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Lithium Air Batteries Get Boost From IBM and DOE
coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy and IBM are serious about developing controversial lithium air batteries capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge – a huge increase over current plug-in batteries that have a range of about 40 to 100 miles, the DOE said. The agency said 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will be used by IBM and a team of researchers from those labs and Vanderbilt University to design new materials required for a lithium air battery."
Because this is a game changing technology, if it pans out.
Well, because the DOE is bankrolling their computer time, does that mean the results will not be patent-encumbered?
Or are we in for more NiMH crap?
Absolutely a game changer. In fact, I got a real charge out of reading about them. The current methods are terminal. I was much more depressed before reading about these things. I think the technology really has potential. Hopefully they will cell, but they might have to amp up the advertising.
Current plug-in vehicles? Like, what a Chevy Volt or a hacked Prius? Nonsense. Try a Tesla Roadster, with a single charge range of 250 miles. Lithium-air might double the range then. But a factor of 5? No.
I do have one question though. How are lithium-ion batteries affected by increasing cell size? The Tesla Roadster currently uses a ridiculous number of very small cells in its pack, in a move that looks dictated by ridiculous patent licensing terms limiting cell sizes to those suitable for laptops in an effort to prevent the existence of something like the Roadster. That's what it looks like. But is there a technical reason to limit cell size? There is surprisingly little information available about how the performance of lithium cells change as they get physically larger (or smaller).
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> They use highly flammable metals to do this so we will have another round of
> explosive cars out on the highways...
Anything that packs enough energy to run a car 300 miles into the volume of a gas tank is going to be potentially dangerous. There's no way around it.
> ...and being metals they will require some thought into the use of water to
> put the flames out at accidents.
Whereas water works real well on gasoline fires.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Energy-dense storage media have been the missing link in a lot of relatively clean energy generation schemes. For example, both solar and wind power are challenged by the need to store power for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Full charge of a Tesla Roadster, which has a 250 mile range, takes 3.5 hours on a 240 volt circuit at 70 amps. So yes, at quickest supported charging rate, the amperage is quite substantial. Many residential homes in the US have 100 amp service. 200 amp service is probably a good idea for Roadster owners. Charging a lithium-air battery pack with double the capacity might take 7 hours. But it could vary considerably from that guess because battery charge times differ depending on the chemistry and nanoscale structures in the cells. Lithium-air might be better or worse. One supposes part of the research effort is to figure out how to make sure the battery has reasonable charge times.
And unlike gasoline, there's no need to pump lithium around the car, so the risk of fire is much lower assuming adequate tank protection from puncture damage. With electric, instead of needing to protect a significant portion of the car from overheating or puncture damage, you only have a single compartment to protect, and that's typically underneath the vehicle.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Rare earth elements consist of the f-block metals. The first column s-block metals Li, Na, K, Rb and Cs are all alkali metals. Lithium is actually the least reactive metal of the column. Potassium catches fire on exposure to water and Caesium essentially explodes on contact.
If eBikes are the way forward, then I'm turning this boat around.
"His name was James Damore."
Tbh with the Tesla breaking 500km the main obstacle for Electric Vehicles is no longer storage capacity of the batteries but rather the recharge time and battery price. LiFeP batteries have short recharge times ( 5 minuets or so ) and are starting to come down in price, so the big issue right now is designing an electric interface that can safely deliver the 200kW or so that would be needed to charge the a Tesla-equivalent 50kWh battery pack in less than 15 minutes. The standard proposed in Europe supports up to 43kW so there's some way to go still, but theoretically if you just developed the EU's proposal to support 100kW then using 2 cables would get you down to a 15min charge time.
It's a bit of an engineering problem to make such an interface safe for the average commuter to use, but it seems to me it is now fairly clear that batteries will be future energy carrier for personal cars. Hydrogen no longer has any advantages over batteries since it is has a low energy efficiency and even worse refueling problems than electrics, not to mention the infrastructure challenges. There is still no good way to produce biofuel at the scales required, and even if you could you would have to set up a new infrastructure from scratch, and they would likely still result in more pollution than the batteries. With fast charging batteries on the market now flywheels have also lost their advantage of being able to "charge" very rapidly and their low energy density and high cost makes them unlikely.
