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Can flow batteries finally beat lithium?
- llamaInSouth 3y agoCan you re-charge those like you fill up a gas tank?
- tadfisher 3y agoYes, although you'd also have to drain the tank of spent fuel. Could be done with a double-nozzle filler.
- shikon7 3y agoOr qadruple nozzle, as you need to do both for the anode and the cathode fluid.
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoSounds like a much worse solution than what we currently have which is pretty simple and cheap
- Turing_Machine 3y agoThe big advantage of a flow battery is that "recharging" can be just about as fast as filling up a gasoline-powered car. The energy is in liquid form... you just drain the used liquid, fill it up with "charged" liquid, and you're back on the road. The "dead" liquid is "recharged", but that happens in tanks at the fueling station. The car doesn't have to sit there and wait.
- elif 3y agoBased upon their example "just about as fast as filling up a gasoline-powered car." Is not exactly accurate for a number of reasons. On paper, it would be more like filling up and emptying 4 gasoline-powered cars. That's about 8x the process in the ideal case. Other considerations would be the necessity for 8x as much storage in gas stations, 8x as many refilling trucks to supply and empty those stations, and above all, the development of a nationwide network of such infrastructure as pervasive as the existing fuel network. This is even more dead on arrival than hydrogen.
- dlgeek 3y agoWhy would it need 8x the storage or trucks? They'd recharge the spent fluid on-site and re-use it.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoYou do understand that conventional gas pumps are legacy devices on which the UI dates back to the days when the gas was literally pumped by hand? That they don't remotely approach maximum practical flow rate that can be produced by a pump, even a small one? That there are quick connectors that can vastly exceed the flow rate of the current hand-held nozzle shoved into a hole?
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoWell made electric vehicles are A) getting faster to charge B) already have the infrastructure in place C) Way cheaper to install. No fluids to exchange, no facility to create/store/handle fluids. Standard Model 3 has 272 miles of range. That 4.5 hours of driving, which is way more than most people are doing in a day. I drive 30k miles (~3x the average) a year but average about 80 miles a day. Unless you are driving across the country frequently this isn't really going to make any sense. Then on top of that you are going to have to support totally different battery tech, then also the density of these batteries isn't great. This is just never gonna happen.
- wkat4242 3y agoI don't agree. It's way way better than charging an electric battery. For those who can't charge at home this is a real pain in the ass right now and a big time waster (which driving already is compared to public transport where you can at least do something with that time, like read, study, watch something)
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoCharging at home is a time waster? You just plug it in right? Idk where the waste is there. In the US driving isn't really a time waster compared to public trans because pub trans is usually slow, doesn't take you to your destination so you gotta walk, doesn't come frequently and you put yourself in more physical danger. Hard to read when there is a guy tweaking next to you. The costs of doing this plan mean that it will absolutely never happen. The grid is there, super chargers are easy to use, no fluid storage or machines to manage fluids. No fluid leaks, no extra infra. Plus battery tech and ability to recharge is always changing.
- wkat4242 3y agoNo, I mean it wastes time if you can't charge at home because you have to regularly wait while it charges elsewhere. You can sometimes combine it with a shopping spree or something but if you don't happen to need to do that (which for me is most of the time) you're stuck waiting. I mean when I still had a car I used to hate going out just for a tank run (like before a night trip to the airport) and the station was within half a mile. I couldn't do that every few days plus have to wait around for that thing to charge. My car was to make my life easier, not harder (and even then it failed at that because I hate driving so much). Glad I live in a city now with amazing public transport.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoAre you talking about filling a gas tank, or charging an EV battery? Why do you think it sounds like a worse solution?
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoCharging an EV battery. Lots of easy to use infra in place. No exchange of fluids.
- llamaInSouth 3y agoBut it would be a lot faster... and I don't have much issues with the fluid in my gas car
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoThat doesn't matter. The infrastructure cost makes it completely infeasible for the rare few times you'd have to fill up on the road and the small amount of time it would cost you.
- datacruncher01 3y agoFlow batteries biggest issue has been density. If they have solved it at better cost effectiveness than current EV batteries then it may take off. I doubt the complexity of the electrolyte water solution, pumps, and membranes would really win out against an equivalent electrolyte in a rechargeable battery for car sized volumes. Where this could be a major use case is large scale grid batteries. That would allow for an effective baseline power store for solar and wind power.
