9 ms·

Zinc-air batteries as an alternative to lithium-ion: study

amelius 3y ago
Regarding the safety claim: if the air is part of the batteries, doesn't that mean they burn longer if they catch fire, and more difficult to extinguish?
spullara 3y ago
If you are interesting in new battery technology that is shipping and in production devices, check out our company Sila: https://www.silanano.com/our-solutions/titan-silicon-anode https://www.silanano.com/our-solutions/titan-silicon-anode The only public uses I can share is the WHOOP 4.0 band and in Mercedes-Benz G-class EVs coming 2025.
jsndidneske 3y ago
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jsndidneske 3y ago
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crystaln 3y ago
Let's talk in 25 years.
SubiculumCode 3y ago
Ha. Now we get to think about both lithium and zinc reserves among geopolitical rivals...but it does appear that zinc it about 100x more abundant than Lithium.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  You can always go and extract lithium from sea water. At the moment we're just pumping the brine from desalination plants back into the sea, but if we want we could add extractors there [2]. Also, while I generally agree on sounding the "divest from China, Russia and other enemy nations" bullhorn, with Australia and Canada there are close allies of ours among suppliers [1] and Chile and Argentinia may not be allies but at least neutral so we can broker deals with them. The problem is more in the refinement of said lithium and the manufacture of batteries. For environmental and cost reasons, most countries were OK with having that shit done in China, but nowadays there's serious capability built up in the US and EU. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-the-largest-lithium-reserves-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-th... [2] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em00498f https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0...
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Why is there lithium in the sea?
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - notamy 3y ago
      Brine is a source of a lot of minerals, apparently! TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining
    - Joker_vD 3y ago
      Because the rest of the periodic table is also there? I don't know what else to say: if there is something in the Earth's crust then it is in the Earth's ocean as well. Where do you think all the water came from anyhow?
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        Most metals form chemical compounds that have poor solubility in water, therefore even if they are present in sea water, their concentration is extremely small. The only metals that are abundant in sea water, due to the high solubility of their compounds, are the alkali metals and the alkaline-earth metals, more precisely the eight metals lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, magnesium, calcium, strontium and barium. (beryllium is not an alkaline-earth metal, despite the fact that most chemistry manuals group it with the alkaline-earth metals, because it is believed that simple minds will easier remember simplified classifications, even if they are only approximately true, while cesium is extremely rare and, due to that, it remains rare in sea water too) For any of these 8 metals, it can be profitable to extract them from sea water, where they exist in huge quantities. For the other metals, which are present only in tiny quantities in sea water, it is likely that the great amount of energy needed to separate them from sea water makes their extraction not worthwhile.
        Joker_vD 3y ago
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Lithium is not rare, it's not going to lead to the development of new Saudi Arabias, and the lithium in batteries can be indefinitely recycled. I wish people would stop trying to paint the energy future along these lines. It's a fossil fuel rip-it-and-ship-it mindset from the past bolted onto the future and it's often propagated by people who an $$ interest in keeping things the way things are, or are trying to pump some new temporary get-rich-scheme ("harvest lithium from abandoned oil wells!" "buy these penny lithium stocks" etc)
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    Lithium, as an element is not rare, but the deposits that are economically viable to mine are. I keep hearing about extracting lithium from seawater, but no one so far have come up with viable technology. Funny thing is: laws like EU's one that demands all new cars be electric by 2035 will lead to lithium shortages, which means Lithium batteries will become much more expensive in the next few decades.
sadhorse 3y ago
Zinc-air is a primary cell. Once discharged you throw it out. This means external infrastructure to support recycling. What is the agenda of people pushing a poorly written thing like this? Not gonna lie, I broke a personal rule reading something with "could" in the title.
- sbradford26 3y ago
  >"Rechargeable zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are becoming more appealing because of their low cost, environmental friendliness, high theoretical energy density, and inherent safety," Dr Muhammad Rizwan Azhar said. From the article there. They cover that rechargeable zinc-air batteries exist and that is what this is focused on.
- bityard 3y ago
  Are we reading the same article? I don't see "could" in the title, and the third paragraph begins with the word, "rechargeable."
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Huh. Double the energy per kg of lithium. Potentially as good as gasoline. This would be a game-changer. And the article (if you can call a paragraph an article) is about rechargable batteries.
- nojvek 3y ago
