Aluminum-Celmet Could Increase EV Range By 300%

LesterMoore writes "Japanese company Sumitomo Electric Industries have developed a new material that they believe can significantly improve the capacity of EV batteries. The material is a form of porous aluminum called 'Aluminum-Celmet.' 'The positive electrode current collector in a conventional lithium-ion secondary battery is made from aluminum foil, while the negative electrode current collector is made from copper foil. Replacing the aluminum foil with Aluminum-Celmet increases the amount of positive active material per unit area. Sumitomo Electric’s trial calculations indicate that in the case of automotive onboard battery packs, such replacement will increase battery capacity 1.5 to 3 times. Alternatively, with no change in capacity, battery volume can be reduced to one-third to two-thirds. These changes afford such benefits as reduced footprint of home-use storage batteries for power generated by solar and other natural sources, as well as by fuel cells."

Comments

Alumninum Cermet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect this should be "Aluminum-Cermet" since the metal apparently is deposited on a ceramic base.

Japanese often mismaps the "R" sound into an "L" sound ... perhaps that happened here?

Re:Alumninum Cermet?

[nmb3000]

I thought it odd as well, but checking the company's website it is in fact "Celmet".

It appears that Celmet is a proprietry compound they've been making for a while from nickel and chromium which is designed to be very porous (and high surface area). This announcement seems to just be that they've created an aluminum variant and figure it should work well in lithium batteries.

However, like others have noted, it appears to be pure conjecture on the company's part. There's no mention of creating an actual battery using this method and, if I were to guess, this whole thing is just an attempt to generate interest in their new (patented, trademarked, and whatever else-d) material.

Re:Alumninum Cermet?

[Kagetsuki]

They've made prototypes and samples, the information just isn't fully available in English. Documentation on one of the samples: www.sei.co.jp/tr/pdf/energy/sei10498.pdf

Power Miracle

[clinko]

I'm working on a battery entirely powered by stories about battery improvements. It is due "within the next 3-5 years" and should improve our buzzword threshold by 2 fold!

Re:Power Miracle

[whiteboy86]

I would not bet on any battery tech..., but magnetically levitated (in vacuum) flywheel might actually be a power/energy storage miracle, it is much more viable now then any chemical battery. I would dare to say flywheel is back - big time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Re:Power Miracle

[timeOday]

Except guess what, battery density actually has improved steadily over time, and dramatically overall. It's not automatic, it's the result of many improvements just like this one.

Re:Power Miracle

[cgenman]

Flywheels come with their own set of problems. They exhibit gyroscopic effects. The heavier the flywheel, the more energy it takes to accelerate or decelerate, fighting against itself. You have to maintain it in a vacuum. My 10-year-old car can't even keep the exhaust from breaking every five minutes, let alone maintain anything vacuum tight.

Also, you're not really talking about THAT massive a store of energy. Gasoline is at 47.2 Megajoules / Kilogram. LiOn batteries used in cars are at 720 Kilojoules / Kilogram. The article you list refers to commercial flywheel power storage at 40 Kilojoules / Kilogram. That's 10x less than Lithium Ion batteries. For the equivalent amount of weight, a Ford Volt could drive a paultry 4 miles between charges.

I wouldn't be surprised to see flywheel regenerative braking and acceleration take off... Momentarily store energy at a dead standstill before harnessing it to launch forwards. That's what it is used for in motorsports and it works well there.

But it would take a bit of a leap to get from there, to a car whose flywheel is spun up in the morning before driving out. Remember, once all of the physics conversions and equations are stripped out, you would need to spin a big honking physical something fast enough to power pushing around a 2k pound car for a day's driving.

Re:Power Miracle

[Concerned Onlooker]

And that is different from gasoline powered cars in what way?

Re:Power Miracle

[GameMaster]

For the most part, gasoline powered cars only explode in television shows or movies.

Re:Power Miracle

[zmollusc]

I haven't noticed the improvements in battery tech because every time the batteries improve, the manufacturers use smaller ones.
My first cellphone used six AA nicads (which gave a day or so of use when new) whereas now my current (hah!) cellphone has a battery the size of an After Eight mint (which gives a day or so of use when new).

Re:Power Miracle

[arkhan_jg]

Nickel foam is already used in NiMH batteries to improve storage capacity, it's just expensive, so most often used in high-density NiMH car batteries. They already produce a low-nickel variant of this foam that's cheaper and simpler to produce, called celmet, that's comparable in performance to more expensive production methods - Sumitomo are not a fly-by-night company, this is part of their bread-and-butter business.