Basically eventually battery price will come down enough, and the Oil price will rise high enough, that electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol. It's now just a matter of time, maybe just a few decades, before the majority of cars produced will be electric.
One could argue that with the number of automobile related fatalities every year, that they are already population control devices.
"His name was James Damore."
> Can the US Gov hold patents?
It can and does.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yeah, really explosive. And those are cobalt-based cells, the kind that everyone worries about but which are not used in most EVs (just Tesla and Tesla-derivatives).
How much worse of an accident do you get than one in which you end up with an SUV sitting on top of your car and your battery pack fully bashed in?
Noone ever goes walrus!
8 hour charge for how many miles? I don't know about you, but my daily commute isn't 600 miles.
It's level 1 or level 2 charging at home, and level 3 or higher for long trips. And that's what it's going to be for probably the next century. It doesn't make sense to do it any other way. You only need fast charges when you're taking long trips, so you need fast charging stations available on the road. Around home, you want slow charging, which is gentler on the batteries (and, not to mention, the grid), as well as being more efficient.
By the way, for those who are curious:
Level 1: ~110V, 20A or less. US standard: SAE J1772 or the ever-common NEMA 5-15 plug.
Level 2: ~220V, 80A or less. US standard: SAE J1772. European standard: Mennekes, based on IEC 60309.
Level 3: ~440V, up to "hundreds" of amps. No official standard, but the TESCO connector seems to be becoming dominant.
The most powerful EV charger I'm aware of is an 800kW charger created by Aerovironment for TARDEC. That's ~800V and ~1000A, if I recall correctly. It's about the size of four vending machines pushed together.
Noone ever goes walrus!
" And after the 1.6 billion hours, does the computer self destruct? Just curious."
Same. 24 million hours? There's only 8,765 hours in a year, so what is that, about 2,500 years?
So I googled it. Apparently supercomputer hours aren't people hours, they're processor-hours, so 1 processor working for 1 hour is 1 processor hour. 24 million hours means (# of processors) * (# of hours) = 24 million. For example, (24,000 processors) * (1,000 hours) = 24 million. So it could be done in 41 days, not 2,500 years, if they have 24,000 processors working on it.
Not sure if I like this method of measuring processor usage since a project that took a million hours in 2001 wouldn't take a million hours in 2010 but that's what's in the article.
Oh and to answer your question: no, it probably doesn't self-destruct but it'd probably be replaced since I'd imagine if 1.5% is anywhere near my hypothetical 41 days then that'd put 1.6 billion at about 7.4 yrs.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
"And after the 1.6 billion hours, does the computer self destruct? Just curious"
Sorry I'm back and I have answers.
The Oak Ridge "Jaguar" Supercomputer is the World's Fastest, with 37,376 six-core AMD processors. That puts it at 224,256 processors, so those 24 million hours should be done in 107 hours, or a little more than 4 days.
The 1.6 billion hours comes from the here: "....computing facilities at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories will employ a competitive peer review process to allocate researchers 1.6 billion processor hours in 2010." That works out to be about 297 days.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Nope.
Lithium is plentiful, you can mine it from seawater indefinitely for about $60 per kg. It's just that some countries can supply lithium at smaller prices.
Gasoline at 50MJ/kg is pretty much the most dense energy storage possible in this universe excluding nuclear energy.
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric). And comparing any of them to nuclear energy is laughable.
This is kind of a fundamental limit as to how much energy can be stored in *any* system using potential energy of the electric field of matter.
No, it isn't. Nor is beryllium. Energy doesn't even have to be stored in chemical bonds (see, for example, digital quantum batteries).
You may get 2x better efficiency in an electric motor,
Try 4x in typical driving conditions.
but I can not see how a battery can approach this value.
It doesn't need to. A motor the size of a watermelon propels the Tesla Roadster from 0-60 in under 4 seconds. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light and the engine is heavy. In EVs, the motor is light and the "fuel" (the battery pack) is heavy. It's a reversed paradigm. You have to compare the mass and volume of the engine + fuel to the mass and volume of motor + fuel. And with current battery tech, you'll find that EVs are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to matching gasoline cars. But batteries have increased nearly 5-fold in energy density the past 21 years, and show no signs of stopping.
