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Researchers Working on Liquid Battery That Could Last For Over 10 Years (engadget.com)
Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget: If Harvard researchers have their way, you may not have to worry about replacing power backs quite so often. They've developed a flow battery (that is, a battery that stores energy in liquid solutions) which should last for over a decade. The trick was to modify the molecules in the electrolytes, ferrocene and viologen, so that they're stable, water-soluble and resistant to degradation. When they're dissolved in neutral water, the resulting solution only loses 1 percent of its capacity every 1,000 cycles. It could be several years before you even notice a slight dropoff in performance. The use of water is also great news for both the environment and your bank account. As it's not corrosive or toxic, you don't have to worry about wrecking your home if the battery leaks -- you might just need a mop.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
He said Canada, not USA.
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That's curious. Viologens tend to be substantially toxic. An example of a viologen is the herbicide paraquat. of which, it only takes 25mg/Kg to kill the average dog.
The subtitle of the article makes it pretty clear that the handheld market is not what is being targeted here:
It might be an ideal form of energy storage for solar and wind power.
It's intended for fixed-location installations where physical volume isn't such a concern, so energy density, while important, doesn't matter as much. The same niche is currently occupied by the nickel-iron battery that was recently mentioned in another /. article that I can't put my typing fingers on right at the moment. Same issues there: high reliability and lifetime, but (comparatively) poor energy density suggests power-smoothing for solar or wind would be an ideal application.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
This is a flow battery. The cathode and anode are dissolved in the electrolyte on opposite sides of a membrane. Current can then flow across the membrane to produce electricity. Their attraction is that because the cathode and anode are in a liquid state, you can "recharge" a battery simply by pumping out the old fluid and pumping in new fluid - just like with gasoline. No need to develop specialized machinery to remove, move around, and insert heavy block batteries. The drawback is that energy density is a lot lower than for solid batteries, consigning them (thus far) to fixed energy storage systems (e.g. battery backup for a building).
They've developed an electrolyte which doesn't degrade as readily and can last a decade. The battery does not last that long. Its cathode and anode still need to be replenished to recharge it.
> In the 90s and 00s we'd get monthly articles about a new optical format that would store 1TB of data using holograms and fairy dust. None of them ever made it to market. Even now all we have is 100GB quad-layer Blu-rays.
They basically turned into the Archival Disc format, which has a first-generation capacity of 300GB per disc and a second generation capacity of 1TB per disc. The problem is that they keep delaying them: they were originally supposed to launch in 2015.
In the mean time, Sony went ahead and used BDXL for their Optical Disc Archive cartridge format, which stores up to 1.5TB per cartridge by sticking a bunch of BDXL discs into the cartridge. Those have been shipping for years. Once the 300GB discs are finally available, they're expected to use them to refresh their cartridges with capacities of 3.6 TB. They're meant to compete with tape. IIRC they cost a bit more but have much better random access times, and they're still much cheaper than hard disks.
And have a real world lifetime of a few years. Archiving data is a tough job. Storing it in an amorphous, heat and light sensitive material is data suicide. Tape is still king here, and has decades of actual archival use to prove it's longevity. (yes, tape is subject to decay, but at levels that make optical discs look like play-dough.) I, personally, have tapes over 25 years old that are still perfectly readable. (and that's 15 years in a kitchen drawer, not the Svalbard seed vault.)
(* Note: choose your tape technology wisely. QIC-80 is known to not even survive a single full-pass write. LTO is all the rage, but it's exceedingly easy to permanently damage.)