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."

Comments

The magical ingredient

[JDG1980]

Graphene. Is there anything it can't do?

Re:The magical ingredient

[Crudely_Indecent]

Yo mama!

Re:The magical ingredient

[Halo1]

Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was

• sandwich silicon between the graphene sheets, because silicon can bind many more ions than carbon (the downside is that it fragments, and that's what they addressed with their sandwiching process) -> more capacity
• make minuscule holes in the graphene sheets to offer shortcuts to ions traveling from one side of the sheet to the other side (-> faster charging)

Re:The magical ingredient

[timmy.cl]

"graphene" is single-atom-thick carbon.

Re:The magical ingredient

[oakgrove]

I just sprinkled bacon bits on a stack of hundred dollar bills. I am so excited!!

Re:The magical ingredient

[cellocgw]

Yep, it can do anything. In fact Texas Instruments is using it in their next-gen calculators. You'll soon be able to buy a ....
.
.
.
wait....
Graphene Calculator!

Re:The magical ingredient

[darksabre]

Graphite is the form of carbon used in pencils. Anyway, my pencil is a lot more than a single atom thick ;-)

Re:The magical ingredient

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet you say that to all the girls...

Re:The magical ingredient

[v1]

it doesn't surprise me at all that scientists are finding all sorts of neat uses for graphene. (curious, that's NOT in my dictionary here...) The main novelty here is they're dealing with a building material on an atomic scale. Since things behave very differently at those scales, it's only natural to find new uses for it. And this is only one element they're working with. Imagine what all awaits discovery at the nano scale?

It's like all these years you've been somehow managing to fix fine swiss watches using a baseball bat and tire iron for tools, getting at best mediocre results and only modest improvements from time to time. Now someone hands you a tweezers. Hey, this works better! really? They need to explore other nano materials instead of concentrating all their time on this one new one.

Re:The magical ingredient

[icebike]

This reduced the time it takes the battery to recharge by up to 10 times.

I just cringe when I read that kind of stuff coming from an article about scientific fields.

Does that mean 1/10 the time?

Re:The magical ingredient

[jeffmeden]

Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was

• sandwich silicon between the graphene sheets, because silicon can bind many more ions than carbon (the downside is that it fragments, and that's what they addressed with their sandwiching process) -> more capacity
• make minuscule holes in the graphene sheets to offer shortcuts to ions traveling from one side of the sheet to the other side (-> faster charging)

That's not quite the whole story: current lithium-ion battery designs have *graphite* in them, which is a bit disingenuous to describe merely as "many layers of graphene". The fact that in this design, they are in discrete multiple layers (with silicon and, as a result of this research, perforations) is what makes the difference. To my knowledge (correct me if I am wrong) no commercial battery has discrete graphene layers in it (graphene is a relatively new area of research, circa 2004, and conventional li-ion battery design has been relatively unchanged for about 20 years.)

Re:The magical ingredient

[adonoman]

No, in this case, "10 times" had nothing to do with multiplication. It's simply a statement of the number of instances on which they reduced the recharge time. "On last tuesday, we reduced the the recharge time by 1%. On wednesday, we got an extra 1%. We did that up to 8 more times (we lost count, but that's the upper bound)"

Increased lion capacity!

[biodata]

Stay in the car!

Re:Increased lion capacity!

[delinear]

Not only are they increasing the capacity, they're increasing the charge speed. That's all we need, millions of super fast lions :(

Re:Increased lion capacity!

[ackthpt]

Not only are they increasing the capacity, they're increasing the charge speed. That's all we need, millions of super fast lions :(

If Marlin Perkins were here he'd have to rebadge the show EXTREME Wild Kingdom

... as Jim approaches the lions ... oh my, they are fast! Good thing his surviving family is covered by Mutual of Omaha.

Increased Lion capacity

[Xian97]

What if I am still running Snow Leopard?

Coming to the market in 5 years time?

[abigsmurf]

Just in time for the cheap, ultra efficient solar panels that will be available then

Better Place

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Better Place

[scamper_22]

Managing that battery inventory is going to be a huge problem. How are you going to make sure each 'gas station' has enough batteries on hand. Since they're not cheap, it's a huge cost. This might not be a huge problem in the city, but that's not where people have a fear of running out of battery. Heck, a simple EV you charge at home would suffice if you simply traveled in the city.

