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Stanford Develops Fast-Charging, Stable Aluminum Battery
An anonymous reader writes: Stanford researchers have announced the creation of an aluminum-ion battery that they say will charge quicker, last longer, and be generally safer than common lithium-ion batteries. "Aluminum has long been an attractive material for batteries, mainly because of its low cost, low flammability and high-charge storage capacity. For decades, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to develop a commercially viable aluminum-ion battery. A key challenge has been finding materials capable of producing sufficient voltage after repeated cycles of charging and discharging. ... For the experimental battery, the Stanford team placed the aluminum anode and graphite cathode, along with an ionic liquid electrolyte, inside a flexible, polymer-coated pouch." The researchers' main challenges now are getting the battery to produce a higher voltage and store energy at a higher densities.
"The researchers' main challenges now are getting the battery to produce a higher voltage and store energy at a higher densities."
So basically, they're only challenges left are making it into a decent battery?
Practically any material can cause terrific explosions when powdered and airborne. Sawdust explosions have reduced more than one lumber mill to ash, but that doesn't mean we stop building houses from wood.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Don't be stupid. We're fucking up our planet because of our addiction to fossil fuels. If this actually pans out, then it'll make electric vehicles very economical, and will completely obsolete gasoline-powered cars, which is easily the biggest source of our carbon pollution. We'll need more electric generation capacity of course, but that can be done with lots of different sources, including carbon-free ones such as solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear.
With the obvious problems with our environment at this time, it's my opinion that replacing gas cars with EVs ASAP is a screaming emergency.
It's most certainly a lower flammability hazard than the Lithium and Magnesium being used in the current generation of batteries.
You can light steel wool with a common cigarette lighter. We should definitely stop making firetrucks out of steel.
Won't the electrolyte need to have a component that's explosive?
The electrolyte is 80% CFl3 by volume. Sufficient?
I don't read AC A human right
More patents for Stanford. The rich will get richer. Stanford is in the top 5 for universities granted patents. Schools still don't make enough money from tuition so they have to steal their students ideas.
People who try to invent things tend to own more patents than people who do NOT try to invent things. Ideas without work tend to be worthless in many cases. It is the hard work of profs/students combined with the resources of the Schools that pays off for all the people involved. Tim S.
No one smokes anymore, you can light steel wool with a fresh 9V and shoving it in the wool.
Mostly random stuff.
"Battery "breakthroughs" need to state power *and* energy density (not the same thing), plus how long they last. They usually fail on energy."
needs more brawndo
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Actually, our addiction to reproduction is fucking up the planet.
That addiction is not universal. Advanced economies don't over reproduce. Among indigenous 'muricans, population is at replacement. Most Western European nations are actually declining. The Japanese government is marketing parenthood to their youth because they've basically stopped breeding.
The 70s called and want you back. In every developed nation, we've reached zero population growth, except for immigration. Every time people get to a high enough state of wealth, they stop having lots of kids (except for a few wackos like the Duggars). All the other nations are developing pretty rapidly at this point; China has a huge and growing middle class, and labor rates have grown so much that they're going to be looking at outsourcing stuff to cheaper countries before long. Eventually, we're going to have to figure out how to get along in our societies without ever-increasing populations.
"A key challenge has been finding materials capable of producing sufficient voltage after repeated cycles of charging and discharging."
they seem to have accomplished this.
it is good news.
Practically any material can cause terrific explosions when powdered and airborne. Sawdust explosions have reduced more than one lumber mill to ash, but that doesn't mean we stop building houses from wood.
Time out outlaw bakeries. That flour is a fire hazard!
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
This is one of the things we europeans do right -- we build our houses out of stone.
That's awesome for regions that don't have appreciable seismic activity.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
At least one of us appreciates this pun...
Population growth as a global threat is entirely discredited. Point to some nation where pop growth is noticeable, and you'll find a nation where food supplies are hampered by war, dictators, or racial strife. Food on our planet, even in Africa, can be produced in abundance. Getting it to those who need it, especially in refugee camps, is the first problem.
And Africa seems to have more than its share of strife. The UN has certainly punted on that, and the US should rethink its policies. The list is long enough to find at least one conflict to address.
