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Researcher Develops Explosion-Proof Lithium Metal Battery With 2X Power of Lithium-Ion (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Tufts University professor and founder of Ionic Materials, Mike Zimmerman, hopes that his resilient ionic battery technology will finally replace Lithium Ion. The reason scientists and researchers pay so much attention to battery design is because today's lithium-ion technologies have several downsides, as we saw recently with Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 recall. If you were to take apart a lithium-ion battery, you'd find a positive electrode called the anode and a negatively charged electrode called the cathode. There's a thin separator that sits between the anode and cathode. Everything else is filled up with liquid, or electrolyte. Charging the battery causes positively charged ions to flow through the liquid from the negative side to the positive side. As you use the battery, the ions flow in the opposite direction. However, the electrolyte is extremely flammable and they can explode when pierced or overheated. Zimmerman's ionic battery trades the flammable liquid for a piece of plastic film to serve as the electrolyte. It isn't prone to overheating and catching fire. The same goes for piercing, cutting or otherwise destroying the battery. Also, unlike lithium-ion batteries, Zimmerman's ionic batteries use actual lithium-metal, which can store twice as much power. Lithium-ion batteries don't contain lithium-metal because they're even more prone to overheating and exploding than lithium-ion, but that risk is removed by Zimmerman swapping out the liquid electrolyte for a solid. Further reading: Yahoo News
The thing that is preventing 600 mile range electric cars is not the limited capacity of lithium ion, it's the cost. I mean, 750 kilograms of lithium ion battery is the equivalent of a 15 gallons of gasoline in a regular car. A Tesla 85D carries a 540 kg battery and gets 270 miles range. You can easily make a vehicle that can carry 1200 kg of battery. A Tesla with 1000 kg of battery would weigh about 3000 kilograms -- but even accounting for the increased weight, it get well over 600 miles of range (that's enough to comfortably drive between any two big towns in most if not all of the US). The problem is that 1200 kilograms of lithium ion battery costs a shit-ton of money. That's the whole point of the gigafactory. What I am saying is that if we had zero new advances in battery technology other that making it much cheaper than it costs today .. we could have electric cars that outperform gasoline cars in miles travelled before refilling.
So if there is an advance in batteries I want to know, what will it cost in the medium term?
As usual, new battery announcement, with nonexistent details about real, practical questions that are highly relevant to practical implementation such as: Power density? Battery lifetime? Ease of manufacturing/cost? All of these need to be at least as good as current, top of the line li-on batteries, or it'll die the same death as the previous hundred or so "breakthrough" batteries that have been announced. None of them were so much as mentioned, instead saying (evasively) this uses "real!" lithium metal which "can store twice the power (energy density) of traditional li-on batteries". But can the battery itself store twice the energy density of li-on batteries? And which ones, today's top ones or like, some irrelevant comparison to li-ons from over a decade ago?
This is the source of the information. It's part of PBS' "Search for the Super Battery" which airs today (February 1, 2017) at 9 pm on PBS.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Perhaps this is better, "Li-ion batteries use an intercalated lithium compound as one electrode material, compared to the metallic lithium used in a non-rechargeable lithium battery."(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery), even referenced. - and just in case - "In chemistry, intercalation is the reversible inclusion or insertion of a molecule (or ion) into compounds with layered structures. Examples are found in graphite and transition metal dichalcogenides." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_(chemistry)) - oh bugger - "Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers are atomically thin semiconductors of the type MX2, with M a transition metal atom (Mo, W, etc.) and X a chalcogen atom (S, Se, or Te.). One layer of M atoms is sandwiched between two layers of X atoms. A MoS2 monolayer is 6.5 Ã... thick."(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_metal_dichalcogenide_monolayers) - when will it end - The chalcogens (/ËkælkÉ(TM)dÊ'ánz/) are the chemical elements in group 16 of the periodic table. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcogen) ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen