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Superior Anode For Lithium-Ion Batteries Developed
RogerRoast writes "The anode is a critical component for storing energy in lithium-ion batteries. The Berkeley Lab (D.O.E) has designed a new kind of anode that can absorb eight times the lithium of current designs, and has maintained its greatly increased energy capacity after over a year of testing and many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles. According to the research published in Advanced Materials they used a tailored polymer that conducts electricity and binds closely to lithium-storing silicon particles, even as they expand to more than three times their volume during charging and then shrink again during discharge."
I couldn't see the main article because it requires subscription but how much extra capacity does this actually translate into? (Assuming it works...)
No sig today...
Seems like, now the claim of sony vaio of 12 hour battery backup can be challenged. - http://www.techgineering.org/2011/09/01/2013/sony15-5-vaio-s-laptop-claims-12-hour-battery-life/ .
i wish, my toshiba laptop had the same technology.
There has been many nice headlines over the months (years) about such and such new advances in battery technology. Surely it's nice, but now I am becoming jaded with such articles. Here is what I want now: "New AAA batteries lasting twice as long as those currently sold reach the market // blah blah ... as measured by independent testing ... blah blah"
... a beowulf cluster of these!
Maybe *you* only want to know about things once they are no longer R&D and are just lumpen consumer goods available in your local B&M.
Others may like to know about research, both blue-sky and nearer commercialisation.
The fact is that batteries *have* improved vastly over recent time, but not possibly by quanta and in formats that excite you.
I'm rather impressed by the LiFePO4 battery that I have rigged up alongside my 2kWh of SLA gel to reduce cycling of the latter, at several times the energy density by volume and weight (and not that expensive). But I went and haggled and bought it straight off a vendor's R&D bench armed with the knowledge that it wasn't likely to turn up in consumer gear in that form, at least not for a year or two.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Must be a reconfiguration of the Matrix.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I got to agree with you coward!
Wasn't this same story posted about a week ago?
There are many improved versions of the Li-Ion battery that last longer (as in more cycles) but they never seem to reach the market. Yeah feck it you can buy loose 18650 LiFePO4 cells and even lithium based supercapacitors but name one phone or laptop a normal person can easily buy with anything other than the bog standard 400-500 cycle-then-dead Li-Ion battery?
I expect that the reason for this is quite sinister - Li-Ion batteries are used to enforce planned obsolescense, which is why standard cells are often packed into an overpriced proprietary plastic casing before sale. Manufacturers of consumer electronics don't want batteries that are still good after thousands of cycles. Apple also deserves a mention for pioneering the idea of packing the battery into the hard to open case of the phone/laptop itself, forcing 99% of the people who own these products to buy a new one as soon as the battery dies.
You should rethink your crush on the cute red-haired girl, and maybe settle for deoxygenated speaker cable instead--where basic research to applications cycles at the speed of CTRL-S in PowerPoint. I guess I'm jaded, too, about erection returns.
Serious question: How many headlines does it take to change a battery? Plenty, if you get sucked into the cul de sac of small iterative improvements in the suburb of basic physical limits.
Why do we settle for chump change? I suspect that somewhere among the 10^500 Calabi-Yau manifolds there's a periodic table where every headline is grand. How life organizes in this universe is another question, best explored by those demanding results yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Do take a map and a compass. The parameter space resembles Tokyo pancaked into a Mandelbrot. Just one small wrong turn, no headlines for you.
(lower density than NiMH, but that technology has severe limitations on longevity that are not going to go away)
This isn't wrong, it's ridiculously wrong. NiMH batteries are used in the Toyota Prius, where almost all of them last for thousands of charge/discharge cycles. The *prototype* of all NiMH batteries lasted 500 c/d cycles and most modern NiMHs last on the order of 4000 cycles or more:
Interest grew in the 1970s with the commercialisation of the Nickel hydrogen battery for satellite applications. Hydride technology promised an alternative much less bulky way to store the hydrogen. Research carried out by Philips Laboratories and France's CNRS developed new high-energy hybrid alloys incorporating rare earth metals for the negative electrode. However, these suffered from the instability of the alloys in alkaline electrolyte and consequently insufficient cycle life. In 1987, Willems and Buschow demonstrated a successful battery based on this approach (using a mixture of La0.8Nd0.2Ni2.5Co2.4Si0.1) which kept 84% of its charge capacity after 4000 charge-discharge cycles. More economically viable alloys using mischmetal instead of lanthanum were soon developed and modern NiMH cells are based on this design.[9]
For comparison, lithium-ion batteries are often only rated for something like 200 c/d cycles, with the best commercial-grade lithium-ion batteries not rated for longer than 1000 c/d cycles.
