IBM Creates 'Breathing' High-Density Lithium-Air Battery

MrSeb writes "As part of IBM's Battery 500 project — an initiative started in 2009 to produce a battery capable of powering a car for 500 miles — Big Blue has successfully demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery. In it, oxygen is reacted with lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released — in the words of IBM, this is an 'air-breathing' battery. While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in a lithium-air battery comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter. The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries: the max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline."

Comments

Gasoline-like energy density

[GameboyRMH]

Your move, range anxiety crowd.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[jellomizer]

Recharge in less then 5 minutes?

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[loufoque]

How expensive is it?
How long does it take to charge?
How long can it hold its charge before it leaks?
How many recharge cycles can it do?

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Rhywden]

Solved by standardized connectors and form factors.
Instead of charging the battery in the car, exchange the empty battery for a loaded one.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[GameboyRMH]

Drat you've got me. God forbid you have to take a half-hour break to get an 80% recharge after driving for over 8 hours at highway speed. You might even have to choke down a snack to bury your sorrows.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[AmiMoJo]

Not an absolute requirement by any means. Current cars can do an 80% recharge in half an hour, more than adequate for most people. Remember that in the future the idea will be to charge your car in the car park or at home, not just on the road. If you manage to hit the 500 mile range then half an hour to recharge your own body is probably a good idea.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[dalias]

No, increasing the time to 30 minutes would mean insane profits from your customers being stuck there for 30 minutes with nothing to do but drink your coffee and eat your food.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[noh8rz3]

Also, remember that electric motors are 3x more efficient that gas engines (80% thermal efficiency vs. 25%), so batteries don't need to get parity with gasoline in order to be comparable.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[rubycodez]

I have natural gas taps in my house. Some people have fuel oil delivered. Anyway, even if a car can be recharged in minutes at a station, it could also be charged overnight when needed.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Rhywden]

Ah, but that's the beauty of it: You don't need to know the number of duty cycles.
You exchange your empty battery for a charged battery with the assurance of the fuel station that this battery carries the charge you just paid for.
And if that one's empty, you'll replace it again.
Furthermore, you can insert some electronics to store and display statistics - no need to sell a dumb battery.

Again, a solvable problem.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Junta]

To be fair, it may represent a different business model entirely.

Gas stations mostly operate on thin margins on the gasoline itself, with the profit center being trying to get people to walk in the door to by some snacks/drink/whatever. Generally only items that can be browsed and purchase comfortably in a minute or so, since the store doesn't want a car consuming a spot more than that.

However, having vehicles that require a lot longer to charge and can be safely recharged without the operator in attendance changes the dynamics. No longer do you have businesses that are places to replenish vehicle range primarily, but you have a wider variety of businesses where they want people to sit around for a lot longer time away from their car. Some may provide metered charging as a way to augment their revenue or recover cost of the service, some even may provide it for 'free' to draw people in the door. You can already see this happening. In my area, there are shopping malls with currently free charging access. There are also restauraunts with metered chargers. A number of employers are starting to mention free charging as a perk, in part to draw people in and in part to show off how 'green' they are.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[benjfowler]

Flywheel storage. Under existing service station forecourts, are massive fuel tanks. Replace them with flywheel energy storage systems (which can be trickle-charged from the grid and discharged very fast if need be), and we may yet be in business.

Flywheel storage are used to augment the National Grid in powering the Joint European Torus, and can deliver many tens of megawatts of power on demand.

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

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[IndustrialComplex]

Liability of the swap station. Large propane cylinders are leased and are not cheap to buy. Return one undamaged and get a certified good one. If it dies outside of an accident the swapping company replaces it.

Solvable.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Teancum]

My bullshit meter is being pegged off the charts to even consider this. Yes, there might be some supposed "automated facilities' that could pull this off, but I shudder to think of the potential accidents, lawsuits, and other issues that could come from such a "fast recharger". "Training" might be able to help with the technicians who are at a filling station performing this task, but any kind of casual attitude will result in a great many deaths.

I'll also note that the example of a Nissan Leaf is hardly the best one to use as well, as it certainly isn't going to have this magical "500 mile range" as suggested in the original article.

As for grid impact.... I've seen first hand what the current infrastructure of California has for any kind of significant grid impact. I was involved with a.... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it.

The interesting thing about it for the purposes of this discussion is that it used 1 MW of energy off of the existing power grid in downtown San Francisco, and I was on the engineering team to get it set up. As a part of our testing process, we would "turn it on" and often use that full rated capacity of sucking the 1 MW off of the grid for relatively short periods of time and then turn it off after the test (usually about 15-20 minute test for what we were doing). At the same time we had the radio on tuned to a local station, and it made us sick to realize that when the device was turn on that it triggered blackouts throughout the city and those blackouts ended when we turned the device off.

