Slashdot Mirror
Research Promises Drastically Increased LiOn Capacity
daem0n1x writes "Could this be the breakthrough we've all been expecting that will finally make the electric car a reality? Researchers of Northwestern University USA discovered a new way to build lithium-ion batteries that changes dramatically both the charge time and capacity [original paper, paywalled]. Guess what it involves? That's right, graphene."
Graphene. Is there anything it can't do?
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
Stay in the car!
Korma: Good
But will it work with graphene....?
New device with more overall wattage requirements is always a few months out.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Electric cars are already a reality. They're just expensive and inefficient.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
So what if the football team isn't in the top 25.
I can finally start saving to get my Tesla in 3-5 years!
What if I am still running Snow Leopard?
New technology will not revolutionize the market - not unless it can be mass-produced at reasonable price.
There are countless energy technologies that are 'better' than what we have. But they meaning nothing to the economy and to consumers unless they come with a plan to manufacture them cheaply.
Just in time for the cheap, ultra efficient solar panels that will be available then
I'm tired of hearing about new "breakthroughs". I dont wanna hear about it until its product on the shelf, that I can use, otherwise its just vaporware
you're an idiot.
this fucking website is useless. everything posted here was on sites like msnbc half a week ago, without the ridiculous bias that comes with most postings on slashdot.
the new mods are fucking stillbirths. fix your shit.
Start the clock to an oil company purchasing the patent and locking it away ...
This is a must read article on the subject. Electric cars fail because batteries are too expensive, and because they required infrastructure of charging stations. This company however solves both these problems. You make an electric car without the battery, which is cheaper than a standard car and more reliable to boot. Then this company leases you a battery, which costs less per month than gas. And they handle the infrastructure, which includes stations that swap your battery out for a fully charged one. You never wait to charge your battery, and they can swap it out since you don't own it.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all
Part of this model is the assumption that battery technology still moves along rapidly. So the company can phase in newer, better batteries and you aren't tied to a battery you purchased when you bought your car.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
If it violates the TOS of the website, it's now a crime. Sort of a "make your own rules" clause for corporations that lets them throw customers in jail. I wouldn't want to see /. throw anonymous coward in jail, so I feel a duty to inform you.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
So if this battery has ten times the capacity of standard Lithium ion batteries, and after a year it's only five times more. That means its capacity falls off by 50% per year. I guess that would be fine for phones, but not so much for cars. It would be quite the environmental nightmare if car owners threw out their gigantic batteries every three years because the car had only 1/8 of the range it had when you drove it off the lot.
That's right, bacon."
More appealing answer.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Perhaps the discovery of graphene will be viewed as the event which tipped us over into the Singularity !
How is this from Northwestern Univ. if all the author affiliations are Wuhan University?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
If we could combine all the tech from all of the battery stories we've read in the past year, we could power an interstallar craft for a year with a single AAA battery and recharge it by rubbing it on a fluffy shirt for a few seconds.
Having read the article (*gasp*) as well as a few others it seems these batteries do NOT hold 10x more power. They degrade 10x slower on on drain/recharge cycles and can be charged 10x faster. BUT this is not the same as having 10x more POWER per cycle. Gonna have to wait some more before you get an cheap electric car that can go 500 miles before charging (though charging 10x faster is nice).
Letter To Iran
If this technology reduces energy storage costs dramatically, renewable energies (solar, wind, etc) would become much more practical because they could be stored, ie, made available on demand instead of when Mother Nature provides them.
... they'll fit right into the steady curve of slowly but steadily increasing battery capacity. People assume that all these battery advancements we keep hearing about never pan out. Well, some of them do, but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic, and after the years go by before they actually hit the market, they're just incremental improvements on what was available before they came out.
There's nothing wrong with that.
The article only mentions how it will benefit small electronic gadgets. Is there any reason this might not benefit cars?
I am just a regular /.er, I don't RTFS, I normally even skip reading the summary. But you just have to push me into completely disregarding the words in the title at this point.
I am making a vague guess that this has something to do with increasing Lithium Ion battery capacity to store electricity, but really, somebody just 'promises' something?
I don't know. I promise to stop reading the titles of these stories too if they keep writing them this way. Hey, it never stopped me from posting!
You can't handle the truth.
Obviously missing data in TFA: estimated cost of production for these marvelous batteries ...
http://www.transparency.org
If I had a dime for every bulletin about some new battery technology, I'd be rich. And here we are today still plodding along with slow incremental bumps in battery capacities.
I'll believe this one too, as soon as I can go buy one. But I won't hold my breath.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
In other words, they don't know if it will scale.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23877/
It is irritating to read something saying electric cars might one day be reality, when I have a Nissan Leaf sitting in my garage and I have put 6,000 miles on it already. I've never come even close to running out of power. Why do we need some fancier battery to make something already here be a reality?
