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U.S. 5X Battery Research Sets Three Paths For Replacing Lithium
dcblogs writes "One year ago this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $120 million plan to develop a technology capable of radically extending battery life. 'We want to change the game, basically,' said George Crabtree, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a physics professor who is leading the effort. The goal is to develop a battery that can deliver five times the performance, measured in energy density, that's also five times cheaper, and do it in five years. They are looking at three research areas. Researchers are considering replacing the lithium with magnesium that has two charges, or aluminum, which has three charges. Another approach investigates replacing the intercalation step with a true chemical reaction. A third approach is the use of liquids to replace crystalline anodes and cathodes, which opens up more space for working ions."
Year-old news, right here on Slashdot!
What about Carbon nanotube Super Capacitors? MIT Nanotube Super Capacitor
More for me!
Has....well way the !@#$% too many charges. :-P
Magnesium?
Who doesn't like a 3,100 C fire in his pants!
How am I going to connect the battery cables to it? /snark
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Do not do it !! It is an NSA TRICK !!
Basic arithmetic isn't hard - Take the cycle life - multiply it by the Wh capacity - you now have the total amount you will get out of the battery.
Now take the capacity and divide by the cost - is it less than gasoline? Nope - and we assumed that the cost to charge is zero.
Now we can also take the amount of false pride people have in owning so-called green cars - and see that there is a market place for peoples ego trips based on faulty logic.
We have people using more fuel (due to conversion losses) and moving pollution to other places and they think they are earth gods..
As everybody knows, every major scientific breakthrough came through government funded research groups setting ambitious goals and a time frame.
You can't replace Einstein with 100 scientists.
I'll be impressed when it is a product rolling off of a production line, until then its money down the drain.
This is another Solyndra. Check back issues of Technology Review. There have been announcements of "breadthroughs" or promising research in new, higher capacity batteries for decades, ready to go into mass production just as soon as they solve a few technical details. All those new battery technologies can now be found somewhere in oblivion, and not on a store shelf; that last, minor technical detail turned out to be a lot tougher, or a lot more expensive than the developers admitted. Its just fine for venture capitalists to throw money down a rathole, it's their money after all, but DOE is throwing our taxes to the current administration's big contributors. A lot of it will end up in politicians' pockets after the companies mysteriously go "bankrupt." And there won't be any new batteries.
Another liquid battery concept for grid storage was mentioned here: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/511081/ambris-better-grid-battery/
For electric cars, lithium batteries are good enough. Lithium ion batteries were first done in the lab in the 70s. Sony brought lithium ion to market in the early 90s. Lithium ion batteries have dominated consumer electronics, where energy density is important, price and longevity are less so. Lithium battery based cars started showing up in 2008. There are several cathodes and a few anodes for lithium batteries. Longevity has been increased, and cheaper cathodes have been devised, getting the price down to ~$300 kwh. Other, experimental battery chemicals have been tried, and lacked the success of lithium ion. Lithium metal battery hasn't worked. The well researched sodium sulfur battery, and its successor, the Zebra battery, did not live up to promises. Rechargable air batteries have yet to reach the market. Fuel cells are a very niche product right now. It will be difficult to find the chemistry superior to lithium, so get used to lithium for the next decade or two.
how does the heat dissipation compare to said to-be-replaced lithium batteries?
all the same, it's good to see progress in the energy storage field.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is the type of stuff the governments all over the world should be doing to combat global warming if they actually thought it was real and a threat instead of using it as an excuse to raise taxes.
Now if we could just get them to extend this into other areas like internal combustion engines being more efficient while not tripling their costs or maybe even a drop in replacement for a standard ICE motor in existing vehicles as well as industrial processes and such and I don't think most people who think global warming is a crock would object so strongly.
Maybe moving this to areas other then just batteries is what the economy needs.
Hey didn't they promise us this ten years ago? (It's always ten years away)
How about you fuckwits just shoot for a 5% improvement on cost, storage, life, AND deliver it in 5 years. Come up with that and well talk about maybe paying you. You thought you were going to get the money first? Silly gov't leach.
