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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.
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
If you didn't have the memory of a goldfish you would have noticed that only a few of the many battery improvements written about ten years ago have made it to market at all.
There, FTFY.
The road from lab to product is long and full of speed bumps (or rather: unexpected craters in the road). If you look at actually available products, battery tech is a steadily improving but SLOW moving market. A good analogy is open source software: on a regular basis there's important releases (that actually bring something new to the table), and the occasional surprise. But overall, it's a very gradually evolving ecosystem.
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.
If you didn't have the memory of a goldfish you would have noticed that only a few of the many battery improvements written about ten years ago have made it to market at all.
Let me guess - you hate EV's. Friends and I have a wager about the EV denialist's last reason that they are an "utter failure".
My money is on the color they are painted.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If all the advances which were announced had played out as announced though they would probably have increased by a hundredfold or more.
Most research doesn't pan out. Not in batteries, or in any other area of scientific endeavour. That doesn't mean we should stop doing science. It also doesn't mean that we should stop reporting on science. If you don't want to read about science and technology, then GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. Go watch cat videos, or whatever. Good riddance. I am sick of all the SJW articles and other crap on Slashdot, so it is very annoying to read people like you whining about articles reporting real science and potential technological improvements. Articles on things like battery research are exactly what Slashdot is for.
Any government subsidies to the electric car industry pale in comparison to those of the petroleum industry. Not to mention the ICE auto manufacturers who DID go bankrupt, and were already bailed out by the government. Do you have any citation for Tesla about to go bankrupt?
It's like every other fake outrage for the self righteous, like BENGHAZI! where the hypocrtites get outraged over something that when they do it - its different, and its just fine.
You hate electrical cars? - the subsides for them are socialist, communist, atheist, gay marriage enabling hogwash, and the road to perfidy. You like your GMC Savana 3500? Then Oil subsidies are magically turned into laissez faire capitalism, and blessed by the invisible hand of the free market - Just like it says in the old Testament.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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?
Actually this is far better (from what I can see of it) than any of the previous work on li-air, which I've always taken a rather long view on. While it's really unfortunate I can't read the paper to see the exact details to get an idea of the manufacturing process and read more about the nature of the testing and the drawbacks mentioned, getting 93% efficiency and 2000 cycles on lithium-air are really staggering figures.
The only drawbacks the article mentions are "because the battery's ability to charge and discharge is too low." Soooooo... does that mean low power density? If so, to that I say so what? Today's li-ion cells have way more power density than is needed for propulsion, that's why you have things like Teslas beating supercars - their peak power is something like 20 times what they need to cruise at highway speeds. You could drop discharge power density by an order of magnitude and still have a fine car (optionally with a supercapacitor or small high power-density li-ion pack for bursts if desired) . And for recharge power density... when you have the absurd energy densities provided by li-air, it ceases to matter any more. Seriously, when you can drive all day on a single charge, who needs rapid chargers? You just plug in and charge while you sleep, so it makes no difference whether you can do it in 30 minutes or 8 hours. The top end of Level 2 charging should be enough to give a reasonably efficient vehicle a whole day's drive, no need for Level 3+.
I'd gladly take way lower power density in exchange for way higher energy density.
From the paper's abstract, I see that the chemicals involved in the battery are LiO2, graphene oxide, LiI and dimethoxyethane. LiO2 is cheap. Graphene oxides vary quite a bit depending on the preparation method, so it depends on what varient she's using, but most are cheap. Lithium iodide is cheap. Dimethoxyethane is cheap. Seriously, unless she's using an unusual rare/expensive form of graphene oxide, or is doing something weird and potentially costly in the manufacturing process, these should be affordable.
I really wish I could read more about the details, as that's where the devil lives, but... damned restricted access, yadda yadda yadda. :P
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
In case you didn't notice, batteries have dramatically increased in energy density over time. No, a cell phone is not entirely a battery, but battery sizes have shrunk in conjunction with phone sizes, even while their capacity (mAh) has been rising (significantly) over time.
People's inability to notice changing technology around them never ceases to amaze me. It's astounding how fast people get used to new technology and forget what old technology used to be like. It's like picking up an old video game that you played as a teenager and being shocked at how bad the graphics were.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."