18 ms·
Scientists say new material can triple lithium-ion battery energy density
- maga 8y agoHN, do your thing, tell us why it's not going to work.
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agoI'm thinking the battery explosions will be more spectacular too.
- the8472 8y agoConsider the energy density of a cup of water when viewed as fuel for fusion reactions.
- anonuser123456 8y agoZero? A cup of water doesn't typically contain tritium.
- slavik81 8y agoYou can fuse anything lighter than iron and it will release energy. The process with tritium is just easier. Stars can extract the nuclear potential energy from hydrogen and oxygen just fine.
- inteleng 8y agoI'd love to see someone fusing water at sea level.
- slavik81 8y agoThe oxygen would be the hard part. You'd want a temperature of about 2 billion degrees Kelvin and have it compressed to a density of about 4 million kg/ml. That's a lot of activation energy, but it takes money to make money. Err, takes energy to make energy.
- the8472 8y ago> activation energy Which was the very point of my example.
- _Kristijan_ 8y ago@elonmusk did you listen?
- frankus 8y agoI wonder what the effect is in specific energy. Weight is at least as much of a concern as volume for a lot of mobile applications.
- philipkglass 8y agoIn the parlance of this space, energy density usually means specific energy. "Volumetric energy density" is the term normally used if research is highlighting a material that achieves high energy-per-liter storage from its high specific gravity.
- stephengillie 8y ago> A conventional graphite cathode, in a process known as intercalation, can only transfer a single electron. But compounds like iron trifluoride can transfer multiple electrons. Flourine is difficult to work with, so these batteries may cost more. Hopefully the energy density offsets the cost.
- rini17 8y agoThis is not nastiness like pure fluorine or hydrofluoric acid, but a salt. It may be somewhat toxic, but it does not require extraordinary handling precautions.
- greglindahl 8y agoI wonder what happens when it catches fire?
- sverige 8y agoI'm sure it burns just like regular lithium-ion batters.[0] The addition of FeF3 probably doesn't change the correct response to the hazards much -- put out the fire if you know how to safely do so with the proper personal protective equipment, otherwise get the heck away.[1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLc74Qpvweg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLc74Qpvweg [1] http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/application-notes/hdr202li_hd220rli_battery_msds.pdf http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appli...
- gus_massa 8y agoProbably the risk level increase as much as when you add a tablespoon of Sodium Chloride [1] to a burning fireplace. [1] table salt
- 08-15 8y ago...and yet sodium fluoride is a component of common toothpaste. Manufacturers of sodium chloride (table salt) don't work with chlorine, either.
- m3kw9 8y agoKeep saying but let us know when a real world product can be achieved
- theweb1 8y agoHow's that even possible ?
- curiousgal 8y agorevolutionary_battery_tech_news++
- bootlooped 8y agoerror: integer overflow
- tzahola 8y agoFirst law of battery tech headlines: it’s all vaporware unless it’s shipping in laptops.
- Animats 8y agoActual paper [1]. They don't have a battery yet. Just a "half-cell".[2] They have the cathode side, but not the anode side, apparently. This group has access to all the good toys. They're doing X-ray crystallography with a synchrotron beam line. They have a scanning tunneling microscope with a 3-axis nano-manipulator. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04476-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04476-2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-cell
- plaidfuji 8y agoI believe in battery research a half cell is a perfectly acceptable test bed for quantifying cathode performance, given that the anode material is not the bottleneck in the device. Researchers shouldn't have to spend their time doing full-device optimization every time they want to demonstrate improvement in a material.
- mrfusion 8y agoI always found it confusing that the lithium solution is most of the mass of the battery but all of the energy is in the anode and cathode.
- neltnerb 8y agoThe lithium is also in the anode and cathode, the electricity is generated by lithium traveling from one to another through the electrolyte. The electrolyte is heavier and bulkier but is picked for the ability to let lithium get through without letting electrons get through. I guess you could call it a lithium solution since lithium passes through it to get between the anode and cathode. The anode and cathode need to be electrically insulated from one another requiring a substantial gap, or else the battery will short out internally or self-discharge if the electrical resistance is too low. That's why it's so big. Of course, reducing that gap is a big area of research. Solid electrolytes in principle might be easier to do this with since they stay put, but stuff cracks when lithium concentrations go up and down. The materials literally swell with lithium at the nanometer scale and then break apart. It's pretty hard, you can't unfortunately just vapor deposit a thin film of a solid electrolyte on the cathode since the materials are a bit too fragile to maintain the electrical resistance required for it to work.