"...will finally make the electric car a reality?" Um, first of all electric cars are actually older than gasoline cars (snobby comment, done). Second, with current battery tech electric cars are already more cost effective than gas driven cars when you compare vehicles of identical costs. The only wrinkle is lack of highways travel, but there's a solution for that too. Compare a $10k used car to $10k electric car: The cost of a decent LiFePO4 battery pack is $6k, the distance per charge is at least 50 mi, the charge cycles is at least 2k -meaning that the $6k battery pack will last for 100k mi. The cost of electricity to recharge the pack is ~$0.10 per 950 Wh which means the cost of 100k mi is ~$1645.14 -or $7645.14 for the total cost of electricity and battery. Now, for the gasoline car lets say gas will average $4/gal for the next 10 years (that seems low considering it more than doubles in price every two years) and that a decent used car will get 35-40 MPG in the city. Considering ONLY the cost of gas (not oil, maintenance, or repairs on the engine), the cost of fuel for 100k mi will be between $10k and $12k. This is with a very conservative estimate of gasoline costs and not accounting for the lower maintenance costs of electric drive systems. To address highway travel, any car 3500 lbs and under requires about 18 HP to travel at 60-70 MPH. If you have trunk space or a trailer hitch on your electric car, you can add a gasoline or propane generator to produce the 13.5 kW that your car uses on the highway and have infinite range. Or do what I do and barrow someone's gas car when you need to go more than 50 mi. Sorry about the formatting, /. took away my paragraphs :(
Stories about breakthroughs where outstanding issues are simply not mentioning or downplayed is starting to get old.
How many zebras, antelopes and gazelles do you want to fit into one, seriously?
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Will this improve the battery life on my cell phone, laptop, and tablet?
Advice: on VPS providers
Like soo many great new inovative technologies that could change the world for the better, it will never see the light of day!
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
You forgot "efficient solar panels".
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)". The article linked in the summary is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Yay, a decent comment from Anonymous Coward. He's not just trolling, hooray.
and yet not one of their resellers offers their product... i smell vaporware. and perhaps fraud.
i heard about inphase when everyone else did -- and i can't find one not even at $18,000.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I've ever heard of. Swapping out gigantic car batteries as the method of recharge?
That's just so wildly impractical. Why does that idea continue to hang around?
Oh man, I've heard this before.
They want to LEASE me a battery instead of letting me own it.
What happens if the DRM on my battery becomes obsolete??? Will the battery that I paid for stop working?
What happens if I want to play my battery in another manufacturer's CAR???
What happens if I want to LOAN MY BATTERY TO A FRIEND???
CAN I MAKE COPIES OF MY BATTERY???
WILL THEY WAN TO TRACK MY USAGE OF THE BATTERY???
WILL THEY WANT TO CONTROL WHETHER I CAN DRIVE WITH IT IN A PUBLIC AREA???
WILL I HAVE TO SIT THROUGH A LONG INTRO MOVIE ABOUT BATTERY PIRACY BEFORE I CAN START MY CARRR?????
No thanks. I'm sticking to open source batteries.
slashdot = stagnated
I was listening to someone on the radio who had an idea about improving elecctric cars that I liked. Start up a Indy-500 type of race for them. The teams individually decide on the cars design: large heavy battery for fewer pit stops, smaller lighter battery with more pit stops. The only problem is that the people watching the races will hear a "fweep" as the cars pass by, instead of a "VROOOOM!".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I welcome our new master of batteries! Our lives our saved! All ye hail King...
...hold on, what was his name again? Ah, here it is...
...King Kung!
(I know, I know, terrible...sorry, I'm a bit of a nerd...I couldn't resist)
How about the existing technology where the norm is losing 100% of capacity after 300 charges? Is that any different?
Carbon is bad!
1. It will weigh more (whether it's 10X or not needs to be compared to the weight of support structures in the battery)
2. It could cost a lot more (Lithium is the major cost component)
3. It will burn more, which is why the next project is about fire protection
Oh man, I've heard this before. They want to LEASE me a battery instead of letting me own it.
I know you're joking, but just for giggles...
What happens if the DRM on my battery becomes obsolete??? Will the battery that I paid for stop working?
Yes. And it will probably happen on a semi-regular basis to a very small number of people.
What happens if I want to play my battery in another manufacturer's CAR???
In theory, everyone will use compatible battery packs except Sony.
What happens if I want to LOAN MY BATTERY TO A FRIEND???
Your friend had better return the batteries to you instead of trying to pawn them.
CAN I MAKE COPIES OF MY BATTERY???
Do you own a factory in China?
