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Cambridge Researchers Present Lithium-Air Battery Breakthrough (google.com)
Reuters reports on a tantalizing advance in battery technology described this week by Cambridge researchers, who have made large enough steps toward a practical lithium-oxygen battery to give a laboratory demo of their system. Commercially available lithium-oxygen batteries would be significant because they would
have the potential to deliver the desired power thanks to a high energy density - a measure of energy stored for a given weight - that could be 10 times that of lithium-ion batteries and approach that of gasoline. They also could be a fifth the cost and a fifth the weight of lithium-ion batteries. But problems have beset lithium-oxygen batteries that affect their capacity and lifetime, including troublesome efficiency, performance, chemical reaction and potential safety issues and the limitation of needing pure oxygen rather than plain old air. The Cambridge demonstrator battery employs different chemistry than previous work on lithium-air batteries, for example using lithium hydroxide rather than lithium peroxide. It also uses an electrode made of graphene, a form of carbon. The result was a more stable and efficient battery."
Some more about this research can be gleaned from Clare Grey's web page at Cambridge.
It'll be out in 50 years
Pretty smart for a 12 year old
10 years from now, but closer to 20.
I wish I had an actual breakthrough battery for every battery breakthrough story I've seen on Slashdot for the last ten years...
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
I sometimes get the feeling that graphene is like the discovery of semiconductors (or possibly of semiconductor doping). It's got revolutionary applications, making the formerly impossible (or at least impractical) practical, and the formerly expensive affordable. On the other hand, at this point in its lifetime it gets used far more in the research lab than in the manufacturing plant, and for all the times it appears in the scientific literature it is slow (or at least, it feels slow) to appear in consumer products. I suspect it will get there, and become ubiquitous, though. Once a "killer application" of the material is discovered - something that is sufficiently economically valuable that development teams will throw huge resources behind it and a new area of competition across multiple consumer product R&D teams arises - it will produce a change - probably the next big change in electronics. Think about how lithium-ion batteries revolutionized portable electronics and miniature aircraft (and are in the process of revolutionizing electric cars).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
10x the energy density!
1/5 the cost
1/5 the weight.
I mean, why do reports write these stories when they would never write the same story about any other tech with the phantom results?
Tesla needs 1,200 amps+ *today* Liion can deliver that *TODAY*... in a package that's not too crazy. This is what matters, usable battery tech in a real world application. Let's start having scientists write these breakthrough stories. The only time I see scientists use words like the ones in the article are when they are trying to get grant funding. They aren't even worth clicking through to anymore...
Science bitch!
Not even close. It's impossible to make a battery close to the energy density of gasoline. We're talking a thousandfold increase, not 10x.
In particular there have been some improvements along those lines recently. Likewise just last year new batteries with silicon electrodes increased energy density over anything seen before, and smartphone manufacturers are already using them for their newest toys.
There has been no revolution in batteries, no completely new chemistry that changes everything, but there has been steady development.
Lithium batteries have more than doubled in energy density over that period, while dropping in price.
If all the advances which were announced had played out as announced though they would probably have increased by a hundredfold or more. It's interesting to hear about the advances I just wish that they were not over hyped to the point where they make grossly inaccurate claims about their impact. Perhaps this will improve battery energy densities by a factor of 10 as claimed but, lacking expert understanding of batteries on which to base my own opinion, I tend to put more weight on the previous record of similar claims from battery researchers which suggests that a 10% improvement might be nearer the mark assuming it ever becomes practical to implement outside a research lab.
OK, correct me if I'm wrong here, but. . . Won't a lithium-air battery (or an aluminum-air battery, which is also discussed from time to time) actually increase in mass as it discharges? It's pulling oxygen from the air and then binding it into oxides which then have to be carried around until the battery is recharged, right?
No, I am not spinning some dark conspiracy theory about Big Oil. Simply this, if it had not been grandfathered out of product liability laws and hazardous substances regulation, gasoline and diesel will not be approved for use as automobile fuel. All other hydro carbons with the same energy density (42 MJ/Kg), volatility and flammability are strictly regulated.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Most research doesn't pan out. Not in batteries, or in any other area of scientific endeavour.
I don't know where you got that from but it simply isn't true. In my own field of particle physics it is extremely rare that an experiment does not work. It's true that some experiments work better than others and an experiment might not find new and exciting physics but in that case you learn that your existing laws of physics work under conditions where nobody had ever tested them before.
Mind you we also don't go around telling people that our next experiment will find an easy way to convert matter to anti-matter and solve the entire world's energy needs either. It's not impossible that some experiment might find a way to do that if the physics we don't know turns out to allow it but there is no reason to think that's a likely outcome so we don't say it.
That doesn't mean we should stop doing science. It also doesn't mean that we should stop reporting on science.
Are you sure that you read the post I wrote? Not once did I even hint at either of those things. All I ask for is honest and accurate reporting of science and not the usual hyped up "you won't believe how good the new battery technology is" type of crap because I really won't believe it anymore. I'm all for science reporting but stick to the facts, i.e. the science, and not wild speculation about a science-fiction future which is sadly more and more of what we see on Slashdot.