10 ms·
Lithium-based batteries (and associated tech) are to the 21st century what the internal combustion engine was to the 20th century and what the steam engine was
by Robotbeat 6y ago
Lithium-based batteries (and associated tech) are to the 21st century what the internal combustion engine was to the 20th century and what the steam engine was to the 19th century.
There’s a ~90% chance you’re using a device powered by a lithium chemistry battery to read this right now (laptop or tablet or phone). The smartphone alone (enabled by lithium based batteries) has transformed the world. Lithium-based batteries have impacted public health & healthcare (e-cigs vs conventional, medical devices like insulin pump, etc), micromobility (e-scooters, e-bikes, electric wheelchairs, etc), countless accessories (smart watches, smart speakers, wireless earbuds), grid storage, electric cars, electric buses, electric trucks, electric ferries, electric rocket pumps (RocketLab), satellites, submarines, civil drones (like Zipline), and a whole bunch of things that have not yet been invented and perhaps require improved chemistry like lithium metal anode or lithium sulfur or eventually lithium-air (enabling long-haul electric flight, even supersonic flight).
For things like this article described, it will enable more expansion of form factors and reduce costs. Jet suits have been done before but equivalently-specked electric motors are much cheaper than the small, micro turbines used for projects like this. And micro turbines have such atrocious efficiency (about 4.4% for hobby turbine engines... meaning their fuel supply only has a useful specific energy of about 1.9MJ/kg or 525Wh/kg, compared to 0.5 MJ/kg for high-C-rate LiPo, 1MJ/kg for really good production Li-ion and 2MJ/kg for low C rate lithium metal anode cells and lithium sulfur) that after another few decades of battery chemistry improvement, electric microturbines not only will have punchier power but also longer duration.
There’s a ton of undeveloped opportunities out there that will be enabled by the efficiency, convenience, low-cost, high reliability, and oxygen-independence of lithium chemistry batteries.
- CrazyCatDog 6y agoLithium ion cannot output enough (low C) to make this feasible (yet). Much more likely using Li-Po cells, which are far more adept at emptying themselves at high load—but thermal runaway (eg insanely hot fires) is all too real with Li-Po, though less so today than say 6 years ago!
- nikda 6y agoFrom Wikipedia: A lithium polymer battery, or more correctly lithium-ion polymer battery (abbreviated as LiPo, LIP, Li-poly, lithium-poly and others), is a rechargeable battery of lithium-ion technology using a polymer electrolyte instead of a liquid electrolyte.
- Robotbeat 6y agoYou’d be surprised. There are some high-C lithium ion cells, but they’re not as easily available as LiPo. If you need to dump your power over 4-10 minutes or longer at peak power, there are lithium ion cells available. Less than 4 minutes, LiPo is still better for now.
- CrazyCatDog 6y agoTotally agree. My use case: 3 seconds max (launch), 3 seconds in-flight would be out of sight— total power on time between charges is well below one minute. I’m tempted to guess that this would be the most efficient way of converting electricity in wing suit applications as well.
- jononor 6y agoThat is more supercapacitor territory than batteries, especially if you do not require long-term energy storage (can accept relatively high self-discharge). The energy recovery systems in Formula 1 racing (KERS) are examples.
- Robotbeat 6y agoWhat’s interesting is that in many cases, LiPos can equal the specific power of supercapacitors!
- Hnrobert42 6y agoIf you are so inclined to answer, I’d live to know why lithium batteries and not some other form of battery? That is, do other elements not have the right properties? Are they too rare? Are they dangerous? You sort of answer a bit in your last paragraph. Why did it take until now to get to lithium batteries? Why way NiCad the thing before? Will lithium continue to dominate, or are there other competitive solutions just one breakthrough away? What about hydrogen cells?
- Robotbeat 6y agoThe periodic table is limited. Of all metals, lithium is the lightest. It also has the highest mass-specific conductivity and the highest chemical specific energy of all the metals. Hydrogen is not a solid or a liquid at room temperature and is also too volumetrically in-dense.
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- henrikschroder 6y agoI have never really understood the hydrogen hype train, because liquid hydrogen is terrible in so many ways. A bucket of gasoline contains more hydrogen atoms than a bucket of liquid hydrogen, it contains more chemical energy, and you can actually keep it in a bucket at room temperature without anything terrible happening. Sure, liquid hydrogen has a lot of energy by weight, but energy storage needs to be good by weight and by volume, and hydrogen is terrible by volume. There are cases for using hydrogen as your energy storage, but if your thing is smaller than a truck, it's probably not one of them. There's just so much wishful thinking around.