Noone ever goes walrus!
> Last I heard was lithium was a precious metal...
You last heard wrong. It goes for around $100/kg, less than 1/4 the price of silver.
> ...50% of the world's sources were in one country (So Am).
Chile seems to currently have the largest proven reserves, but lithium is not very rare (similar in concentration in the Earth's crust to nickel and lead) and is widely distributed.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The issue here, is how much of the 50MJ/kg is actually converted into mechanical energy via the combustion process, and how much of it is expelled as waste thermal energy out of the tail pipe, and leaked out of the metal skin of the engine?
Since an electric engine is not a thermal engine, it does not have to obey carnot efficiency. Nearly all of the thermal loss comes directly from the resistance of the materials in the battery pack, and in the coil windings and power leads to the motor.
The pedant will argue that the power plant that generates the power which charges the battery pack is a carnot heat engine (Steam turbine in nuclear plant, Steam turbine in coal plant, with exception of water turbine in hydroelectric.), and thus suffers the carnot efficiency limit, in addition to the compounding losses of resistance in trasmission, charging, and operation (making it always net lower than direct gas combustion.) This however totally ignores solar power(Not a carnot heat engine), Wind power (also not a heat engine, unless you get REALLY pedantic, and say that wind is just a natural thermal imbalance in the atmosphere, and subject to carnot efficiency from the sun's heat, which is really stretching it.), and hydroelectric power (also not a heat engine). Also, it does not apply the same way to a geothermal plant, despite being a heat engine (Hot steam, geothermal heat source), since the plant does not burn a fuel (compares apples to oranges.
Thus, the REAL issue is not how much energy is stored in the "fuel", but how much energy in that fuel is actually used to do work. A black hole contains an absurdly high amount of energy per kg, but you cannot get any energy out of it, making it worthless, etc.
Researching lower resistance + higher capacity + lighter weight battery packs, along with the use of very low resistance/superconductive coil windings would do much to push an electric engine above the maximum efficiency of any heat-based engine, simply by reducing the amount of heat produced, potentially by orders of magnitude.
That is to say, you don't NEED to carry around 50MJ/kg of energy, if you get better economy out of your storage system: You can carry more water in a tincan than you can in a 55 gallon barrel with holes poked in the bottom, using the same number of trips. The reason is because the tincan doesn't leak nearly as much as the 55 gallon drum does.
THAT is how an electrical motor can beat a heat engine's efficiency. (assuming you arent filling the tincan using leaky 55 gallon drums, of course; using a coal/oil/nuclear power plant to charge the battery defeats the purpose, since the second law demands that you could never beat direct application using indirect application. The transmission system will ALWAYS incur a loss in addition to the losses of the direct generation at the power plant.)
Thus, what the pedant needs to do is stop thinking in terms of oil being the gold-standard, since that creates circular logic. (If Oil is the gold standard, you can never beat oil.) Instead, you should look at the total effiency as the standard, and aim to beat that. That can actually be done.
"Many residential homes in the US have 100 amp service.
Most have 200. 400 is usually available at extra cost.*"
*citation need
Got it right here, says you're wrong
New construction homes get 200 amp, but even as recent as 2006 builders were providing 100 amp and 200 amp as an upgrade. This electrician in Wisconsin recommends 100 amps for house under 2,000 sq/ft. I don't exactly know date when 200 amp became the standard for new construction but it's clear 100 amp is the norm for your average pre-owned home. 400 amp service for a residence basically doesn't exist unless you have extreme circumstances, like you were dumb enough to buy a 15kW tankless electric water heater (idiot should have bought gas) that's sucking down 130 amps when in use.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Didn't anyone ever tell you that the fuse is *meant* to be the weakest link? Now, with your 200 amp fuse/breaker in place you'll burn out the house wiring instead.
Gasoline has a lot of energy per volume, no doubt. But an IC engine has a maximum efficiency burning that gasoline of about 40%, real world efficiency is around 20%. Electric motors are 90% real world efficient. Now assuming your 50MJ/kg is correct, all your battery has to do is match 11MJ/kg and it will equal gasoline assuming everything is equal. As noted in another post its not equal, the electric motor weighs almost nothing compared to the IC engine, as a result you need even less energy. According to the article the batteries being researched will be capable of 5.6MJ/kg. That's halfway to the equal comparison. This isn't even considering that cars are designed for 300+ miles per fillup but the average daily use is less than 40milies and the median is less than 20miles.