Pop growth is an old and cheap canard. Stick to global climate change. That scam is pretty much still being pushed hard.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You can light steel wool with a common cigarette lighter. We should definitely stop making firetrucks out of steel.
Aluminium is actually far more flammable than steel. This is why they stopped using it for the superstructure of warships and you will not see aluminium armour. Aluminium is highly reactive but what stops it burning is that it very rapidly forms an inert, oxide layer in air which, unlike iron that has rust, remains strongly attached to the metal. However under the right conditions you can overcome this and then aluminium burns which is clearly not the case for steel.
However I expect that it will be a lot safer in a battery than lithium because of the protective oxide layer...unless the battery technology circumvents the formation of this layer in someway to make the battery function.
Smart people get rich at an alarming rate. Maybe we need to stop them from being so smart? Or at least so industrious?
Seriously, where do you go to school, Columbia? Bates?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Practically every dollar store in North America has a box of lighters next to the cash register. They'll card you to buy them, but they're the universal method for setting things on fire.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Surely washing clothes by hand cuts down on energy usage :)
The good stuff is in space. The cheap stuff is on the roof. The only reason we are stuck with "the same old technology" is because we are looking at the bottom of the market where an economy of scale meshing with semiconductors means we have similar stuff to what was used twenty years ago - elsewhere other stuff is in use.
gasoline-powered cars, which is easily the biggest source of our carbon pollution
Nope, not even close. If you want to make an argument, don't just pull crap out of your arse - it just makes you look dumb.
I do agree our addiction to fossil fuels is a huge problem, but moving to EV cars now won't make one jot of difference, because the electricity we use to charge them comes from... fossil fuels. Of course it's easier to replace fixed generating plants with alternative energy, so EV cars will get greener over time as that transition is made. But right now, buying an EV just to claim green credentials is largely an illusion.
Don't underestimate the importance of the bargain bin. Recently the cheap stuff has become cheap enough to make it commercially interesting even without subsidies.
According to Wikipedia, we already have grid parity in many scenarios: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Reaching_parity.
C - the footgun of programming languages
A "resource" can also be people's brains, just as it used to mean people's muscles, ie. slavery.
The point is, people invented stuff, which meant we could do far more, using stuff which was previously of no use. Resources can be "created".
I mean, that's the whole point about green technology isn't it? Use something which was previous mostly useless, like tides and wind. Likewise, we'll "create" new "resources" if we can invent new ways of doing stuff. And if you're worried about running out of rocks, well we might be able to invent ways of using asteroids.
You can't "run out of resources" as such, rather, you can run out of imagination and science.
I mean, I agree it is a race, population versus ingenuity, but we've always had that race, there has always been survival pressure.
And the "let's just stop" option, doesn't put off the inevitable "running out" either, it just means a long period of stagnation, followed by extinction anyhow.
It is "create" or "die".
Some of the energy that charges them comes from fossil fuels, some from other sources. The exact mix varies a lot depending on locale and is close to zero for fossil fuels in some places. One of the big issues with renewables such as solar and photovoltaic is that they are bursty, but having a load of storage devices connected to a smart grid will help this: program your car to keep the battery at over 70% capacity for your regular commute and let it charge more when electricity is cheap and sell back to the grid when it's expensive.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I read that the on average, having one child is the equivalent of driving 10 hummers to work every day. Don't blame the people who have 2mpg vehicles, blame the people who have children.
The electrolyte is 80% CFl3 by volume. Sufficient?
What's the other 20%? Hydrogen perperoxide, or anhydrous hydrazoic acid?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That may or may not be the case. It depends heavily on the energy investment for that water - how much energy went into getting it, purifying it, distributing it, and heating it. Next, consider the amount of soap you are using. A modern high efficiency washing machine uses very little soap per clothing article. Human hand washing (clothes or dishes) tend to oversoap, which is wasteful on its own, but also requires more water to rinse out. Finally, consider the energy used for drying the clothes. Hand-washing is usually associated with line-drying, but you might still be using an electric dryer.
