Silicon As the New Lithium

hduff writes "While lithium-ion batteries offer better performance than lead-acid or ni-cad batteries, the supply of lithium is limited and the batteries can pose problems. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute are building a better battery with easily obtainable sand and air."

Comments

Re:What about copper?

[Wonko the Sane]

There's so little gold in the entire world that even if we spun all of it unto wires the contribution would be negligible.

But notice the caveats

[Ancient_Hacker]

Wonderful, but there are an awful lot of warning signs that this thing is not a world-beater:

* It's not rechargeable. And I don't know of any simple electrochemical process that reverses the oxidation of silicon.

* It requires a Flourine-carrying electrolyte! Lithium is bad enuf, but Fluorine is really bad stuff.

* Usually "air-powered" batteries are limited to very low current, slow discharge applications, such as hearing-aids.
So it's very unlikely these could ever work like in a laptop or car, where you need amps, not microamps.

* Any practical and competitive battery would have to have a good power-density and be stable and manufacturable at a reasonable price.

Re:What about copper?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There was a (temporary) setup along those lines at one point.

For Uranium isotope separation, they needed some large electromagnets. Unfortunately, WW2 was weighing rather heavily on the copper supply. Instead, they borrowed 13,000 tons of silver from the treasury.