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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."
Recharge in less then 5 minutes?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
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...
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.)
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 ;-)
The plug performs a "handshake" and won't go full power without a safely mated connection. There are people who think of these things.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.