About Cabling Installation & Maintenance

Our mission: Bringing practical business and technical intelligence to today's structured cabling professionals

For more than 30 years, Cabling Installation & Maintenance has provided useful, practical information to professionals responsible for the specification, design, installation and management of structured cabling systems serving enterprise, data center and other environments. These professionals are challenged to stay informed of constantly evolving standards, system-design and installation approaches, product and system capabilities, technologies, as well as applications that rely on high-performance structured cabling systems. Our editors synthesize these complex issues into multiple information products. This portfolio of information products provides concrete detail that improves the efficiency of day-to-day operations, and equips cabling professionals with the perspective that enables strategic planning for networks’ optimum long-term performance.

Throughout our annual magazine, weekly email newsletters and 24/7/365 website, Cabling Installation & Maintenance digs into the essential topics our audience focuses on.

  • Design, Installation and Testing: We explain the bottom-up design of cabling systems, from case histories of actual projects to solutions for specific problems or aspects of the design process. We also look at specific installations using a case-history approach to highlight challenging problems, solutions and unique features. Additionally, we examine evolving test-and-measurement technologies and techniques designed to address the standards-governed and practical-use performance requirements of cabling systems.
  • Technology: We evaluate product innovations and technology trends as they impact a particular product class through interviews with manufacturers, installers and users, as well as contributed articles from subject-matter experts.
  • Data Center: Cabling Installation & Maintenance takes an in-depth look at design and installation workmanship issues as well as the unique technology being deployed specifically for data centers.
  • Physical Security: Focusing on the areas in which security and IT—and the infrastructure for both—interlock and overlap, we pay specific attention to Internet Protocol’s influence over the development of security applications.
  • Standards: Tracking the activities of North American and international standards-making organizations, we provide updates on specifications that are in-progress, looking forward to how they will affect cabling-system design and installation. We also produce articles explaining the practical aspects of designing and installing cabling systems in accordance with the specifications of established standards.

Cabling Installation & Maintenance is published by Endeavor Business Media, a division of EndeavorB2B.

Contact Cabling Installation & Maintenance

Editorial

Patrick McLaughlin

Serena Aburahma

Advertising and Sponsorship Sales

Peter Fretty - Vice President, Market Leader

Tim Carli - Business Development Manager

Brayden Hudspeth - Sales Development Representative

Subscriptions and Memberships

Subscribe to our newsletters and manage your subscriptions

Feedback/Problems

Send a message to our general in-box

 

Spinoff From Argonne-led Innovation Hub Opens New Frontier for Batteries

Research by the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) has enabled spinoff company Blue Current to develop a safe, solid-state battery that is ready for megawatt-scale manufacturing. JCESR is an Energy Innovation Hub led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. An arm of Koch Industries has invested $30 million in Blue Current to build its first pilot factory in Hayward, California. Blue Current’s target market is electric vehicles.

Solid-state batteries, which contain solid electrolytes, are much less flammable than liquid batteries, potentially making them safer. But solid electrolytes face technical challenges.

A crystalline class of solids known as glass ceramics have good conductivity. But they lack the ability to stick to the chemically active materials in battery electrodes that store lithium ions. Another class of materials known as polymers is effective at sticking to electrodes. But they have low conductivity.

In 2015, as part of JCESR-sponsored research, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addressed the shortcomings of glass ceramics and polymers by bonding them together. The resulting composite solid electrolyte demonstrated good conductivity and good stickiness. Inspired by the composite’s potential, Blue Current developed it further.

Since then, the company has refined its components and addressed technical challenges common with solid-state batteries. For example, to help solid electrolytes stick to electrodes, some companies add heavy metal plates and bolts that put battery cells under high pressure. These fixtures increase manufacturing costs. Blue Current’s composite can maintain good contact with electrodes without the use of plates.

As part of rigorous safety testing, the company subjected its cells to harsh conditions that electric vehicles could encounter in the real world. Thermal runaway—an overheating event that can lead to fires—never occurred.

“JCESR creates and proves the ideas that eventually go commercial,” said George Crabtree, JCESR’s director and an Argonne senior scientist. “These are the riskier ideas that no investors would fund—and that companies are unlikely to pursue—because the outcome is so uncertain.”

“The idea of using composites in batteries was new and unproven prior to the JCESR program,” said Kevin Wujcik, Blue Current’s Chief Technology Officer. “JCESR put resources behind composites because the materials had potential to address a market need for safe, solid-state batteries while solving important technical challenges.”

JCESR's science has also enabled the success of two other startups: Sepion Technologies and Form Energy.

Contacts

Christopher J. Kramer

Head of Media Relations

Argonne National Laboratory

media@anl.gov

Office: 630.252.5580

Stock Quote API & Stock News API supplied by www.cloudquote.io
Quotes delayed at least 20 minutes.
By accessing this page, you agree to the following
Privacy Policy and Terms Of Service.