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Will Future Tesla Cars Use Metal-Air Batteries?
thecarchik writes "Most advocates and industry analysts expect lithium-ion batteries to dominate electric-car energy storage for the rest of this decade. But is Tesla Motors planning to add a new type of battery to increase the range of its electric cars? Tesla has filed for eight separate patents on uses of metal-air battery technology (for example, #20120041625). The metals covered for use in the metal-air battery are aluminum, iron, lithium, magnesium, vanadium, and zinc. Metal-air batteries, which slowly consume their anodes to give off energy, hit the news last month when Israeli startup Phinergy demonstrated its prototype battery and let reporters drive a test vehicle fitted with the energy-storage device. Mounted in a subcompact demonstration car, Phinergy's aluminum-air battery provides 1,000 miles of range, it said, and requires refills of distilled water (which acts as electrolyte in the cells) about every 200 miles."
They will buy it, but seeing is believing
1,000 miles of range, it said, and requires refills of distilled water about every 200 miles.
My car has a range of 6000 miles. That is how often I have to stop to change the motor oil. Of course, I also have to stop every 300 miles to get some gas.
But they'll be guaranteed to return home safely if supplied with a constant supply of liquid Johnny Cash
Phinergy's aluminum-air battery provides 1,000 miles of range ... and requires refills of distilled water ... about every 200 miles.
Wait, you're telling me this thing gets 5, FIVE cycles before its off to the recycling heap? Good luck with that!
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
More importantly, will future news articles trade the opinions of "industry analysts" for hard facts and press statements? I'm not calling Betteridge, I'm just tired of these will they-won't they fluff pieces being passed off as actual news.
I gather zinc-air cells would be rechargeable if it weren't for the water in the air. I've heard of various companies working on rechargeable zinc-air, lithium-air, and even sodium-air.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
I looked up the recycling efficiency of Aluminum in this case and found it was about 15%. This is worse efficiency than the lowest number you see for an Gas Engine. So using something like this for day to day usage seems out of the question.
But with the right packaging it might be a decent range extender in addition to a Lithium main battery pack.
Short answer, no.
Long answer, not in the foreseeable future, unless someone strikes their best luck.
Metal air batteries (lithium in particular) suffer from a bajillion problem that are not even close to solving in the lab, let alone in a device.
Someone might within 5 years come up with a working lab demonstrator, but something with enough power to move a car (and a "sports" car as a Tesla at that) is way off, considering the current state of research. So considering that the patents will be expired when the technology might be ready, it's just empty internet talk.
If I could swap the batteries for topped ones like propane tanks at Lowes or Walmart every two or three weeks that would be a workable proposition for me, depending on cost. These places are already all over the place and have large storage volumes to store the stock and the empties. That's a reasonable infrastructure shortcut and these outlets would love to get you in the door to buy other stuff; that's why they have Redboxes and the like. I think they'd be on board. Soon you would see refueling stations that would not need all the environmental hoops of gas stations and would just be a matter of storage volume and inventory control, as well as providing the distilled water.
If it's even half that easy I'd bet the lobbyists would fight this tooth and nail, since it would almost pull the rug from under the oil industry. I'd almost dare to be an early adopter.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery), research shows each one of these 1000 Miles packs would cost around $30 + tax + misc = $150? even then it is still competitive with Gas prices nowadays... The only question I can think of is the sustainability of this if it becomes widely adopted.
I hereby invoke Betteridge's law of headlines.
the pi and the arduino are any indication, the new Tesla vehicles will be made entirely of metal-air batteries. the user will interface with the radio using ruby, and the turnsignals will be excreted in realtime by a makerbot.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Theoretical energy density - 6000-8000 watt-hours per kilogram.
Forget cars, I want these for my laptop on trips.
Who wants 125+ hour battery life?
These are probably defensive patents.
Why are we even arguing about the range of batteries? Just start building good electric only automobiles already. The source of the power is irrelevant.
How hard is it to manufacture a light weight mini gas generator trailer you can pull behind your electric vehicle?
Why can't we simply build the best damn electric car technology allows, without crudding it up with all kinds of hybrid gas engine transmission shit? An external generator would be way more efficient if it didn't need to an over engineered drive system to 'also' transfer power to the wheels.
You can drive forever with unlimited range pulling a generator trailer. The generator could attach directly to the car like a bike rack, and be used for other useful things where you might need portable power.
Or you could skip the generator entirely if all you do is city driving and save more weight and cost. You could rent a generator for long trips. You could even skip the costly batteries and enjoy a simplified electric drive powered only by the generator.