  Gasoline is 45MJ/kg. Lithium ion is ~0.5MJ/kg. Gasoline is ~100X energy dense compared to Li-ion batteries. It’s fundamentally very hard for batteries to come anywhere close to hydrocarbon fuels. One is pushing electrons around with anode/cathode, while hydrocarbon fuels are breaking the chemical bonds to release energy. Intense electron gradient is pretty hard to achieve per unit mass. Electrons love their protons.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    LiIon is 1MJ/kg? But yes, a wide margin. I see I was confusing Wh/kg with MJ/kg. Zinc-air could reach 5. Still down there.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  It would be. But like all other material science publications: paper is cheap and easy to manipulate, a lot can happen between the laboratory and the product shelf that impact those KPIs. The energy density is useless until factors such as packaging and thermal management are taken into account. Those can eat up any perceived advantage in hurry. So I'm not going to get excited until there is an actual product which may well be many years away. So there is nothing to 'move over' just yet.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Manufacturing tolerances are a significant factor in power density for the last two battery chemistries. And when manufacturers have gotten ahead of themselves, there have been lawsuits about laptop and cellphone fires. Big sloppy batteries have wider safety margins and uninspiring performance. The safety margins and avoiding toxicity in manufacturing can eat up gobs of the “potential” for a battery chemistry. For years or indefinitely.
hcknwscommenter 3y ago
The link in the YC headline is to a press release. However, the press release links to the actual paper, which provides a wealth of tehcnical detail. This is a rechargeable zinc air battery. Not a primary battery. Although, this is early stage battery research. There is nothing about cycle life or Wh/kg. IMHO, this is years, potentially decades, from commercialization. Still quite interesting.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Nothing about current capacity either. Each 2 kilos of elemental zinc that can be oxidized to release electricity requires 1 kilo of oxygen to be brought into the reaction. So it's efficient in some ways since you don't have to supply the oxidant as part of the battery package. But it takes a lot of cubic feet of oxygen to make a kilo, it's not easy to get that many grams of oxygen into the eletcrolyte very fast, and air is only about 21 percent oxygen. So it takes way more kilos of air than it does zinc. Rechargeable or not, for very high current duty you may just need pure oxygen and it may be better under pressure, or perhaps compressed air might up the current capacity in a worthwhile way. Interestingly, in some industrial oxygen measuring devices the sensor itself is a zinc-air "battery" consisting of a thin film of teflon (which is somewhat porous to oxygen) streched across the only exposed face of an electrolyte-moistened metallic zinc electrode, surrounded by a reserve of gel electrolyte that replenishes as it creeps into the layer between the zinc and the teflon film. At nominal 21 percent ambient oxygen content a steady current is produced from the rate of oxygen diffusing through the film making contact with the zinc, measured by a meter, and calibrated to display 21. In reduced oxygen atmospheres the minuscule oxygen directly in contact with the zinc is rapidly depleted and the meter declines accordingly into the "unsafe" region.
  - distract8901 3y ago
    Conversely, zinc air primary cells are also used as pressure actuators. Don't have a link handy, but Big Clive on YouTube did a series of videos a while back on some industrial air fresheners and grease dispensers that use one of these cells to very slowly create a large amount of air pressure to squeeze out viscous liquid over time. The amount of gas released can be controlled with the current through the cell. Very interesting technology!
guerby 3y ago
From the article linked: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eom2.12394 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eom2.12394 "Herein, we report a nanocomposite based on ternary CoNiFe-layered double hydroxides (LDH) and cobalt coordinated and N-doped porous carbon (Co-N-C) network" So it contains Nickel and Cobalt. Lithium has an efficient (enough for cars and stationary storage), durable (> 5000 cycles to 80% SoC) and mass produced battery chemistry: LFP (Li-Fe-P), with no controversial mineral like Cobalt.
- causi 3y ago
  5000? Have there been significant improvements? Last I heard the expected cycles were something like 1000.
  - Beached 3y ago
    yup. lfp can cycle every day for over 12 years and still retain 80% capacity. there are a number of home battery vendors doing 5 year 5000 cycle/80% capacity warranties for their LFP batteries already on the market.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - donny2018 3y ago
      Still not there yet. For grid storage we need batteries with 30+ years lifespan in harsh very hot/very cold weather conditions. They also need to be much cheaper per kW/h than current lithium ion tech.
      - ggm 3y ago
        We want. But we don't need 30 years any more than we "need" 20 or 10. It's economics against utility. We could deploy with 5 years, and replace the short life elements across the long life of the other infrastructure. Batteries are modular. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. Many things deploy at scale before true economies of scale are reached.
bengy5959 3y ago
I feel like there's a new revolutionary battery technology every 6 months then we never hear about it again.
- audunw 3y ago
  I made a point to follow Solid Energy Systems many years ago, to see how one such battery technology panned out. They went dark in public media for a while. But they’ve recently gotten more publicity again. Turns out they got some industrial customers for their battery cells in some demanding niche. Since they didn’t need to attract investors anymore, and I guess they had enough customers to fill the capacity they had in that period, they had no reason to publicise their activities. Now they’re out there again with interviews and such. I suppose they’re looking to scale up. Feels like there’s a lot of companies like that these days. Ones that you might heard about as a breakthrough 5-10 years ago and then nothing.. while they’re busy using the investments they got figuring out manufacturing at scale. That’s just the time it takes. Many of them now seem to have pilot/demonstration manufacturing plants up and running now. In another 3-6 years I think we’ll start to see several of these chemistries in consumer products.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
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  - doublerabbit 3y ago
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- s0rce 3y ago
  Its just academic research papers that get brief press coverage. Its very hard to actually commercialize these and compete (performance and economics) with the incumbent technologies. Some stuff makes it in specialized applications (satellites, earbuds, etc).
