Slashdot Mirror
Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life
UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life... 'We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,' Cui said. 'There are no roadblocks for either of these.'"
You saw it.
I saw it
But clearly "they" did not see it, else "they" would not have submitted a dupe.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Now, if we can see the same kind of improvements in electricity transmission, solar power electricity generation, and larger scale electricity storage, we might be able to really reduce fossil based fuels and CO2 emissions.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
...this mean we also get 10x the lipo explosion?
Don't the editors at least read the headlines? Or do they have a lower standard to live down to than the rest of us?
This is Sony's way of making a military-grade exploding battery.
OMG, I saw it too!!... I remember reading it here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/19/169259
Damn I thought we were going to get a factor of 100 improvement in battery capacity.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... by publishing the story half as many times?
Save even more power by not marking this as redundant?
Now I can have 10x the explosion in my Dell laptop!
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
We are not going for "triple post" we are supposed to try for first post. Tim S
Lithium Ion battery does explode. A Lithium Ion battery that is 10X as powerful, or last 10X as long ... now, will it explode 10X more powerful ?
Please give that a thought, shall we ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's not even 10fold -- at least not currently. It's only "several" times improvement without an equivalent cathode improvement. Now, that may well happen, but it hasn't happened yet. However, they think they may be able to commercialize it in five years.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
"...There are no roadblocks for either of these."
So quit with the jibber-jabber and make with the 50 hour laptop battery.
Electric cars will now be able to go 10 times as far or 10 times as fast. I vote for a 0 to 60 Mph in 0.25 seconds Tesla.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
And, let me add, I don't say this to diminish the importance of this news. A severalfold improvement is major, major news. Not in the least because this anode likely lends itself to very rapid charging at the same time. What we're looking at is, as it stands, giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle, meaning that there's no reason to stick with gasoline (when you can get lower maintenance (assuming long lifespan batteries), higher torque, quieter, more thermodynamically efficient vehicles that only require gas station visits on long trips, require hardly any new infrastructure (versus oil, which needs a lot of infrastructure construction) due to mostly off-peak charging (timer-based to get you a low rate and use our huge amount of unused off-peak capacity), lets us use domestic energy supplies instead of funding our enemies with oil imports, and even if all of the electricity came from burning fossil fuels, would still emit almost half the greenhouse gasses. An equivalent cathode improvement for electric vehicles simply means that you could then drive cross-country on a single charge.
As for lifespan, Yi Cui's team expects to be able to get at least 1,000 cycles out of this. That may not sound like much, but when you can go ~350 miles on a charge, that's 350,000 miles. And not like the battery just disintegrates up at the end of its lifespan; it simply doesn't hold as much charge.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
This technology sounds wonderful. I'd absolutely adore batteries to last ten times longer than they do at present. It would be amazing... imagine 20 or 30 hours of 'real life' battery life on a laptop instead of 2-3 hours. However, I'm really getting tired of stories on Slashdot that basically can be summarised as "Scientists promise [amazing product] using [amazing technology]". Nanotech, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, micro-scale fission power plants, exotic materials... whatever. You know what? I'm sick of reading stories about theoretically possible things that might (but probably won't) make it into an actual product some time in the near future.
Slashdot ought to have a section for "navel-gazing scientific speculation". Seriously, this sort of "we can make [x] perform [10, 100, 1000...] times better!" bullshit belongs right alongside the "in [10, 20, 50] years, everyone will be in flying cars!" type of crap which has filled Scientific American for, well, forever.
It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).
So where's the "NotGonnaHappen" tag?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Nanowires Boost Laptop Battery Life to 20 Hours
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/19/169259
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Nano-technology . . . last I heard, not the easiest stuff to engineer in. Nope - can't find too many qualified workers on street-corners. 'quipment ain't at the local machine shop.
Erm, even if this isn't just another load of vapor, just how much will these things cost? and how do you mass-produce 'em?
Oh, and we've heard this whole "new technology discovered which promises blah." We didn't need to hear it twice.
Why is graphite used as an anode material? What does it offer ? I was just reading some cool articles on how to make electricity from sewage ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MicrobialFuelCells/ ) and thinking this. I read articles where they similarly talk about little 'whiskers' or cilia that bacteria have in relation to this sewage-to-voltage idea and wonder if it's all related somehow.
Yea, I am starting to turn into a biochemistry hacker. Just imagine what my basement will smell like now...ha ha ha
http://www.solarnetwork.net/ is an app that hopes for this - but bigger and cheaper storage would help with the intermittent nature of these 2 power sources. does anyone think that affordable battery capacity could increases the way hard drive capacity did over the last 10 years? 1997 I think I was installing 8GB drives in a machine maybe? maybe even 4GB drives for laptops? Today it's easily 10 times that size on average.
To be honest, that depends on what their marketing division means with a "cycle"...
c++;
After the event, there were several studies of what to do about it. One suggestion was to make available lithium batteries as an alternative. The cells proposed were really quite big. After a few interesting incidents in testing, one of which had an engineer cowering behind a filing cabinet screaming "get that wire away from that thing", one REME officer suggested that with a simple piece of spring loaded steel, the cells could find an alternative use as emergency grenade substitutes. (Disappointingly, the actual solution proposed was to fit an internal fuse.)
Given the energy density of this proposal, a simple micro-Sterling generator driven by sticks of dynamite might be safer in the briefcase.
*The Ministry of Defence is kind of like the Pentagon, but without the competence.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Also time shifted photovoltaic and wind power suddenly become much more viable. The problem with solar power is that we throw away much of the peak supply because we can't store it anywhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As that technique stores a lot more energy in the same volume, I would imagine that a lot more energy will come out if something goes wrong with the battery.
This could get interesting later..
Insert
giving it the sort of charge time and range as a gasoline vehicle
Stop and think for a second, or do some math, because electric cars will *never* 'fill up' as fast as a chemically powered car. Instead of pouring in gasoline, imagine that gasoline powering a flamethrower which you point into your gas tank, and you'll have a better grasp of what it means to transfer energy directly (as in electricity) versus high density potential (like gas).
Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph.
One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
To make the numbers easy, figure 300 mile range. That means you need to drive for 5 hours.
5 hours times 15 kilowatts is 75 kilowatt-hours.
Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.
75000 watt-hours divided by 500 volts equals 150 amps.
For an hour. Assuming perfect charging.
To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.
To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter (and you'd still get a temperature rise of 90 degrees farenheit over ambient). And note to electricians who may think the numbers are off, don't forget you're charging with DC voltage, not AC, so you're gonna need about 5000 circular mils worth of wire.
I cannot imagine Joe Average plugging TWO wires, each of which is thicker than his wrist, into his car for a 3 minute recharge.
And yeah, you could drop it to 300 amps, but then you're talking 5000 volts.
So basically... you're never, ever going to see a 'gas station' for electric cars. They'll always be charged for long periods at home, or at 'charging garages'.
"I vote for a 0 to 60 Mph in 0.25 seconds Tesla."
To avoid blackouts it should also come with a pair of pressurised pants like jet pilots use (preferably with room for an adult diaper).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You won't see a trailer with a running generator and fuel supply on it like you describe, as it would kill efficiency and be inconvenient. Much simpler to just rent a gas powered car. However, I'm guessing that soon there'll be hybrids with a low power (10 HP), constant RPM (max 2500 RPM) diesel generator on board. Park the hybrid and let the engine keep running to charge the battery pack. Full battery pack plus 7500 watts of generating capacity would amount to about a 500 mile range, and allow you to recharge anywhere that isn't an enclosed space, or slow charge overnight from an outlet.
Maybe you take the wrong approach to "charge" a car.
What about standard, pre-charged batteries that you simply swap at the "gas" station instead of really charging the car? This way the whole process can be done in the same amount of time than filling up gasoline.
This is not even to complicated. You more or less rent the battery from the respective company and return it when it's empty (just to exchange it for a fully charged one).
The "gas" station has all the time in the world to charge the empty batteries, replace/repair faulty ones, etc.
Isn't that a more logical (and much safer) solution to the problem?
Ha!
yer cars are loaded with demolition charges
these are placed to insure that your car is totaled in the event of a minor accident
this is so tha the insurance company can part our your car and give you a screw-job settlement and make money on car accidents
the safety argument is a pretext for this scam: a good seat belt is all that is needed
when the demolition charges blew in my wife's Saturn it turned a $2000 collission into a totla wreck. in addition the charge broke the bones controlling the thumb in her right hand resulting in a monster medical bill and 8 weeks in a cast
Silicone-based batteries, eh ?
*clamps starter cables on wife's nipples*
Erm... Why does it suddenly say 'silicon' ? *starts running, HARD*
What a depressingly stupid machine.
The whole principle of operation of storage batteries is to separate charge by oxidising at one pole and reducing at the other, thus the larger the electrical storage per unit volume, the greater the available chemical energy. When the poles are connected, the oxidiser is reduced and the reducer is oxidised back again, in such a way that the exchanged electrons pass along a wire outside the battery rather than directly between the reagents internally. Replying to the GP, the lower the internal resistance, the closer the reagents must be together and the more rapid their reaction, since this is how the battery discharges. Any internal short will allow a potentially more catastrophic reaction, since more current will be generated. It is true as per the GP that butter has a high energy density but is quite safe. Now mix that butter with the correct quantity of powdered oxidiser - say powdered potassium chlorate - and you have, basically, home made blasting explosive. You are not comparing like with like. I wonder who the GP works for?(It's probably illegal to write this posting from the UK, but, Gordon, are you going to lock up everybody who knows a bit of basic chemistry?)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The analogous situation currently exists with small propane tanks for gas grills, etc. There are dozens of places that have racks of these ready to swap with your old one. I think this is an excellent business model. Each location will need to an inventory of batteries that is equal to the peak turn-over rate times the recharge time plus a bit of a cushion. The trick is getting automakers first to build electric cars at all and second to agree on a standard battery module.
Your numbers are a bit off. The Tesla roadster quotes a range of 356km on 54kWh.
If you use 1000 V , 4 parallel plugs, a 100A charging current, that gives you 66kWh in 10 minutes. 100A is doable with AWG 1 ( 7.35mm ), and most of the time you wouldn't be charging from empty anyway, so something like 6 minutes is more reasonable. Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.
Interview with Dr. Cui, here.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
This is why plug-in hybrids are our best real hope.
Something like the upcoming Chevy Volt does it even better than the plug-in modded Priuses available now. It uses its gasoline motor only to charge the batteries, and thus runs far more efficiently than a motor that sometimes pushes the car.
It requires absolutely no change in our gasoline delivery infrastructure (unlike hydrogen), but would require an increase in electricity generation to take advantage of the plug-in aspect for daily use.
Also, once we get a handle on cheap cellulosic ethanol we can use our existing gasoline delivery infrastructure to give them a carbon-neutral fuel.
One work-around is to make the batteries easily swappable, like you drive in, the battery drops down, like dropping your gas tank, and a newly charged battery pops up. Could be done in ten seconds, much faster than filling your gas tank.
Or, alternatively, you could lease the batteries from the manufacturer who will then support the energy distribution retailers (Shell, BP, ect) in swapping them in and out of your car.
So, you roll up, pop your cell out, it validates against your account and is collected in a bin.
A recharged cell is placed near enough to your car for you to connect it, or alternatively it's clipped into your car by machines. I guess that will depend on the weight of the component.
You pay, you drive off.
Your old cell is recharged, if it is near failure it is disposed of and a new one drawn down from stores. If not the recharged cell is (48hrs later?) provisioned to another customer at the "gas station".
So... it's not a problem, at all.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
What you say is true only for batteries specifically, not for electric cars in general. There's nothing stopping you from changing the electrolyte or the battery itself. In fact, it's been done before... in 1907 - http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9719105
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Not to excuse them, but at least it's a different article on a different website, and at least it's not another worthless copy+paste blog "article" from over a year ago. This dupe is pretty high standard compared to some.
=Smidge=
Until solar and wind power exceed overall power demand, there is no real need to store that power: any power from clean/renewable sources will reduce the amount of non-renewable resources used in other power plants and this in itself could be considered as a form of grid-based storage. Another form of grid-based storage is to operate hydroelectric turbines in reverse during low-demand hours to pump water back to the high-side, basically using the water reservoirs like capacitors to even out production requirements from other power plants.
I think your point about continued use of batteries after they are no longer transportation grade is very important. This model is already being commercialized using Tesla Motors' batteries. I estimate here that these used batteries would provide storage of about a half a day's worth of our total generation if our transporation sector were converted to plug in hybrids. With a 45% wind, 45% solar and 10% hydro grid, this would be most or all of the storage we would need. This would allow us to concentrate on the power sources with the highest EROEI and thus increase prosperity as oil depletes.
So you're saying that the method of putting gas into the car gas tank doesn't translate well into putting electricity into a car battery.
Shock. Surprise.
New method, off the top of my head. Docking stations for cars. Since you don't have a gas powered engine in the front of the car any more, you can put the connector up there. You align up with the power supply plug in the wall and move the car forward into it.
To fix your high amperage/voltage/wire thickness problems, just put in 20 leads, and directly wire them to specific groups of batteries. 300 amps divided by 20 is 15 amps, and 250 volts. Ta da.
And that's with 20. Make the standard connection have more and it becomes even easier.
What's wrong with high voltage anyway? (I'm more familiar with the effects of AC high voltage over DC)
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
But you don't use "filling stations" under an electric scenario the way you use them with gas. The only reason I'd ever set out on road trip with less than a full tank of gas is because it's more convenient to gas up on the highway than before I get on the highway. If the opposite were true, I'd always started gassed up. If, for example, I had a gas pump at my house, I'd always start full.
If my "gas" is electricity I do have pump at my house. True, if I were completely discharged it might take me ten hours to top off, but that's only going to happen if I'm taking a cross country trip, where I run into problems if I want to travel more than the maximum range of the battery before plugging in. Supposing the range of my vehicle is 350 miles, I could easily make it from New York to Washington DC (230 miles), but I'd just miss being able to go from LA to San Francico (381).
Now, for the LA to San Francisco trip, I don't really need to top off all the way to full to get there. If electricity is available everywhere, in homes, motels, even parking garages, I don't drive around with one eye on the gas tank and the other looking for a gas station. If I can get to my destination, I can plug in. Even parking meters could be "pumps", simultaneously charging you for you fill up and parking time. In short, you'd never really think about where the next gas station is in city driving.
So on my LA to SF trip of 381 miles, when I pull into a highway "filling station" I'm not looking to charge up from 50 miles of range to 350; I only need to go from 50 to 100 (to be conservative). Furthermore, since this is a six hour drive, let's say that adding fifteen minutes for a fill up and a cup of coffee is not unreasonable. Using your figures, we're talking 1/7 the energy in five times the time, so 85 amps at 500v would do.
Of course, what I'd like to see is rapid "recharging" by simply swapping batteries. This could be done robotically in seconds, if batteries were designed to be quick swapped like cassettes.