For cripe's sakes people. Train locomotives figured this out decades ago. Gas goes to a generator, and electrical power from the generator drives the motors. It really is that simple.
I've just poured hot grits down my pants.
You should have poured distilled water into your metal-air battery instead. Instead, your car has ground to a halt.
Also you now have hot grits in your pants.
Why stop to refill water. Just add a big enough water tank to the car and and you can go further without refueling. Steam locomotives have done this for years and it works flawlessly, though it would be best if a car wouldn't need a trailer to store all the water for the engine.
The important question here is: how much water is actually needed? If water usage is too high, then getting enough clean water could be a bigger problem than range between refuels. Carrying a heavy water tank is also far from ideal. Batteries are heavy enough as it is.
According to the Phinergy link, they're using the battery as a range extender.
They propose that an electric car would have Lithium rechargeable batteries, and also a fuel-air battery (55 lbs of extra weight). You would charge your car normally for "drive around town" daily use, but have the extended range when you need it. (Such as, when you suddenly have to drive out to the Everglades to get rid of a body.)
At 1000 miles per battery and 20 MPG times $4/Gal = $200. If they can make the unit cost less than that, it makes a lot of sense.
Aluminum is around $1/lb, so the bulk aluminum cost should be around $50 (assuming most of the weight comes from aluminum). That's not a lot of profit margin for a tech product, but as a consumer product it might be.
Why would sustainability become a problem?
Aluminum is recycled not lost, so no worries there. A lot of electricity will be needed for that, but that is already true.
yes but similar to what other posts has pointed out, the efficiency of such recycling operation to make anodes again is the deciding factor.
Does the process to recycle the aluminum battery require less energy than the process to produce gasoline?
I built a small solar distiller with misc parts I had on hand, and it costs nothing to distill as much as I want
It even works on overcast days just fine.
First of all, the MPG (miles per gallon) quoted for combustion engines consuming standard gasoline or diesel gasoline are stated for the amount of miles driven per gallon of fuel expended.
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The "gallon of water" expended is not the consumible fuel, but part of the solvent required to dissolve the metal which serves as the consumible fuel. So you're comparing apples and oranges, or to use a car analogy, you're comparing a consumible fuel (gasoline) to a solvent (distilled water) rather than comparing it to the cost of the dissolved metal electrode lost (the consumed electrode is the fuel).
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So to get a real cost comparison, you'd have to know how many miles (M) you'll get out of the battery and what the replacement cost of the battery is (B), and add it to the cost of the "demineralized" distilled water that will have to be added until the battery needs to be replaced (will that be 100 "fill ups" or 267 fill ups and how many gallons will it be?) Say you need G gallons, and distilled water costs D per gallon. So now your miles are M, and your total cost (not counting oil, repairs, and whatnot) is B + G*D.
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So your cost per mile is M \div (B + G*D). The IRS allows you to deduct about 0.555 dollars per mile for business use, so say that a car costs in toto 55.5 cents per mile. Say you've got a car that gets 30 MPG nowadays, and gas is just under $4 per gallon. You're paying 13.33 cents per mile in consumible fuel costs for that gas combustion engine. (So the IRS is guessing that the rest of the cost for running your car [insurance, maintenance, oil changes, etc] is about 40 cents per mile). Can your electric car really come in under that cost? Tesla wants to charge $15000 for a 60kwh battery that may (only "may") last 6 or eight years. What's the replacement electrode and battery cost for this thing? When there are concrete numbers out there, then it's viability or utility can be calculated.
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But you can't just count the cost of the distilled water or calculate a miles per gallon of distilled water when the distilled water alone is NOT the consumible fuel component!
Although some folks call this energy source a metal-air "battery", since it has an anode and cathode and an electrolyte, in many situations, more like a metal-air fuel cell than a "battery" as its anode is consumed in a reaction that is not efficiently reversable from an energy point of view (if at all in some varients) and thus not rechargeable in the traditional sense of an automobile battery.
Of course, this doesn't make it unusable. In fact, quick mechanical replacemement of the fuel that stores the energy is the one big advantage of gasoline powered engines, that might be enabled by a metal-air fuel cell (you might be able to empty the old reactant and replace with new metal-air fuel pellets in filling station). But to say this is a battery technology does not really convey what is exciting about this technology.
That's how long it takes to consume the metal spark plug electrodes.
Also, I have to stop and put in liquid every 300 miles or so, but that is immaterial to my range calculations.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
No, don't just compare to piss poor (efficiency wise) internal combustion engines; rather compare to 'normal' lithium ion and H2 fuel cell powered cars before deciding on another technology.
