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Sugar Batteries Could Store 20% More Energy Than Li-Ions
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science have developed a way to create sugar batteries that store 20% more energy than lithium-ion cells. Before it can be used as the anode in a sodium-ion battery, sucrose powder is turned into hard carbon powder by heating it to up to 1,500 degrees celsius in an oxygen-free oven."
Except that swapping batteries might be a bit tricky, I can think of a perfect application for these.
And I ain't li-on.
So... there's no actual sugar in it, just a carbon/sodium anode. So why call it a sugar battery? Pure asshattery of course!
"Hey! were's my cell phone?! Those ants are taking it! STOP!"
If you carbonize it, it's no longer sugar. You could probably use a host of other substances for the same purpose besides sucrose.
Carbon / Sodium battery not sugar battery. Must be just like Spenda -- We processed sugar so that it is no longer sugar, so we can make a stupid claim that gets your attention because you are fooled into thinking it is somehow made of sugar.
But we're not talking sugar straight out of the paper packet. Before it can be used as the anode in a sodium-ion battery, sucrose powder is turned into hard carbon powder by heating it to up to 1,500 degrees celsius in an oxygen-free oven
... or another form of power is a sin.
I cannot find the right words to say how much this offends me. There are plenty of other places to get carbon that does not mean driving up the cost of food for everyone else, especially in poorer countries, like what has happened with corn/maize.
--
BMO
Meh, we just plant more beets or cane.
There's no shortage of sugar in the world, so its not like you are taking food out of people's mouth.
Further, US style high-surgar diets being exported to poor countries is very harmful.
In these countries, traditional healthy diets, made up of grains, beans, vegetables, fresh fruit and animal products are being replaced by more processed and junk foods high in saturated fats, salt and sugar.
Batteries may turn out to be the best use for excess sugar, since the alternative would be eating it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
activated by insulin injection ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If they can argue that carbonizing C_6 H_12 O_6 into carbon with high temperature still allows them to call it a "sugar battery", I argue that my elemental alchemist's transformation into plutonium can also be called a sugar battery.
In America, first you get the sugar then you get the power, then you get the women.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Battery tech is growing fast. I saw a PBS show on research that has a pretty good grasp of how to replicate plantlife's ability to convrrt sunlight into sugars. The batteries based on this are already providing all the needs of mid-sized office buildings.
> Except that swapping batteries might be a bit tricky,
Apple would like to get behind this wonderful new technology. Now we must find a judge who will let us patent Sugar. Muhahahahah!
...that a fat (based) battery could store 9/4ths of the energy than a "sugar battery" does. (fat: 9kcal/mol sugar: 4kcal/mol)
>There's no shortage [reuters.com] of sugar in the world, so its not like you are taking food out of people's mouth.
But it could create one. Like it did with corn.
Not addressed to you:
Oh, and btw mods, "overrated" and "flamebait" are not "I disagree"
Thanks.
--
BMO
FTFY.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
You keep using that statement. I do not think it means what you think it means
Title says it all (sorry, I couldn't resist)
You're missing a huge factor of scale here.
We're using corn, soybeans, etc. as fuel. They're the energy source, so a lot of the market goes into fuel instead of food. Run out of fuel, you need more corn.
These guys are using sugar to make a component on the battery. The energy comes from somewhere else. No matter how many times you recharge the battery, you won't use any more sugar.
Even if we went into full scale production of these and replaced Li-Ion batteries altogether, it wouldn't make an appreciable difference on the sugar market.
As an aside, you also have to consider that by removing the requirement of lithium, you're moving from a scarce resource to a common one. We could make those batteries in the U.S. (or whatever country you happen to be in) and not require buying lithium from China. Lithium is used for several drugs, and by removing the demand for lithium, those drugs may drop in price to the point they'll be more accessible to people in poorer countries.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
First, regarding the so-called sugar battery;
It's really a sodium-ion battery.
They claim a 20% increase in power storage over a lithium-ion, which probably means a 20% decrease in cost, best case.
Sodium-ion batteries have cycle problems - after about 50 charge/discharges, they typically have 50% of their original capacity. They don't even talk about this, so I'm betting they haven't solved the problem.
Second, about lithium-ion batteries;
Lithium isn't rare - you could extract it from sea water for about 3 times what it costs now. Even at that price it wouldn't mean much to lithium-ion batteries, because despite the name, lithium isn't the primary ingredient, nor is it the most costly.
Envia's breakthrough battery is a lot better at 3 times the energy density and half the cost, and it's a lot closer to market.
