battery Resourcers Inc. of Worcester.

The technology involved shredding batteries and removing the steel cases, aluminum and copper wires, plastics, and pouch materials for recycling. Researchers then dissolved the metals from those battery bits in an acidic solution. They by tweaking the solution’s pH, the team removed impurities such as iron and copper and recovered over 90% of three key metals – nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The recovered metals formed the basis for the team’s cathode material.

The soot produced by unburnt hydrocarbon flames is the second largest contributor to global warming, while also harming human health. Researchers have developed state-of-the-art, high-speed imaging techniques to study turbulent flames, yet they are limited to an imaging rate of million-frames-per-second. Physicists are therefore keen to obtain a complete picture of flame-laser interactions via single-pulse imaging.

In a new report published in Light: Science & Applications, Yogeshwar Nath Mishra and a research team at the Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, the NASA Jet propulsion lab, department of physics, and the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics in the U.S., and Germany, used single-shot laser-sheet comprised ultrafast photography per billion frames per second, for the first time, to observe the dynamics of laser-flames.

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Tesla held Investor Day 2023 this week and announced the construction of a new plant in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. The new facility will be Tesla’s largest production facility.

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Elon Musk’s company will invest $5 billion to build the Mexican plant and create 5,000–6,000 jobs. Over time, however, the amount of investment and the number of jobs will double.

MANUFACTURA’s eggshell project transforms organic waste into a sustainable building material made from 3D printed eggshells.

As fusion developers around the world race to commercialize fusion energy, TAE Technologies has pioneered the pursuit of the cleanest and most economical path to providing electricity with hydrogen-boron (also known as p-B¹¹ or p¹¹ B), an abundant, environmentally sound fuel. Today the company is announcing, in collaboration with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), a noteworthy research advancement: the first-ever hydrogen-boron fusion experiments in a magnetically confined fusion plasma.

In a paper published by Nature Communications, scientists explain the outcome of the nuclear fusion reaction of hydrogen-boron in an experiment in NIFS’ Large Helical Device (LHD). This paper describes the experimental work of producing the conditions necessary for hydrogen-boron fusion in the LHD plasma and TAE’s development of a detector to make measurements of the hydrogen-boron reaction products: helium nuclei, known as alpha particles.

The finding reflects years of collaborative international scientific fusion research, and represents a milestone in TAE’s mission to develop commercial fusion power with hydrogen-boron, the cleanest, most cost-competitive, and most sustainable fuel cycle for fusion.

The company also showcased other executives, which could alleviate concern that Musk has been too distracted by his other business ventures. They also talked about “meat and potato” topics like cutting costs, improving margins, and EV-charging infrastructure.

The keys to winning the EV race will come down to product appeal, software or user interface, controlling cost, and consistent execution, he said.

“And Tesla right now is one generation ahead of the other automakers,” Fields said, though rivals like Ford and Hyundai are making a lot of progress. “Tesla still has the leg-up on the competition, and I think they demonstrated that yesterday.”

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“You could sort of see a home use for robots, certainly industrial uses for robots, humanoid robots,” he said.

Musk’s musings about AI came during Tesla’s first-ever Investor Day presentation, which was held at the carmaker’s Austin, Texas, Gigafactory.

During the presentation, Musk showed an updated video of the company’s “Optimus” robot prototype, which Musk said he aims to use in Tesla factories and sell to the public.

The photo showed the rear end of a red Tesla Model S parked in a home garage. A rather large Tesla home charger could be seen on a wall, but it did not seem to be plugged into the all-electric flagship sedan directly at all. Instead, the Model S was parked over what looked like a wireless charging pad. This promptly fueled speculations that Tesla may be looking to roll out a wireless charging system, at least for residential customers, in the future.

A wireless charging system for Teslas would be nothing short of a game-changer. The company’s Supercharger Network already changed the game thanks to its ease of use and convenience. But even manually plugging in a Tesla to a charger is less convenient than just parking over a charging pad. Of course, there are some notable disadvantages to wireless charging, such as slower charging speeds. But if Tesla can figure out a way to roll out a wireless charging system with at least a decent charging rate, the company’s vehicles would likely become even more attractive to consumers.