The reason I'd like to see this is that it makes worrying about the state of your battery, particularly recycling the battery, a non-issue. The trick is that the batteries would have to be, in essence, leased, probably from a single entity. When you roll up to a filling station, it's either because you're on a long trip, or the battery you have is getting flaky. The robot pops the old battery cassette out, puts a fresh on in, and puts the old battery in the recharge queue. The battery has a computer on it, so you get a credit for the remaining energy. If the battery's performance has been decaying, the energy in the battery is extracted an its kicked out into a recycling queue. The battery is picked up by the owner, taken apart and reconditioned into a "like new" battery.
The main problem with this scenario is that battery technology is going to be an important focus of innovation for the next couple of decades. But in the long run this creates a system that is not just more convenient than gasoline in most situations (which a charge anywhere scenario would be), but nearly completely hassle free.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Who cares if things get reported more than once. It's something that enough people thought was interesting that they thought it should be posted. Obviously some people want to discuss it. If you've already read the story, and don't want to discuss it any more, then that's fine, but there's lots of people who miss the story the first time around, and would like to discuss it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You think these things are going to be the size of laptop batteries? They're going to be the size of a gas tank, or larger. Or if they are small, there will be a few hundred of them plugged together. Either way, it will not be easy to swap them out.
The main problem right now isn't batteries, it's making clean electricity. If we can solve that, all the rest is just a technicality.
Maybe it'll be batteries, maybe it'll be hydrogen, maybe even both (hydrogen/battery hybrid). Who cares, so long as it runs?
No sig today...
However, batteries are heavy. For this to really work, they would need some sort of standard form factor batteries that could be lifted in and out of the car by some kind of machine. There's no way you'd get some minimum wage kid lifting 20 lbs. batteries all day, like you can get them to fill up cars at the gas station. Also, It would have to all be in one single casing, or it would take half an hour to unload and reload all the batteries.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
356 KM is not really that far. I know people who commute that far every day to work.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Instead of recharging your battery inside the car, simply exchange your exhausted battery for a fresh battery at the 'gas station'. They recharge your exhausted battery for however long it takes, and exchanges it for someone else's exhausted battery. People with gas grills are already used to doing something like this; when your propane tank is empty, you take it to a location where they exchange it for a full tank. They then fill the tank you gave them and sell it to someone else.
I think your parent poster doesn't realize how long it takes to turn a basic scientific discovery into a consumer product. There is a ton of work to do: understanding the phenomenon, optimizing conditions, designing a device, patenting, building a manufacturing plant, working out failures and inefficiencies, licensing, marketing, and getting the cost low enough to be affordable outside of military and space applications.
Before I became a scientist and engineer myself I would have thought a couple years would be plenty. Now I see that ten years is more realistic, and the basic research that I do could be twenty years or more from a consumer device.
The result is that we are using big scientific breakthroughs, but the science part was done a decade ago. Current processors use strained silicon on germanium, a development similar in scope to silicon nanowire anodes. I think Slashdot even discussed it several years back.
Sometimes Slashdot discusses Apple announcements about a new laptop available today. Sometimes Slashdot talks about solid state hard drives expected in a few months. And sometimes we hear about discoveries right at the beginning of the development process, and that's just fine for science-oriented people like me.
That may work ok for $10-$20 propane tanks. I see dented and rusted ones all the time. I don't see it working anytime soon for the $500-$3000(?) batteries. Plus you'd need to have many many many multiples of them everywhere. That is a lot of investment in something that may be obsolete with the constant improvement in technology.
No.
Charge time and range, compared to gasoline?
It takes approximately four minutes to fill the tank of my VW, to give me around 350 miles of range. I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).
Even cutting those four hours (240 minutes) by a factor of ten means a charge time of 24 minutes.
And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.
You got it right on the quietness and thermodynamic efficiency, though.
In fact, the electric buses used around the Montmartre area of Paris are so quiet that they have been fitted with a device to make a pinging noise to remind tourists to get out of the way.
Beef.
The point of the article though is that the range would extend to 3560 km, if that is how you want to use the batteries. Otherwise you need ten times less mass in batteries for the same (oops slightly greater) range.
That might be a pretty good idea, for several reasons. But it's not a slam dunk; there are problems that would have to be resolved.
What is the total weight of the car batteries? How much energy will be spent physically swapping them? This isn't just a starter battery... If nothing else, this would probably be the end of the self-service gas station (at least until our car-refueling robot overlords sweep in to save the day)... And remember, it's the driver that's going to end up paying for any labor, or any energy expense in general from swapping batteries.
Another poster's concern about some batteries being in better condition than others doesn't seem like a huge deal in and of itself. The battery station is going to have to monitor the condition of the batteries in its inventory to dispose of them when they're no longer usable; so there's going to be some standard minimum: "you will get at least X out of this battery swap." Maybe you get more sometimes -- nice bonus. The station might set tiered pricing -- for an extra $x.xx you get a better guarantee about the condition of your new battery...
However, unless the station can penalize you for degradation of the battery you turn in (relative to the condition in which you got it), there will be no incentive not to mistreat batteries. What exactly that means will depend on the battery technology, but generally some usage patterns are better for overall battery life than others. If the average battery is abused, average overall life goes down, and then cradle-to-grave energy efficiency goes down (as you have to manufacture / recycle more batteries).