The Germans are spending tens of Billions getting batteries into homes to smooth out solar power. Their idea is simple; by encouraging people to actually buy the stuff it will create a market and get the companies moving on research and development. I am willing to bet that 90% of the American money will go to a select group of companies and universities that lobbied hard for that money. Then over the next few years we will read in Popular Science and here on Slashdot about "BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH! New battery tech is 100x better and 100x cheaper!!!" but when you read the article it will be a pile of hype over a test-tube battery that is the size of a postage stamp that can barely power an LED and requires 3 hours of CERN LHC time to make.
The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
if they hire somebody that knows chemistry.
you ignorant fucks.
"Are you CRAZY... You cant put acid in consumer controlled devices."
Yeah. Who knows how much excess reality it'd end up consuming.
It sounds awfully like the Soviet "quinquennial" plans :-/
Aren't the commercial implications of such an advancement enticing enough to make the private sector throw many more millions, if not billions, into this research, if they haven't done so already? Granted, they would only allow new batteries to come to market if they lasted for fewer charge cycles.
The headlines seem to always point to more power/weight or power density. No one seems to be concerned with robustness. Mobile power systems operate in a harsh environment... Extreme temperature ranges, Extreme vibration, contamination (from water, salts, abrasive sands, etc). I would like to see more effort towards versatile and survivable power systems over more "power vs weight" speculation.
trasgu
What I am seeking is a long-lasting low loss storage.
The long lasting appears to be Nickel-Iron but it is expensive and lossy.
The low loss high energy option was supposed to be EESTOR but perhaps they are in the same isle as the flying cars.
An all-liquid formulation is probably the most worthy of these goals, for increasing energy density still further without losing the seriously impressive power density and charge rate of LFP batteries. The voltage will also be a factor in some devices -- already many devices can be powered by single cells, simplifying charge circuits (no need for balancing or detecting a failing cell) and possibly improving reliability (since one failed cell = a dead pack).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I am a battery scientist, and while I think that Argonne is one of the places where great work is done, they have set very ambitious goals for themselves.
1) Replacing Li with Mg is a lovely idea, but currently there is no fully stable electrolyte and as far as I know nobody has good candidates for electrode materials. Don't even get me started on Al.
2) Lithium-air batteries have been debated to death also here on /.. The current status is again that there seems to be no stable electrolyte, no clear idea of what exactly happens, and if we factor in the weight and complexity of adding various components to the battery assembly to make a real device out of it, the great theoretical energy density of Li-O2 is reduced to Li-ion levels, if not even less.
3) The liquid slurry electrode is an interesting concept which at least recycles materials that are available and known to be working. This is more of an engineering problem than a scientific one, and could see quick advancement in 5 years.
I hope the community as a whole will be able to find the breakthrough to finally have people stop cursing batteries.
Batteries: you hate them since 150 years!
This is Slashdot, where it is trendy to hate on anything America does. Also there's the risk that the DoE might succeed (the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos, NREL, Oak Ridge, Sandia, to name a few). In this case Argonne is leading the battery project, working with Berkley, PNNL, Sandia, and SLAC. There are also some public universities participating as well. So gotta get that hate in now!
As you say, the reality is that all this battery research is beneficial. Doesn't matter where it is developed, it'll be sold to the world. Nobody is going to drop millions or billions in the tech and say "Ya, that was neat, no reason to sell it though!"
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades^WCharges
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_for_the_National_Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union
Just saying... :D
It would be great if this worked. I just fear that the government might kill some of this technology instead of helping it along.
There are various ways they can do this unintentionally.
1. Take all the profit out of dominating the market removes most of the profit incentive to developing new technologies. If the government just owns this thing or gives it away then the factories that tool up to build it might not be able to recuperate capital expenses to produce the tech because they won't be able to initially charge higher prices.
2. Possibly they'll put all sorts of regulations on the production, pricing, distribution, or installation of these batteries resulting in them being effectively expensive because of regulatory overhead. There are many instances of the government doing this both intentionally and unintentionally. They kind of do it to anything they pay any attention to by default. Given that they are paying attention to this thing... it worries me. I just suspect these batteries might come with forms that have to be filled out in triplicate and then snail mailed to 5 different PO boxes in Washington DC by the end of every fiscal year... or some other such nonsense.
