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MIT "Yolk and Shell" Nanoparticle Promises Longer-Lived Rechargeable Batteries

Posted by timothy on from the expand-contract-expand-contract dept.

jan_jes writes: A new "yolk-and-shell" nanoparticle created by researchers at MIT and Tsinghua University in China could boost the capacity and power of lithium-ion batteries. The researchers have created an electrode made of nanoparticles with a solid shell, and a "yolk" inside that can change size again and again without affecting the shell. The new findings, which use aluminum as the key material for the lithium-ion battery's negative electrode, or anode, are reported in the journal Nature Communications. The use of nanoparticles with an aluminum yolk and a titanium dioxide shell has proven to be "the high-rate champion among high-capacity anodes." The linked article goes into much more detail about the (serendipitous) discovery.

35 comments

  1. This is pretty interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thanks for posting!!!!

  2. Wow... by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 3, Informative

    TLDR?

    • * > 3 x the charge density of carbon cathodes
    • * Still has nearly double the charge density of carbon after 500 balls-to-the-wall rapid charge cycles (6 minutes)
    • * Made of very cheap stuff - we package soda in aluminium and slather titanium dioxide on our bodies and then wash it away, ferchissakes

    Very, very exiting. I imagine they'll be getting a call from Elon Musk in their near future.

    1. Re:Wow... by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      Indeed, aluminum is the 3rd most common element in Earth's crust (more common than iron), oxygen is the most common, and titanium the 9th most common (more common than hydrogen). Now, of course, it's not elemental abundances that matter but raw feedstock prices. Their feedstocks are 50nm aluminum powder, sulfuric acid, and titanium oxysulfate. Concentrated sulfuric acid is one of the most widely used industrial chemicals on the market, cheap at about $700 a tonne. Even high purity sulfuric acid isn't particularly expensive. Titanium oxysulfate is about $5000 a tonne - still really trivial compared to the value of the anode material you're getting. However: 80nm aluminum nanopowder (in the same size ballpark) costs $1109 per kilogram, and that's the cheapest I've found online that has a price quote. And this here is a big problem, that's just way too expensive, your finished batteries will be selling for something in the ballpark of $100/kg. But, this is small scale. If anyone here has any idea how cheaply 50nm aluminum powder could be made if desired in quantities of hundreds of tonnes a year, I'd be quite curious.

      Of course, as pointed out below, the sort of news we really want to see is about significant cathode improvements...

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    2. Re:Wow... by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 1

      I should, of course, have said "anodes". D'oh.

      The main reason this is exciting over all those finicky technologies like encapsulated silicon and coated carbon nanotubes and graphene sponges and whatever, is that it's made of cheap stuff treated using a simple chemical process. It has a hope in hell of entering production sometime soon.

    3. Re:Wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't know anything about the specifications or manufacture of such things, but nano-tek.co.uk appears to have 30nm powder, possibly in a lower quality, for £2000/metric ton (£2/kg). There's quite a variation there, perhaps due to quality control rather than manufacture per se. I guess a lot depends on if the process needs 100% pure spheres or if the process can cope with 90% spheres and filter out the bad anodes later.

    4. Re:Wow... by Rei · · Score: 2

      Link? Make sure you're not looking at alumina nanopowder (aka Al2O3), it's cheaper. But if it actually is aluminum, just lower quality, I'd expect the process to be fine with non-spherical particles or a greater variation in particle sizes.

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    5. Re:Wow... by Rei · · Score: 2

      Hmm, found it. If it indeed is possible to buy it that cheap, then I'd expect that to work, and the whole process to be quite economically viable. :)

      Strange that the powder looks blue in the images.

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    6. Re:Wow... by Rei · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wait a minute.... it says mean size 30 *micron*, not 30 *nanometers*. Sorry - the particles are 600 times too large :(

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    7. Re:Wow... by turning+in+circles · · Score: 1

      Looks to me like it's just a question of, has any serious manufacturer tried their hand at it. Many routes exist to synthesize the Al NPs (see "Methods for synthesis of Al NPs ) and whoever licenses the technology will figure out how to make them cheaply. I mean, you could just do it in a giant glovebox to avoid the problem of the Al oxidizing.

      --
      Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
  3. Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'll add it to my ever growing list entitled "Technologies promising to double battery capacity that have yet to come to market"

    1. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Eventually one of these technologies will be workable and make it to market. Then all hell will break lose. You need to understand how close to making renewable energies and electric cars viable as complete replacements of fossil fuel technology we are. It only takes one or two doublings of battery capacity per dollar to make oil and coal economically infeasible for anything but legacy and niche applications.

