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It seems there's news of a battery breakthrough every week. I've learned to temper expectations, because so many "breakthroughs" turn out to be dead ends. Becau
by simondotau 3y ago
It seems there's news of a battery breakthrough every week. I've learned to temper expectations, because so many "breakthroughs" turn out to be dead ends. Because it's not enough for a battery to be incredibly light, or made of abundant materials, or last for ten thousand cycles. It needs to be good any many things and at least okay at most things.
E.g.—
• How much capacity per dollar?
• How much capacity per kilogram?
• How much capacity per litre?
• How quickly can it be charged?
• How quickly can it be discharged?
• How much energy is lost between charging and discharging?
• How predisposed is it to catching fire?
• How available are the materials needed to manufacture it?
• How available are the tools/skills required to manufacture it?
• How resilient is it to mechanical stress, e.g. vibration?
• How much does performance degrade per cycle?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a high state of charge?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a low state of charge?
• How much does performance drop at high temperatures?
• How much does performance drop at low temperatures?
• How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?
A sufficiently bad answer for any one of these could utterly exclude it from contention in many usages. A battery which scores well on everything except mechanical resilience is a non-starter for EVs, for example. On the other hand, a battery that's no good for EVs might be great for stationary storage.
I'm only a layperson and this list is the result of just a few minutes thought. I'm sure someone with more familiarity with the subject could double this list. But the point is, when you daydream about some hypothetical future battery tech, you need to appreciate just how well today's lithium chemistries score in so many areas.
- HPsquared 3y agoThere's probably a Nobel prize in it for anyone who can significantly improve on lithium ion. It's a tall order. Many have tried, many have failed. Eventually someone might succeed.
- Turskarama 3y agoIf someone managed to improve on it in every metric then yes, absolutely. The thing is though that you don't have to beat it on every metric to be useful, you have to be _good enough_ on every metric and then really good on one or two. For example, it's absolutely fine for a battery to weight five times as much if it doesn't need to be portable. Five times as heavy but half the cost per MWh? That's great for grid storage! Twice as expensive and non rechargeable but 4 times the capacity (per unit volume)? Great for pacemakers! It's all about finding the right niche.
- HPsquared 3y agoI suppose so. Looking at the list, a lot of them can be relaxed for grid storage. They can be run at absolutely any temperature, for instance. On the other hand an electric aircraft battery needs 10/10 on pretty much all of them (except perhaps cost - up to a point).
- simondotau 3y agoGrid batteries are exposed to the full range of temperature swings of whatever climate they're installed in. Protecting a battery from the local climate is expensive and power intensive. Not a deal-breaker, but this cost needs to be factored into the cost of the battery, and any active cooling/heating needs to be deducted from its efficiency.
- Qwertious 3y agoTemperature tolerance means the battery is more flexible and has lower installation costs - lithium batteries should generally be stored in somewhere fireproof, for example.
- javajosh 3y ago>Twice as expensive and non rechargeable but 4 times the capacity (per unit volume)? Great for pacemakers! And bombs. When it comes to energy density, be careful what you wish for.
- Turskarama 3y agoWell if someone manages to make a battery with the energy density and cost of TNT you let me know.
- _ea1k 3y agoIt doesn't have to be that powerful. An incredibly energy dense, single use battery would be a boon for suicide drones. The explosives can be separate.
- tyho 3y agoI doubt it will happen this decade. lithium ion is Goodenough.
- HPsquared 3y agoNominative determinism has a pretty good track record, I wonder if any investors use it. Although it's tricky - I'd never have thought someone called "Goodenough" would invent something so revolutionary.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoNominative determinism has a pretty good track record, I wonder if any investors use it. That's like saying that horror scopes and phrenology have good track records.
- HPsquared 3y agoMonth of birth does have a little bit of predictive power, there are statistical differences between people born in winter vs. summer (and possibly the effect of being older/younger than their classmates in formative school years). Unusual things can be correlated. Also, I was not being entirely serious.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoAlso, I was not being entirely serious. Then why are you trying to rationalize it as being true? Month of birth does have a little bit of predictive power Not for what horror scopes are
- CyberDildonics 3y agoI know you saw articles about the inventor dying and his name being 'Goodenough' and you want to make puns, but regular lithium ion has big problems with durability. Lithium iron phosphate, lithium titanate and sodium ion batteries all improve durability but have different downsides as well.
- uoaei 3y agoA lot of the capacity we'll end up needing will be stationary in nature, where weight isn't nearly as important as energy density, stability, charge/discharge rates, etc. Such installations can be climate-controlled using energy stored in those batteries. Some of the more creative designs end up making about half of the questions you listed more or less irrelevant so that we can focus exclusively on electrical performance.
- sparrowInHand 3y agoBut the mobile/car devices space is the gatekeeper. Nobody produces batteries without extensive testing and extensive testing happens in fast lifed industries. Same why powerwalls were not a thing, before laptops phones pushed liIon-Batterys through this barrier.
- DennisP 3y agoIron-air is going directly to grid storage, there's a commercial facility being built right now.
- uoaei 3y agoTo me it seems that established power generation is the gatekeeper -- with on-demand generation and the entire set of infrastructure behind it, the economic pressures aren't there for stationary storage. Mobile storage was incentivized for other reasons that are divorced from stationary needs.
- laserbeam 3y agoAnd the problem with the article is it doesn't discuss virtually any of those. How are we publishing papers on batteries in 2023 without making these things obvious in the abstract? During the first 5 seconds of reading a publication on batteries I should be able to answer at least 1 or 2 of those questions.
- DrScientist 3y agoEh? Did you read it? Note the article is a summary of the research, not the research itself.
- passwordoops 3y agoAnd in the first paragraph the PR article should mention all these numbers and how they compare to the existing batteries the "breakthrough" is purporting to replace
- wiz21c 3y agoDo some standardized tests exist ? I know there are some for some neural net problems.
- laserbeam 3y agoyeah, I'm talking about the summary, not the research. The summary really should cover that, in very obvious ways. Otherwise I'll assume the authors/publishers want to hide their bad results. You kinda have to brag about them.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoEh? Which of those did it talk about?
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoIs there a standard flowchart of tests for battery researchers, or those evaluating novel battery chemistries? For example, first test energy density, then BOM without economies of scale, et cetera.
- bartislartfast 3y agoI would love to see a grid of all these values for all the latest battery technologies, to see what's leading the field between solid, sodium, aluminium, Sulfur Selenium, iron, etc