  - hinkley 3y ago
    You could also find your way into automotive and never achieve more than 40% of the battery market. What works in cars and flashlights is different, and by the time you got automotive penetration, grid storage would also be at volume, sucking up as much production as vehicles, and without having to worry about power density and max charge rate.
jacquesm 3y ago
This is odd, the article confidently states: "ECU's Dr Muhammad Rizwan Azhar led the project which discovered lithium-ion batteries, although a popular choice for electric vehicles around the world, face limitations related to cost, finite resources, and safety concerns." But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough says that someone else did that. Am I missing something or is that claim in the article incorrect. ECO or mr. Azhar are also not mentioned at all on the wikipedia page about Lithium-Ion.
- deleted 3y ago
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- bonzini 3y ago
  The project discovered that "lithium-ion batteries face limitations". It didn't discover the batteries.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Nevertheless a bit bold to call that a discovery? Next up, a discovery that humans can't jump to the moon? "We've tried, really hard! And as we learned in multiple expeditions, contrary to popular belief not even during an eclipse!" There's probably some intermediate draft version where it all made sense and perhaps each of the changes that led from there to the eventual outcome appear perfectly sensible when looked at from the right angle. But none of that will make the end result any better.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Wow, that's a pretty disingenuous way of writing that sentence. I totally fell for that. The last part of the sentence states stuff that is known to everybody that uses Lithium Ion and has been known from day #1, it shouldn't even rate a mention in this article. But that is visually separated from the first part to leave it hanging by itself. I wonder if that was an accident or if this was worded that way on purpose to trick the reader.
    - 3y ago
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isatty 3y ago
Please fill this out as it’s educational, I don’t mean it as snark: Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
- WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
  The reason we don't see new grid storage tech succeed is because there is no market for it. Seems like there ought to be a market... every electrical system in the world would be much better off with gobs of storage. But there isn't... because... Electrical markets are very highly regulated. The barriers to market entry are astronomical and quite frankly uninvestable. When I was active in the space, no utility would even think of buying a piece of new hardware unless the design had a 7 year track record in actual on grid operation for a respected utility. Not quite a pure circular fallacy, but darn close. There are a lot of good technologies out there that really do work. But they can't attracted funding to scale because they simply can't reliably access the market. The grid scale energy storage problem is social, not a technical.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Batteries have been quite important in Texas for the past few weeks during unusually warm evenings with unusually little wind. They've had a number of days recently requiring emergency deployment, and a sizable chunk of that came from batteries, setting some records with peaks over 2.5GW. (There is also significant battery deployment in CAISO.)
solarkraft 3y ago
I've been reading about new battery technologies for over a decade and so far none have meaningfully made it to the market.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  What about lithium iron phosphate, lithium titanate and sodium ion batteries? Sodium ion batteries are brand new and being sold commercially right now.
- helf 3y ago
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pfdietz 3y ago
Companies have been looking at rechargeable zinc-air batteries for many years. One perennial hopeful has been Eos, now called Eos Energy Enterprises. They've been at it for more than a decade. I really wonder why it's taken them so long.
- scythe 3y ago
  EOS is just a conventional zinc-nickel battery, or so I thought. Their Coulombic efficiency is bad (<80%) and grid storage demand isn't high enough to justify using a much less efficient battery to achieve a much larger scale system so the company is effectively dead: https://iceberg-research.com/2021/01/14/eos-energy-fake-customers-wont-recharge-a-dead-battery/ https://iceberg-research.com/2021/01/14/eos-energy-fake-cust... Gelion has a Zn-Br with a higher but not great Coulombic efficiency (87%), though they still have a questionable near-term demand outlook. No company AFAIK is commercializing Zn-air due to the severe power density issues.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Eos was Zn-air; if they've switched to Zn-Ni that says something.
nottorp 3y ago
What's the air in zinc-air really? I'm guessing it's some solid material but porous enough to be called 'air' ?
- deleted 3y ago
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- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  No, it's really air, at least in the zinc-air cells I'm familiar with. A lot of hearing aid batteries used to be (and possibly still are) zinc-air cells. They had an actual air vent on them, with a little sticky tab over it so they wouldn't discharge on the shelf. You'd pull off the tab before putting them in your hearing aid. This was a while back -- possibly they've been supplanted by some lithium based technology by now.
  - rzzzt 3y ago
    How do you attach a lead to air?
    - nottorp 3y ago
      That's what prompted my initial question :)
      - rzzzt 3y ago
        The Wikipedia article on zinc-air batteries has an animation, but I should probably be taking a nap instead of trying to take it in: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_zinc_air_cell_1100.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_zinc_ai...
        nottorp 3y ago
        Interesting battery. More like a fuel cell that retains part of the fuel (the zinc)? "Zinc–air batteries cannot be used in a sealed battery holder since some air must come in; the oxygen in 1 liter of air is required for every ampere-hour of capacity used." More complex details on the wikipedia article ofc.

