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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."
Nonsense, this is bleeding edge. In a few weeks, they'll realize that they can use lead, with three charges. Then if they apply that liquid bath, say with a true chemical reaction.... ...hmm, I wonder if sulfuric acid could do the trick....
then they'll have a real, working battery that can compete with Lithium!!!
And you thought this was last year's news?!?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You know, if they ever perfect those lead batteries, I think they'd also have the benefit of providing hydrogen as a waste product, which is AWESOME because then we can run our fuel cells with it!
It's win-win-win, baybee! Free energy is like money in the bank!
(Now pass me that crack pipe!)
Kid-proof tablet..
Are you CRAZY... You cant put acid in consumer controlled devices.
Sulfiric acid can cause severe burns, imagine what would happen if there where industrial or transport accidents and it leaked on people, and what if people take the acid out and thrown in people faces...
No way would the government let people have control of such powerful chemistry, well at least without strict licensing and enforcment laws. You just cant trust society with this sort of technology, its just a matter of time till its used by the terrrist.
Im going to start writting letters straight away about this !!!
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
That's an interesting question:
Gasoline gives us only one cycle.
$ units
You have: (114000 btu / gal) / (3$ / gal)
You want: W hr / $
* 11136.701
Sounds bad... but car engines are only about 20% efficient and electric cars are more like 80% efficient.
If we normalize that way, the gas car is 2227, and the batteries are 4388.
Looks like the batteries win, even with current temporary lull in gas prices.
In part, you are right. Batteries have to be competitive with traditional fuels. While some people may want EVs for "green" reasons that only they can understand, they do not represent any significant part of the market. I bought my car (Prius) not because I wanted to save the planet, but simply because I needed a new car, and Prius was a very good choice in many aspects - comfort (CVT rules!) and mieage, and reliability, and price, and cargo space, and passenger seats, and cost of service. Saving the planet? Not on my salary. Let Al Gore do that on his.
But moving pollution elsewhere, in itself, is not such a bad idea. First of all, even if the volume of pollution is unchanged, moving it away from cities helps already. However large power stations are more efficient, such as they produce less pollution per kWh of energy, compared to a car. It remains to be seen what effect the transmission losses have; but the losses are present in both cases; an ICE is not very efficient, and it is largely heating the Universe. At the same time, charging of an EV is not a lossless process either, and the batteries do not last forever - they contain polluting chemicals, and they need energy to be produced and recycled.
Remote power stations have yet another advantage - they can use cheaper or cleaner fuels. Coal is cheaper, and is plentiful. Sunlight, hydro, wind, geothermal, tide, etc. are cleaner. Those are options that you can exercise. You have no such options with gas-powered cars; they only can run on oil products by definition - and supply of oil is, apparently, limited.
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.
Car engines may be more than 20% efficient in the best case, but in real world operation including idle and jack rabbit starts, probably not. That's why they introduced hybrids: you pay extra for some batteries in order to keep the engine closer to its theoretical maximum efficiency.
IIRC, the electricity to power a car is well under half the cost of gas per mile, especially if you meter it at off-peak hours. So it would still come out ahead. The car costs more to buy mainly because of the batteries, which is the cost that we were analyzing in the first place.
The limited range is probably the main show stopper for electric cars right now.
Nature has always gone with calcium as the most energy efficient electrical energy medium, a deeper look there especially in nano structures would also be worthwhile.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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!