5 ms·

Breakthrough: solid-state alkaline batteries a viable alternative to lithium-ion

100 points by WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

scythe 9y ago
>that can be recharged hundreds of times In the world of rechargeable batteries, "hundreds" of charges isn't very many. You could use that up in six months if you're a heavy user. In cars you want thousands of cycles, so the battery outlives the car (charging every day for 15 years = 5478 cycles), which prevents very costly replacements. So, it's cool, but by itself, not the breakthrough we're looking for.
- thinkcontext 9y ago
  Depends on how cheap it is. 400 cycles could be enough if the price was proportionally cheaper than the lifetime of lithium.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Big battery cars like the Bolt and Tesla do not need to fully cycle every day.
  - PhantomGremlin 9y ago
    Exactly right. 5478 cycles at 200 miles per is greater than 1,000,000 miles. Few people will put that many miles on a car. OTOH, given how there are fewer moving parts in EVs, there's certainly a better chance for an EV to make it the distance than for an IC car.
    - dade_ 9y ago
      Automated driving / assisted driving may also reduce the odds of a car being totalled. It will be interesting to see the stats.
    - chongli 9y ago
      Batteries don't maintain their maximum charge cycle to cycle. High cycle count batteries hold a fraction of the charge of new batteries. You may get 200 per cycle at the beginning but after a few hundred cycles that could drop down to 150. Depending on your daily commute, the car may become unusable long before the battery is completely exhausted.
      - Robotbeat 9y ago
        Usually the "cycle life" of a battery is when the capacity drops to 80% of new when fully discharged and recharged. You can extend the life of most lithium batteries dramatically by not charging all the way and not discharging all the way. Use the middle 50% of the battery's capacity for the vast majority of the cycles, and your battery may last 4 times as many cycles.
        chongli 9y ago
        But that means your 200 mile battery is now a 100 mile battery from day one. If your daily commute is 150 miles, that means you need to carry the weight of a 300 mile battery. With all the extra expense of moving the additional weight plus the extra initial cost of the larger battery, are you really further ahead?
        kwhitefoot 9y ago
        If your daily commute is 150 miles perhaps you are living or working in the wrong place. :-) Of course if you have access to electricity at your workplace you only need 75 miles anyway. A Hyundai Ioniq charging from a normal 230V 16A circuit charges fully in about 8 hours giving you about 150 miles. But 75 miles to get there means it will be only half empty when you arrive so it will only take 4 hours. The real challenges with electric cars now for the near and medium future are infrastructure not range. There is a project starting, in the UK I think, to turn lamp posts in to charging stations. One could imagine a scenario where companies used the availability of charging stations in company car parks as incentives to work there.
- slight 9y ago
  In racing and acro drones on the other hand you're lucky if the lipo hasn't puffed or burst into flames after 20 cycles! edit: typo
mrob 9y ago
>Ionic can help us get lithium-ion past cobalt and completely eliminate it with alkaline There are already lithium-ion chemistries that don't use cobalt, eg. lithium iron phosphate[0]. This has lower energy density than lithium cobalt oxide, but it's safer and survives more charge cycles. It's already commercially available. Solid-state alkaline might be able to beat it on cost, but it's a long way from commercial availability and lithium ion technologies keep improving, so that's far from certain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate
- DiabloD3 9y ago
  You kinda had me sold on more charge cycle. And as for commercially available, it seems all the good "professional/industrial" work tools (drills, etc) use LiFePO, even though it's bulkier and heavier (and probably explains why Milwaukee is so goddamned expensive).
  - e2e8 9y ago
    Do power tools really use LiFePO? Based on everything I have seen they all use the common Li-ion chemistry cells. For example a common cell in power tools is the Samsung INR18650 25R, which is not LiFePO I think.
    - Animats 9y ago
      DeWalt used LiFePO for years, but now seems to be using generic lithium-ion batteries. LiFePO has the nice "doesn't blow up and catch fire" feature. Boosted Skateboards first generation used LiFePO, and worked great, but was expensive. So they switched to generic lithium-ion for the second generation. Their battery recall followed shortly thereafter.[1] [1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/boosted-recalls-electric-skateboards https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/boosted-recalls-electric-s...