If you are hunched over a creek, scrubbing your clothes on a rock with freezing, chapped hands, followed by line-drying in the sun, then you clearly are doing better than the status quo. But if you are filling a great big tub multiple times (wash, rinse, etc.), with water that came from oil-fired desalination plants and heated to a balmy 30 C, then using an electric dryer on high, "hand washing" will clearly be more energy-intensive.
No? I am unimpressed.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
>That would take several halvings of the human population.
How do you figure? Even assuming humans and our animals accounted for 100% of the planet's biomass, after a single halving that would be reduced to... wait for it... 50%.
Meanwhile, as already mentioned, the advanced economies have pretty much already stopped growing and are beginning to shrink - it's the developing economies that are still experiencing a population explosion, and they're mostly rapidly reducing their reproduction rates as well as they get access to birth control family planning education. Of course projections are still that we'll handily break 10 billion by mid-century before the total population begins to fall, even if we achieved global zero population growth today, simply due to the generational lag. That's going to be rough - the developed world will likely need to give up its gross overconsumption, or there's a fair chance we'll be looking at global food wars, especially thanks to the chilling effects of climate change on agriculture during the transition period. But hey, nothing leads to population reduction like massive global famine and warfare, right?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Heating and cooling the buildings that house billions of people, and doing things like farming and treating/transporting water and other important things are hugely more polluting than cars.
Wrong. Most of those things (particularly HVAC) can be done with electricity, so it's at least highly feasible to move that to non-fossil-fuel energy sources.
Electric cars are just going to move the pollution to another place.
Wrong, they allow you to use non-fossil-fuel energy sources. They're also far more efficient than small ICE engines, so even if your energy source is fossil fuel it's still more efficient.
That won't help until aging hippie hand-wringers stop getting their panties in a twist, and get out of the way of us building a lot more modern nuclear power plants. Nothing else will even put a dent in it.
Wrong again. As I said above, EVs are so much more efficient that even if you stuck with fossil fuel power plants it'd be more efficient than millions of shitty, poorly maintained, inefficient gas engines. And solar power is being used more and more; Germany gets a huge amount of power from solar, and that's not a particularly sunny place unlike much of the US. Wind is also supplying a lot of power these days.
Modern washing machines (esp. horizontal-axis ones) are so water and energy efficient it's just idiotic to bother washing clothes by hand. It's just like modern dishwashers; they're far more efficient (both water and energy, since you need hot water to wash dishes well, and it takes a lot of energy to heat water) than washing dishes by hand.
Dryers are different, since they do use a lot of power (just look at the electric cord on them): you can dry things in the air outside. However this requires you to have decently warm outside temperatures, no rain, and low enough humidity. These conditions may not reliably exist for you.
It makes you look dumb when you pull this crap out of your ass. EVs are so much more efficient than gas cars that even if they're ultimately powered by fossil-fuel power plants, today's fossil fuel plants are so much more efficient than gas engines that you'd still use less energy and generate less pollution.
Actually, the correlation of lower birth rates is usually related to education and occupation. Lower skilled, lower educated groups tend to have more children. Part of this could be explained by the actual need for "labor" in the family farm/business/etc if there was a conscious choice made in that direction.
An aluminum ion battery would be a huge advance, especially (particularly) if it's cheaper.
Doesn't look like they'll be ready in time for my battery replacement, but who knows.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
How do you figure? Even assuming humans and our animals accounted for 100% of the planet's biomass, after a single halving that would be reduced to... wait for it... 50%.
No. Percentages do not work that way - it would be reduced to 100% in your example. Let's use some absolute numbers: assume there are 99 humans to every 1 non-domesticated animal. Humanity is then 99% of the population. Halve the human population, and say it's now 49 humans to 1 non-domesticated animal. Now humans are 98% of the population.
Real numbers are surprising on the actual proportions. I offer you this visual representation.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Yes, we should make them out of magnesium. The difference in weight would allow them to get to the fires much faster.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Aluminium ... electrolyte ... stores large amounts of energy ... isn't this just an electrolytic capacitor?
Best argument to a global basic income I've heard so far.
> That won't help until aging hippie hand-wringers stop getting their panties in a twist,
> and get out of the way of us building a lot more modern nuclear power plants
The only thing stopping nuclear power is the cost of the plants.