3. They could also give manufacturing rights only to a few companies that are suspiciously campaign donors of whatever administration is currently in power while not permitting anyone else to produce the batteries. Later on it will be determined that the contractors chosen were not actually competent to produce them, cost over runs happened, quality was horrific, and the whole thing will go down in scandalous flames.... with no one getting anything useable out of it. AKA Solyndra.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
<sarcasm>Our glorious Man of Steel has handed down the new 5 year plan of the New Economic Policy and Progress for our nation. His commands shall be carried out without fail! Workers of the world rejoice!</sarcasm>
Bear with me now. A gallon of gasoline, depending on blending and the amount of ethanol has a high heating value (HHV) of about 120,000 BTU per gallon. At 100 percent conversion efficiency, 3400 BTUs gives you 1 kWHr, so 100% conversion of a gallon of gas gives 35.3 kWHr. That is what the EPA means by "eMPG" -- the EPA is assuming 100% conversion efficiency, but that is counteracted by the eMPG rating being artificially high because of that assumption.
Apart from arguments on whether EPA mileage reflects actual mileage, and whether an electric vehicle (EV) takes a "bigger hit" in efficiency in cold weather than a gasoline car, the gasoline MPG combined with the MPG gives you the cents-per-mile; the same holds true for eMPG combined with the kWHr rate according to how eMPG translates into kWHr -- as supplied to the plug connection to the EV. Thus we have "real word" fuel consumption numbers on current-gen gas cars, "real world" kWHr consumption on current-gen EV's, and we don't have to get tied up in knots over figuring all the energy losses in gasoline cars and in EVs.
That Enerdel battery "costs" 18 cents/kWHr, and my Midwestern power company sells me electricity at 14 cents/kWHr. That is, the electric cost is 32 center/kWHr or $11.30 per "electric gallon", but for an EV getting 100 eMPG, that works out to 11 cents/mile.
For gasoline at 4 dollars/gallon (it is cheaper now but will probably climb in price next summer), that works out to 13 cents/mile.
OK, I am sold, that at least from a policy perspective, that if this price on batteries holds up or improves, and if gasoline keeps getting more expensive, a given but you never know for sure, and if electric rates don't increase, not really a given with current policies, or if through Smart Grid that EV owners are given a "deal" for charging at night or other off-peak times, this new battery tech is at least putting the EV "in play."
The other consideration is that $4/gallon is what I pay at the filling station and 14 cents/kWHr is what I pay at home as a retail electric customer. Is this $711 the retail price of that battery pack, or is it the wholesale price to an automobile manufacturer? If I want to replace a 30 kWHr battery pack in a LEAF, do I pay 21 grand or do I pay twice that amount at the Nissan parts counter?
I am do not know much about batteries......... so forgive me for this question if is too dumb:
Why not produce a liquid electrolyte (charged) and sell it as we do today with gasoline? The discharged one could go back to the "station" before the new, charged one gets in. It could require less batteries since the "energy" would be in the electrolyte and not in the batteries.
Does anybody know the way to calculate "gallons of charged electrolyte x miles" with current technology using an existent pure EV?
5 people working 5 years on improving efficiency 5 times ... Does that sound like anything meaningful and realistic at all ?
The United States has now adopted the former failed communist state "5 year plan" type system. Things are really looking up here.
Older is better.
01/01/01
This is a great article that discusses the physics behind energy storage, and why hydrocarbons are so hard to beat in some areas.
http://www.thebulletin.org/limits-energy-storage-technology
Its good that new electrical storage solutions are being sought. Not just for vehicles, but also for energy storage. If you get all the power you need for the whole day during the day (from solar power), but the power goes out two hours after sundown because you can't store all you make, its useless to have that much capacity. It would also make it cheaper for large utilities to not get caught during periods of high demand (store power during periods of low demand, bring it on stream when you need it).
Chuck Norris' beard?
If anode is is replaced with atmospheric oxygen, half of battery weight is gone. Altenatives are zinc, lithium and alumininim cathode. Zinc oxide from discharging process can be recharged without using eletricity. By means of carbothermal regeneration. ZnO is heated 1200C, carbon is feeded in the process and the result is gasified Zn. Heating can be done by using biomass, solar concentration et al. ZnO is safe, no fires in car accidents. Contrary to flammable Li an Al.
They do already