We get a story about new tech promising an order-of-magnitude increase in the capacity of lithium batteries
We have yet to see any come to fruition.
Sure, we all want this. And I realize I'm likely to get moded down, not because I'm saying anything wrong but because someone who saw the original story and was excited doesn't like hearing the truth. But I'm getting a bit tired of hearing about all of these advances in battery technology that never actually seem to make it to the marketplace, in spite of claims that the advance can quickly and easily be applied to current production techniques.. Of course if this stuff really panned out we wouldn't even need batteries, we would all be using those nano-particle based super capacitors that I read about here years ago.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Actually, it's even more interesting. I'd researched battery market for my $DAYJOB and it turns out that there are _literally_ hundreds of groups working on battery development.
About a third of them are frenetically working on _commercializing_ existing developments, trying to beat other groups in a race to market. In a couple of years we'll see several commercial-ready battery technologies capable of producing batteries with at least 2-3 times the capacity of current ones.
Just imagine - the bloodbath free-for-all competition of battery makers. With patent lawsuits flying left and right. It's going to be FUN FUN FUN!
I would wonder how many times you could cycle this battery before the thing breaks down due to all that swelling and contracting, esp under automotive environmental conditions of extreme cold, heat, heat rate of change, large current demand while cold, fast charge cycle, etc, etc.
Also are these things fail safe? if there's an internal short, is the damage self-limiting, or will it feed back on itself and blow up? There's a lot of energy density in there.
Batteries are inherently a difficult component to innovate and develop. Putting aside limitations in chemistry and the costs involved, batteries are also subject to some of the toughest criteria before it'll even be considered viable for use in consumer products, operating temperatures, toxicity, size & weight, availability, longevity, stability & manufacturing scalability are some of the factors that need to be considered before new battery technology can be used. Once a battery meets all of the criteria, history has shown companies are quick to adopt it into their products (Sometimes a little too quickly), plus companies are willing to invest quite a bit of money into R&D of battery technology. Probably the more notable advantage that companies are now starting to really work towards making components more power efficient and not just because being 'green' is a good marketing phrase. At the end of the day though, battery technology is still woefully behind every other technology in a mobile/portable or even technology in a modern car.
Does that mean that you need empty space surrounding the battery equal to three times the volume of the discharged battery? If that's the case, you get 8 times the charge capacity but it occupies 3 times the space so is it equivalent to slightly more than doubling existing batteries? Have I missed something?
I would suggest that smaller and lighter vehicles are a more sensible path to pursue. Smaller cars means cheaper batteries, which means that current technologies are affordable after all.
While there's still quite a bit of room for improvement in weight savings, consider that developing a battery that has higher energy density will allow you to put fewer pounds of battery into an EV, of whatever design.
Car makers would love to make their vehicles lighter for no additional cost. Right now steel is cheaper than carbon fiber. You need a car of at least a certain weight to meet the safety requirements. As long as batteries remain weighty, you have to add even more weight in structural support to carry them. 200 miles worth of batteries weighs more than 2x100 miles worth of batteries - you have to burn more power pushing the extra weight.
Another consideration entirely would be that while EVs are indeed the popular topic when it comes to batteries, I'd love to have a battery for my smart phone that will a day of heavy usage. And a lifespan of a year or two of charging is sufficient for most cell phones.
I don't read AC A human right
I've read quite enough "miracle breakthrough" stories down the years to waste my time on this one. It'll be yet another bunch of beardy weirdies claming a theoretical result in the lab which is a magnitude short of the headline, but they have a plan to make a breakthrough (the plan being the only plan) real soon now. Insert more funding to continue.
If it's not on the market, it's not news. End of story.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
LiFePO4 lasts longer in terms of cycles, but has half the energy density of standard LiIon (and lower nominal voltage), I think that's why you don't see it in appliances. But it's an interesting battery - it has very low internal resistance which means you can pull a LOT of current from it what makes it great for certain applications (intermittent usage, high peak-current). What's more the LiFePO4 chemistry is safe, it won't explode in your face because of a short. Another alternative are LiMn cells, they have the same voltage as ordinary LiIon (can be used as drop-in replacement), slightly lower energy density, can supply high currents and last twice (or maybe more?) as long. From what I hear this chemistry is not feasible for small batteries (in terms of volume). Oh and they rarely explode.
Great they and 100000 other groups have revolutionary lithium anode research! Wake me when they get to production and I'll buy some. Until then I guess A123 is my best bet for advanced batteries.