  - flexie 9y ago
    Charge cycles are important but energy density is king at the moment. EVs need longer range. The 500km(300mi) of the larger models S, X and 3 and are the absolute minimum if you want the broader consumer market to consider EVs as viable alternative to combustion engine cars. It might be sufficient if the supercharger network is expanded. But most EVs currently on the market have half that range. It's simply never going to be something people are willing to buy as a primary car (and most second cars are old primary cars that the family demotes to second car). As for charge cycles, you could swap the batteries once in a while like you swap tires, if they are cheap enough.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
SoMisanthrope 9y ago
Agreed with Aphextron. This is old, stale news. Until someone gets one of these "promising technologies" into production, I'm not going to read about "new batteries." Information, like this, has been circulating for a decade. I've still yet to see any of the nanotech in a battery.... yawn.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
I wish there was a series not - on breakthroughs and tech-pr releases, but really on the obsticles that keeps those inventions and advances from becoming every day reality. Sort of like a progress blog, which updates the timeline with every new obsticle.
ScottBurson 9y ago
> So far, the company, which is backed by William Joy, a pioneering Silicon Valley computer designer, has demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles for its prototypes. Skepticism is certainly warranted, but Bill Joy is no fool. Here's hoping this comes to something.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  Bill Joy??! I hope you don't have to switch the batteries into "insert mode" to charge them.
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    At the least it will turn on instantly.
- deelowe 9y ago
  I thought he vowed to not have anything to do with tech or consumerism or something like that a while back. [Edit] nvm. Looks like it's covered in his Wikipedia page. I guess he's trying to invest in green tech as a means to curbing the negative effects of tech.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
iGo Green's rechargable alkaline batteries from 2011 (http://www.zdnet.com/article/igo-green-rechargeable-alkaline-batteries/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/igo-green-rechargeable-alkaline...) In my experience "any" battery is rechargable if you are willing to wait long enough but recharging rate has always been a killer for alkalines.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  I have a battery charger that, in addition to typical NiMH batteries, is designed to recharge regular disposable alkaline batteries. It doesn't work every time, and you don't get the same capacity as the original, but you definitely can get a few more uses out of most disposable alkalines.
dmritard96 9y ago
Really curious about self discharge. We make super low power wireless systems and one of the best parts of alkaline is that they are effectively shelf-stable unlike most lithium chemistries that loose a lot to leakage. For phones, tablets, computers etc, this is fine since the charge/discharge cycle is frequent, but for applications were devices are either sleeping most of their life or are off most of their life, low self discharge is huge. Hoping for the holy grail for this application in this but not holding my breath as it always seems that breakthroughs are never in the market...
- theatrus2 9y ago
  Well, primary lithium cells are among the highest shelf life commercial batteries. If shelf life is important, why are you running on rechargeable?
  - dmritard96 9y ago
    I'm not - we ship our stuff with alkalines. but regardless of what current chemistries are best at today, one time use blows. Lets say we get 1 year on our alkalines and would get 1.8 years on lithium, after just a couple years, I will have one or two sets of battery waste even though we are specc'ing our hardware for at least 6 years (when we expect a decent number of units flash memory to start dying. There aren't yet good reusable batteries with good shelf life but there are plenty of applications where that would substantially prevent waste and generally make things simpler. I'm agnostic/indifferent to chemistry (assuming their externalities are similar, which they're not btw), but having a few AAAs for my whole life would be fantastic and probably reduce the environmental consequences of society quite dramatically.
    - CamperBob2 9y ago
      There aren't yet good reusable batteries with good shelf life but there are plenty of applications where that would substantially prevent waste and generally make things simpler I wonder if Eneloop NiMH rechargeables would be a good fit? Their self-discharge characteristics are pretty decent. 6 years is probably pushing it, I guess.