There would be overhead on the station's end to keep a sufficient inventory of charged batteries. To keep that to a minimum, there should be pretty tight standards to make all cars' batteries interchangeable. Is that currently the case in electric cars? How practical is it to have one (or at least a small number of) standard battery? (Again, we're no longer talking about the market for starter batteries here...)
Suppose I swap out my batteries and the replacements fail catestrophically; who all has liability exposure? The station? The previous owner? The manufacturer? How do you keep track of a battery's lineage of ownership?
Ooh, crazy Bad Hollywood Plot theory time -- a terrorist quietly assumes control of a battery station. Over the course of a few days, he swaps out the batteries from as many cars as possible, replacing them with packages that are half battery, half explosive. Once his devices are distributed, across the city vehicles start exploding at random. Film at 11.
Car batteries are not ~$40, 20lb propane tanks. Car batteries are $8k, several hundred pound devices bolted to the base of your car. Not going to happen.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
I would guess a Li Ion battery charges now in around four hours (probably closer to eight hours, but I'll be generous).
Don't guess.
It's about three hours to fill a typical current EV that's at "empty". Tesla is 3-4. Aptera is 2-4. However, this is mostly battery limited. There are already fast charge batteries ready to hit the market -- Toshiba and AltairNano are producing them. 5-10 minutes charge time. EEStor's EESUs are also 5-10 minutes. And this is for an empty battery. It seems likely that the Stanford batteries, given nanostructured electrodes, will also be rapid charge/discharge.
And I think you'll find that electric motors already provide torque comparable or superior to gasoline engines of a similar size and weight.
That's what I said.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
So which is it, life, or capacity? As I know those terms:
Life: the number of times the battery can be recharged to some approximation of its original capacity.
Capacity: The amount of energy, think amp/hours at the rated voltage, that the battery can deliver.
So does this battery provide 10X as many recharge cycles in service as normal batteries, or does it deliver 10X as much energy per volume or weight as normal batteries?
Of course, I want both, but don't expect to get it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why is that so hard to imagine? Joe Average already plugs in a gas "cable" thicker than his wrist every time he fill up. Teaching him to plug in a slightly different, slightly larger cable seems like it would be the least of your worries. I'd be more worried about reliably and safely generating that kind of power on demand.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yes, it is that far. Those people are insane. If you're commuting more than 20 miles a day, the problem isn't with your car, the problem is that your house is located too far away from your job. You need to move, or take a different job.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Assume your electric car needs only 20 horsepower to maintain 60 mph.
;) 200*60=12kWh/h=12kW. As for range, 200Wh/mi * 300 mi = 60kWh.
One horsepower is about 750 watts, assuming perfect efficiency.
That's 15 kilowatts to keep the car going 60 mph.
It's simpler than that. A typical modern EV gets about 200Wh/mi at 60mph. Some get notably less, like the Aptera, but that's a crazy Jetsons-like car, so we won't count it
But hey, let's go with your 75kWh. It's in the ballpark.
Now let's assume the 'electric station' supplies electricity to charge your car at 500 volts.
Why limit it to 500V? The EEStor's EESU, for example, is a 3500V ultracapacitor.
But hey, let's go with 500V.
To get to a 3 minute charge time (one twentieth of an hour) you need 20x the amperage, or 3000 amps.
And? You do realize that when you're filling a gasoline car, you're putting enough energy in it that if it were burned ideally, could turn a car twice its size into a pool of molten metal. Let's picture a small car, just over 1 ton -- usually as a 12 gallon or so tank. 131 MJ/gal times 12 gallons 1.6GJ. The specific heat of steel is 500J/(kg*K). Assuming a 1500 degree celcius rise in temperature, you could melt 2.1 metric tonnes of steel.
That's an awful lot of energy. Even when not burned ideally, it's still a ton of energy. Picture the damage from a molotov coctail and how it's burning less dense alcohol and a lot less of it. Regardless of the energy source, it takes a *lot* of energy to get a vehicle to go long distances. All you're changing when going from gas to electric is the form that it comes in.
By the way, 5 minute charge time is a more typical number. But let's just go with 3 minutes and thus 3000 amps.
To carry 3000 amps of current for 3 minutes without melting insulation, my numbers show you'd need copper wire about 2.5 inches in diameter
Only if the wire is passively cooled. Oh, wait, you didn't bother to think about active cooling, now did you? A mere blower circulating air through an outer sheath lets you cut that to a typical power cord size.
Why do people always assume that engineers are idiots when talking about new tech?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
This is the same business model that many specialty gas suppliers have worked on for a while now (bottled gas for industrial purposes like welding, etc.)
The problem is that the form factor for every car battery produced from now to eternity would basically have to be standardized... And the physical location of the battery and method for changing the battery will have to be standardized, so that it can be done by robots. Physical labor will drive up the price, and lower the speed of changing the battery substantially (just imagine the gas prices in Oregon, where a clerk does fill your car up--and quadruple that), and let's face it, it just isn't practical for men to manhandle batteries like the ones which drive electric forklifts.
