With colleagues from the CSIR battery department , involved in the early research of Zebra and lithium batteries, while receiving the International Battery Association Yeager Award. Courtesy of Dominique Guyomard. Recognizing the cost and stability advantages of manganese over cobalt and nickel oxide electrodes, the CSIR team adopted strategies to engineer and patent new lithium insertion materials, which included manganese oxide electrodes with one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional pathways for lithium-ion transport; they were successful on all three counts, designing and evaluating lithia-stabilized alpha-MnO2, lithia-stabilized layered-MnO2 and lithia-stabilized spinel-MnO2 electrode materials, respectively.
While in South Africa, Thackeray was presented with several awards for his research contributions. In , he was awarded a Silver Medal from the South African Institute of Physics for significant achievements for a scientist under the age of 35 for his seminal work on spinel electrodes. In , he received the CSIR Outstanding Achiever Award and three years later the International Battery Association Research Award for significant contributions to the development and understanding of manganese oxides and vanadium oxides.
Other awards followed. In , despite the success of the lithium battery research being conducted, CSIR, decided to cut its further funding, ostensibly because there was no industry in South Africa to capitalize on the technology. Here chance, or good fortune, intervened. Thackeray, sensing a bright future for lithium battery technology and recognizing an excellent opportunity, accepted.
He and his family packed their bags and left South Africa for Chicago in January Argonne, With colleagues Khalil Amine left and Chris Johnson right.
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With Christopher Johnson and others, he used the funding to continue his unfinished research of lithia-stabilized alpha-MnO2, spinel-MnO2, and layered-MnO2 electrode structures. The first generation Chevy Volt, in particular, uses a lithium-ion battery with a blend of the Argonne composite materials and stabilized LiMn2O4 spinel in the cathode.
In March , Thackeray received an invitation to meet George Bush, the US president, at the White House for discussions with eight others on his energy policy relating to lithium-ion batteries and bio-fuels. Also in attendance were Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary; Karl Rove, a former presidential senior adviser and deputy chief of staff; and Steven Chu, the future energy secretary in the Obama administration.
The rest has become history.
That conversation — albeit through a circuitous route and Thackeray was just one of the major players — ended in the most extensive US government funding for the research and commercialization of advanced batteries. Thackeray subsequently wrote a white paper for the White House outlining a strategy to address the needs for lithium-ion battery technology. Thackeray remains a distinguished fellow and senior scientist at Argonne. To date, he has published more than scientific papers and is an inventor on 50 patents, several of which have been licensed on an international scale or sold to industry.
Thackeray, now 65, believes that there is still much more to be done by the next generation of chemists, physicists, materials scientists, theoreticians and engineers to push the envelope of battery science and technology in an interdisciplinary manner even further. This century will be about harnessing clean energy, a matter that is of growing environmental, economical and strategic importance for the future of the planet and humankind.
Michael Thackeray. Home Battery Heroes Michael Thackeray.
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En route it runs on the same railway on which a noted British foreign correspondent in the Anglo-Boer War made good his escape from Boer captivity, hidden in a freight train. Namely Winston Churchill. This is no high-class, high-speed service. It is a cheap and cheerful day trip on vintage coaches, operated by men playing with a train set as big as their boyhood dreams. So he and a friend flew to Nairobi and hitchhiked around Africa, riding every steam train they could find, until eventually they joined South African Railways and became drivers.
For the past 10 years Peter has been an unpaid volunteer with Friends of the Rail FOR , a club of railway enthusiasts who restore and operate steam trains for the fun of it. There is room to spread out and stroll to a buffet lounge car decorated with historic railway photographs, where pancakes, hot dogs and drinks are dispensed. We leave the industrial suburbs of Pretoria behind and trundle past the sea of corrugated iron shacks that is Mamelodi township, a vibrant kaleidoscope of African life.
Our train is an express in name only. It rarely attains the heady speed of 30mph, and for much of the time it proceeds at a more measured pace that allows barefoot urchins to run alongside on dusty tracks, cheering and waving, and inquiring whether we might have some sweets to spare.
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There is room to spread out and stroll to a buffet lounge car decorated with historic railway photographs, where pancakes, hot dogs and drinks are dispensed. We leave the industrial suburbs of Pretoria behind and trundle past the sea of corrugated iron shacks that is Mamelodi township, a vibrant kaleidoscope of African life.
Our train is an express in name only. It rarely attains the heady speed of 30mph, and for much of the time it proceeds at a more measured pace that allows barefoot urchins to run alongside on dusty tracks, cheering and waving, and inquiring whether we might have some sweets to spare.
People like steam trains. Even motorists held up at railway crossings grin and give us thumbs-up signs. Approaching Cullinan, the endless vistas of South Africa open up, of grasslands and woods and hazy hills on far horizons, bringing scents of the veld, of hot grass, blue gum trees and dry, red earth. The big attraction in the town is a hole in the ground.
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It is a very big hole, more than half a mile long and 1,ft deep, that looks like the impact of a meteor strike. The first two cuts from this gigantic gem now adorn the Crown and Imperial Sceptre in the Tower of London.