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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'd guess about 8 times.
If that's true, and even if it only works out to six times in production then it almost solves the car battery problem. We can get about 100 miles with existing batteries and 600 miles is about as far as a normal person would want to drive in a day (ie. average 60mph for ten hours).
(I say "almost" because of the following posts...)
No sig today...
I am becoming jaded with such articles.
What's annoying are all these material science articles where someone has made a new material at lab-scale and this is immediately extrapolated to commercial products Real Soon Now. About one of those appears each week. This is one of the saner ones, though.
The Great New Material usually turns out to have some problem. It costs too much to make, it's too brittle, it won't work when hot or cold, it's too hazardous, or it has a short lifespan in the intended application. Sometimes this is overcome, but most of the time, not.
There's nothing wrong with having articles about this stuff, but writers should be clear on where they are in the range between "theoretical chemistry indicates this molecule would be insanely great" and "the product is shipping in volume".
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.