Can we artificially produce fat? :-)
If not, perhaps this is a solution to the obesity epidemic. Companies will *pay* you for lyposuction and then use the byproduct to make power
but why start with sucrose? Any vegetable matter will do. Grass clippings are cheaper.
mod this +5 misanthropic
battery..............
(come on dude where are you chiming in????)
Oh, and btw mods, "overrated" and "flamebait" are not "I disagree"
Thanks.
But there's no "You are an idiot" mod, so I guess they'll have to do.
....stick your tongue on a nine volt battery...
1. Yes, it happened with corn/maize. Good. It's among the worst grains available. And for the gluten free (myself included), I throw in corn with all things gluten. It's better that way.
2. Sugar is bad, too. Get real food that naturally tastes good. You don't need to sweeten everything to make it taste good. The only reason for that is because you've numbed yourself to every other good taste and are addicted to the sugar. Get off of it. You'll be better for it.
As a guess, I'd say it was because grass clippings and other vegetable matter aren't very consistant and would require refining to attain the purity of carbon needed.
Sugar (sucrose, anyway) is a refined product. I know, I pick up truckloads of it in Louisiana from the Domino refinery every now and again :) A fellow truck driver got a bag of raw sugar off a dump truck that was being delivered there, but he couldn't use it because it had sand in it.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
... or another form of power is a sin.
I cannot find the right words to say how much this offends me. There are plenty of other places to get carbon that does not mean driving up the cost of food for everyone else, especially in poorer countries, like what has happened with corn/maize.
-- BMO
Fuck the poor
-M. Romney
A fellow truck driver got a bag of raw sugar off a dump truck that was being delivered there, but he couldn't use it because it had sand in it.
Ok, I know truck drivers stereotypically don't have the highest education, but... don't they teach how to separate sugar from sand in elementary school science class?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
One minute you're putting sugar in the oven at 1500 degrees, the next the stay-puft marshmallow man is leveling half of New York City
Of course there are leftovers. I was not trying to balance the equations for C_6 H_{12} O_6 on one side and Pu^{238}_1 on the other side. I was using my Alchemist's license, which I keep on hand next to my Poetic License. If I were eco-freakin'-good, I could balance it and take the left-over protons+neutrons+electrons and create plain old {H_2 O} out of it. :)
Wow. They started using sugar in food again? I must have missed that bulletin.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Lithium is used for several drugs, and by removing the demand for lithium, those drugs may drop in price to the point they'll be more accessible to people in poorer countries.
I don't know for certain but I'd say the reasons which keep Depakote and other lithium mood stabilizers expensive have little to do with the supply of lithium.
Inflation adjusted prices of lithium have been stable since the seventies at just over 40$ per pound in 1998 prices, in 1998. I'd say the prices have to do with patents.
I believe the maker of depakote actually just paid around two billion dollars. It works wonders for many and its properties were discovered by noting that at a certain sanatarium, patients with unstable moods were calmer, the water was tested and found to have high Li levels.
5, Funny.
And if these can be made from palm sugar instead of cane sugar, all we need to do is replace the world's remaining tropical rainforest with more palm plantations and all our supply problems are gone, right?
and when battery stops working, you don't throw it away, you just eat it
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
"sucrose powder is turned into hard carbon powder by heating it to up to 1,500 degrees celsius in an oxygen-free oven."
Sounds exactly like my cooking.
They say don't feed the trolls, but dude, you fucking suck! Your post was retarded, you can't spell, and honorable suicide, Harakiri, is a Japanese thing, not Chinese you moronic douche bag. Ironically, you have failed so hard that perhaps it is YOU who should kill yourself, not any Chinese. Unless you ARE Chinese, but I kind of doubt that, you're obviously too fucking stupid.
For rice indeed, you sad piece of dog shit... A lesser man would tell you to open your own bowels and let the shit that is you spill forth, you dickless asshole. Racism is so last century, so who the hell invited you to this one, eh? And no, your joke wasn't funny.
I could separate sand and sugar and if I had no other source of sugar or my time was worth nothing I might. With the price of sugar as it is it wouldn't take many minutes of effort before it wasn't worth it, even for a truck driver.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Then rhy am I raffing so rawd?
U MAD BWO?
"or another form of power is a sin."
The moment you started talking about sin your post became Flamebait. The mods are doing their job well.
It would also help if you posted citations supporting your claims.
Why should anyone trust what you happen to believe are facts? On that basis, Overrated becomes acceptable.
A ton of sugar would cost a lot more than a ton of coal. http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/sugar.html . The amount of coal is so abundant still that the market price of it is lower than the cost of raising sugar-cane or sugar-beets and refining them into sugar.
a ton of coal costs from $30 per 2000 lbs in Y2K upto $150 per 2000 lbs in the year 2008, and about $30-$50 per ton in May of 2012.
a ton of sugar would cost about $600 with the world price of sugar at less than 60 cents per kilogram.