- h0l0cube 3y ago> Flow batteries biggest issue has been density. I don’t know about the other practical considerations of putting this into a car, but certainly the article suggests the density problem to be solved > With the basic science problem resolved, Katsoudas adds, Influit is now developing a battery with an energy density rated at 550 to 850 watt-hours per kilogram or higher, as compared to 200 to 350 Wh/kg for a standard EV lithium-ion battery. The company expects larger versions would also beat old-style flow batteries at backing up the grid because the nanoelectrofuel can be reused at least as many times as a flow battery—10,000 or more cycles—and it will probably be cheaper.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoBut lithium batteries are Goodenough. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough
- elif 3y agoAh yes, a convenient 400 liters of fluid, yielding an incredible 4 miles per gallon, saving a remarkable 120 lbs over a typical 1000 lb EV battery, assuming all of the non-fluid components are weightless and the fluid is only as dense as water. What a vision of the future, where fuel transportation costs are not only an order of magnitude larger on paper, they are paid twice as used fluid must also be stored, transported, and processed.
- tmikaeld 3y agoAs mentioned in the article, the fluid can be recharged inside the vehicle, the pumping is just an option to speed it up.
- puchatek 3y agoThis tech is in its infancy
- red75prime 3y agoNo guarantees that it will mature into something competitive in automotive industry though.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> they are paid twice as used fluid must also be stored, transported, and processed Isn’t this true of the discharged electrolyte in conventional batteries?
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIn theory you could transport the fluid like gasoline so you could charge it in some central facility the equivalent of a refinery, but then you'd need it to be transported both there and back. The better solution is presumably to charge the used fluid directly at the fueling station using a grid connection, though that does have some issues. What happens if the used fluid out of some random car is contaminated with something?
- adrianN 3y ago
- elif 3y agoIf you can't do it at home safely with about 5 seconds of effort, you will never beat conventionally charged batteries. 98% of EV charging happens this way. Trying to emulate traditional fuel stations is actually chasing a 2% use case... Like trying to out-perform cloud storage with a better jazz drive it's just an anachronistically bad interpretation of the fundamental problem.
- tmikaeld 3y agoAs mentioned in the article, the fluid can be recharged inside the vehicle, the pumping is just an option to speed it up.
- kragen 3y agoyour argument, if it were correct, would entail that gasoline cars could never have become popular, since it in no way depends on the 2x specific energy advantage li-ion has over victorian-era lead-acid batteries this suggests that some crucial aspects of the situation have escaped your notice, so perhaps your dismissal is too hasty
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> can't do it at home safely with about 5 seconds of effort, you will never beat conventionally charged batteries As the article points out, conventional batteries are a logistical nightmare on a battlefield.
- adrianN 3y agoOn a battlefield you can probably just pay the premium for e-fuel.
- tbarbugli 3y agoI live in a mid-sized city in NL, lots of EVs here. 98% of these car are not charged at home.
- davedx 3y agoI live in NL and I challenge your assertion about home charging. What do you base it on? Most people on my street with an EV have a home charger, even the apartment blocks have them outside.
- AYBABTME 3y agoWhen you fill up a gas car, you stand by the pump as it gets filled. Say it takes 5min, that's 5min of being right there holding the pump (or babysitting it), with your attention mostly budgeted to this (minus dumb browsing). When you do sub-2h trips on a Tesla, you don't need to fuel at all. The car charges at home, you spend no time whatsoever on the act of fueling. On longer trips spanning 3+ hours, when you plug a Tesla, you might be charging for 15-20min but the attention budget you dedicate to the act is on the order of 20s. You stop, plug the car, walk away and go eat a taco or buy some groceries or empty your bladder, or watch a video in the car. You'll physically arrive maybe 10-15min later than a gas/flow car (assuming no resting), but you'll have mentally dedicated much less time to the act of replenishing the spent energy. To me, this is more than worth it. Over a year of driving and commuting and road tripping, I spent a tiny fraction of what I would have on the act of starring at or thinking about an energy replenishment device. The idea of frequently babysitting the refilling of a liquid in my car is obnoxious.
- Phlarp 3y agoThe amount of cope in this comment is astronomical
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dmoy 3y ago> Say it takes 5min, that's 5min of being right there holding the pump (or babysitting it) 5 mins is like 50 gallons of gas, which is a very, very large gas tank. That's like larger than a Ford F-350 gas tank. My car's gas tank fills in like one minute, if I run it fairly close to empty (which is rare)
- Dalewyn 3y agoA fully fueled F-350 can easily travel 700+ miles before it needs to refuel, too. Assuming it's just being driven around town, you'll probably go months between stopping at the pump.
- Animats 3y agoSo why don't they mention stationary energy storage? In a fixed installation, you can have all the tankage you want. Is the round-trip efficiency low?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- infogulch 3y agoThere's not that many variables to keep track of, yet articles on energy storage tech consistently disappoint by always missing the most relevant ones.