It's the spaces in the cities or commuters.
The roll out and management of this is a huge problem.

But even assuming you could manage that well enough, there is another minor problem.

Maybe I'm just paranoid coming from Africa where people will steal anything making infrastructure hard to build out... but you're talking about an expensive batter than can be 'easily swapped out'. Something tells me that makes it 'easy to steal'.

Re:Better Place

[GameboyRMH]

Battery swapping is going to look like a hilariously silly idea 5-10 years from now when an electric car can drive plenty far enough on a single charge. Heck even now you can buy quick-charging electric cars off the showroom floor that can reach an 80% charge in 30 minutes.

And to the guy about to post "Electric cars are a joke! I drive 900 miles every day you know!" well stick to your Ford Ranger with jerry cans in the back, but don't pretend that most people have any use for such range.

Re:Better Place

[necro81]

I like the idea but it makes you dependent on them plus you need to live/work at driving distance of one of their station

A similar argument could be made against internal-combustion automobiles: you are dependent on oil companies and you need to live/work at driving distance to a filling station. I know these are facile comparisons, but I hardly think that these limitations make Better Place an impossible or useless proposition. There are lots of people that live/work in an urban area that could have a sprinkling of such stations. You can recharge the battery at home or work like a typical EV. Being able to swap it out is a way to reduce capital cost/risk in owning a battery outright, and allows you to get a full charge in a few minutes when you need.

Re:Better Place

[peragrin]

What is easier to store? Gasoline for 1000 cars or battery packs for 1000 cars? Your typical gas station has a couple thousand gallons of gas below it. A battery pack for elevtric cars occupies 16 cubic feet(figure 4'x4' area). To store enough batteries for 1000 cars will require 16'000 feet of storage or roughly the area occupied by a 5 bay mechanics garage.

It will also by using more power than a hospital. And you need one on every street corner. Even with home charging we will need to double the electtical capacity and output of the USA in order to move a significant populations to electric cars.

Take a look at the whole problem. It is really scary when you put hard numbers into play.

Re:/. is an empty shell of what it once was.

[elrous0]

I don't even comment on /. anymore.

Re:Reality

[sgt scrub]

Flying cars are already a reality. They are just expensive and inefficient.

Re:Reality

[Baloroth]

Interstellar travel is already a reality. It is just expensive and inefficient.

"Guess what it involves?

[circletimessquare]

That's right, bacon."

More appealing answer.

New battery stories

[P-niiice]

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.

Don't confuse Duration with Capacity

[DumbSwede]

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).

Re:Don't confuse Duration with Capacity

[Dr_Barnowl]

They do have more capacity - this isn't the traditional carbon electrode, this is a graphene-stabilised silicon anode, and silicon holds more charge.

They also have more power, as well as more capacity. If the internal resistance is low enough to charge it in 15 minutes, it's low enough to discharge it that fast as well.

Alas, the missing bit is similar innovations in cathode technology.

And when they finally hit the market...

[Guspaz]

... 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.

Re:Better battery life is always a year away

[delinear]

Yes, we've progressed from not having invented it to having solved some interesting research problems. Next stage is cancelation.

Re:Better battery life is always a year away

[necro81]

Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.

On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.

Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.

Re:Where was this reasearch done?

[dokebi]

The confusion is because the paper linked in the summary is incorrect.

The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)" and the summary linked paper 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?

Wrong article linked in summary

[dokebi]

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?

Re:Better battery life is always a year away

[DrgnDancer]

Still, the main use case they are touting in the summary is cars. Faster charging, higher storage density batteries are a huge deal in that space. One of the big complaints with electric cars is that they take much longer to charge than a gas powered car takes to fill up, so faster charging is a big deal. More power density means either a) you can store the same amount of power in fewer batteries (thus theoretically reducing the weight and cost) or b) can get much farther on the same sized battery.

Right now electric cars are right on the cusp of being really commercially viable. If they become a hair cheaper, a hair longer range, a hair quicker to charge... it could put them over the top. This has the potential to do all three, and if the research is accurate increase all of them by more than a hair.

Plus, you know, I wouldn't complain if my iPhone went 3 days without a charge.