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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
Without half that summary being a 5th grade science lesson I would have no fucking clue how a battery works
Among battery researchers that I know, a key figure of merit is the amount of power you get after the thousandth charge-discharge cycle. There are plenty of great battery ideas out there, but they don't have the lifetimes to be commercially feasible. I wonder how this stacks up.
The other problem is charge time and charge station availability.
Tesla is almost deliberately misleading on their charge times. Now before you start madly typing hear me out. They say 'half charge in 20 mins at a superstation' That gets me ~150 miles. In my current ICE car that would take 4-5 gallons depending on how I drive it. I can get 5 gallons in 5 mins easy. Full tank in under 10 mins and that gets me regularly 400 miles range. For a tesla however the numbers are basically random from 20 mins to 52 hours depending on how you are charging it. Now assuming I only use super stations at *BEST* to get 300ish miles it will take me 40 mins. For 1000 mile trip you have probably added in nearly 2 hours extra travel time. Depending on how you do it. As I get older, money I have, time is more precious to me.
For commuting these things are just fine. Plug it in at work/home and you are probably fine. For a long trip they are not going to work any time soon. We still have ICE and hybrid for those cases. From where I sit for quite a long time.
Range anxiety that you point out is not the issue. It is charging time and charging availability anxiety. A bigger battery helps that somewhat but also makes the issue even worse. Once those issues are worked out this will be a silly conversation. For example if there was 1 gas station in my state I would not think 'man gas cars are amazing'. No, I would be thinking 'not going to buy that'.