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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."
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.
Call me when this research turns into a produced battery.
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Will they be able to prevent thermal runaway in these better than in, say Lithium based batteries? As density goes up this needs to be more of a concern. Laptops melting down are one thing, but imagine the havoc of a car exploding due to battery failure. That's the last thing the electric car movement needs to have happen.
How about potatoes?
Everybody knows that if you can design an economically viable improvement on present-day batteries, you are going to be wildly, obscenely rich. There are plenty of applications where people would be perfectly willing to pay several times more for a battery than what they are paying now if there was a significant improvement in capacity/mass. This leads to a lot of research being concentrated even on very wild potential ideas. Many are viable in the lab, but are too expensive to produce (by a margin of several orders of magnitude), too dangerous, too short-lived, or any combination thereof.
No matter how many misses there will be, this situation is more or less the ideal case for a free market to optimize for -- if it is possible to safely store more electrical energy in a smaller mass, it will be found eventually.
Unlike the fuel cell guys, which are constantly promising consumer products shipping in "just a few months", I'm glad these folks realize their work is still well away from widespread application where it's really needed.
You may try to apply moore's law to things other than cpus, but that doesnt make it happen. The frequency of the news articles shows only a huge demand by consumers and researches need for funding.
In most designs regenerative braking has to throw away power because you can't charge the packs fast enough. A battery that CHARGES faster would be useful not only for quick-charging but also for regenerative braking. I didn't RTFA though so I have no idea if it carries more current in both directions.
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(As there is no way to link to it, I’m including the quote here. Just imagine I would have linked to it ;)
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Idiocracy (2006)
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The problem is getting 100kW to your house, about 417 amps at 240V. The NEC standard for a single-family home is 100 amps, but most are only rated for about 60. The power pole transformers are usually well provisioned, which means that entire neighborhoods would need to be upgraded to increase everyone's capacity. It is a bigger problem than upgrading phone lines from copper to fiber.
Even if it was a problem in reality all that would be needed to mitigate it would be to mandate that chargers spend 1 minute at the start and end of a charging session to slowly ramp the power up/down. That would only add 1 minute to the total charge time, and since modern turbines in load leveling power plants can spin up and down on those timescales it solves the issue.
What articles were you reading that said a battery tech would go from "in the lab" to "on the market" in 18 months? 5 years or so is more typical. And 500% battery improvement tech announcements are rare. There are a couple out there, like li-air, but not many. And many people confuse significant improvements on one part of a battery (say, the anode or cathode) with improvements on the cell as a whole.
Li-ion batteries have advanced about 40% since 2005.
There's a serious problem with the announcements making the news but the commercialization coming in under the radar. Remember back in 2007 when Slashdot covered that silicon nanowires had been determined to be an excellent anode for li-ion batteries? The reporting was crap, mind you -- they confused an anode density improvement "up to 10x" with being a whole battery improvement (even a 10x anode improvement would be an under 2x battery improvement if not paired with an equivalent cathode improvement, mind you). The researcher was looking to be "forming a company", but first they would have to deal with "cycle life" problems. The first batteries of this type were to hit the market as early as 5 years.
It's only 3 years later and it's already started. Mind you, these first versions are much more limited -- they start out. But as the tech is refined, they will continue to advance, just like the old graphite anodes did. Early li-ion cells really sucked compared to what we have today. Silicon will go through the same process.
You see the same thing with cathodes. And other anode materials. And separators, and electrolytes, and casings. And all in all, the tech marches on. But consumers don't even notice it because their devices just keep shrinking the batteries and consuming more power. The battery improvement isn't Moore's impressive doubling-every-1.5-years. But it's just as relentless.
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The comparison to a gas tank is somewhat inadequate as these batteries are far heavier than gasoline; if you have a serious accident that compromises the frame of the car you really can't guarantee that the battery container is going to be unperturbed. There needs to be two or more dedicated safety measures to contain or divert the energy from the batteries away from the occupants in the event of damage.
Also: They can release their energy much more quickly (and thus more hotly) than gasoline. Gasoline requires oxygen from the air (or wherever) to burn and this limits its thermal power. Lithium cells are self-contained and have all the pieces of the reaction ready to go. (That's why they're heavier than an equivalent amount of gas.) They're only limited by the physics of the propagation of the catastrophic energy release mechanism.
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