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Interviews: Ask Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor John Goodenough a Question
John B. Goodenough is a solid-state physicist and professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at The University of Texas at Austin. While he is most famous for identifying and developing the lithium-ion battery, which can be found in just about every portable electronic device on the market, he has recently created a new fast charging solid-state battery that looks to revolutionize the industry. We sent him an email about doing an interview and he has responded. Now is your chance to ask Goodenough a question!
We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to John Goodenough himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) Go on, don't be shy!
We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to John Goodenough himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) Go on, don't be shy!
There are several innovative ideas for better batteries that never make it to market. The problem is that you can make a few by hand in the lab, but production of useful numbers does not scale well at all or it scales, but is horrible expensive.
Will your development reasonably scale? If not, what stands in your way.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
There seems to be some confusion about whether or not your battery has the same material or differing material on the two electrodes. Can you elaborate on this and, if the electrodes are the same material, how the battery works?
Could you speculate on the reasons behind the increasing frequency of li-ion battery fires? Cheaper parts, smaller tolerances, higher energy density, or all of the above?
Over time batter energy density has improved by approximately 5-10% a year. Do you expect this trend to continue? If not, what do you expect will happen in the long-term? Are there other metrics by which you expect batteries to continue to improve?
Assuming your new battery tech scales easily and economically for mass production and given the intensifying demand for such tech ... when would you expect to see it supplant lithium-ion as the battery technology of choice for manufacturers ?
Perhaps slashdot should institute a policy of delete-moderation for QandA. I'm all for whatever nonsense in news posts, but this is like inviting a guest into your house and then using them for midget bowling. It's abusive.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The five stages of name-pun reaction:
1) Amusement. This stage starts at age about 4 to 6, when the punee first gets the joke. It typically lasts about 30 minutes.
2) Tedium. This stage typically lasts a few months
3) Anger. Will you stop with that stupid joke already?
4) Bargaining. If you stop making those stupid jokes, I'll stop pummelling your ribs with a baseball bat.
5) Acceptance. Let the jokes flow through you, omnipresent yet harmless like the air. Find your inner peace. Make it your life's mission that everyone who has ever made this joke will be carrying in their pocket a chemical bomb of your design.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I've noticed that replacement lithium polymer battery packs for hybrid cars sell often sell for less than $1000 on eBay, while much smaller lithium based 12v batteries for conventional cars (with starter motors) often sell for more. As an example, here is a battery suitable for starting a small V8 that sells for $1600.00 http://www.jegs.com/i/Lithium-...
I would assume that it would be much easier to manufacture conventional 12v starter batteries in volume due to the ability to put them in many more different models of vehicles.
The ability to shave off 30+ lbs of weight from racecars would be enormous, so the demand is there, but why not the supply?
I am very excited about sodium batteries.
As sodium is a much more environmentally friendly element to produce at large scale (my conjecture, I didn't look it up).
What were the roadblocks of using sodium in previous batteries?
I suspect whisker growth, but am not familiar with batteries enough to know other possibilities.
With the glass version, what are the big drawbacks to using sodium instead of lithium (if any)?
Thank you for your kind reply in advance!!
Prof. Goodenough,
Right now, electric cars are only for the well-to-do. In my rural area, not only do people have to drive long miles, but many of them couldn't afford a new car anyway, let alone an electric one.
Do you envision battery prices becoming down to the point where an electric vehicle can compete with a gas-powered car at the low end of the income scale as well as at the high end?
There are many reasons why this isn't ever happening. A very big one is that such a 'battery' would be producing heat all the time. Say your device has 10W peak demand, and your radioisotope thermal generator (nuclear battery) has efficiency 10% (better than we've yet achieved), then you'd need an RTG which was emitting 100W of heat all the time. (On the plus side, it would do a fine job of heating the interior of your car on cold days.) (If your device only uses 10W occasionally, you could pair a 1W output RTG with rechargable batteries, but now all you're saving yourself is the need to plug it in each night.)
Further reasons:
* Cost - even with efficiency of scale, producing radio isotopes will be very expensive
* Scaling - the technology works (sort of) for 100W power generation, it may be hard to scale down to 10W or 1W
* SIze - a 100W RTG is the size of a person.