- robotresearcher 6y agoYou are absolutely right. The great appeal of hydrogen is that you can get it straightforwardly from water and it oxidizes back to water. Hard to imagine a cleaner energy cycle, subject to the extraction energy source but that’s in common with the alternatives. Pretty much everything else about it is bad. Shame.
- xwdv 6y agoDoes this mean when we run out of lithium we will fall into some kind of dark age?
- Robotbeat 6y agoWe will never run out. Lithium is infinitely recyclable, is common in underground brines and some rocks all over the world, and has sufficient concentration in seawater that it can usefully be extracted (for non-insane cost) if for whatever reason all other sources are exhausted.
- adrian_b 6y agoCorrect. Certain kinds of lithium batteries can be limited by the availability of other elements used in them, which are less abundant than Li, e.g. cobalt. There are efforts to reduce or eliminate the use of such elements.
- Robotbeat 6y agoYup, and worth pointing out such chemistries are already common, although slightly heavier. Lithium iron phosphate, for instance, which also tends to be safer and have longer cycle life, has improved to the point that Tesla is planning on using it for low cost versions of Model 3 (and/or whatever their $25k model will be called), as is already common for electric cars there. Iron and phosphorous are very common and cheap. So there are lots of alternative batter chemistries that all have lithium as the common element.
- CrazyCatDog 6y agoLiFePo4 is a fantastic middle ground between Li-ion and LiPo—I made out like a bandit at the end of the Obama administration when all the green startups went belly-up; Chinese LiFePo4 cells were a dirt cheap and ubiquitous in California back then. I still use some of those cells to charge Lipo cells in the field.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
- swiley 6y agoIt's funny but I happen to be reading this on a desktop with an AGM (sealed lead acid in fiberglass) battery backup.
- hackerbee 6y agoCongratulations, you are one of the less than 1 out of 10. AGM is great for stationary batteries, and has a place in vehicles but they will probably be replaced by lithium chemistry batteries in the coming decades as well as cost is coming down further.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoAllow me my cynicism (this is HN after all): the rise of electric R/C planes and "foamies" has been a fascinating change in the model-airplane hobby but at the same time it has shown that you can practically put an electric motor + lithium cell on anything and it will "fly". So much so that I feel like the art/science of aerodynamics in modeling has fallen by the wayside. Your run of the mill quadcopter is an ideal example of just throwing together motors + batteries + tech and getting a flying machine out of it. It feels inelegant to me because if any of those systems fails, the entire vehicle drops like the non-fliyng-thing that it is. Even helicopters auto-gyro for a period of time after engine failure and can firefly "fly" to a quick landing. If there is a continuum running from "flying machine" (like a glider) to "rock", the "wing suit" seems laughably close to the rock end of the spectrum. Throwing electric motors at it.... </rant> To expose my hypocrisy, I'm a huge fan of the lifting body program out of Dryden Flight Research Center (now Armstrong Flight Research Center) of the 1960's.
- throw0101a 6y ago> Your run of the mill quadcopter is an ideal example of just throwing together motors + batteries + tech and getting a flying machine out of it. There's the old saw that airplanes fly using lift, but helicopters fly by beating the air into submission.
- loeg 6y agoHelicopters fly by trying to tear themselves apart, and mostly failing at this.
- joosters 6y agoI don't understand the lasting appeal of quadcopters in particular. We can build remote-controlled 'normal' helicopters that have fantastic performance and much greater efficiency (no need for 4x the motors and stubby blades). The only downside I understand is that R/C helicopters are very difficult to fly, but that should be straightforward to overcome by putting a basic computer + sensors between the controller and the servos - the user could control the helicopter as if it were a quadcopter, and the electronics transforms those inputs with its sensors/gyros to control the helicopter appropriately. This would seem to save costs due to fewer parts, lower weight, better battery efficiency, etc, but no-one seems to do it. I must be missing something?
- bredren 6y agoIt’s rather pedestrian in the shadow of this soaring sermon, but I found these Lithium Batteries in the shape of traditional D cells. They put out 1.5v just like regular Ds but the end screws off slightly to reveal a micro usb to charge them! I wish I had these for my stuff when I was a kid. I use them to power my automatic cat feeder. It’s great.
- thimkerbell 6y agoWhere?
- bredren 6y agoI’m not going to post the link but they are called Twharf D Cell Batteries 1.5V/5000mAh D Batteries Micro. I really could not believe it when I charged them for the first time. Here is a pic https://i.imgur.com/2LoyZlR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/2LoyZlR.jpg
- hamburglar 6y agoThose look incredibly useful. I'll be ordering some in the future if they are still around and don't seem to have any reliability/safety issues (I'm slightly wary of Lithium batteries being crammed into places that haven't been thoroughly tested for that application, given the tendency of these things to catch fire. A Mag-lite with lithium batteries would be great but resembles a pipe-bomb a little too much for comfort until they're proven.)
