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Carbon Nanotube Batteries Pack More Punch
cremeglace writes "Researchers at MIT have come up with a new way of making batteries from carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are attractive materials for battery-making because of their high surface area, which can accept more positive ions and potentially last longer than conventional batteries. Instead of this design, the MIT researchers introduced something new — using chemically modified carbon nanotubes as the positive ion source themselves. For now, the new batteries can power only small devices, but if the method can be scaled up, the batteries may provide the power needed for applications like electric cars."
Of all the technologies that are supposedly "just around the corner": fusion power, flexible displays, etc., dramatically improved batteries are probably the most wearyingly repetitive. Literally every 3 months since 2005 I've seen an article on Engadget, or wherever, about some university that claims 500% longer-lasting batteries in the lab, to be available to consumers "in 18 months". Ain't happened yet. Let's all claim success about boosting battery capacity when we can actually buy them, until then this is just so much hot air.
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...but if the method can be scaled up, the batteries may provide the power needed for applications like electric cars.
And it's that one big damn, 'if,' that actually prevents most technologies like this from seeing commercial production/practical application.
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was this a bad joke or are you actually retarded?
We're already close to the limits and it can't really be improved.
Yeah, I remember hearing a talk way back when pointing out that we're going to run out of shrink Real Soon Now because 100 nm is the absolute limit that simply can't be bettered. The guy introducing the talk said he'd given a similar one on the 60's or early 70's saying that 1 micron was the absolute limit that simply couldn't be bettered...
This is not to say that there aren't limits, but that we are terrible at predicting them. Anyone who confidently pronounces a limit on something is just announcing their ignorance of technological history, which pretty much disqualifies them from pronouncing a limit on something. It's the only catch...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
IIRC, thermal runaway, as you call it, is a problem specific to Lithium based batteries due to the chemical properties of lithium. It's somewhat volatile, you could say: impact and temperature extremes tend to do bad things to it (whether we're talking explody-boom or cell lifetime). Carbon, on the other hand, is innately stable.
Lithium powered hybrids are just a Bad Idea. I have no idea how they got that shit off the ground.
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There's plenty of battery technologies that perform well enough for cars already.
Lithium Iron Phosphate is almost ideal as an example. It holds less charge than a
Li-Ion pack, but in return it can recharge in a sensible amount of time ( 10-15min ).
Now I know some people with no clue will come claim that amount of energy can't safely
be transferred or something. You're wrong. Recharging a 25kWh battery pack (corresponding
to ~150km of driving) in 15 minutes would require 100kW. This is a bit more power than
most devices, but heck, my hairdryer does 2kw out of a standard socket, and I'm pointing
that thing in my face every morning. 100kW might be a lot compared to a cellphone charger,
and it will take a bit of engineering to design a connector, but it's hardly an unachievable
amount of power.
The problem is that these advanced batteries are expensive. Heck even Li-ion is prohibitive
for a family car. Tesla gets away with it because they are selling a luxury model, but if
batteries are going to power a significant fraction of cars then their cost has to come down.
The question now is not so much if but when batteries will take over. Much will depend on what happens
with the oil and electricity prices, but eventually petroleum will become sufficiently expensive that
an electric car is simply a more economical choice.
No. We should instead find someone who is not only intelligent but also honest to listen to.
The AEI who funds Green would love nothing more than to keep the world running on coal and oil until Armageddon. The pseudo-intellectuals they hire are no authority on science, technology, economics, politics, or even religion.
In the last year or so there's been a new battery research story every month promising longer lasting batteries that are smaller and usually cheaper. Yet the most advanced you can buy are still just play Lithium Polymer batteries which seem to power my Android phone for about 15 minutes.
How weird. The tiny lithium battery I put in my smartphone a year ago still powers it for at least a day's worth of use on a full charge, if not more depending on how little browsing and video watching I do. I won't spoil the ending and tell you what kind of phone I have; I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
And for what it's worth, it may feel like an eternity but no less than 10 years ago we had no such fancy-fangled inexpensive lithium batteries for our phones/laptops. If you wanted one, it was gonna cost you, it wasn't going to hold much energy, and it would be dead with about 6 months of regular use. Today's very cheap, highly durable, very energetic lithium polymer batteries are the result of continuous un-sexy research that made headlines in the 80s and 90s, but is still undergoing a lot of change and improvement. The next revolution in battery storage will probably also happen without much fanfare; I hope your phone holds out until then!
Yeah, well... when we're arriving at wires being tens of atoms wide, I'm tending to believe we're at the limits of physics rather than process.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm so sick of this. Lithium-based battery technologies have a high energy/weight ratio because lithium is a very light metal. It has little to do with the fact that the spinel used for one of the electrodes is easily ignited. NiMH batteries are far safer and won't burn or explode the way lithium does, but because the metals used in them have higher atomic masses, they are also heavier for the same amount of energy.
People keep talking about burning batteries as if the problem with li-ion is that we're trying to pack too much energy in a small space, but a plutonium based RTG packs WAY more energy, yet will never undergo thermal runaway ( it obviously has other problems though ).
Chemistry is hard
Physics is hard
You can't pretend thermal runaway is due to energy density alone. The chemistry of the substances a battery is made of, the thermal conductivity of the electrodes, the physical size of the battery, the activation energy of the components... it all plays a part, and it's quite possible to store orders of magnitude more energy/volume or energy/weight than in a Li-ion battery without it being prone to thermal runaway. It's just not very practical for electric cars at the moment.
Micro tubes != nano tubes.
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