Well it seems as if 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company) was just recently granted a new patent on a silicon based anode. I do not know if this is similar to Envia's anode or not. Perhaps Atul Kapadia will comment on this story and tell us if it is or not.
Like I said at the outset, 3M has just been granted a patent for an anode which uses Silicon in its construction. A rather good story on Envia's success can be found here. And a story about 3M's latest venture can be found here. And in the later story you can see that the Silicon is touted to improve the cell capacity of batteries by forty percent (Lithium ion batteries that is)!
And needless to say I first talked about the fact that silicon could be used in the future in batteries. And my original story which touted the possibility of silicon based batteries can be found here.
But the one question I have for Mr Kapadia is whether or not this was his company's novel anode design? Beyond that I would like to know if now that we have two of the largest corporations in the game can we expect more breakthroughs to happen at a quicker pace or not?
Well I have since reviewed the actual patent application. And it seems to me that we've had this technology since bak in the 90's. There is like a whole page of patent updates to the original patent. So my question now becomes this: since there have been patents dating back almost 20 years, why has someone not developed this technology?
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