PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Researchers seek longer battery life for electric locomotive

Researchers seek longer battery life for electric locomotive
2013-01-04
(Press-News.org) UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Norfolk Southern Railway No. 999 is the first all-electric, battery-powered locomotive in the United States. But when one of the thousand lead-acid batteries that power it dies, the locomotive shuts down. To combat this problem, a team of Penn State researchers is developing more cost-effective ways to prolong battery life.

The experimental locomotive's batteries, just like automotive batteries, are rechargeable until they eventually die. A leading cause of damage and death in lead-acid batteries is sulfation, a degradation of the battery caused by frequent charging and discharging that creates an accumulation of lead sulfate.

In a recent study, the researchers looked for ways to improve regular battery management practices. The methods had to be nondestructive, simple and cheap -- using as few sensors, electronics and supporting hardware as possible while still remaining effective at identifying and decreasing sulfation.

"We wanted to reverse the sulfation to rejuvenate the battery and bring it back to life," said Christopher Rahn, professor of mechanical engineering.

Rahn, along with mechanical engineering research assistants Ying Shi and Christopher Ferone, cycled a lead-acid battery for three months in the same way it would be used in a locomotive. They used a process called electroimpedance spectroscopy and full charge/discharge to identify the main aging mechanisms. Through this, the researchers identified sulfation in one of the six battery cells. They then designed a charging algorithm that could charge the battery and reduce sulfation, but was also able to stop charging before other forms of degradation occurred. The algorithm successfully revived the dead cell and increased the overall capacity. The researchers, who report their results in the current issue of the Journal of Power Sources, then compared the battery to a new battery.

"We desulfated it, and we increased its capacity," said Rahn. "We didn't increase it all the way to brand new. We weren't able to do that, but we did get a big boost."

The researchers increased the cell capacity by 41 percent and the overall battery capacity by 30 percent. Even better results might have occurred if sulfation were the only aging mechanism at play, but the researchers found other factors reduced capacity, as well.

"Some of the other cells we identified may have had a water loss issue," said Rahn. "And for these types of batteries, there's nothing you can do about it."

Other mechanisms that can damage lead-acid batteries include positive electrode corrosion, irreversible hard sulfation, positive electrode softening or shedding, electrolyte stratification, internal short-circuiting and mechanical damage.

The researchers are now developing alternative models to replace the electroimpedance spectroscopy model that would allow charging right up to, but not past, sulfation in batteries where sulfation is not yet present, hoping to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

"You would charge as fast as you can and right when you see gassing starting to happen, you ramp down and reduce the current charging," said Rahn. "It's still related to degradation, but it's not really a rejuvenation project anymore."



INFORMATION:



Penn State and Norfolk Southern, which operates 21,000 route-miles in 22 states, began developing locomotive No. 999 in 2008 to evaluate the application of battery technologies for railroad motive power, with particular interest in energy savings and emissions reduction.

The U.S. Department of Energy funded this most recent study.

**js**


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Researchers seek longer battery life for electric locomotive

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Outsourced radiologists perform better reading for fewer hospitals

2013-01-04
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Experience working for a particular hospital matters when it comes to the performance of radiologists who work for outsourcing teleradiology companies, according to a team of researchers, whose finding could have important implications, given the growing use of telemedicine. "More than half of all hospitals now use teleradiology services," said Jonathan Clark, assistant professor of health policy and administration, Penn State. "Hospitals send their X-rays, CT scans, MRIs and other images to outsourcing companies who then forward the images to ...

Scripps physicians call for change in cancer tissue handling

2013-01-04
SAN DIEGO – Genetic sequencing technology is altering the way cancer is diagnosed and treated, but traditional specimen handling methods threaten to slow that progress. That's the message delivered this week in a column appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by Scripps Clinic physicians Eric Topol, Kelly Bethel and Laura Goetz. Dr. Topol is a cardiologist who serves as chief academic officer of Scripps Health and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI), leading Scripps' genomic medicine research efforts. Dr. Bethel ...

Research update: Jumping droplets help heat transfer

2013-01-04
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Many industrial plants depend on water vapor condensing on metal plates: In power plants, the resulting water is then returned to a boiler to be vaporized again; in desalination plants, it yields a supply of clean water. The efficiency of such plants depends crucially on how easily droplets of water can form on these metal plates, or condensers, and how easily they fall away, leaving room for more droplets to form. The key to improving the efficiency of such plants is to increase the condensers' heat-transfer coefficient — a measure of how readily heat ...

Your brain on Big Bird

Your brain on Big Bird
2013-01-04
Using brain scans of children and adults watching Sesame Street, cognitive scientists are learning how children's brains change as they develop intellectual abilities like reading and math. The novel use of brain imaging during everyday activities like watching TV, say the scientists, opens the door to studying other thought processes in naturalistic settings and may one day help to diagnose and treat learning disabilities. Scientists are just beginning to use brain imaging to understand how humans process thought during real-life experiences. For example, researchers ...

Study reveals new survival strategy for bacteria exposed to antibiotics

2013-01-04
Researchers have uncovered a new way that some bacteria survive when under siege by antibiotics. This survival mechanism is fundamentally different from other, known bacterial strategies. Understanding it may be useful for designing drugs that target hard-to-treat bacterial strains, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, an increasingly urgent public health problem. The study is based on Mycobacterium smegmatis, a cousin of the microbe that causes TB, and its response to the TB drug isoniazid. The research, by Yuichi Wakamoto of the University of Tokyo and Neeraj Dhar ...