They've now applied the same foam technique to creating aluminium foam instead of nickel foam, so it can be used in Lithium batteries instead of NiMH. Given their focus, I imagine it's going to be more suitable to larger Li-ion batteries for EV purposes rather than smaller consumer electronics, but there's no fundamental reason it won't work for Li-ion batteries. After all, all you're doing is increasing the surface area of the electrode with a foam-type material; the trick is making it cheaply enough while maintaining mechanical strength. That appears to be the problem they have solved for aluminium, using their existing technique.

Re:Power Miracle

[TheRaven64]

Someone was complaining to me recently about rechargeable D cells only providing the same capacity of AA cells[1]. I told him he should check the capacities before buying them, since all rechargeables list their capacity in mAh on the side. I told him 650mAh was about what he'd expect from an AA, because that was about the most I could find when I last bought AAs. Then I decided to actually check. It turns out that these days 2-3Ah is normal for AA batteries. I used to have a Psion Series 3, which ran on alkaline AA batteries and had a battery monitor that told you how much it had drained - that's more than I got out of alkaline non-rechargeables back then (mid '90s).

It's easy to miss these advances, but I was really surprised how much cheap rechargeables have improved. The other thing that really brought home the improvement to me recently was a toy helicopter that I got for my birthday. I got one a few years ago, but it had a much smaller and lighter body, and didn't fly as long. In the early '90s, I asked about building electric toy helicopters, and was told that there was no power source that would work for them. The person I was talking to went through the calculations - batteries of the time simply did not have the energy density to lift themselves. That was just before LiIon started to become commercially available. Now, not only is it possible, it's so cheap that you can put them in toys for children / geeks. Oh, and as an aside, I also remember seeing the first prototype for a helicopter with counterrotating rotors on Tomorrows World. It's really amazing seeing a toy containing so many technologies that were totally unavailable just a couple of decades ago.

[1] This is actually true for Duracell - their rechargeable batteries all seem to use the same cell, irrespective of the size.

Let's Raise Some Money

[mark_elf]

TFA is full of words like "reportedly" and "could". It's marketing baloney. If this stuff is so great, let's have a story about a working battery. Also, the technical details in the summary about electrodes and battery size reduction don't appear in TFA. Please remember, No Original Research is one of the core content policies of /.

Re:Let's Raise Some Money

[Iskender]

It's true that this is not ready. However, the basics are probably sound - changing battery electrodes can boost power significantly. They're pretty much the movers and shakers in batteries, after all.

Lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries probably started this way too. There will always be a lot of fluff but it's important to keep an eye out for technical developments since some will actually be the next big thing, like powerful LEDs. New electrodes in some shape and form are probably it when it comes to lithium batteries.

Obligatory xkcd reference

[fotbr]

http://xkcd.com/678/

As a side note, a hovercar might be nice later this summer when my commute floods.

Slashvertisement

[Mr. Underbridge]

Search for the term "Aluminum Celmet" and all the returns are from the last month or so, all reference the company mentioned here, and are either press releases, stories on tech sites made from press releases, or astroturf on forums. The term "celmet" appears to be a trademark of the company.

I'm very interested in novel battery research, but this one tastes like Ovaltine.

Re:Who Else read that as "aluminum-cement"?

[publiclurker]

From what I can tell, they only know how to make this foam with a few types of metal right now.

If this is decent at all...

[Anubis IV]

...and can be applied at sizes smaller than a car battery, the first practical applications of it won't be car batteries. They'll be consumer electronics. If you've ever seen the inside of an iPad or iPhone, you already know that the largest single component is the battery. Being able to shrink it means that the technology companies can shrink the form factors of devices like those. I know in the case of the iPhone, the camera is one of the current major constraints on thickness, but for laptops you may be able to see drastic reductions in thickness and weight. And for smaller electronics, you may be able to simply make the device lighter, or else can afford to make fewer compromises due to space constraints. It could be very interesting indeed.

Now, granted, this sounds like a lot of astroturfing, but if there is any worth to it, you can bet that the technology companies that are trying to make slim and stylish devices will be all over it. Apple in particular, since they've already started developing their own battery technologies to save space and increase capacity.

Re:Who Else read that as "aluminum-cement"?

[aevan]

Same...and then went on to read EV as in extra-vehicular (activity) and wondered what the hell helmet material astronauts were using that so limited them before...

This might be real

[Animats]

The actual press release is rather conservative.