Also, because having batteries accessible via the top of the car will drastically limit the freedom of designers to differentiate makes and models, it just wouldn't work that great--also, it would mean the center of mass would almost certainly be much higher than it should be, making the car less stable; I can imagine a robotic changer being built into a pit, so that you drive over it; the robot unbolts the battery from the bottom of the car, retrieves a new one from an underground charging pit and so on... So, either batteries are going to have to be built in semi-modular banks, to allow greater versatility--rather like a giant AA cell, or as one very large, structural unit, which may supplant more permanent structure in a car--acting as a sort of industry-wide standardized undercarriage.
It's going to be a long and hard path, whichever direction we go.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
The two thick wires you mention are no worse than those darn rubber nozzles. And 5000 volts isn't such a big deal. Yes, you'll need good insulation and interlocks, but if the battery can take it (and no reasonable battery can), transferring megawatts of power is not an unsolvable problem.
No.
You have to look out for people trying to game the system. I'd run a battery in my commuter car for a few years, until it started to degrade. Then take it to a 'station' and swap it out for a good one. I'd keep 'filling up' until I got one that was practically new. Then I'd stop 'filling up' and charge my batteries at home.
Batteries are like propane tanks, that are emptied of it's contents, but the bottle remains unchanged.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The Slashdot summary correctly draws from the news.com article, but the news.com article is mis-reporting this news. It is not battery life that is being discussed but rather energy density. Capacity has never referred to battery life. The Nature Nanotechnology journal article in question (abstract, fulltext, pdf - for some reason they are all freely downloadable) reports that their Si nanowire anode has a little more than 10 times the capacity of common graphite anodes, and they have achieved that in charging and 75% of that in discharging.
In terms of cycles, they have data in their supporting info document that shows they have only tested a cell with this electrode up to 30 cycles! So no discussion of battery life can even be made.
Energy density can be found by knowing the capacity of each electrode, the electrolyte properties and volume, and the cell voltage (which is usually about 4 V for Li-ion batteries). They claim to have reached their theoretical maximum 4200 mAh/g capacity for a Si electrode. This is indeed ~10x the capacity of graphite anodes, which are the lowest capacity anodes used in Li-ion batteries (300-400 mAh/g). More common carbon (C6) anodes are about twice that. And, in fact, Li metal anodes have about the same capacity, 3800 to 4000 mAh/g, as these Si nanowires. So the capacity is hardly a breakthrough. However, they may be more safe than Li metal: "Li metal" batteries are Li-ion batteries with Li metal electrodes, which have had safety issues due to Li dendrites (trees) growing between electrodes and shorting out the cell. This article (needs subscription) from years back explains the details of electrode choices and other challenges regarding Li-ion and Li metal batteries. It seems these Si nanowire electrodes may yield similar energy density to Li metal, or several times that of the Li-ion batteries that are in common use.
Have you ever read the book "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie?" While dupes are not the end of the world, you sitting there and speciously defending bad editing (Seriously, it's their job to make sure stories only make it up once. You know, for the sake of the site regulars.) only encourages it, and once it's ok to edit badly, the quality will sink further.
So, again, don't get all pedantic on others just because you can't think of the consequences of an action or choice.
If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
This also means that your effective operating range is limited by your car; you can't go farther than your car batteries can take you on a single charge, because you can't recharge them anywhere, and if want to be able to return home, you're limited to half of that. Of course you can take a bus/train, but that is inconvenient, expensive and only available in and between larger population centers.
Heh, I can just imagine a scenario where the leaders of some small town in the middle of nowhere ban all cars capable of reaching the nearest town, leaving everyone dependent on them for supplies...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
just to exchange it for a fully charged one
You buy a new car. With a new battery. With a range of 300 miles.
You use the car for a month, recharging at home.
You take a trip, and hit a 'swap station' on the way.
You get home with your 'new' battery, only to discover that your range has dropped to 150 miles, because the battery is a year and a half old and near the end of its useful life. Don't forget that lithium batteries only have a useful life of about 1.5 years.
Yeah, you could solve that problem by having car dealers install used batteries, but there's another issue. How much will a 'fill up' cost? Considering each battery will have a different capacity, you'll never know how much range you'll get from a swap.
You'll also need multiple batteries, as the needs for a 2 seat Smart ForTwo are different than for an electric Hummer.
As for safer, two points:
Easily removable batteries means easy accessibility to the battery compartment, which implies less safety in an accident. It also replaces gas siphoning with battery theft.
Standard sized batteries also leave less room for car designers to work.
I could see it potentially working with a dealer-based swap system, but not with widespread adoption.
I read that to my eldest daughter just a few nights ago.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"several" is at least 3, which means I'll be able to go from 3 hours runtime with my current setup to 9+. That's freakin' awesome.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Why would anybody these days bother writing sci-fi when they could be making real money and real job security in "citing" their own theoretical papers in order to sell "breakthroughs" in the furtherance of "nanotechnology" grant-seeking? It's been this same process since the term hit the mainstream and it's been gobbling up oodles of research grants ever since. All you have to do is lay down some bologne about how you can paint your house with a bunch of ants and it'll light itself up for you when scheduled on Christmas and you've got it made. Especially if you get to ditch the batchelor's life of grant-seeking for "corporate r&d". Who'd ever want to go back to the hustle and bustle of phone calls to publishers and the back-and-forth of editing manuscripts?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
100 Amps even for 6 minutes is essentially unworkable!
Most homes are equipped with TOTAL electrical service of 200 amps or less. Most older homes are 120-140A and my new home is 150A.
