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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.
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else. Wake me when there's a product I can somehow use in my daily life.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
They don't make money if you're not replacing your batteries all the time.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
Promises in advanced batteries are borderline worthless. Everyone has a superior battery.....that they can't deliver one. /Sakti3/ Sumitomo low-temp molten , etc.
Ambri / Sadoway "dirt-cheap, made from dirt" / Japan Power Dual-carbon / Phinergy's aluminum-air
Hal's Battery Blog has notes on battery announcements going back years. Many, many promises, not many tangible advances.
https://halsbatteryblog.wordpr...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
One more press release about a laboratory demonstration with an undefined time to market.
Just about zero technical details, why did I click on it?
Haven't we had enough of this stuff, Slashdot?
Not sure if it's paywalled...
It seems that they're claiming energy densities of ~20Wh/L; wikipedia quotes 250-676 Wh/L for lithium-ion, however, TFA is referring to a flow cell, so it's a bit apples and oranges...but as far as using one of these in your phone, don't hold your breath.
Great news but I live in Canada. Any battery tech needs to be testing at -30 Celsius before I care.
And I live in Texas where we need to survive at nearly 90 Celsius when leaving a phone in your car in August...
Between you and I, That's quite the temperature range...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Water doesn't tend to be the problem in aqueous solutions. The fact that it's a solution means that you've got these other chemicals in your water if it spills. I doubt anything that stores a high amount of charge is something you want to casually mop up while the kids and pets lap it off the floor.
I think you're just ignoring the breakthroughs that have been happening.
It's only about 15 years since a laptop was 1.5" thick, weighed 5lb, and had an amazing 2 hour battery life. In only a decade and a half the amount of energy that's been packed into a laptop battery has increased enormously.
This is also hugely visible when you look at power tools. I cordless power drill from 15ish years ago would almost certainly us NiCd batteries, with a life of only an hour or two. Modern power drills will last a full day or more with a battery pack that's substantially smaller, and that charges in a far shorter amount of time.
And perhaps 130 years from now, someone will find a way to encapsulate or solidify the electrolyte to prevent spillage or evaporation. Maybe they'll call it a dry cell.
This may explain why my wife is by herself in the bedroom way more than she was a decade and a half ago.
#DeleteFacebook
He said Canada, not USA.
#DeleteFacebook
Don't forget it's mixed up with water and also with electrolytes, which are both safe - even for plants.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Fake news! Fake news! The WHO is Chinese communist plot to destroy the straight, WASP American family! /s
It seems every 6 months I'm turning on the news to witness another "breakthrough" in energy storage that never seems to make it to the consumer market or anywhere else.
That's because there are many obstacles to making a successful battery. So basically, depending on the technology you are working with, you may need about 10 or 20 "breakthroughs" before you get a new type of battery on the market. That said, sodium batteries are on the market and they are great for storing power for your house but due to patents, VCs and assholerly in general, they are expensive.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
How come ferrocene gets a wikipedia page, but viologen has to make do with the Aldrich Chemicals page?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He is a little high but not much. 150-160F is very likely in texas or about 65C. I've seen local news "bake" things inside cars to demonstrate just how dangerous leaving a child in a car is in texas.
You should look at gaming laptops, some of them are a bit thick, but they really are true desktop replacements. https://www.asus.com/us/Notebo...
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.
"All" we have is 100GB quad-layer Blu-rays.
I bet they were once something in a lab, too.
> 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.
You should look at gaming laptops, some of them are a bit thick, but they really are true desktop replacements.
Yep, I discovered the same thing. My 5 year old laptop is at the end of it's life and I will likely be replacing with with an alienware laptop not because I'm a gamer but because I actually want an upgrade not a downgrade.
Seems like the primary point of this battery tech is getting slam-dunked by the mobile phone and personal device power crowd. It's NOT a matter of energy density (although that is a moderately important issue), but the LONGEVITY / RECHARGE CYCLES of this battery tech.
Hell, even if it is 10 times the size of current lithium tech batteries, the fact that it can survive for a DECADE of charge / discharge cycles makes it a REAL plus in the 'load levelling' supplemental power arena, especially since they won't be stressed to full discharge / recharge on a daily basis - - - which SHOULD effectively extend the useful lifespan to several decades.
It's not a question of how much power you can pack into a given volume, it's HOW LONG the battery can perform before needing replacement - - - and this tech really seems to be a contender for bulk power storage for dealing with peak demand power usage - with a very long life cycle.
Please get off the volumetric power rants, and look at the feasibility of using this type of battery, even if it takes up a lot (relatively) of space, and consider it's application as a serious long-term power load leveling technology.
Consider, also, that it is much smaller than compressed air, elevated water, or molten salt storage systems, and appears to offer much lower maintenance / support expense, since it is basically an electrical cell that probably only requires a reasonable thermal environment.
Yeah, I've made some assumptions - that may be way off base - but at least I'm NOT trying to cram this LONG-TERM, HIGH-RECYCLE, ELECTRICAL STORAGE technology into a miniaturized application (phones, laptops, watches, etc.) that it was never intended for.
redneck geek
From the original paper, it's around 20 Wh/L. Pretty low (lithium ion is ~200-700Wh/L or so), but this would be for grid storage, not phones/cars/etc.