Even if you use a power buffer like a huge capacitor bank to store the amount of energy needed to recharge a vehicle like a Tesla Roadster (which has roughly the quoted 500 mile range suggested in the original article) in a short period of time, that capacitor bank will need to be recharged in roughly a similar amount of time... with a power load for a heavily used recharging station to be roughly equivalent to this device I was using in San Francisco. I could easily see such a filling station be in the MegaWatt range for power consumption. In other words the overall electrical transmission infrastructure to get a whole series of stations like this built would require a substantial construction effort just to get those power transmission lines put to all of those station.

So do you like a future with high voltage power lines being built in your backyard? That is the future you are asking for here, where those become a much more common sight in almost everybody's neighborhood. The grid impact of these stations is going to be enormous with any kind of electric vehicle future.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[guttentag]

Your move, range anxiety crowd.

OK, I'll bite. This is an "air breathing" battery that uses oxygen from the atmosphere to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. What if I drive to some place where there is no air, like Los Angeles, and get stuck there?

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think of the potential accidents that could happen with ordinary drivers operating dispensers of incredibly flammable gasoline on their own! We need automated facilities, or at least trained technicians, if we are to dispense this hazardous fuel to our cars. And imagine a future with high-capacity gasoline tanks buried underground in the middle of a city, slowly leaching fuel into the surrounding soil in almost everybody's neighborhood!

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Belial6]

That's why the cars need a standard connector on the back. So you can hook up that generator trailer and recharge while you drive.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Anonymous Coward]

This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)

For a website filled with electrical and computer engineers, the entire notion that you can recharge an electric battery quick with enough energy to be able to send an automobile over 500 miles in less than 15 minutes should seem totally ludicrous.

No, it should seem feasible, but difficult. I don't expect computer engineers to necessarily have a clue, but as an electrical engineer, I've previously run the numbers, and will proceed to redo them quickly for your benefit:
Going off my general knowledge of gasoline-powered automobiles, a "typical" car might get 35 mpg cruising at 55 mph using only 50 hp (not engine rating, actual horsepower used at cruise), and has a fuel capacity of 20 gallons.
Using these figures in the obvious way, I come up with about 1.7 GJ of mechanical energy at the crankshaft. Permitting 90% electrical->mechanical efficiency, that'd be 2GJ of battery required for equivalent performance. (Quibble with my typical values if you like, but I think I'm correct to order of magnitude.)

The sheer amount of energy to perform this kind of action is going to require connectors to the recharging equipment to be in the kiloVolt range, or perhaps MegaVolt and have amperage with that voltage that can only be supplied by a direct power line to a nuclear power plant.

Charging a 2 GJ battery in 15 minutes requires on the order of 2 MW, plus charging inefficiencies. While this is certainly infeasible for a standard home installation, it hardly requires a nuclear power station; Wikipedia says the world's largest coal-fired power plant is 4GW. 2MW is feasible for recharging at highway stations, provided that electric cars are mostly recharged overnight at home (at much lower rates, manageable by household wiring), reducing demand from every vehicle, all the time (as with filling stations) to only those vehicles needing a top-up during the day (mostly road trips). Then you can get away with a single 2MW service at each station, ~20 MW to match the 8-12 gas pumps needed to service the gasoline fleet during rush hour.

(This is not to say our electrical infrastructure won't need significant upgrades -- distributing it to homes and over a longer time doesn't change the total energy required; but that's a separate issue.)

Worst case, suppose electric infrastructure can't be extended to supply some filling stations for whatever reason -- maybe they're off in the boonies somewhere. What would it take for my neighborhood gas station to set up the ability to recharge electric cars from its liquid fuel supply? Well, as it happens, producing 2.6MW from diesel fuel is a solved problem with significantly improved fuel efficiency from vehicle engines, which combined with the elimination of road tax on fuel consumed by the generator, makes it economically feasible. (Yes, this takes away much of the supposed "green" benefit of electric cars, but if the car runs on overnight charging from nuclear power 90% of the time, with the occasional diesel-fueled quick charge for road trips, I'd call that a win; it's certainly better than running a gasoline car all the time because there was no quick-charging option.)

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[sribe]

If your driving needs ar compatible with an EV, then you can get an EV. If an EV can't meet your needs, then you can get a gasoline car.

Exactly.

Your comment is common, and it implies that this is a death knell for EVs, like they're impractical and will fail. Not true, just different strokes for different folks.