Are you suggesting to use upwards of 75% of the total electric service to charge your car? Even for six measly minutes? When your wife kicks on the microwave you'll blow your main breaker!
This doesn't even take into account apartment dwellers! Where are they going to get a 100A circuit from to do this? Most wall circuits are 20A or less.
if it takes you 20-40 hours to charge it? Does this mean if I run my laptop dry, it could be days before I get a full charge - you know, in between whisking away my 'ltop to Starclucks for coffee, lunch at mickeedee's, and then on the bus home watching episodes of Battle Star Galactica.
:)
How about a 4 hour battery that can charge in 4 minutes? That is a much better technology - not longer battery life.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
356 km is about 200 miles, or 2/3 of my numers. Likewise 54 kwh is about 2/3 of 75 kwh. So I don't think my numbers are all that far off, it's just that your numbers are equivalent to a 30 mpg gas car with a 7 gallon tank. And comparing a car with no air conditioner, no heat and no 'creature comforts', that you can't use to get your groceries back from the market because there's no room, that has a low profile thus a low aerodynamic drag, with what would actually work as a 'family car' is disingenuous.
Most of my numbers were aimed at arriving at the size of the cable needed to handle the current, as most people can't visualize what 400 amps, or 3000 amps means, but they do get 'big wire'. Although I guess I could suggest they look at their electrical breaker box and the size of the wires leading into it, figuring on 100 amps per wire. It's just a visualization thing. And my 500 volt number is a simple rule of thumb, as the highest voltage you'll find in most consumer applications is 480v.
Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey
Exactly. Just refuting the minor bit in the parent post about how you can fill up an electric car in the same time as a gas car. I can put 10 gallons in a tank in 3 minutes, including paying and putting the gas cap back on, and in a 40 MPG car that gets me 400 miles. Versus 2 pit stops in an electric in your scenario, that take much longer and require the vehicle to be designed to handle rapid charging.
Not just on Slashdot, but I'm sick and tired of reading about these subjects AT ALL. But I expect it out of the image-worshipping, idle-minded mainstream product audience. They'll believe anything they're told, and they'll pay for things that they'll never even receive, and they'll forget they paid for it, and one day they'll die, and somebody else who was on the receiving end of the moolah will be enjoying the only one positively influential thing which money can really brings, which is a more relaxed and stimulating lifestyle.
Prematurely published research isn't just navel-gazing, it's scientific fraud, and with as much money as the frauds who support the fields you listed are receiving first from universities, then from corporations, and then from government, it should be considered market fraud and consumer fraud as well.
1. -nanotech- I am not engineer enough to know all the arguments why this will never work, but you know something, I don't miss much, either, and one thing I've noticed is that actually breakthrough amazing things which are now part of our daily lives all held something in common: there was a product that blew our minds and it's been improved ever since. There is no actual product with nanotech. It's the most amazing thing any of us have ever bought (and a lot of taxpayer money goes into colleges, those research grants aren't 100% tuition) and it hasn't ever gotten here, yet. And yet it's always being improved! Yes, we're that stupid!
2. -nuclear fusion (power)- This has been worked at already, during a generation when scientific minds had brainpower, which has been in the current image-culture generation replaced by pure imagination and cleverness. Great minds have already pored over this and it's already been discarded as an impossible dream: the process of the very sun, and a decent explosion, but not sustainable for the purpose of producing power. It just begs for us to go back to the root of the problem and think a little harder about solar power. Solar power, at least, has made recent advances.
3. -genetic engineering- It's never going to work! Period! At first the sci-fi writing grant-seekers convinced everybody that somewhere down the line we'd be harvesting vat-grown, tailor-made body parts. Really? That grew up without the attached human? There are many, many ways to argue that this is absolutely unfeasible, but I'll offer my pet argument (because it also offers impressive visuals): take a look at the 'imprint' of the bodies of living things in Kirlian photography. Do you really think you can make a decent part of a body without growing the whole thing? You can't. Later, the same hucksters promoted these ideas of special abilities or features of the creature that could be produced by tweaking the genetic "code", though the half-wit "scientists" preferred evidently to "cut-and-paste" and more or less make monstrosities whose drawbacks seriously outweigh the perceived benefits. Then they tried to convince us cloning was somehow all new and different and the answer to everything, but they're still stuck with the fact that you just can't fudge something that complicated and force it into production. Granted, one day they might perfect artificial wombs and delivery systems, but with a culture that inhuman they will by necessity have to invent nanny-nursemaids and so on, due to the events of that foreseeable future.
4. -micro-scale fission power plants- at the very least this has always been understood to be quackary.
