During a recent trip to Japan, Michel Armand, a professor
in the Chemistry Department at Université de Montréal,
got behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius. This hybrid car
is a big hit in the land of the Rising Sun. Up to a speed
of 30 km/h, it is propelled solely by electricity, then
the gasoline engine takes over. When the car brakes the
recovered energy serves to recharge the battery, so the
system can run for several years; its gas consumption,
meanwhile, is cut in half. Since cars pollute at low speeds,
this car works wonders by reducing carbon monoxide emissions
in big cities,” says the renowned researcher who
helped develop the battery under the hood of the Prius.
A big supporter of environmentalism, the director of the
only Canadian laboratory of the Centre national de la recherche
scientifique (France), and holder of the Hydro Québec
chair for electrochemistry, has dedicated his career to
energy storage. He describes himself as a big fan of basic
research, but this hasn't stopped him from putting his
name on more than 80 patents for inventions. Lately, another
one of his inventions, the iron-lithium phosphate battery,
completed a world tour. “In my opinion, the development
of energy storage technology is comparable to the invention
of the transistor in the electronics industry. Since the
battery was invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800, it has
taken almost 200 years to increase battery capacity by
a factor of five.”
Michel Armand and his colleague Michel Gauthier, a guest
Researcher at Université de Montréal, have
set up a company called Phostec to market this new technology,
which has been presented at several international congresses.
Because it is iron-based, the battery is safer, less expensive
and less polluting and than the currently used cobalt-based
battery. According to Mr. Gauthier, the discovery is a
major one in the western world. “The ecological battery
responds to a need in the portable electricity sector,
an industry that is key to the future. “ Portable
computers, vehicles and communication systems could benefit
from this sort of innovation. If the process proves to
be as effective as the laboratory tests suggest, we will
have to get ready to supply the entire world market with
lithium batteries, a market representing 10 billion euros
a year. “When Michel Armand told me that a physicist
in Texas, John Goodenough, had found a material capable
of improving electricity storage that met our ecological
criteria, I felt a chill run down my spine,” Mr.
Gauthier tells us. But they were still a long way from
a working model. A way had to be found to increase the
capacity of the electrode. The researchers acquired the
rights from the Texas physicist before conducting experiments.
The breakthrough occurred when they got the idea to cover
the electrode with a layer of carbon.
Researcher: Michel Armand
Telephone: (514) 343-7604
Email: michel.armand@umontreal.ca
Funding: Hydro-Québec, Centre national de la recherche
scientifique (France)