They cost $8/W CAPEX and come in sizes of 900MW and up. Finding someone willing to put up the tens of billions of dollars needed to build a typical multi-unit plant is difficult in a market economy. That is the reason, *the only reason*, that more nukes aren't being built.
But just think about your own argument for a second. Do you really believe that nukes are so horribly supported that the entire industry has been stopped dead by "aging hippie hand-wringers"? If you really believe that, do you actually *want* that apparently utterly incompetent industry building nukes?
Here's actual up to date numbers, turn to page 11:
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
> Nothing else will even put a dent in it.
Nukes have put a very very small dent in the problem, and it grows smaller every year. Meanwhile, NG, wind and solar are putting huge dents in it, every year. The last EIA numbers suggest that renewables will be installed at ten times the rate of nukes, on a power-delivered basis:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=20492
Nukes are dead, they committed suicide.
Yes, considering human advancement can be measured by energy consumption it's EXACTLY what we need. And even better that it uses Aluminum instead of toxic Lithium. Now turn in your geek card and get the fuck out. You're not a techie, not a nerd, not a geek, you're just a progressive liberal troll who thinks living like a Hobbit is where it's at. So go take your troll act somewhere else.
> Most of those things (particularly HVAC) can be done with electricity
And for most, georeturn HVAC is far, far more energy efficient than any other source.
It's expensive when everyone has their own tubing, but it seems to me there's a lot of municipal greywater that could be serving this purpose.
> Nope, not even close
Here we go, this should be good...
> but moving to EV cars now won't make one jot of difference
Moving to EVs will lower emissions by about one half...
> because the electricity we use to charge them comes from... fossil fuels ...because the energy we use to charge them comes from a mixture of sources that are, on average, far less polluting than a gasoline engine:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Moreover, the most fantastical rate that we could possibly make the move to EV's is slower than the rate we're already greening the electrical supply, so EV's will continue to improve over time at a rate gasoline improvements can't match:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/future-grid-energy-in-the-not-so-distance/
Which is really besides the point, because the emissions of most of the industrialized world is already below the point where you're better off with an EV:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/electric-cars-and-carbon-intensity/
And all that we really need is cheaper batteries, which we should be crossing gasoline numbers around 2020:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/ev-battery-prices-falling-rapidly/
> EV just to claim green credentials is largely an illusion
A statement that you might believe if you've never really looked at the issue or run a single number to back up your prejudices.
I have a brand new Frigidaire dishwasher. It's most efficient cycle, using air drying and "eco mode", uses 22 litres of water, takes 99 minutes to complete, and something like 2 to 3 kWh of power. That is in addition to the gas water heater that supplied the hot water.
Your dishwasher is likely using most of its power to heat the water it uses beyond the temperature it's getting it from the water heater. Boiling-hot water works wonders in cleaning dishes.
Did you actually measure your dishwasher's power usage in this cycle with a power meter?
Also, I completely doubt that you can clean the dishes nearly as well by hand. There's even been studies on this and the effect on children's immune systems; hand-washed dishes just aren't very clean (which actually helps the kids on average, but for older people or anyone with a compromised immune system isn't a good thing).
Those are excellent points. Geothermal HVAC is extremely efficient, unfortunately its initial cost is higher so it's not used that much.
If this actually pans out, then it'll make electric vehicles very economical
It will also help mightily if night-time storage of daytime-generated (PV) electricity can be made much more economical (especially for regions where "grid-as-storage" is not viable, or won't be viable once the financial incentives for doing so been done away with).
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Ah, well, if you're talking *immediately*, then yes, it's different. I was presuming the new steady-state would be the relevant number, in which case halving the resource demands would make room for the wild populations to expand. Though considering the densities we maintain, the fact that we'd abandon the most desirable land last, and the fact that we would probably continue exterminating wildlife to maintain agriculturally convenient populations (neither wolf packs nor roving herds of elephants are conductive to farming) we might indeed still need several halvings.