Regarding the safety claim: if the air is part of the batteries, doesn't that mean they burn longer if they catch fire, and more difficult to extinguish?

spullara 3y ago

If you are interesting in new battery technology that is shipping and in production devices, check out our company Sila: https://www.silanano.com/our-solutions/titan-silicon-anode https://www.silanano.com/our-solutions/titan-silicon-anode The only public uses I can share is the WHOOP 4.0 band and in Mercedes-Benz G-class EVs coming 2025.

jsndidneske 3y ago

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jsndidneske 3y ago

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crystaln 3y ago

Let's talk in 25 years.

SubiculumCode 3y ago

Ha. Now we get to think about both lithium and zinc reserves among geopolitical rivals...but it does appear that zinc it about 100x more abundant than Lithium.

mschuster91 3y ago
You can always go and extract lithium from sea water. At the moment we're just pumping the brine from desalination plants back into the sea, but if we want we could add extractors there [2]. Also, while I generally agree on sounding the "divest from China, Russia and other enemy nations" bullhorn, with Australia and Canada there are close allies of ours among suppliers [1] and Chile and Argentinia may not be allies but at least neutral so we can broker deals with them. The problem is more in the refinement of said lithium and the manufacture of batteries. For environmental and cost reasons, most countries were OK with having that shit done in China, but nowadays there's serious capability built up in the US and EU. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-the-largest-lithium-reserves-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268790/countries-with-th... [2] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em00498f https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0...
- flangola7 3y ago
  Why is there lithium in the sea?
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - notamy 3y ago
    Brine is a source of a lot of minerals, apparently! TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Because the rest of the periodic table is also there? I don't know what else to say: if there is something in the Earth's crust then it is in the Earth's ocean as well. Where do you think all the water came from anyhow?
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Most metals form chemical compounds that have poor solubility in water, therefore even if they are present in sea water, their concentration is extremely small. The only metals that are abundant in sea water, due to the high solubility of their compounds, are the alkali metals and the alkaline-earth metals, more precisely the eight metals lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, magnesium, calcium, strontium and barium. (beryllium is not an alkaline-earth metal, despite the fact that most chemistry manuals group it with the alkaline-earth metals, because it is believed that simple minds will easier remember simplified classifications, even if they are only approximately true, while cesium is extremely rare and, due to that, it remains rare in sea water too) For any of these 8 metals, it can be profitable to extract them from sea water, where they exist in huge quantities. For the other metals, which are present only in tiny quantities in sea water, it is likely that the great amount of energy needed to separate them from sea water makes their extraction not worthwhile.
      - Joker_vD 3y ago
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Lithium is not rare, it's not going to lead to the development of new Saudi Arabias, and the lithium in batteries can be indefinitely recycled. I wish people would stop trying to paint the energy future along these lines. It's a fossil fuel rip-it-and-ship-it mindset from the past bolted onto the future and it's often propagated by people who an $$ interest in keeping things the way things are, or are trying to pump some new temporary get-rich-scheme ("harvest lithium from abandoned oil wells!" "buy these penny lithium stocks" etc)
- Detrytus 3y ago
  Lithium, as an element is not rare, but the deposits that are economically viable to mine are. I keep hearing about extracting lithium from seawater, but no one so far have come up with viable technology. Funny thing is: laws like EU's one that demands all new cars be electric by 2035 will lead to lithium shortages, which means Lithium batteries will become much more expensive in the next few decades.