Steroids that only nature could make on a large scale -- Until now

Steroids that only nature could make on a large scale -- Until now
2013-01-04
LA JOLLA, CA – January 3, 2013 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have achieved a feat in synthetic chemistry by inventing a scalable method to make complex natural compounds known as "polyhydroxylated steroids." These compounds, used in heart-failure medications and other drugs, have been notoriously problematic to synthesize in the laboratory. The researchers demonstrated the new strategy by synthesizing ouabagenin [wa-bah-jenn-in], a close chemical cousin of ouabain, which Somali tribes once used as a potent poison on the tips of their arrows but ...

Coral records suggest that recent El Nino activity rises above noisy background

Coral records suggest that recent El Nino activity rises above noisy background
2013-01-04
VIDEO: By studying a set of fossil corals that are as much as 7,000 years old, scientists have dramatically expanded the amount of information available on the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, a... Click here for more information. By examining a set of fossil corals that are as much as 7,000 years old, scientists have dramatically expanded the amount of information available on the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, a Pacific Ocean climate cycle that affects climate worldwide. The ...

Rethinking bacterial persistence

2013-01-04
It's often difficult to completely eliminate a bacterial infection with antibiotics; part of the population usually manages to survive. We've known about this phenomenon for quite some time, dating back nearly to the discovery of penicillin. For more than 50 years, scientists have believed that the resistant bacteria were individuals that had stopped growing and dividing. Up to now, in fact, it hasn't been possible to track the growth of cells before and after their exposure to antibiotics, which makes any analysis of the phenomenon quite imprecise. "Using microfluidics, ...

First meteorite linked to Martian crust

2013-01-04
Washington, D.C.—After extensive analyses by a team of scientists led by Carl Agee at the University of New Mexico, researchers have identified a new class of Martian meteorite that likely originated from the Mars's crust. It is also the only meteoritic sample dated to 2.1 billion years ago, the early era of the most recent geologic epoch on Mars, an epoch called the Amazonian. The meteorite was found to contain an order of magnitude more water than any other Martian meteorite. Researchers from the Carnegie Institution (Andrew Steele, Marilyn Fogel, Roxane Bowden, and Mihaela ...

Bering Sea study finds prey density more important to predators than biomass

Bering Sea study finds prey density more important to predators than biomass
2013-01-04
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Marine resource managers often gauge the health of species based on overall biomass, but a new study of predator-prey relationships in the Bering Sea found that it isn't the total number of individuals that predators care about – it's how densely they are aggregated. It's more than searching for an easy meal, the researchers say. Predators need to balance how much energy they expend in searching for food with the caloric and nutrient value of that which they consume. When prey doesn't aggregate, however, the search for food becomes much more difficult ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

A third of licensed GPs in England not working in NHS general practice

ChatGPT “thought on the fly” when put through Ancient Greek maths puzzle

Engineers uncover why tiny particles form clusters in turbulent air

GLP-1RA drugs dramatically reduce death and cardiovascular risk in psoriasis patients

Psoriasis linked to increased risk of vision-threatening eye disease, study finds

Reprogramming obesity: New drug from Italian biotech aims to treat the underlying causes of obesity

Type 2 diabetes may accelerate development of multiple chronic diseases, particularly in the early stages, UK Biobank study suggests

Resistance training may improve nerve health, slow aging process, study shows

Common and inexpensive medicine halves the risk of recurrence in patients with colorectal cancer

SwRI-built instruments to monitor, provide advanced warning of space weather events

Breakthrough advances sodium-based battery design

New targeted radiation therapy shows near-complete response in rare sarcoma patients

Does physical frailty contribute to dementia?

Soccer headers and brain health: Study finds changes within folds of the brain

Decoding plants’ language of light

UNC Greensboro study finds ticks carrying Lyme disease moving into western NC

New implant restores blood pressure balance after spinal cord injury

New York City's medical specialist advantage may be an illusion, new NYU Tandon research shows

Could a local anesthetic that doesn’t impair motor function be within reach?

1 in 8 Italian cetacean strandings show evidence of fishery interactions, with bottlenose and striped dolphins most commonly affected, according to analysis across four decades of data and more than 5

In the wild, chimpanzees likely ingest the equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day

Warming of 2°C intensifies Arctic carbon sink but weakens Alpine sink, study finds

Bronze and Iron Age cultures in the Middle East were committed to wine production

Indian adolescents are mostly starting their periods at an earlier age than 25 years ago

Temporary medical centers in Gaza known as "Medical Points" (MPs) treat an average of 117 people daily with only about 7 staff per MP

Rates of alcohol-induced deaths among the general population nearly doubled from 1999 to 2024

PLOS One study: In adolescent lab animals exposed to cocaine, High-Intensity Interval Training boosts aversion to the drug

Scientists identify four ways our bodies respond to COVID-19 vaccines

Stronger together: A new fusion protein boosts cancer immunotherapy

Hidden brain waves as triggers for post-seizure wandering

[Press-News.org] Researchers seek longer battery life for electric locomotive