- Animats 3y agoRight. Cost/KWh, KWh / Kg, KWh/m^2, charge time, discharge time, and product development stage (0=design scribbled on paper, 10=on sale at WalMart) gives you the basics.
- infogulch 3y agoAdd one for degredation rate (maybe capacity loss per cycle). I'd be thrilled if all articles at least mentioned all of these.
- edg5000 3y agoA potential bottleneck will be the peak power consumption and peak charge rate. If you need to store energy year-round, charged and discharged at relatively a trickle, then this tech might be a solution. I wonder how big and expensive a 5kW ion exchanger would be. That would be able to power my household in the winter. Charging at 5kW during the ~5 hours of sun during the ~5 summer months. Discharging at .5kW average in winter, 5kW peak? If a 5kW unit would be prohibitively expensive or large for my example scenario, then different materials and configuration for the ion exchange unit would be needed. Note: I am not worried about the size of the pumps and tanks. These could be stored underground, in the case of a suburban house. For apartments, this would be harder to retrofit. Above paragraphs in this comment are all about the ion exchange unit, which would determine the maximum charge/discharge rate.
- kumarvvr 3y agoNo. These are best suited for stationary, long term extendable storage. Ideal for solar plants, etc.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> These are best suited for stationary, long term extendable storage What advantages does flow provide over non-flow chemistries in stationary contexts? Do you mean remote and stationary, thereby benefiting from refuelling?
- jillesvangurp 3y agoCost, availability of materials and you can scale the battery by getting bigger tanks. The flip side is that the amount of power they can deliver doesn't scale this way, just the amount of energy storage. Also round trip efficiencies aren't great. For stationary storage size matters less.
- adrian_b 3y agoThe flow batteries separate the energy storage part of the battery from the power producing part of the battery. Unlike in conventional batteries, you can design a battery with any combination of stored energy and of maximum power. The stored energy is determined by the volume of fluid stored in a tank, while the maximum power is determined by the surface of the electrodes. For large amounts of stored energy, a flow battery becomes much cheaper than a conventional battery, where you must increase simultaneously the energy and the power, by making bigger electrodes (or by increasing the number of electrodes, i.e. the number of batteries). Moreover, because the active substance stays fluid instead of changing phases, it is not degraded after each charge-recharge cycle, so the lifetime of a flow battery may be much greater. There may still be problems with precipitates or changes in chemical composition in old working fluids, but such problems should be easier to solve than making long-lived solid electrodes.
- jnsaff2 3y agoSeasonal energy storage (charge in summer and use in winter) with lithium is not feasible. If the medium would be cheap and could be pumped into arbitrarily large tanks that don’t need constant energy input to hold the charge then this could be an enabler for seasonal storage. I don’t know whether either of them are true for flow battery (yet). They are certainly not true for H2. H2 also has atrocious round trip efficiency, not sure about flow either.
- dtgriscom 3y agoThis article is indeed a bit boosterish, but the negative responses seem disproportionate to me.
- davedx 3y agoNothing about costs?
- ajb 3y agoThe article claims that their tech should be cheaper than li-ion if manufacturing is scaled up. This is actually plausible, because there are fewer parts. Each li-ion battery consists of a huge number of cells which must each be manufactured with precision, whereas precision parts comprise only a small piece of a flow battery - most of it is just the four tanks This does seem a relatively promising tech. Cheaper and less flammable. One thing that don't mention is whether it's can charge conventionally as quickly as li-ion. If so then it could be a drop in replacement even without deploying electrolyte replacement stations.
- davedx 3y agoRight, had to scroll a long way to find this but there is a quite outrageous claim that it’ll be cheaper: > Influit expects that its current generation of nanoelectrofuel, together with the entire ecosystem needed to produce, distribute, and recycle the fuel that the company is building around it, should cost $130/kWh when used in an EV. In comparison, lithium-ion batteries cost around $138/kWh. No details given of how they arrived at this figure. If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.
- ajb 3y agoI wouldn't expect them to publish those details, cost structure is something most companies keep close. If you are a potential partner or investor and sign an NDA, then you might get details. The rest of us will have to wait and see
- cheema33 3y agoI frequently see ICE owners putting down EVs. And I think they will not get the picture until one of the family members buys one and they get to experience for themselves. My family owns two EVs and we will never go back to ICE cars. We've been driving around in EVs for over 5 years. Sure there are cases where EVs are an ill-fit. For example, if you are an apartment dweller and do not have a way to charge the car at home. But many other concerns are way overblown.