Not a lot of ways of doing that cleanly though. A global one-child policy might do it, though the population would still continue ballooning for a while as generational lag takes its due. With climate change mucking with farming for the next few centuries though... well I try to maintain hope that such a gentle path is still feasible. Otherwise it's famine and war, or, if we're lucky, a plague like mankind has never seen before.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They're easily found next to the charcoal and lighter fluid in every grocery store. How else do you light your 50000BTU_barbecue?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Every smoke detector has a 9V battery.
Until the first time it goes off while you're cooking.
Anyway, smoke detectors are storage space for dead 9V batteries.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Some of the indigenous people of South America did a remarkable job of building structures out of stone which are very earthquake safe. Not that it's a very cost effective method of construction. Although, with modern technology perhaps we could produce generic blocks with enough precision cheaply.
Gentlemen, why use lighters or batteries, when you can use the tool everyone carries, a common 1W laser
can be done with electricity
Which has nothing to do with the post I was responding to, which asserted that internal combustion cars are "the biggest source of carbon pollution." I'm pointing out that that post is simply incorrect. Wrong. Bad information, commonly spread around as if it were true. It's not.
You're talking about what could, in principle, be done. In the future. Which is not now. Which has nothing to do with that GP's false meme about cars and pollution.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Do you really believe that nukes are so horribly supported that the entire industry has been stopped dead by "aging hippie hand-wringers"?
In effect, yes. Because of undue squeaky wheel influence over legislators that don't want to upset their small number of professional activist-type far left base members, the people in question play a large if somewhat indirect role in blocking such things. The resulting regulatory hurdles make what certainly is (at the infrastructure level) an expensive proposition prohibitively expensive because of the multi-decade red tape and litigation hurdles that must also be crossed. So much so that the efforts are essentially abandoned before they begin.
Nukes have put a very very small dent in the problem
Exactly my point. They aren't being allowed to play the role they could. Meanwhile, the public consciousness is being fixated on other non-solutions like wind and solar, which themselves don't put a dent (let along a reliable dent) in the problem - and if scaled up to the point they'd make a serious difference, would become their own special kind of blight. Never mind that traditional grid suppliers still have be there any way, at full capacity, to deal with the inevitable slack in the wind/solar supply, day to day.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
run a single number to back up your prejudices
How ironic that you decide to take me to task on this - a person who is actually a builder of EVs and a great believer in the benefits of an electric power-train. My point was merely that the OP's claim that petroleum-powered vehicles is the biggest source of carbon pollution is a pile of crap, as your own quoted figures demonstrate. If every car on the planet were replaced overnight by an EV, carbon pollution would not change significantly, and in any case that could never happen.
Of course EVs are the way forward for cars, and I'd love to see it - the sooner the better. But in the real world things change slowly for all sorts of reasons - technology being only one small component of that. You even make the point yourself about the "greening of the electrical supply" - which was exactly a point I was trying to make as well! By the time we're all driving EVs, other factors will be in play that complicate the picture - probably for the better. Hell, the fusion problem could be cracked by then making the whole fossil fuel vs. "alternative" argument go away.
The expensive space usage stuff is starting to head that way as well thanks to combining small cells with large cheap mirrors.
It also appears that the conventional stuff is now far better housed and mounted. A big hailstorm came through near where I live in November and there's still quite a lot of roof repair and window replacement going on now (April) yet I didn't see a single damaged panel. That may have been due to the direction the storm came from, but even then it demonstrates that the solar panels are a lot more resistant to storm damage than they used to be.
Your dishwasher has a hot water connection? I've never seen one that had more than a cold water connection on it. I suspect if you check it won't have one and virtually all the power it uses is used to heat the water, besides that it just pump some water round for a while.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Well then there must be odd Dollaramas here in Montreal, they all have their battery display cases at the cash registers, but I can't recall ever seeing a lighter there. Chocolate bars, yes.
Mostly random stuff.
Think about it, why is lithium used for mobile applications now instead of nickel or lead? Weight! Aluminum batteries would be substantially heavier, and take more energy to move around. Hardly a miracle to revolutionize EV's.
Huh? One of the ions used in the electrolyte in a battery is probably not a majority of the battery's weight. And aluminum is one of the least-dense metals there is.