I know. Butter is just an example of a substance that holds a lot of energy and is perfectly safe to handle. You could eat the butter, and use it to power a hand crank to run your mobile device. A trained athlete could generate hundreds of Watts Not very practical, I admit, but it shows the things that are theoretically possible with the right kind of chemicals. We're just barely scratching the surface.
They were once something amazing too. How long will it be before a 100 GB quad layer Blu ray disk only holds a dozen Word files, each containing the text "Hello World" ?
Similarly we need new batteries for our new toys. But new toys have outpaced batteries.
Fortunately new batteries don't have the backward compatibility constraints that optical disks have. If there are ten billion optical disks out there, it's a big deal to suddenly try to change to a new format. Not quite so much a problem with Tesla, or even Black & Decker switching to a different battery. Not totally trivial, but not nearly the problem either.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.)
My thoughts exactly (no mod points today or I would have modded you up as insightful). But you use the term "news" when I get all of my science fiction tech improvements from Slashdot. I've seen many battery and motor announcements that just never seem to make it to the real world. Anyone remember that small extremely efficient motor that was supposedly going to make it to hybrid cars and revolutionize things? What ever happened to that? I can't even find traces of it in the Slashdot archives!
Sure. So what's the point? We supposed to be really pissed off? Or just not try to find breakthroughs? Or just keep the press on total lockdown until an actual breakthrough is put into successful service, a word of it getting out punishable by law if something leaks out? I mean we have a lot of people here on Slashdot who are pissed at the announcement and grousing about it. Has the technology site Slashdot been replaced by the old guys down at the Legion who hate everything? Sit at the bar, drink beer and the world's gone to hell.
This is how science and technology works. If we don't like it, they're saving a seat for y'all and the beer's cold and the conversation grouchy.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm not trying to be topper here (since the data recovery company say they do it a lot) but last year I had a few reels from the 1980s transcribed with no apparent data loss. The newer stuff is on a better plastic so is likely to last even longer.
To keep with the topic there have been some massive improvements with tape storage technology. LTO7 is 6TB per tape. That's something you don't have to handle like eggs as you need to do with a hard drive.
Yes, the plastic tape is better, but they pack ever more data into the same space making "bit rot" much more of a problem. The best tape tech is DLT (and SDLT) -- relatively heavy tape with laser etched tracking on the back of the tape. DAT/AIT comes in second -- VCR technology with tracking data recorded along the bottom of the tape at the same time as data. Sony used to make some very strong ("DLC") tapes. In last place is LTO -- hard drive technology applied to a tape... tracking information is stored as data on the tape in a manner that cannot be replaced in the field. (It is absolutely trivial to ruin an LTO tape. I've had dozens destroyed by Iron Mountain.)
(NASA has had data tapes from the 60s and 70s "recovered" -- the drives to read them no longer exist, and they're in a format no one remembers.)
Would the Dell XPS range not suit you better then? Since Dell bought Alienware they're practically the same thing, but without all the gamer gimmickry.
One of my goals is to be able to drive 3 displays, one of which is a 4k. Most laptop video cards only support 2 displays at a time and the lcd counts as one of them. The alienware line makes 3 displays and/or 4k easy as they sell a docking station that supports 3rd party video cards.
the problem with BDXL is threefold:
1: They're expensive.
2: BDXL drives are rare and expensive, with only 2 makers left.
3: The lifespan of the discs is potentially less than a decade.
By the time you start taking that into account it's a better bargain to buy a (very expensive) LTO7 drive and feed it with (relatively cheap) 6TB capacity tapes. Or step back a generation and buy a (cheaper) LTO6 drive and (very cheap) 2.5TB tapes. (those are raw capacity, not the "compressed" claims made for them)
The only caveat with this approach is that you should ensure your environment is clean. They're somewhat dust-sensitive.
FWIW: CDRW format is _extremely_ durable, because it's not dye based.
The problem is that it's very low capacity. :(
"The procedure to recover from a very old and brittle tape on the other hand is a lot more than just putting it in the right drive."
The "correct" way to preserve data is to migrate to new media as the old is replaced, not to put the old media in a corner and hope it's still readable in 20 years time.
I'm having this argument right now with a researcher who has several thousand Exabyte tapes full of astrophysics data taking up valuable storage space. My argument is that we need the space and they'd fit on a couple of LTO7s. His is that he'll never need to read them and if the drives die there's always Ebay.
There are a number of specialist recovery firms who have managed to keep old drives operational, but they don't come cheap. I've been quoted £250 a pop to recover old (1980s) NASA 9-track reels that one researcher has been storing in his garage for the last GodKnowsHowLong. He's put his ambition of restoring them all on hold after being quoted a quarter of a million pounds for the task.
Why so expensive? Simple - apart from the effort in actually restoring the tapes, wear and tear on drives with increasingly irreplacable parts is a major issue. It's easier to decode an old vinyl/shellac record with a high resolution optical scanner(*) than to try and recover old magnetic tape formats if you don't have the right heads.
(*) This has been sucessfully done to a limited extent with standard 1200dpi kit and can recover snapped or distorted records. It's actually easier to achieve than the legendary laser turntables that never hit the market.
Quoted tape lifespans are somewhat misleading.
LTO will keep for 20+ years - if used once and then put in storage.
Or the tapes will die after about 50 full write cycles (not the 162 that's claimed byt the LTO consortium)
Use them for archival OR backup purposes. Never use the same sets for both.