sadhorse 3y ago

Zinc-air is a primary cell. Once discharged you throw it out. This means external infrastructure to support recycling. What is the agenda of people pushing a poorly written thing like this? Not gonna lie, I broke a personal rule reading something with "could" in the title.

sbradford26 3y ago
>"Rechargeable zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are becoming more appealing because of their low cost, environmental friendliness, high theoretical energy density, and inherent safety," Dr Muhammad Rizwan Azhar said. From the article there. They cover that rechargeable zinc-air batteries exist and that is what this is focused on.
bityard 3y ago
Are we reading the same article? I don't see "could" in the title, and the third paragraph begins with the word, "rechargeable."

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Huh. Double the energy per kg of lithium. Potentially as good as gasoline. This would be a game-changer. And the article (if you can call a paragraph an article) is about rechargable batteries.

nojvek 3y ago
Gasoline is 45MJ/kg. Lithium ion is ~0.5MJ/kg. Gasoline is ~100X energy dense compared to Li-ion batteries. It’s fundamentally very hard for batteries to come anywhere close to hydrocarbon fuels. One is pushing electrons around with anode/cathode, while hydrocarbon fuels are breaking the chemical bonds to release energy. Intense electron gradient is pretty hard to achieve per unit mass. Electrons love their protons.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  LiIon is 1MJ/kg? But yes, a wide margin. I see I was confusing Wh/kg with MJ/kg. Zinc-air could reach 5. Still down there.
jacquesm 3y ago
It would be. But like all other material science publications: paper is cheap and easy to manipulate, a lot can happen between the laboratory and the product shelf that impact those KPIs. The energy density is useless until factors such as packaging and thermal management are taken into account. Those can eat up any perceived advantage in hurry. So I'm not going to get excited until there is an actual product which may well be many years away. So there is nothing to 'move over' just yet.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Manufacturing tolerances are a significant factor in power density for the last two battery chemistries. And when manufacturers have gotten ahead of themselves, there have been lawsuits about laptop and cellphone fires. Big sloppy batteries have wider safety margins and uninspiring performance. The safety margins and avoiding toxicity in manufacturing can eat up gobs of the “potential” for a battery chemistry. For years or indefinitely.

hcknwscommenter 3y ago

The link in the YC headline is to a press release. However, the press release links to the actual paper, which provides a wealth of tehcnical detail. This is a rechargeable zinc air battery. Not a primary battery. Although, this is early stage battery research. There is nothing about cycle life or Wh/kg. IMHO, this is years, potentially decades, from commercialization. Still quite interesting.