Electric energy can propel your car for $0.03 per mile. If gas taxes were taken out (I used my states gas tax, yours could be several cents different either direction), you are paying roughly $2.30 per gallon and if you car gets 35mph per gallon you are paying $0.06 cents per mile, that's HALF the cost.
There are so many people that don't realize how game changing the Chevy Volt is. Give it a battery pack that can sustain it for equivalent miles to a gas tank (currently it's 40mph on pure electricity with a gasoline generator backup) at the same vehicle weight and the gasoline IC engine will fade into history. This doesn't even factor in how much funner it is to drive a car with electric drive train, the power and torque curve are identical where in an IC engine they are offset significantly. Car and Driver LOVED the Volt and Tesla Roadster because they are a blast to drive and cheaper to drive than a gas car. It's a win-win for everyone if the battery tech advances to the stage that you can get similar miles from battery pack as from gasoline.
> It's just that some countries can supply lithium at smaller prices.
But only slightly smaller. Lithium is fairly uniformly distributed throughout the Earth's crust. It is, of course, cheapest to mine it where the concentration is a bit higher than average, but as those concentrations are not all that high compared to the average the countries that own them aren't going to get rich from them. If they try to jack up the price whoever they are trying to hold up will just start mining it at home.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
All rocket fuels and explosives are much worse. Typically 10% of gas. This is mostly due to the fact that these fuels must include the oxidizer, i.e. oxygen. But even excluding that, they are worse than gas. TNT, one of the best explosives, have 8MJ/kg, the same as household garbage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density/
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
It all depends on the discharge/charge ratings for the cells. We regularly punish Li cells in hotliner electric gliders.
For example, a 1,000mAH Li-Ion cell with a 5C charge rating can be safely charged at 5,000mA from near flat in 10 to 12 minutes. The charge ratings tend to go down as cell sizes increase, though, due to ventilation issues - you just can't dissipate the heat from the battery packs quickly enough unless you involve forced-flow systems, and if it gets too hot you'll get a runaway situation and BOOM.
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric).
Hydrogen was included in TFA comparison.
No, it isn't. Nor is beryllium. Energy doesn't even have to be stored in chemical bonds (see, for example, digital quantum batteries).
Energy is still stored in the electrical field in matter. A quantum battery needs a lot of infrastructure to handle the forces, so at least 50% of the weight will be wasted. (compare to the weight of a clamp holding a spring.)
Try 4x in typical driving conditions.
No, A small VW diesel has up to 40% efficiency. An elelctric car may have 90%, but you can only use 60% of the battery without damaging it in a few cycles, so overall, 2x is conservative.
It doesn't need to. A motor the size of a watermelon propels the Tesla Roadster from 0-60 in under 4 seconds. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light and the engine is heavy. In EVs, the motor is light and the "fuel" (the battery pack) is heavy. It's a reversed paradigm. You have to compare the mass and volume of the engine + fuel to the mass and volume of motor + fuel. And with current battery tech, you'll find that EVs are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to matching gasoline cars. But batteries have increased nearly 5-fold in energy density the past 21 years, and show no signs of stopping.
You are partially correct. A brushless electric motor can have very high intermittent power density. maybe 10x of a gas engine. It is only limited by cooling. For continous power its power density is the same as a gas engine. Maybe a hybrid combination can beat either. It is actually quite complicated to cool an electric motor. Think 100kW power, and 10kW heat. That means liquid cooling with pumps. radiators, and a much bigger motor to accommodate water cooling. Find an electric motor that had higher energy density than a gas engine for continous output, and I will stand corrected, and learn something new.
Here is a 220kg gas engine rated for 200kW continuous and 330kW peak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_993#Turbo_S
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
You can allredy run your subnotbook for mor than a dae by terning of yur spall chikr.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Electric energy can propel your car for $0.03 per mile. If gas taxes were taken out (I used my states gas tax, yours could be several cents different either direction), you are paying roughly $2.30 per gallon and if you car gets 35mph per gallon you are paying $0.06 cents per mile, that's HALF the cost.