It seems you're assuming (B) is the cost of an entire battery.
I would expect the consumable portion of the battery other than water would be in the form of replaceable rods or plates much like replacing a spark plug or a Diode.
They may want $15,000 for the entire battery, but the Tesla engineers are pretty bright people, and I am sure will find a solution that's easily maintainable. They must have something in mind so far, or I expect they wouldn't have taken it this far.
But you're right though, all this is at this point is speculation. I for one look forward to discovery and implementation of newer technologies. We won't know what will work and what won't until it's been put it on the market and tested 'in the wild'.
Having been a wrecker driver, I think the idea of a battery that goes completely dead on impact by it draining all it's water is beyond awesome. With electric cars these days just touching one of those things after a major accident could send you to the pearly gates.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Several years ago I read that IBM set up a team on researching Metal Air Battery ... lemme search the link ... ah, found it
http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=3203
The project started around 2009
Unfortunately there is no news on the Metal Air Battery project from IBM
If you have any info regarding the latest development(s), would you kindly share with us here?
Thanks !!
A link to another startup that is researching Metal Air battery --- http://gigaom.com/2013/03/01/fluidic-shows-a-peek-of-its-metal-air-batteries-for-off-and-on-the-grid/
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Does the process to recycle the aluminum battery require less energy than the process to produce gasoline?
Yes. It is also even slightly better (15%v13%) than the energy efficiency of pumping "free" oil out of the ground and refining it to make gasoline at today's prices. Aluminum is more recyclable-sustainable than gas burned in an ICE too.
So they're patenting the use of a metal-air battery to power a car?
Exhausted combination patent anyone?
Alcan tried to commercialize the aluminum-air battery 30 years ago, and largely failed. They even spun off a subsidiary called Alupower, here's their patent portfolio: http://www.patentgenius.com/assignee/AlupowerInc.html
A more knowledgable article here.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
How many people keep a car for more than 6 years?
Right now, Tesla is looking to produce their Model X (a cross-over), and then will do Bluestar. That will be an electric car costing around 30K. After that, they will do a new roadster. My understanding is that will blow the doors off nearly everything. The reason is that it will be AWD borrowed from the model X. Then add to it the much better body that Tesla will no doubt design and build. So, I would expect to see 0-60 in the 2-2.5 range. And the old roadster was in the price range of vettes that had similar performance.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
block daylight with my HOSTS file. You see how that renders the idea infeasible.
(Hand waving wildly) Me me me me me!!!
I don't need that sort of expense any more often than I absolutely have to replace it because it is worn out, and costing me more in repairs than the new one would cost in car payments. The 2005 WRX finally got sold last year, and replaced by the 2012 WRX. I loved the 2005 WRX, and if it wasn't lunching things like the power steering pump ($525, plus $300 installation), timing belt and rollers at 210,000 miles ($1300), radiator ($400), and other stuff, I'd still have it.
The current car has an early start toward getting replaced early, tho. The power steering rack went west, developing a leak, which would have cost $1200 outside the warranty, but $100 inside the warranty - it should have been free but Subaru was all sideways about my having used the car in a road rally - which is really just normal driving down the roads on a Sunday afternoon - but they tried to use it as a get out of jail free card. Also have had the brake light switch go west - don't know how much that would have cost to get fixed, and now the Steering Wheel Angle Sensor is fried, causing the stability control function and the "hill holder" function to fail. Since it's outside the warranty now, those functions will be forever silent, because I'm not paying the $700 or so cost of buying a new sensor and having it replaced. Don't think I'll be keeping this car as long as the 2005.
If you sell your car before it is too old, you can recoup a significant portion of the money.
A car more than six years old would be difficult to sell for a good price.
How many people keep a car for more than 6 years?
Anyone who's not a consumerist snob or travelling salesman? Here in the UK, a lot of people do less than 5,000 miles a year, so 10 years is a more than reasonable life expectancy. Most people don't buy a new car every 2 or 3 years, there's no real need apart from showing off to the neighbours your new registration.
If you're doing 30,000 miles a year and can't afford a Mercedes, then you have a point.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
This really angers me, makes me realize that Slashdot article submission is rigged. I submitted the story about the 1000 mile batteries to Slashdot a couple of months ago and they never ran the story. http://rawcell.com
Are the drivers supposed to be playing air guitar and throwing horns to the sound of Sodom's "Outbreak of Evil"? In this case I think I will buy the model 666.
Hail Satan!!! \m/
-- 29A the number of the Beast