fuzzfactor 3y ago
Nothing about current capacity either. Each 2 kilos of elemental zinc that can be oxidized to release electricity requires 1 kilo of oxygen to be brought into the reaction. So it's efficient in some ways since you don't have to supply the oxidant as part of the battery package. But it takes a lot of cubic feet of oxygen to make a kilo, it's not easy to get that many grams of oxygen into the eletcrolyte very fast, and air is only about 21 percent oxygen. So it takes way more kilos of air than it does zinc. Rechargeable or not, for very high current duty you may just need pure oxygen and it may be better under pressure, or perhaps compressed air might up the current capacity in a worthwhile way. Interestingly, in some industrial oxygen measuring devices the sensor itself is a zinc-air "battery" consisting of a thin film of teflon (which is somewhat porous to oxygen) streched across the only exposed face of an electrolyte-moistened metallic zinc electrode, surrounded by a reserve of gel electrolyte that replenishes as it creeps into the layer between the zinc and the teflon film. At nominal 21 percent ambient oxygen content a steady current is produced from the rate of oxygen diffusing through the film making contact with the zinc, measured by a meter, and calibrated to display 21. In reduced oxygen atmospheres the minuscule oxygen directly in contact with the zinc is rapidly depleted and the meter declines accordingly into the "unsafe" region.
- distract8901 3y ago
  Conversely, zinc air primary cells are also used as pressure actuators. Don't have a link handy, but Big Clive on YouTube did a series of videos a while back on some industrial air fresheners and grease dispensers that use one of these cells to very slowly create a large amount of air pressure to squeeze out viscous liquid over time. The amount of gas released can be controlled with the current through the cell. Very interesting technology!

guerby 3y ago

From the article linked: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eom2.12394 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eom2.12394 "Herein, we report a nanocomposite based on ternary CoNiFe-layered double hydroxides (LDH) and cobalt coordinated and N-doped porous carbon (Co-N-C) network" So it contains Nickel and Cobalt. Lithium has an efficient (enough for cars and stationary storage), durable (> 5000 cycles to 80% SoC) and mass produced battery chemistry: LFP (Li-Fe-P), with no controversial mineral like Cobalt.

causi 3y ago
5000? Have there been significant improvements? Last I heard the expected cycles were something like 1000.
- Beached 3y ago
  yup. lfp can cycle every day for over 12 years and still retain 80% capacity. there are a number of home battery vendors doing 5 year 5000 cycle/80% capacity warranties for their LFP batteries already on the market.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - donny2018 3y ago
    Still not there yet. For grid storage we need batteries with 30+ years lifespan in harsh very hot/very cold weather conditions. They also need to be much cheaper per kW/h than current lithium ion tech.
    - ggm 3y ago
      We want. But we don't need 30 years any more than we "need" 20 or 10. It's economics against utility. We could deploy with 5 years, and replace the short life elements across the long life of the other infrastructure. Batteries are modular. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. Many things deploy at scale before true economies of scale are reached.

bengy5959 3y ago

I feel like there's a new revolutionary battery technology every 6 months then we never hear about it again.

audunw 3y ago
I made a point to follow Solid Energy Systems many years ago, to see how one such battery technology panned out. They went dark in public media for a while. But they’ve recently gotten more publicity again. Turns out they got some industrial customers for their battery cells in some demanding niche. Since they didn’t need to attract investors anymore, and I guess they had enough customers to fill the capacity they had in that period, they had no reason to publicise their activities. Now they’re out there again with interviews and such. I suppose they’re looking to scale up. Feels like there’s a lot of companies like that these days. Ones that you might heard about as a breakthrough 5-10 years ago and then nothing.. while they’re busy using the investments they got figuring out manufacturing at scale. That’s just the time it takes. Many of them now seem to have pilot/demonstration manufacturing plants up and running now. In another 3-6 years I think we’ll start to see several of these chemistries in consumer products.
throwaway5959 3y ago
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- doublerabbit 3y ago
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s0rce 3y ago
Its just academic research papers that get brief press coverage. Its very hard to actually commercialize these and compete (performance and economics) with the incumbent technologies. Some stuff makes it in specialized applications (satellites, earbuds, etc).
- hinkley 3y ago
  You could also find your way into automotive and never achieve more than 40% of the battery market. What works in cars and flashlights is different, and by the time you got automotive penetration, grid storage would also be at volume, sucking up as much production as vehicles, and without having to worry about power density and max charge rate.

jacquesm 3y ago

This is odd, the article confidently states: "ECU's Dr Muhammad Rizwan Azhar led the project which discovered lithium-ion batteries, although a popular choice for electric vehicles around the world, face limitations related to cost, finite resources, and safety concerns." But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough says that someone else did that. Am I missing something or is that claim in the article incorrect. ECO or mr. Azhar are also not mentioned at all on the wikipedia page about Lithium-Ion.