100 points by WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

>that can be recharged hundreds of times In the world of rechargeable batteries, "hundreds" of charges isn't very many. You could use that up in six months if you're a heavy user. In cars you want thousands of cycles, so the battery outlives the car (charging every day for 15 years = 5478 cycles), which prevents very costly replacements. So, it's cool, but by itself, not the breakthrough we're looking for.

thinkcontext 9y ago
Depends on how cheap it is. 400 cycles could be enough if the price was proportionally cheaper than the lifetime of lithium.
greglindahl 9y ago
Big battery cars like the Bolt and Tesla do not need to fully cycle every day.
- PhantomGremlin 9y ago
  Exactly right. 5478 cycles at 200 miles per is greater than 1,000,000 miles. Few people will put that many miles on a car. OTOH, given how there are fewer moving parts in EVs, there's certainly a better chance for an EV to make it the distance than for an IC car.
  - dade_ 9y ago
    Automated driving / assisted driving may also reduce the odds of a car being totalled. It will be interesting to see the stats.
  - chongli 9y ago
    Batteries don't maintain their maximum charge cycle to cycle. High cycle count batteries hold a fraction of the charge of new batteries. You may get 200 per cycle at the beginning but after a few hundred cycles that could drop down to 150. Depending on your daily commute, the car may become unusable long before the battery is completely exhausted.
    - Robotbeat 9y ago
      Usually the "cycle life" of a battery is when the capacity drops to 80% of new when fully discharged and recharged. You can extend the life of most lithium batteries dramatically by not charging all the way and not discharging all the way. Use the middle 50% of the battery's capacity for the vast majority of the cycles, and your battery may last 4 times as many cycles.
      - chongli 9y ago
        But that means your 200 mile battery is now a 100 mile battery from day one. If your daily commute is 150 miles, that means you need to carry the weight of a 300 mile battery. With all the extra expense of moving the additional weight plus the extra initial cost of the larger battery, are you really further ahead?
        kwhitefoot 9y ago
        If your daily commute is 150 miles perhaps you are living or working in the wrong place. :-) Of course if you have access to electricity at your workplace you only need 75 miles anyway. A Hyundai Ioniq charging from a normal 230V 16A circuit charges fully in about 8 hours giving you about 150 miles. But 75 miles to get there means it will be only half empty when you arrive so it will only take 4 hours. The real challenges with electric cars now for the near and medium future are infrastructure not range. There is a project starting, in the UK I think, to turn lamp posts in to charging stations. One could imagine a scenario where companies used the availability of charging stations in company car parks as incentives to work there.
slight 9y ago
In racing and acro drones on the other hand you're lucky if the lipo hasn't puffed or burst into flames after 20 cycles! edit: typo

mrob 9y ago

>Ionic can help us get lithium-ion past cobalt and completely eliminate it with alkaline There are already lithium-ion chemistries that don't use cobalt, eg. lithium iron phosphate[0]. This has lower energy density than lithium cobalt oxide, but it's safer and survives more charge cycles. It's already commercially available. Solid-state alkaline might be able to beat it on cost, but it's a long way from commercial availability and lithium ion technologies keep improving, so that's far from certain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate

DiabloD3 9y ago
You kinda had me sold on more charge cycle. And as for commercially available, it seems all the good "professional/industrial" work tools (drills, etc) use LiFePO, even though it's bulkier and heavier (and probably explains why Milwaukee is so goddamned expensive).
- e2e8 9y ago
  Do power tools really use LiFePO? Based on everything I have seen they all use the common Li-ion chemistry cells. For example a common cell in power tools is the Samsung INR18650 25R, which is not LiFePO I think.
  - Animats 9y ago
    DeWalt used LiFePO for years, but now seems to be using generic lithium-ion batteries. LiFePO has the nice "doesn't blow up and catch fire" feature. Boosted Skateboards first generation used LiFePO, and worked great, but was expensive. So they switched to generic lithium-ion for the second generation. Their battery recall followed shortly thereafter.[1] [1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/boosted-recalls-electric-skateboards https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/boosted-recalls-electric-s...
- flexie 9y ago
  Charge cycles are important but energy density is king at the moment. EVs need longer range. The 500km(300mi) of the larger models S, X and 3 and are the absolute minimum if you want the broader consumer market to consider EVs as viable alternative to combustion engine cars. It might be sufficient if the supercharger network is expanded. But most EVs currently on the market have half that range. It's simply never going to be something people are willing to buy as a primary car (and most second cars are old primary cars that the family demotes to second car). As for charge cycles, you could swap the batteries once in a while like you swap tires, if they are cheap enough.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