This is Sumitomo Electric, annual sales about US$20 billion, not some startup. Their major businesses are wire and cable, which includes fibre optics and associated laser diodes. Looking back at their press releases, there are items like "Arrival of the "Era of High-Temperature Superconducting Wire with 200-A-Class Critical Current", followed a few months later by "World's First In-Grid High-Temperature Superconducting Power Cable System is Now Online at Albany, New York". This company doesn't typically overhype their technology.

Their "celmet" materials have been around for a while, but until recently, they were nickel-based only. They've made some NiMh batteries with this technology, but there wasn't a big win. Now they have an aluminum version, which is more useful for batteries.

This might actually work.

Re:This might be real

[crunchygranola]

the problem with aluminium as a high-capacity rechargeable battery is that the energy storage capacity is so high (80kWh in a 100kg cell is not unreasonable) that it can easily be classified as a weapon (in the same way that a molotov cocktail can be classified as a weapon).

The energy content of 100 kg of TNT is 115 kWh, so this is almost 70% as high. Thermal destruction of a battery like this won't be pretty. (Well, maybe it *would* be pretty in a Myth Busters/fireworks kind of way, but you won't want to be close by.)

Re:This might be real

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about 100 liters of gasoline? In more *useful* terms,

gasoline - 45MJ/kg
100kg, 80kWh (magic) battery - 2.9MJ/kg
TNT - 4.7MJ/kg

So, what's the problem? gasoline is 10x as much energy dense as TNT. But then the comparison is kind of ridicules. TNT is designed to release all energy at once. A battery or gasoline, generally cannot do that. Gasoline can only do that under very specific circumstances. Batteries are even less likely to be destroyed as rapidly as openly burning gasoline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_Energy_Densities

Re:This might be real

[Anonymous Coward]

By that logic you should be really worried about butter. 100 kg of butter has an energy content of 830 kWh after all. What makes TNT dangerous isn't the energy density, which is pretty low, but the speed of the reaction.

Re:This might be real

[Alioth]

You're comparing apples with oranges: TNT releases that energy in a very small fraction of a second. However, a lithium battery when it catches fire takes a minute or two to actually burn out, so unlike TNT it won't explode, it'll just burn. Petrol (gasoline) burns much more rapidly and ferociously than a Li-Ion battery. Also liquid fuels can spread out while they are burning and catch a lot of other things on fire, a lithium battery tends to sit and flare off in one place. It's considerably less threatening than a liquid fuel fire.

A lithium battery probably makes a better weapon by blunt impact rather than burning.

Awesome!

[ewieling]

This is great news! Only 20 years until the patent expires and products can start being made using this technology.

Re:The car battery problem has been solved

[Gordonjcp]

The Sinclair C5 - cool though it was, and I still want one - was a small electric recumbent cycle. Its real range was closer to 25km than 40km, and at a top speed of 25km/h. It had pedals, but then the aerodynamic design was compensated for by carrying around 30kg of deep-cycle lead-acid battery. It needed to charge up overnight from flat, giving about an hour's run time for a full 12 hours of charging.

I'm not a particularly hardcore cyclist, but even I can beat the C5's range and speed, powered only by a pint or two of beer and a couple of pies...

Future Tech is Future tech, so stop being a cynic

[Xeranar]

I have no other definition for a group so well entrenched and yet supposedly so well educated in science. First off take a course in the history of science and understand just how developments actually work. We've been wowed by computer sciences for the last two decades and the lightning speed of updates but in the real world of mechanical parts and economics moore's law just doesn't apply. The first EVs used nickel-cadmium batteries the newest models use lithium ion technology. In ten years this aluminum-celmet which is a process that is widely known and thus likely will be trademarked but not patented. We're close to breaking the magic 300 mile range barrier and when we do the EVs will sell.

The overall cynicism of the posters is getting depressing and irresponsible. Science occurs at the speed of humanity, advancements happen every day that takes years to filter into our world. If you don't like reading about cutting edge future technology then stop reading these articles.

Misleading use of percentages

[stormboy]

Looking at the stated figures for battery volume, the increase in range is "by up to 200%" NOT "by 300%" as the title states. The correct use of the 300% figure would be "increase range to 300% of current range". An increase of range by 300% would mean the range would be 400% of the original range. It may seem like a little difference between the words "by" and "to", but misuse of words and percentages occurs far too much to exaggerate things that do not need exaggerating.

Re:What the heck is a EV battery?

[Kagetsuki]

Electric Vehicle

How was it going to improve your sex life?

[denzacar]

will increase battery capacity 1.5 to 3 times