- adrianmonk 8y ago> By adding cobalt and oxygen atoms to iron fluoride nanorods Could someone who knows this area comment whether this sounds expensive to manufacture?
- neltnerb 8y ago"Typically, FeF3∙3H2O and CoF3 were ball milled at a molar ratio of 9:1 for 30 min to reduce the particle size and get a homogeneous reactant mixture. Then, 170 mg of such mixture was dispersed in 1-propanol (75 ml) and stirred vigorously at room temperature for half an hour. The resulting suspension was transferred into a Teflon-lined 100 ml stainless-steel autoclave reactor, and subsequently sealed and heated at 210 °C for 24 h in an oven. For comparison, FeOF was also synthesized by the same procedure using pure FeF3∙3H2O as the starting material dispersed in butyl-alcohol. FeF3 was prepared by ball milling the as-purchased FeF3 for 6 h. The pre-lithiation of Fe0.9Co0.1OF is synthesized by ball milling Fe0.9Co0.1OF and LiH at a molar ratio of 1:2 for 10 h." This is standard ceramic slurry processing, they mix the powders with some liquid and then heat the two ceramics together to do a solid state reaction. I am somewhat impressed that the reaction went suitably at 210C, but that's not particularly hot. I'd think that the raw material costs would dominate here. EDIT: Ball milling is when you spin a jar on rollers with the ceramic powder and big teflon beads that crush it gradually over a long period of time. It can be done dry or wet, but it's not a fancy procedure.
- bhnmmhmd 8y agoIt's was about time we moved on to the next energy-storage technology for mobile devices. I can't believe in 2018, battery is still the main issue of all flagships.
- jdavis703 8y agoWon't it always be an issue? I have a feeling they'll just put in more and better power-hungry hardware and software and we'll be back in the minimally acceptable battery life range.
- function_seven 8y agoRight. And if they don’t do that, then the phone will just get thinner. We already have incredible energy density compared to a decade ago, but that budget is used up by shaving millimeters off the thickness.
- packet_nerd 8y ago> used up by shaving millimeters off the thickness I wish they didn't do that, I would gladly carry around a slightly bigger phone if it had much better battery life.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bdamm 8y agoMany phone models do have expansion options like this, even iPhones. I for one am appreciative of “low power mode” so I get to choose efficiency over app freshness.
- function_seven 8y agoYeah, but that (1) feels like the hardware equivalent of DLC, and (2) the resulting unit is much thicker than it would be if the battery were designed into the device from the start. I get why some people prefer thinness over battery life. Not all use cases are the same. Just wish that there was an option when choosing a model to go with svelte or chunky.
- jwatte 8y agoIsn't there a new cathode material promising manyfold improvement announced about every three weeks or so? I'd like to see one of them actually deliver in new batteries. But instead, the 50% or so improvement we've seen over the last ten years have all been because of incremental refinement. Color me skeptical until it's proven in production.
- Gibbon1 8y agoThere has been an enormous amount work on battery technology for the last 30 years. Probably 99% of it leads to dead ends. Standard rule of battery development, if everything goes right it takes ten years to market. And another ten to get market share. In the late 90's early 2000's there was paper after paper published on lithium iron phosphate batteries and dick all nothing for sale until ~2010. And ten years later market share is growing slowly.
- ethbro 8y agoAre there any main reasons for this? I'd assume conservative and long-design time downstream users mean there isn't a volume market for new battery tech.
- Gibbon1 8y agoI'm assuming twofold; engineering for scale and marketing. Once you've sort of proven something in research you need to develop processes for manufacturing at scale. Those processes are often radically different than the one used during initial development. 10X rule applies. Take ten times the resources to bring something into production than to just design it. And worse with batteries you're dealing with primary materials. You may have needs for material inputs that simply do not exist at scale. No one makes material X in 100 metric ton quantities. The only source is a post doc making 100 gram batches. Sometimes the batches are bad for reasons unknown.
- skookumchuck 8y agoEdison tried for many, many years to improve batteries for electric cars. This has been going a lot longer than 30 years.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- linsomniac 8y agoIf even half of these amazing battery technologies had come true, my car would be driven by a D cell battery. But I'm ok that it hasn't, because I once heard a battery chemistry guy say that "the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb." I can't find the reference any more, but with all the Samsungs and Teslas catching fire, it rings true.