I see a lot of EV proponents discounting the drawbacks, and arguing every which way that EVs with just a little bit of improvement will be good enough for nearly everybody. Let's face it, hipsters congregate in dense urban areas where any car is a luxury, and many just can't imagine that some of us actually live a long way away from anything ;-)

Funny thing is, I would need a lot more range to use an EV, but slow charging times would not bother me so much for a secondary car, because many times it would have multiple days to charge ;-)

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Coren22]

The plug performs a "handshake" and won't go full power without a safely mated connection. There are people who think of these things.

Re:Gasoline-like energy density

[Khyber]

"Sadly a Leaf cant make my 40 mile commute and back."

That's funny, I just drove one while I had my Taurus' transmission worked on.

Temps were around 60F and I did an 80.2 mile drive out to Garden Grove and back.

I'll be doing the same thing again tonight. Fridays are my Garden Grove work nights.

I live in the middle of downtown Riverside.

Your numbers make zero sense in my personal experience.

Air isn't new

[SJHillman]

The summary makes it sound like they've never used air in batteries before. Most small batteries, including hearing aid batteries, are zinc-air. This is why they come with a small sticker on one side - you remove the sticker and give the battery a minute or so to take in air. That said, I don't believe the zinc-air batteries "breathe" like how the article describes, and they're certainly not rechargeable so kudos to IBM.

kWh/kg (electric) != kWh/kg (thermal)

[Anonymous Coward]

The thermal energy in gasoline has to be converted to a more useful form of energy (i.e. turning the wheels), the efficiency of this is going to be ~20% for a automobile. The battery is supplying much more useful energy, the efficiency of converting electricity to useful energy is going to be something like 90% (or more). So a battery with the same energy density of gasoline actually has at least 4 times the useful energy of the same size (weight actually) gas tank.

Re:Comparable?

[Anonymous CowWord]

Putting aside a potential flaw in reporting, you are still ignoring efficiency. Gasoline engines are only 15-20% efficient. Even at 20%, that is 47.2*0.2 = 9.44 Electric engines are around 80% efficient. 9*0.8 = 7.2 Suddenly it is a lot more comparable...

Re:Comparable?

[ZeroSumHappiness]

1. It's the same order of magnitude. Yes, that's comparable.
2. The AC above you actually gives you the exact reason it's better than that. A gasoline internal combustion engine will be 20%-35% efficient at translating that 47.2 MJ to rotary motion of the wheels. A lithium air powered electric motor, however, is 80%-90% efficient. So you're looking at 9.4-16.5 MJ at the transmission versus 7.2-8.1 MJ at the wheels. Assuming a 95% efficiency drivetrain from flywheel to wheels that gas power goes down to 8.9-15.7 MJ. Yeah, that's pretty comparable. Of course, gasoline engines are over 100 years old and lithium-air battery systems less than a decade old, so I think there's some room for improvement there.

Premature Article AGAIN!!

[jklovanc]

According to the video we won't see these batteries in cars until "2020 or 2030". That seems like a long way off considering the summary says "demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery" As far as I can glean from the vague articles is that all IBM has done is demonstrate the fundamental chemistry on a supercomputer. As far as I can tell they have not actually built a working battery of significant size and definitely not one of a size that would power a vehicle. There have been may technologies that work well in pristine laboratory environments but fail when they attempt to scale and/or have to deal with the dirty environment. Sure the battery may even work on a small scale when exposed to pure oxygen but how does it deal with the other elements in the atmosphere? Take a look at this. I do not see where IBM shows how that deal with any of these issues.

Recharge WHILE you drive!

[ShanghaiBill]

Remember that in the future the idea will be to charge your car in the car park or at home, not just on the road.

Actually, in the future, it is likely that you will be able to recharge while you are driving. Here is how it will works: automatic lane control and braking systems will enable cars to travel in "platoons", with just a few inches between cars. This will greatly extend the range of your car by reducing air resistance, but the cars can also be magnetically coupled, so they can push and pull each other. So if you are on a long trip, and your battery is low, the computer in your car can automatically negotiate with other cars in the platoon and purchase power. You can use this to coast without draining your battery, or even run your engine in reverse and recharge your batteries as you drive.

Electric Drive Train?

[clonan]

You are assuming that EV will simply replace the current engine and fuel tank with an electric engine and battery... This is not what has to happen.

Currently engines are big and heavy so you only have one. You then have to transfer the rotational energy of the engine to the wheels. But Electric motors are very light and tiny. So why not have 4?

Put a small electric engine in each wheel and you eliminate the entire drive train... no more drive train losses and EV's are back up to 90%.

Your 72% efficiency only applies to ICE cars that have been converted to EV's.