Expect a visit from three spirits on Christmas Eve.
Seriously?
Why did you bother to take time to post that? Don't you have anything better to do?
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Okay, wise guy, explain to me how you'd separate raw sugar from sand at home, with the intent on eating the raw sugar in its raw state.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
You're probably right.
I didn't realize lithium was (fairly) cheap. I coulda sworn I read that there was a scarcity of it due to its use in batteries.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Wise guy says:
1) If a person is in a survival situation, eating sugar that contained sand would be preferable to starving.
If you have the luxury of time and potable water, then:
2) Simple Filtering: Sugar is more soluble in water than sand. Add water, pass it through a filter. Drink or dry it out as necessary.
3) Flocculation/Filtering: Mix it with water, add a chemical (maybe starch or gluten?) that bonds to the sand particles, making it easier to filter them out.
4) Fermentation/Moonshine: Just add water and brewer's yeast. Alcohol can be separated easily from sand by boiling and condensing the steam (and alcohol has calories). Technically this is cheating, but I bet it'd be the main reason people would grab large amounts of unrefined sugar - so it was worth mentioning.
If the Chinese have 20% of the world's population, they should also have 20% of the world's stupid people.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's why you should use a car (turning mineral oil into mechanical energy) instead of walking (turning food into mechanical energy) ;-)
Oh, and don't think. Thinking involves turning food into electricity (in the neurons), and therefore also is a sin.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(to quote you from another thread) whoosh! I think the joke flew over your head. Patenting alchemy is absurd, like believing in homeopathy. The word "alchemy" is the give-away, me-thinks.
Is it rechargable and having high cycles of charge/discharge just like Li-ion bat?
No... The US has a patent on stupid people so they own about 90% of them... The rest are illegal copies...
Sugar batteries won't only store more energy. They'll taste better too!
Oh look. Reductio ad absurdum et Strawman fallacy all in one post.
--
BMO
What makes li-ion batteries expensive is not the li, or other chemicals. Likewise, it is not the labor. It is the expense of heating the li up to 1250C. Now, to create these batteries, you have to go to higher temps In addition, it has said nothing about charge cycles.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Li-Ion batteries don't actually use a lot of lithium - in my RC heli batteries, the huge ones that are about 4 inches long and 1.5 inches deep/high only contain about 8 grams of lithium.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Lithium is cheap, it's the Ions that are expensive.
humourless mod in 3...2...1...
None of those qualify.
1) He's not starving, he wanted it for the novelty.
2) This works with refined sugar. This is raw sugar. Yes, you'd get some sugar out doing this, but it's not the same.
3) He's a truck driver, not a chemist, and raw sugar isn't evenly granulated.
4) That's not what he wanted the sugar for.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Found a source:
From page 34:
Materials
LiCoO2 0.62
Separator 0.14
Electrolyte 0.30
Anode 0.24
Materials subtotal 1.28
Overhead 0.15-0.25
Direct labor 0.18-0.24
Total manufacturing cost ~1.70
Per this, the lithium compound is indeed the single most expensive part, but not quite half of the materials alone. If we're forced to separate seawater for it, LiIon cell prices would double.
I don't read AC A human right
I think that there's more to it than just Arpa-E and the feds preventing burial, I think that it's also that there's too much non-car interest and research in battery tech - cell phones, laptops, etc...
Plus, conspiracies aside, you have to remember GM is a car company - it wants to sell cars. It's not an oil company looking to sell fuel it pulled out of the ground. If it can sell an EV for a profit, it'll do so. If it's the only one who can produce economical EVs, it stands to make a killing.
For that matter, most of the 'oil' companies have been busily diversifying themselves into 'energy' companies - investing in solar, wind, and other renewables so they're positioned to make the transition from oil when it becomes logical.
I don't read AC A human right
No counter-argument I see.
Is anyone who isn't White and prosperous responsible for anything they do?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
http://imgur.com/bjCRi
What would you make the anode from K-Ion batteries from?
Run Your Rasberry Pi on Sugar
So first they are not sugar batteries, but batteries with anodes made of carbon derived from sugar. Second, the poster feels they will be good for disolvable electronics for the body, but again you are not disolving sugar but some carbonized derivative of sugar which is probably actually toxic to the body.
Its an epic fail when a \. post doesn't RTFA nor understand the article they are posting.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Either the narration on the clip or the article is wrong, The Japanese group seems to claim 20% increase storage capacity over Sodium Ion not Lithium.