* Safety - they contain really nasty radioactive sources. If you use alpha emitters, you can make them 'safe' with very thin shielding, but once the material escapes into the environment (e.g. in a house fire, or someone chops the battery with an axe) it is very nasty indeed.
Yes, future technology can help somewhat with any of these - but it needs to improve all of these problems, each by many orders of magnitude, before nuclear batteries will be practical.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
John,
Is it (theoretically) possible for a battery to reach the same energy density as fossil fuel? Gasoline has an energy density of 46MJ/kg while a lithium based battery has an energy density of around 1MJ/kg.
This would mean that an electric car, boat or airplane would have the same potential range as their oil powered brethren.
How come this is modded up? This is so deeply flawed.
Gasoline engine are terribly inefficient (30-45%) compared to the electric (90-98%), meaning that you need far less energy density to reach the same range for it's weight. And let's not forget the braking. As for airplane, there's no electric equivalent to jet engine.
Energy density is a factor, but not the only one. Price, Safety, speed of charge, number of cycle are all important to consider too.
Elok
To quote the paper :
:) If the substrate reaches 100C again, what appears to be the behavior? Does it depend on a rapid decrease or "flash freeze" to 25C to stabilize the structure? Will it render the cell absolutely useless? Will it simply continue "business as usual"?
"the dipoles can be rapidly aligned at 100°C by an ac applied electric field and frozen into alignment at 25°C < Tg. "
Has consideration been given (experimentation as well) within the laboratory environment to the behavior of the glass substrate within extreme naturally occurring temperatures. While, my personal property values increase proportionately with the effectiveness of global warming and hope at some point to own luxury resort beach front property here in Oslo, Norway, it's not uncommon to operate an EV within sub -20C temperatures and with -50C temperatures further north.
Current Li based cells suffer badly within these climates. In addition, in the past working together with Lee (Elias) Stefanakos Ph.D. from USF, we experienced in Florida certain behaviors in higher unregulated temperatures (with regards to lead-acid cells.. circa 1993) behavioral degradation of chemical electrolytes at +37C (if I recall correctly).
How does your and Maria's solid-state substrate behave within extreme temperatures. While I certainly am no material's scientist, I am curious whether there are behavioral symptoms displayed when performing under such naturally occurring extremes.
In addition, fluid electrolytes can often "self-repair" under these circumstances as a result of "reflowing". If these negative behaviors are apparent in within the solid electrolyte, are the damages sustained (structural fractures for example) or does the substrate display typical expansion and contraction under naturally occurring conditions?
For a bonus
We keep hearing about breakthroughs in the battery technology world to the tune of several per year. After many years in this forum, the empirical observation is that such breakthroughs are forgotten after a few months, quietly buried, practically never having a measurable impact on our lives. Please explain why your latest claim about a battery breakthrough is not going to end up following that route.
Somewhere around the mid- to late 2000s, I was researching LiFEPO4 patents, and came across the University of Texas (UT) patent for which you are listed as an inventor. When I investigated licensing the patent, it was so expensive that it was not profitable to bother with the license at all. The factory partner I worked with was in China, and they were mass-producing the same LiFePO4 for jurisdictions not impacted by the patent.
As I understand it, the law firm that UT chose to manage the patent set a price that was incredibly high. Then, invariably, some company would build a market for a LiFePO4 product that violated the patent, and then the law firm would step in after the company had actually done some business and sue them for all they were worth. I have to admit that this last bit was told to me by some battery industry veterans, but it seems plausible based on how the battery industry works.
Nonetheless, the decision of UT to exclusively grant permission to the law firm to manage the patent kept the invention out of the market and likely cost UT some incredible amount (billions?) in royalties.
How do you feel about your invention, which clearly made mass-production of the chemistry viable, being effectively kept off the market for so long?
(BTW, when UT lowered their prices with, like, 5 years or so left on the patent, the factory I worked with immediately purchased the licensed material for selling their batteries in the U.S.)
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Someone from Ars wrote a great article about several scientists critique of the solid anode/cathode idea not behaving like a 'traditional battery' and 'must be using some unknown physics' since the chemical changes in a solid wouldn't flow/propagate through the electrolyte. How is the chemical reaction causing a charge to accumulate in this solid? This article has since disappeared from the internet. How large was this battery you made? how many did you make? Can you supply the data and build instructions for peer review?
Just drop acid, already, and invent something better... or quit your whining.