deleted 3y ago
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bonzini 3y ago
The project discovered that "lithium-ion batteries face limitations". It didn't discover the batteries.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Nevertheless a bit bold to call that a discovery? Next up, a discovery that humans can't jump to the moon? "We've tried, really hard! And as we learned in multiple expeditions, contrary to popular belief not even during an eclipse!" There's probably some intermediate draft version where it all made sense and perhaps each of the changes that led from there to the eventual outcome appear perfectly sensible when looked at from the right angle. But none of that will make the end result any better.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Wow, that's a pretty disingenuous way of writing that sentence. I totally fell for that. The last part of the sentence states stuff that is known to everybody that uses Lithium Ion and has been known from day #1, it shouldn't even rate a mention in this article. But that is visually separated from the first part to leave it hanging by itself. I wonder if that was an accident or if this was worded that way on purpose to trick the reader.
  - 3y ago

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isatty 3y ago

Please fill this out as it’s educational, I don’t mean it as snark: Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.

WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
The reason we don't see new grid storage tech succeed is because there is no market for it. Seems like there ought to be a market... every electrical system in the world would be much better off with gobs of storage. But there isn't... because... Electrical markets are very highly regulated. The barriers to market entry are astronomical and quite frankly uninvestable. When I was active in the space, no utility would even think of buying a piece of new hardware unless the design had a 7 year track record in actual on grid operation for a respected utility. Not quite a pure circular fallacy, but darn close. There are a lot of good technologies out there that really do work. But they can't attracted funding to scale because they simply can't reliably access the market. The grid scale energy storage problem is social, not a technical.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Batteries have been quite important in Texas for the past few weeks during unusually warm evenings with unusually little wind. They've had a number of days recently requiring emergency deployment, and a sizable chunk of that came from batteries, setting some records with peaks over 2.5GW. (There is also significant battery deployment in CAISO.)

solarkraft 3y ago

I've been reading about new battery technologies for over a decade and so far none have meaningfully made it to the market.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
What about lithium iron phosphate, lithium titanate and sodium ion batteries? Sodium ion batteries are brand new and being sold commercially right now.
helf 3y ago
[dead]

pfdietz 3y ago

Companies have been looking at rechargeable zinc-air batteries for many years. One perennial hopeful has been Eos, now called Eos Energy Enterprises. They've been at it for more than a decade. I really wonder why it's taken them so long.

scythe 3y ago
EOS is just a conventional zinc-nickel battery, or so I thought. Their Coulombic efficiency is bad (<80%) and grid storage demand isn't high enough to justify using a much less efficient battery to achieve a much larger scale system so the company is effectively dead: https://iceberg-research.com/2021/01/14/eos-energy-fake-customers-wont-recharge-a-dead-battery/ https://iceberg-research.com/2021/01/14/eos-energy-fake-cust... Gelion has a Zn-Br with a higher but not great Coulombic efficiency (87%), though they still have a questionable near-term demand outlook. No company AFAIK is commercializing Zn-air due to the severe power density issues.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Eos was Zn-air; if they've switched to Zn-Ni that says something.

nottorp 3y ago

What's the air in zinc-air really? I'm guessing it's some solid material but porous enough to be called 'air' ?

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Turing_Machine 3y ago
No, it's really air, at least in the zinc-air cells I'm familiar with. A lot of hearing aid batteries used to be (and possibly still are) zinc-air cells. They had an actual air vent on them, with a little sticky tab over it so they wouldn't discharge on the shelf. You'd pull off the tab before putting them in your hearing aid. This was a while back -- possibly they've been supplanted by some lithium based technology by now.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  How do you attach a lead to air?
  - nottorp 3y ago
    That's what prompted my initial question :)
    - rzzzt 3y ago
      The Wikipedia article on zinc-air batteries has an animation, but I should probably be taking a nap instead of trying to take it in: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_zinc_air_cell_1100.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animation_of_zinc_ai...
      - nottorp 3y ago
        Interesting battery. More like a fuel cell that retains part of the fuel (the zinc)? "Zinc–air batteries cannot be used in a sealed battery holder since some air must come in; the oxygen in 1 liter of air is required for every ampere-hour of capacity used." More complex details on the wikipedia article ofc.