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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.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
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?
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.
They don't make money if you're not replacing your batteries all the time.
These flow batteries are targeted for home and grid storage, which is a market that currently barely exists. No powerful incumbents are being threatened. Utilities would be affected, but in a good way, since more grid storage would diminish the need for unprofitable "peaker" generators.
Home and grid storage are unique in their battery needs. Unlike transportation and portable devices, energy density by volume and by weight is less of an issue than the amount of charge cycles. NiFe batteries are solid performers, but being able to have better energy density, and not have to worry about watering the batteries or worrying about offgassing is a plus.
Of course, this by itself won't revolutionize things, but you pile up all the improvements happening with batteries, and we are actually getting somewhere. Once we get batteries within an order of magnitude of propane or gasoline with regards of energy density by volume, the transportation industry will be as radically changed as it was when the internal combustion engine did to the industry in the past century.
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.
"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.
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.)