The mechanical flexibility of a cable‐type battery reaches levels far beyond what is possible with conventional designs. The hollow‐spiral (helical) multi‐helix anode architecture is critical to the robustness under mechanical stress and facilitates electrolyte wetting of the battery components. This design enables the battery to reliably power an LED screen or an MP3 player even under severe mechanical twisting and bending.

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The solidified carbide morphology, the decomposition behavior of the M 2 C carbide, and the carbide distribution after forging of an Fe-1.28C-6.4W-5.0Mo-3.1V-4.1Cr-7.9Co (wt pct) high-speed steel prepared by spray forming have been investigated. The spray-formed microstructure has been characterized as a discontinuous network of plate-shaped M 2 C carbides and a uniform distribution of fine, spherical MC carbides. The metastable M 2 C carbides formed during solidification have been fully decomposed into MC and M 6 C carbides after sufficient annealing at high temperatures. Initially, the M 6 C carbides nucleate at M 2 C/austenite interfaces and proceed to grow. In the second stage, the MC carbides form either inside the M 6 C carbides or at the interfaces between M 6 C carbides. With this increasing degree of decomposition of the M 2 C carbide, the carbides become more uniformly distributed through hot forging, which produces a significant increase in ultimate bend strength. The decomposition treatment of M 2 C carbide has been found to be most important for obtaining a fine homogeneous carbide distribution after hot forging.

It is a common observation that when ionic liquids are added to electrolytes the performances of lithium ion cells become poor, while the thermal safeties of the electrolytes might be improved. In this study, this behavior is investigated based on the kinetics of ionic diffusion. As a model ionic liquid, we chose butyldimethylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate (BDMIPF(6)). The common solvent was propylene carbonate (PC), and lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF(6)) was selected as the lithium conducting salt. Ionic diffusion coefficients are estimated by using a pulsed field gradient NMR technique. From a basic study on the model electrolytes (BDMIPF(6) in PC, LiPF(6) in PC, and BDMIPF(6) + LiPF(6) in PC), it was found that the BDMI(+) from BDMIPF(6) shows larger diffusion coefficients than the Li(+) from LiPF(6). However, the anionic (PF(6)(-)) diffusion coefficients present little difference between the model electrolytes. The higher diffusion coefficient of BDMI(+) than that of Li(+) suggests that the poor C-rate performance of lithium ion cells containing ionic liquids as an electrolyte component can be attributed to the two-cation competition between Li(+) and BDMI(+).

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The objective of this study is to investigate the correlation of microstructure with wear resistance and fracture toughness in duocast materials that consisted of a high-chromium white cast iron and a low-chromium steel as the wear-resistant and ductile parts, respectively. Different shapes, sizes, volume fractions, and distributions of M 7 C 3 carbides were employed in the wear-resistant part by changing the amount of chromium and molybdenum. In the alloys containing a large amount of chromium, a number of large hexagonal-shaped primary carbides and fine eutectic carbides were formed. These large primary carbides were so hard and brittle that they easily fractured or fell off from the matrix, thereby deteriorating the wear resistance and fracture toughness. In the alloys containing a smaller amount of chromium, however, a network structure of eutectic carbides having a lower hardness than the primary carbides was developed well along solidification cell boundaries and led to the improvement of both wear resistance and toughness. The addition of molybdenum also helped enhance the wear resistance by forming additional M 2 C carbides without losing the fracture toughness. Under the duocasting conditions used in the present study, the appropriate compositions for wear resistance and fracture toughness were 17 to 18 pct chromium and 2 to 3 pct molybdenum.