- bredren 6y agoI don’t know about their reliability, but the sheer novelty of recharging them is something else. I’ve only done it once in six months for the cat feeder and it hadn’t run out. No fires yet. Presumably the danger would be in the wiring and power electronics. I’d guess the battery is off the shelf, though I haven’t torn one down—they aren’t exactly cheap. My favorite part is the action on opening the end. It is slightly spring loaded, but also limited, it won’t come apart. Someone clever designed it. They have other standard sizes as well, but I haven’t tried them.
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- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago>after another few decades of battery chemistry improvement How do you know we aren't near the end of what is possible with batteries already? I assume that people in the steam and internal combustion era thought things would just keep improving forever as well.
- Robotbeat 6y agoBecause of where we are in the lab for better chemistries.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2kmz7d/liion_battery_pricing_and_energy_density_over_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2kmz7d/lii... This only goes to 2005 and is plateauing at 200. I checked and a Tesla is 250-260 or so. Seems rapid growth is definitely over and we are at the asymptote.
- gorbypark 6y agoI don’t have any experience with Steam engines, but IC engines have made huge improvements in efficiency in the last 10 years or so.
- lovemenot 6y ago>> I assume that people in the steam and internal combustion era thought things would just keep improving forever Maybe at the beginning of steam, but as early as 1824 Carnot had put a theoretical limit on it.
- samfisher83 6y agoDid you know there were electric cars and they were more popular before ICE cars became more wide spread.
- tomc1985 6y agoInternal combustion engines don't degrade to uselessness after three years
- pengaru 6y agoNor do electric motors. Rings, cylinders, valve seats, there are plenty of ICE components that wear out or coke up long before anything on a brushless electric motor will. It makes more sense to compare batteries to tires and brakes; they're wear items. And their cost will keep dropping as their scale of manufacture increases exponentially until the economics start resembling tires too.
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- stjohnswarts 6y agoAre you joking? Electrical motors can go for decades before they need replacing if they're built well. Same with electronics. Contrary to HN bits don't rot, electronics fail though over time depending on robustness. Just because you don't update to the latest and greatest every couple of weeks doesn't mean anything if the device you're using is serving it's purpose well enough. I'm not sure where you're getting "3 years and you're done" from.
- usrusr 6y agoNondegrading motors and electronics are indeed fine if you never leave the range defined by you -charging- pardon operating cable.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoAre you joking? The kinds of electric motors that go for decades with just a couple pumps of grease are reserved for industrial applications because their economics doesn't make sense for consumers most of the time. I like my cordless drills and grinder but I'm not delusional enough to compare them to industrial motors that are twice (or more, they tend to have massive cases) as heavy for the power output and live for decades. I have a 15hp motor kicking around that dwarfs a Tesla motor in every way except output. That kind of stuff is monumentally inefficient for any non-stationary use. 3yr and you're done sounds about right for consumer battery degradation in hard use. How long a battery lasts is basically a reflection of how nice you are to it in terms of charge and discharge cycles and how much reserve capacity you want to tote around. We've got electric motors pretty much down and can build them for just about any use case but for a given longevity vs power output batteries are still pretty bulky for the output you get.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIsn't the efficiency of jet turbines, even microjets, wildly dependent on velocity? I don't know how you can calculate an efficiency without qualification.
- Robotbeat 6y agoI used figures from a hobby turboprop which gives mechanical power output in kilowatts (or horsepower, if you prefer) and it’s basically independent of velocity.
- sudosysgen 6y agoWell yes, that's a turboprop. But fossil fuel wingsuits don't use turboprops, they use turbojets, whose efficiency very much depends on speed, which in practice means that they are most efficient right before their peak mach, up to around mach 2.
- usrusr 6y agoI really like your observation of a "lithium battery age". But people tend to greatly overestimate how much lithium batteries improve: we remember a class of battery powered devices that ran on NiMH, then at some point LiIon became cheap enough for that use case so that the next generation that we got was so much better. We then extrapolated a fantasy battery improvement speed from that one-time jump and this mistake is rarely corrected. Instead it was supported by the next device class that got absorbed by the ever shrinking lithium price threshold. This process is now about finished, very few NiMH applications left to get "lithiumized". But the fantasy also supported, one a lower intensity but enough to impede corrections, by how the actual actual progress within lithium batteries (not quite as big as we wish, outside of price at least) gets complemented by devices becoming more efficient (think LED flashlights) and devices dedicating an increasing fraction of their mass/volume to the battery (smartphones, laptops, also cars if you compare to pre-Tesla electrics)