5. -exotic materials- I remember recently there was research being done on the creation of artificial electron shells by taking avantage of Heisenberg uncertainty in very thin silicon wafers. But they can't figure ou
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The point is when you come out with a sci-fi like this as "real science", it's not about the feasability, especially not the market feasability: it's about the greed of corporate sponsors who will gladly take you on once you graduate, in order to get to be the first ones with a battery like this "on the market". You'll always have the excuse that it's breakthrough and nobody's done anything like it yet, and you'll always have the security that it's this huge burgeoning field of new discoveries that all the other corporations are drooling over and buying up scientists to develope. You'll have it made.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
A123 and Valence offer Lithium Nano Phosphate and Lithium Iron Phosphate cells that can source current at up to 60 times their total amp-hour rating and still deliver 100% of their energy rating, and have excellent safety compared to existing Li-Ion and LiPoly cells. A123 has $350M to spend, and deals with DeWalt/Black and Decker on sale now, and Chevy Volt on the table. It's going to be hard for Stanford to catch up.
Nevertheless, I'm quite excited about all these new Lithium battery technologies and have written a brief article about them for enthusiasts. I think there will be tremendous competitive pressure from these deals and developments, and 2008 will see a big change in batteries, relegating Lead Acid and Nickel Metal Hydride increasingly to niche application status.
If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
Sure there will be. Just a lot less of them. People will still need them on cross-country trips, so they'll mostly be gathered near highways. If there's still a demand, there will still be people around looking to profit off of it.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
You don't need to fast charge at home. If you want a fast charge, you can go to a fast charge station. Or, if you really want a fast charge at home, get a fast charger. Basically, a second set of batteries that trickle charges from the grid, and rapid charges your vehicle whenever you plug in. It'd have the added bonus of providing backup power for your house and even potentially helping with grid load balancing (in exchange for a discount on electricity purchase prices).
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Or you could manually swap out the battery (not an impossible problem because it can be stored anywhere in the car).
Or move to a more European exchange style system.
When did American's become such luddite conservatives.
Next thing they'll have hedge lobbying groups ala Britain.
Another point worth noting is that eastern economies are ramping up while energy use is becoming more efficient. Rural parts of India will be installing led lighting, getting hybrid or electric vehicles etc. America has been on the high horse of modernism because they started from scratch without the baggage of history, it seems the eastern economies are taking that spot now... For the Beijing olympics the Chinese government is tearing down thousands of buildings that are more than 500 years old (in the area south of Tienamen square).
I don't think they'll care about taking Chevrolet's and Fords off the road to help the planet.
http://www.hybrid-vehicle.org/serial-hybrid.html
What I've not yet seen addressed are a comparison of the effective losses in power for each method of locomtion. For example, the Prius uses a cute little 70 horsepower Atkinson Cycle engine, both for charging and motive power. Given that fixed power, what I wanna know is, could more locomotion be generated by charging the batteries and running electric motors, than would be generated by simply applying the same amount of power to a transmission to move the care.
I freely admit to not having the answer to this question. On the one hand, in a serial hybrid setup, you eliminate all those nasty fiction and various other mechanical losses that come with driving a car. On the other hand, adding batteries to a car is no insignificant amount of weight, and said batteries get no lighter even as their potential draws down. And while mechanical losses are minimized, there is still resistance to think of.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
Secondly, a gas "cable" thicked than my wrist is significantly lighter than a SOLID COPPER CABLE thicker than my wrist. I could probably do it. But mom would have to switch back to full-server.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
Hmm, maybe you're right. I haven't been to a gas station in a while, so I'm probably remembering the size wrong.
Secondly, a gas "cable" thicked than my wrist is significantly lighter than a SOLID COPPER CABLE thicker than my wrist. I could probably do it. But mom would have to switch back to full-server.
Okay, so you have the cables mounted straight, on an adjustable slide-out tray that connects them to the car. I still don't see how this is a showstopper; compared to the other problems involved, it seems like a minor implementation detail.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You look at it ... I'm from Portland, you insensitive clod!
Agreed. But just like last time, the Slashdot summary is completely wrong. Last time, the linked article was titled "Nanowire battery can hold 10 times the charge of existing lithium-ion battery" and the Slashdot summary summarized "A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours..."
This time, the linked article mis-reported, and the Slashdot summary followed. The Slashdot summary is also inconsistent with itself: It refers to "increased battery capacity" and then has the title "Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life". "Capacity" is not "lifetime"; it is proportional to energy density.
In both cases it is about the same research and publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, which I link to in my first post in this story: abstract, fulltext, fulltext pdf - for some reason they are all freely downloadable. In terms of "battery life", they have only demonstrated 30 cycles (data in the supporting information for the paper), and only 10 in the actual paper!
What about "electric gas stations" where you change out battery modules and the guys at the station recharge the depleted ones...
Well, I'm not sure why you'd latch onto the crazy Bad Hollywood Plot theory as the point to debate. For the sake of argument, though, there's a difference of scale that makes a huge difference to the plot in question. Think it through in these terms: How many cars could your villain rig quickly enough to go undetected? Answer: a lot more if he controls a refueling point that swaps batteries than merely a repair shop.
Maybe add a chip to each battery so the station and you would both know how old it is?
Excellent post! The first realistic analysis I've seen on electric car charging on /.
Of course it is worse than this because no battery is able to accept 100% of the charge applied.
Less than 100% charge efficiency means a lot of battery heating, and that heat has to be dissipated.
That means liquid or forced air cooling (consuming more energy) to prevent battery overheating while
charging. The net result is that it is doubtfull that it will be possible to charge batteries fully
in less than 30 minutes.