- roryisok 8y ago> with all the Samsungs and Teslas catching fire, it rings true. Are there really a lot of Samsungs catching fire though, in the grand scheme of things?
- abc_lisper 8y agoMore than the teslas I think ;)
- Amygaz 8y agoThese have not much to do with attempt at increasing power density, but everything to do with particle contamination during the manufacturing process.
- Tloewald 8y agoThey have everything to do with increasing power density. By definition power density is potential energy and when you release that energy you get waste heat.
- givinguflac 8y agoThe capacity is relevant to the intensity of the event, but the reason the event occurs has nothing to do with capacity.
- arithma 8y agoThe probability of an event could be related to density. High chemical density possibly required for capacity could mean higher gradients which also could have implications on not only intensity of an event, but also on its probability.
- AngryData 8y agoThe problem is even though we have gotten miraculously stable lithium batteries, they still aren't 'bulletproof' enough that explosion and fire risks are negligible. Add 3x more energy to it and it starts becoming a really big problem. This is what has kept 99.9% of these miraculous battery technologies we always hear about, too dangerous to use in consumer devices. If it is as stable, or preferably more stable, than current tech, great! If it is anything less, you will never see it except in maybe industrial applications.
- Roritharr 8y agoIndustrial Applications, as Tesla has shown in Australia & Puerto Rico, are still a magnificent boon to society, so I hope they roll-out the more dangerous iterations sooner than later.
- roryisok 8y agoPetrol is fairly flammable and explosive too, but we still drive around with big tanks of it under the back seat
- phyller 8y agoGasoline is not explosive, it requires oxygen to burn. We wouldn't allow normal passenger vehicles to drive around with big tanks of explosives.
- ksec 8y agoWhy hasn't anyone invest into synthetic petrol that is carbon neutral?
- neltnerb 8y ago... like the DOE, ARPA, USDA, and NSF? They all are, I've personally worked on projects funded by these organizations to make carbon neutral petrol replacements. Heck, even the oil majors are funding that kind of work, they see the writing on the wall even if politicians play-act that the fossil fuel party will continue indefinitely.
- solarkraft 8y agoPlease don't let this become news until there's a production ready design. There are lots of these battery innovations promising multiple x of improvement, yet never delivering anything. Maybe it's actually interesting to battery chemistry enthusiasts, but you can't give them headlines like this either. Bring the down votes.
- plaidfuji 8y agoI see the Silicon Valley mentality of "it's not news until the product ships" is pretty prevalent here. News flash: this is how R&D works on physical products. Most advancements are incremental. Some are larger than others, but are always built on years of other incremental advancements. This one appears to be larger than usual, so it's news. Your phone battery will continue to grow incrementally in energy density in order to run the increasingly bloated software shipped by the "true innovators". Life goes on.
- cutler 8y agoIs it just me or have we been fed stories about potential improvements in battery life for over a decade now with no real improvements? There seems to be a vortex out in space where all these promises about CPU and battery improvements somehow get swallowed up. Take graphene, for example. Discovered in 2004, it was touted as something which was going to change the world and replace silicon in CPU production. Yet a recent article (https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/what-is-graphene-and-how-will-it-shape-the-future-of-tech/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/what-is-graphene-and...) concluded: "Unfortunately, this is all theoretical. Current graphene cells are not yet up to par with silicon cells".
- princekolt 8y agoAnother thing to keep in mind: It makes no difference if battery capacity grows but power consumption goes up as well. When you have hungry apps (say, Chrome) hogging resources with no regard to the user's device, there is little to be gained from having denser batteries.
- mathw 8y agoThere is if those resources are being used to do more stuff... or you put the battery in a car.
- mastax 8y agoLithium-ion batteries have been slowly improving over the last 30 years. Every year they get a little cheaper, a little higher capacity, a little more reliable, a little higher discharge, over a few more charge cycles. > In 1994, the cost to manufacture Li-ion in the 18650 cylindrical cell was over US$10 and the capacity was 1,100mAh. In 2001, the price dropped to below $3 while the capacity rose to 1,900mAh. Today, high energy-dense 18650 cells deliver over 3,000mAh and the costs are dropping. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_based_batteries http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_based_bat... It's not the revolution we may want, but it is the successful application of battery research.
- sitkack 8y agoAnd there have been amazing incremental battery advances over the last decade.