    2. Re:Great news by Rei · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, that's just the issue - all hell doesn't break loose. Peoples' electronic devices just keep consuming more power and/or manufacturers keep shrinking the size of the battery pack. We keep reading about new battery capacity techs, and while most of them don't make it to market, some of them actually do. For example, on Slashdot 5-ish years ago we were at several points reading about silicon anodes for li-ion batteries. Guess what? Some manufacturers today now use them. But we just don't notice these things because there's no "hell breaks loose" moment.

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    3. Re:Great news by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not personal devices that will benefit the most. As you point out, there is a stalemate between the twin goals of more power, and less power consumption, in the IC market.

      It's devices with relatively fixed power consumption that will benefit, like electric cars. Even if this only adds 50% capacity to batteries, that will push electric cars over the threshold of viability for a LOT more people. Anything that does stuff in the real world rather than the virtual world.

    4. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Um, nope. You won't see electric airliners, or construction equipment, or cargo boats, and you can't grind down batteries and use them as chemical feedstock for the millions of products oil gives us.

      All hell will break "lose" [sic] when oil gets so expensive and rare that even a 1970s car will look like unachievable high tech.

    5. Re:Great news by swb · · Score: 1

      When these batteries come to market they will come with a free bundled cube of holographic memory.

    6. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your phone has perhaps 10Wh of battery capacity (top end phones currently have roughly 3Ah at 3.7V average, so roughly 10Wh). Your electric car drives 50 yards on that charge (typically 20kWh/100km). That should tell you where battery capacity improvements (and bringing the price per kWh stored down) really matter. Hint: It's not your phone. Demand for batteries will explode and economies of scale will be massive as soon as a tipping point is crossed, and that tipping point, as I said before, is only one or two doublings of capacity per dollar away. It will get very ugly for conventional cars and fossil fuel power plants very quickly once that happens. Hence the interest in new battery technology.

    7. Re:Great news by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2
      Electric cars (battery powered) have 2 major obstacles
      • Power density
      • Charge time

      It seems evident that nano technology would be able to make major inroads in the power density area, and quite possibly the charge time as well. I'm still waiting for someone to figure out an economical batacitor (Philip Jose Farmer) which appears to still be in the research phase.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    8. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What will break loose is burning fossil fuels for electricity. To think with thousands of years of new technologies, the majority of our power generation still involves us burning something. Think of all the petrochemicals we would free up for the plastics and chemical industries. For me, it would be nice not to smell diesel or gasoline on my drive to work.

      And the most common byproduct from running electric motors? Ozone! Think about it, we are actually going to produce more ozone for the atmosphere just by putting more electric cars on the road! Now, whether or not that makes it into the upper atmosphere is another thing.

    9. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But you can power airliners and ships with synthetic hydrocarbons, and I'd actually be surprised if construction equipment of the future weren't powered electrically, once it becomes robotic one day. Electrical drives would appear much better for fine control.

    10. Re:Great news by PPH · · Score: 2

      And the most common byproduct from running electric motors? Ozone!

      If you are referring to the product of brush arcing, that is rare. And getting more so all the time as brushless, electronically commutated motors become more common.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    11. Re:Great news by Alioth · · Score: 1

      I doubt that a single modern electric car motor is a brush/commutator type DC motor. Everything in use now will be electronically commutated brushless motors.

      --
      Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
    12. Re:Great news by WalksOnDirt · · Score: 1

      While charge time is important, the power density is already fine (but they are related). Increased energy density would also be desirable.

      --
      a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
    13. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't forget cost, doesn't really help much to have a battery technology that has the same energy density as gas (weight and volume) & can be charged in 2 minutes if it has to be made mostly out of solid gold, platinum and titanium. I wish I saw more effort into developing moderate density, dirt cheap batteries for grid/residential storage. Something that could be trailered in, buried in the back yard, provide enough capacity to run a standard home for a couple days and connected to grid/solar/wind all for a few thousand dollars.

    14. Re:Great news by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      We're talking a charge density that could potentially take a car over a thousand miles instead of a hundred or two at current battery weight. With an arbitrarily reasonable 300-400 mile range with fast recharge, you could have a much smaller battery which would have the synergistic advantage of increasing the mileage.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    15. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But it will come to market, just as soon as they solve a couple of tecnical details, and get the price down. I'm with you, call me when it's rolled out at Wall-mart, that will be proof that this is something more than vaporware.