SoMisanthrope 9y ago

Agreed with Aphextron. This is old, stale news. Until someone gets one of these "promising technologies" into production, I'm not going to read about "new batteries." Information, like this, has been circulating for a decade. I've still yet to see any of the nanotech in a battery.... yawn.

honestoHeminway 9y ago

I wish there was a series not - on breakthroughs and tech-pr releases, but really on the obsticles that keeps those inventions and advances from becoming every day reality. Sort of like a progress blog, which updates the timeline with every new obsticle.

ScottBurson 9y ago

> So far, the company, which is backed by William Joy, a pioneering Silicon Valley computer designer, has demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles for its prototypes. Skepticism is certainly warranted, but Bill Joy is no fool. Here's hoping this comes to something.

DonHopkins 9y ago
Bill Joy??! I hope you don't have to switch the batteries into "insert mode" to charge them.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  At the least it will turn on instantly.
deelowe 9y ago
I thought he vowed to not have anything to do with tech or consumerism or something like that a while back. [Edit] nvm. Looks like it's covered in his Wikipedia page. I guess he's trying to invest in green tech as a means to curbing the negative effects of tech.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

iGo Green's rechargable alkaline batteries from 2011 (http://www.zdnet.com/article/igo-green-rechargeable-alkaline-batteries/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/igo-green-rechargeable-alkaline...) In my experience "any" battery is rechargable if you are willing to wait long enough but recharging rate has always been a killer for alkalines.

Robotbeat 9y ago
I have a battery charger that, in addition to typical NiMH batteries, is designed to recharge regular disposable alkaline batteries. It doesn't work every time, and you don't get the same capacity as the original, but you definitely can get a few more uses out of most disposable alkalines.

dmritard96 9y ago

Really curious about self discharge. We make super low power wireless systems and one of the best parts of alkaline is that they are effectively shelf-stable unlike most lithium chemistries that loose a lot to leakage. For phones, tablets, computers etc, this is fine since the charge/discharge cycle is frequent, but for applications were devices are either sleeping most of their life or are off most of their life, low self discharge is huge. Hoping for the holy grail for this application in this but not holding my breath as it always seems that breakthroughs are never in the market...

theatrus2 9y ago
Well, primary lithium cells are among the highest shelf life commercial batteries. If shelf life is important, why are you running on rechargeable?
- dmritard96 9y ago
  I'm not - we ship our stuff with alkalines. but regardless of what current chemistries are best at today, one time use blows. Lets say we get 1 year on our alkalines and would get 1.8 years on lithium, after just a couple years, I will have one or two sets of battery waste even though we are specc'ing our hardware for at least 6 years (when we expect a decent number of units flash memory to start dying. There aren't yet good reusable batteries with good shelf life but there are plenty of applications where that would substantially prevent waste and generally make things simpler. I'm agnostic/indifferent to chemistry (assuming their externalities are similar, which they're not btw), but having a few AAAs for my whole life would be fantastic and probably reduce the environmental consequences of society quite dramatically.
  - CamperBob2 9y ago
    There aren't yet good reusable batteries with good shelf life but there are plenty of applications where that would substantially prevent waste and generally make things simpler I wonder if Eneloop NiMH rechargeables would be a good fit? Their self-discharge characteristics are pretty decent. 6 years is probably pushing it, I guess.