$2.30 per gallon is dirt cheap, compared to prices here (Belgium). Gasoline here is about €1.40 per liter, that's almost $2 per liter or roughly $7.50 per gallon. The difference in electricity prices is much smaller: with a separate installation that works only during the night you can charge your car at €0.09 per kWh. Regular daytime prices are around €0.18. Judging from this list, that's not too different from prices in the U.S. ($0.0764 in North Dakota, $0.2028 in Connecticut, $0.2379 in Hawaii)
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
She'll be particularly unimpressed when it turns her finger black. And then the finger falls off.
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric).
Hydrogen was included in TFA comparison.
Nice try at changing the subject away from the fact that you're quite simply wrong about gasoline being the most energy-dense or nearly most energy dense substance in the universe. It's not even close. If you really want to find the most energy dense chemicals, you need to look at metastable solids. Cubane and nitrogen rings, for example. And there are some theoretical ones that may be even higher, such as triplet helium. These things way, way outclass gasoline in terms of energy density.
Energy is still stored in the electrical field in matter. A quantum battery needs a lot of infrastructure to handle the forces, so at least 50% of the weight will be wasted. (compare to the weight of a clamp holding a spring.)
1) "Still"? Chemical batteries don't store energies in electrical fields.
2) You're trying to bond energy released in a chemical reaction with tensile strength. Tensile strength != energy. And no, they're not related. A beryllium cord has a *lot* less tensile strength than a carbon nanotube cord (orders of magnitude), but releases significantly more energy when it burns.
No, A small VW diesel has up to 40% efficiency.
"Up to" != "Average usage". Duh. Diesel cars average about 25% efficiency in typical mixed usage. Engines only get their peak efficiency within a narrow power band.
An elelctric car may have 90%, but you can only use 60% of the battery without damaging it in a few cycles, so overall, 2x is conservative.
Wrong on so many different levels.
1) Efficiency has nothing to do with pack capacity. You're equating the two. 90% *efficiency*. Versus 20% *efficiency*.
2) The Tesla Roadster uses over 90% of its pack's capacity. Most li-ion BEVs are in the 75-90% DoD range. Not 60%. The Volt uses 50%, but only because A) they're taking an extremely conservative approach, and B) it's a small-pack PHEV.
You are partially correct. A brushless electric motor can have very high intermittent power density. maybe 10x of a gas engine. It is only limited by cooling. For continous power its power density is the same as a gas engine.
First off, you're confusing DC and AC motors. All AC motors are brushless. Brushless is a category of DC motors. Secondly, no. The Tesla Roadster can do anything but track duty without a liquid cooling system. With a liquid system it could easily due track duty. And even with just air cooling, it beats the hell out of non-sports cars in sustained power output, despite having an engine much smaller than even non-sports-cars that run on gasoline. And furthermore, how important is track duty to the average person?
It is actually quite complicated to cool an electric motor.
No. You can buy motors with the cooling already in place.
Think 100kW power, and 10kW heat.
First off, 100kW power is something you'll only ever get during very high acceleration or extremely high speeds. Cruising power is more like 10kW, meaning 1kW heat. Secondly, since gasoline cars average about 20% net efficiency, 100kW of gasoline power output equals *80* kW of heat that you need to get rid of. It's much, much easier for the EV.
Find an electric motor that had higher energy density than a gas engine for continous output, and I will stand corrected, and learn something new.
The very one we're talking about. The Roadster's motor can do 2/3rds of its peak output as sustained. And peak output does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
Note that the Roadster's motor is hardly the most power dense electric motor out there. Look at the PML Flightlink in-wheel motors used in the Lightning GT, for example. Each in-wheel motor is rated for 120kW peak and are.. well, the size of a wheel.
Noone ever goes walrus!
One of the many reasons we don't burn it in our cars ;)
I often like to joke, when people boast about the sort of mileage they get in their diesel cars and don't seem to understand that diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline and has a lot more pollution emitted per gallon, that I could modify my car to burn a fine beryllium slurry and easily get over 100mpg, and wow, wouldn't that be an eco-car -- 100mpg, right? :)
Not all fuels are created equal. ;)
Noone ever goes walrus!
strange, ibm surely has it's own supercomputers to do this stuff.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/