      Every couple of months, alternating, it seems, with new breakthroughs in solar cells, MIT's magazine, Technology Review has an article on a promising new battery technology. I was reading them with interest ten years ago, now I rarely skim farther than the first paragraph or two. They all promise big improvements in battery or solar cell performance, they all disappear.

    16. Re:Great news by WalksOnDirt · · Score: 1

      We're talking a charge density that could potentially take a car over a thousand miles instead of a hundred or two at current battery weight.

      That would be from increasing energy density. Better power density could improve the 0-60 time. Of course, charge rate and power density are usually correlated, one being the rate energy goes into the battery, the other the rate it goes out.

      --
      a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
  4. Great, but... by Rei · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... there's many alternative, highly improved anode types. There's much more room for improvement on cathodes. There's diminishing returns focusing so much on the anodes. Don't get me wrong, this really does sound like a very good anode material - in particular, both the raw materials and the manufacturing process should be cheap and with good throughput. But we need cathode improvements more.

    --
    I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    1. Re:Great, but... by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      For those interested in the current state of cathodes in li-ion batteries and the research underway to improve them, there's a good paper here. The short of it is that they do keep making incremental improvements, and might continue that way for a long time, but they don't seem to be as subject to the "big leaps" that people are working towards on the anode side. There's been some interesting work since then, though - for example they don't mention anything about the recent work on vanadium/boron glasses (~300Mah/g initial capacity (twice that of LFP), without as much degradation as with forms of crystalline vanadium oxide)

      Honestly, I don't expect any "big leaps" overall in battery tech. But based on everything I've seen that's already "in the pipeline", incremental improvements in li-ion battery capacity should be expected to continue to improve for at least 5 years, and probably much longer. There are a number of proposed techs for what will come after li-ion. I personally wouldn't be surprised if lithium-sulfur becomes the next usurper - it has huge capacity, generally common materials, there's been a lot of work towards overcoming its main downside (short lifespan), and there's already a low-volume manufacturer out there PolyPlus with limited use in special applications.

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
    2. Re:Great, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would call 2.5 times plus increase in energy density and at least moderate cost savings over lithium-ion a fairly big leap. That is if they an solve the issue with lithium sulfur batteries destroying themselves that is. Even if they solve the durability issues its far from a perfect technology but its definitely a step up. Now if only someone was working on a dirt cheap, long life, but moderate density solution (up to half the density of a car battery but dirt cheap) battery solution for grid/home storage.

    3. Re:Great, but... by Rei · · Score: 1

      2x the energy density of current li-ion top-of-the-line cells. A significantly smaller difference by the time the bugs get worked out of LiS.

      Still, it's crazy contemplating what one could do with affordable 1500Wh/kg cells. At that point, fast charge becomes irrelevant, since you can drive all day on a single charge and then just charge while you sleep. 80A@220V should be enough for a sedan (the upper end of Level 2), no level 3 or 4 charging needed.

      --
      I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
  5. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I bet that it isn't all that it is cracked up to be. No yolk.

  6. Crossing fingers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's hoping its all they say it is, but I'm not holding my breath. How many times over the past 10 years has some group claimed that they had some awesome new battery technology and then after years of development their "awesome" new tech provides at most 5% more capacity and maybe 10% quicker charge time. I'll rejoice when they start selling them.

  7. I'm confused... by serbanp · · Score: 1

    key material for the lithium-ion battery's negative electrode, or anode

  8. Elon Musk's Big bet by Invisible+Now · · Score: 1

    I have long believed that when Elon musk was planning his Tesla projects; the electric car and the power wall storage systems he must have faced a critical go no-go decision. At the time lithium batteries were not great but he must have decided they were good enough and bet that improvements would make them better. as his Giga battery factory in nevada comes online that bet is paying off big time. Not only will the cars range be increased but the faster charging rates will make stopping for lunch a pleasant way to charge up while taking a break from freeway cruising. He is a great engineer and has a subtle sense of humor.wsn't he cute to namehis technology companies based on DC after history's most famous proponent of AC?

    --

    "Knowing everything doesn't help..."

  9. MIT professor Ju Li by Alsee · · Score: 1

    The new findings, which use aluminum as the key material for the lithium-ion battery's negative electrode, or anode, are reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT professor Ju Li and six others.

    In related news, MIT professor Ju Na has some exiting discoveries in Sodium technology.

    -

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    - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.