WILL THEY WAN TO TRACK MY USAGE OF THE BATTERY???
Yes, they will. I don't doubt some of the battery's' energy will be used to power onboard microcircuitry designed to track usage trends. They might even try to include GPS if they feel lucky.
WILL THEY WANT TO CONTROL WHETHER I CAN DRIVE WITH IT IN A PUBLIC AREA???
No, but some governments may want to add a battery kill switch.
WILL I HAVE TO SIT THROUGH A LONG INTRO MOVIE ABOUT BATTERY PIRACY BEFORE I CAN START MY CARRR?????
Maybe battery safety in the DMV.
Oh come on, where are the charts and graphs? This is prime data for charts and graphs!
The hobby statisticians in the room are quite displeased.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Yes, but charges and cycles are two different things and people often get them confused, even the news reporters. Most laptop batteries loose 50% of their capacity after 300 cycles. But keep in mind a full cycle is a total discharge, followed by a complete recharge. If you only use 10% of the charge, then recharge then that is only 0.1 cycles. So if a vehicle has 200 miles range, and you drive 30 miles a day or less like most Americans, do the math. That is about 1 full cycle per week. So it would take almost 3 years to lose half of the capacity. Granted, that is still not a great number, but not as bad as it sounds. The Nissan Leaf is supposed to still have 80% capacity after the 8 year warranty. I believe the battery is rated for 2,000 cycles.
For my private reference use only: http://www.lime-exeter.co.uk/bat_paper.pdf
All other access unauthorized.
Will this improve the battery life on my cell phone, laptop, and tablet?
Seriously, dude. Are you having a hard time figuring that one out all by yourself?
Since graphene is only 1 atom thick it is tough to make a significant volume of material. It takes so many layers before you have any thickness. Hopefully the Si layer defines the bulk of the anode, because otherwise you'll just never be able to make a big battery. The cathode and anode need surface area to drive enough chemistry and a big enough cross section to handle the resulting current. That cross section will have to come from the Si...
Unfortunately there has been a news story about a battery breakthrough every week or so for the last 10 years. (In MIT technology review, for example, there's a constant drumbeat of battery-breakthrough stories). Few of these breakthroughs make it to commercialization at all, and those that do are less revolutionary than promised. Batteries have made only gradual progress.
Will the fires from these batteries be 10X bigger and 10X more likely?
it's not increasing the range per charge that matters for me (25 miles is plenty of range for my daily commute and then some), it's reducing the fscking weight of the battery pack and keeping the same range... reducing the charging time is a bonus... but those fscking batteries are heavy... and I have to cart the bike up three flights of stairs to my flat...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Micheal Kristopeit355 = boring troll
you're an ignorant hypocrite.
cower in my shadow some more, feeb.
you're completely pathetic.
"All right, lab workers, how's this new-fangled battery technology coming along?"
"It's going great, boss! We just reduced the charging time to a tenth of what was needed before! This could really be a gas-killer!"
"Excellent work. Now shelve it and let it never see the light of day."
"But..."
"Oh, you're getting your pay-check anyway. What do you care?"
But at least x brand products that use standard AA cells can't take away the warranty if you don't use x brand AA cells in countries that have something like the Magnuson-Moss Act. Apple voids the warranty if you change your own unibody MacBook's battery.
Same reason my car's manual says "only use Citroen-approved parts".
Do countries where Citroën vehicles are popular have any counterpart to the tie-in sales provision of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (15 USC 2302(c))?
Indeed, I find that pretty much any /. article that includes the word "could" in the summary ends up being speculation or vaporware.
Some hard figures would be nice (are they available in the paywalled site?) but the press release seems to suggest 50% capacity loss after 150 cycles. This is *much* worse than current generation li-ion batteries (which typically lose about 20% over about 300 cycles), and would mean that these batteries are impractical for low-cost EVs (as they'd need replacing every 6 months to prevent significant range loss).
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
It might make flying cars more practical though.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
How about making battery usage more granular? On a short trip you drain one or two pounds of batteries. On your commute to work you use 20 pounds of batteries. Day's driving uses 50 pounds. Etc.
So at the eGas Station you swap out only the batteries that are discharged. The discharged 1 pound cells go on a conveyor belt where they are recharged on their way to and at the battery vault.
The downside I imagine is more battery wiring in the car...
I come here for the love
There has been research for a long time on silicon nanoparticles to be used to replace graphene anodes in current li-ion batteries and can offer up to 10x the power density. Only problem is, one, the polycrystalline silicon that you need is difficult and expensive to create, and two, silicon anodes have been shown to fracture very easily when an electric current is applied to it. There is tons of research going on for li-ion batteries and most show up as you can increase power density but reduce life cycle, or vice versa.