STOCKHOLM (AP): The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to 3 scientists for the development of lithium-ion batteries.
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The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced Wednesday, a day after the Physics award was given to a Canadian-American cosmologist and two Swiss scientists.
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They created a rechargeable world
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Statement from Nobel: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 rewards the development of the lithium-ion battery.
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This lightweight, rechargeable and powerful battery is now used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles.
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It can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power — making possible a fossil fuel-free society.
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Lithium-ion batteries are used globally to power the portable electronics that we use to communicate, work, study, listen to music and search for knowledge.
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Lithium-ion batteries have also enabled the development of long-range electric cars and the storage of energy from renewable sources, such as solar and wind power.
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The foundation of the lithium-ion battery was laid during the oil crisis in the 1970s.
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Stanley Whittingham
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Stanley Whittingham worked on developing methods that could lead to fossil fuel-free energy technologies.
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He started to research superconductors and discovered an extremely energy-rich material, which he used to create an innovative cathode in a lithium battery.
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This was made from titanium disulphide which, at a molecular level, has spaces that can house – intercalate – lithium ions.
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The battery’s anode was partially made from metallic lithium, which has a strong drive to release electrons. This resulted in a battery that literally had great potential, just over two volts.
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However, metallic lithium is reactive and the battery was too explosive to be viable.
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John B. Goodenough
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John Goodenough predicted that the cathode would have even greater potential if it was made using a metal oxide instead of a metal sulphide.
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After a systematic search, in 1980 he demonstrated that cobalt oxide with intercalated lithium ions can produce as much as four volts. This was an important breakthrough and would lead to much more powerful batteries.
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Akira Yoshino
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With Goodenough’s cathode as a basis, Akira Yoshino created the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery in 1985. Rather than using reactive lithium in the anode, he used petroleum coke, a carbon material that, like the cathode’s cobalt oxide, can intercalate lithium ions.
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The result was a lightweight, hardwearing battery that could be charged hundreds of times before its performance deteriorated. The advantage of lithium-ion batteries is that they are not based upon chemical reactions that break down the electrodes, but upon lithium ions flowing back and forth between the anode and cathode.
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Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionised our lives since they first entered the market in 1991. They have laid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society, and are of the greatest benefit to humankind.
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Other Nobel winners
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On Monday, the award for Physiology or Medicine went to two Americans and one British scientist. And on Thursday come two literature laureates, while the coveted Nobel Peace Prize is Friday and the economics award on Monday.
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The 2018 literature prize was suspended after a scandal rocked the Swedish Academy. The body plans to award it this year, along with announcing the 2019 laureate.
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In other Nobel awards this year, Canadian-born James Peebles, 84, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, on Tuesday won the Physics Prize for his theoretical discoveries in cosmology together with Swiss scientists Michel Mayor, 77, and Didier Queloz, 53, both of the University of Geneva.
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The latter were honored for finding an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — that orbits a solar-type star, the Nobel committee said.
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On Monday, two Americans and one British scientist — Drs. William G. Kaelin Jr. of Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University and Peter J. Ratcliffe at the Francis Crick Institute in Britain and Oxford University — won the prize for advances in physiology or medicine. They were cited for their discoveries of “how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”
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With the glory comes a 9-million kronor ($918,000) cash award, a gold medal and a diploma. The laureates receive them at an elegant ceremony on Dec. 10 – the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896 – in Stockholm and in Oslo, Norway.
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Prize founder Alfred Nobel – a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite – decided the physics, chemistry, medicine and literature prizes should be awarded in Stockholm, and the peace prize in Oslo. His exact reasons for having an institution in Norway handing out the peace prize is unclear, but during his lifetime Sweden and Norway were joined in a union, which was dissolved in 1905.
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The economics prize – officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – wasn’t created by Nobel, but by Riksbanken, Sweden’s central bank, in 1968. It is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that was tasked with selecting the winner.
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