Slashdot Mirror
Rice University Adds Asphalt To Speed Lithium Metal Battery Charging By 20 Times (nextbigfuture.com)
schwit1 writes: The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that showed exceptional stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles. A high-current density of 20 milliamps per square centimeter demonstrated the material's promise for use in rapid charge and discharge devices that require high-power density. The Tour lab previously used a derivative of asphalt -- specifically, untreated gilsonite, the same type used for the battery -- to capture greenhouse gases from natural gas. This time, the researchers mixed asphalt with conductive graphene nanoribbons and coated the composite with lithium metal through electrochemical deposition. The lab combined the anode with a sulfurized-carbon cathode to make full batteries for testing. The batteries showed a high-power density of 1,322 watts per kilogram and high-energy density of 943 watt-hours per kilogram. Testing revealed another significant benefit: The carbon mitigated the formation of lithium dendrites. These mossy deposits invade a battery's electrolyte. If they extend far enough, they short-circuit the anode and cathode and can cause the battery to fail, catch fire or explode. But the asphalt-derived carbon prevents any dendrite formation.
"The capacity of these batteries is enormous, but what is equally remarkable is that we can bring them from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries," Tour said. "While the capacity between the former and this new battery is similar, approaching the theoretical limit of lithium metal, the new asphalt-derived carbon can take up more lithium metal per unit area, and it is much simpler and cheaper to make. There is no chemical vapor deposition step, no e-beam deposition step and no need to grow nanotubes from graphene, so manufacturing is greatly simplified." The findings have been published in the journal ACS Nano.
"The capacity of these batteries is enormous, but what is equally remarkable is that we can bring them from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries," Tour said. "While the capacity between the former and this new battery is similar, approaching the theoretical limit of lithium metal, the new asphalt-derived carbon can take up more lithium metal per unit area, and it is much simpler and cheaper to make. There is no chemical vapor deposition step, no e-beam deposition step and no need to grow nanotubes from graphene, so manufacturing is greatly simplified." The findings have been published in the journal ACS Nano.
I'd love to see how much energy they could get out of Ni-Fe and Ni-Zn batteries using modern manufacturing techniques... no toxic or exotic compounds required!
Let's hope this isn't patented, so that anyone can use the research. Universities have a habit of taking federal funds, then patenting the research that those funds produce. This research was partly funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Congress should repeal the Bayh-Dole Act and require that any innovations from federally funded research be placed in the public domain.
It contains EVIL OIL products..........
At 943 WH/kg and 1322 W/kg, this is really quite good. According to wikipedia, this is 4x "traditional" Li-ion density in terms of storage and decent in terms of charge/discharge rate.
I know they tested 500 cycles. Get to 1000 and it is practical. Get to 5000 and it owns the market.
Accidentally discovered when somebody ran over a phone
Table-ized A.I.
The idea is - we have too many battery blue prints to work on. None of them are practical enough to be produced.
Of course! Rice = Houston = Petrochemicals!
I predict the final realization will require strapping a 10 kg lump of tar to every 1 kg battery, based on helpful industry input.
So any /.er knows battery "breakthroughs" are once a month or more on average (or so it seems). But most, or so far one supposes all, of them have major problems. A battery needs to hit high power density, IE how much power it can deliver over time. High energy density/specific energy, IE how much energy it can store per liter and per kilogram. It needs to be able to last over a long amount of charge/discharge cycles, because if your battery loses too much energy/shorts/explodes after a few charges then it's useless. And it needs to be cheap to make.
Well, surprise, but somehow this one seems to be the announcement that, could, hit all of those points. The reported numbers are several times the current best for li-on power density, energy density (assumedly for both volume and weight), lasts a lot of charge and discharge cycles, and doesn't require some exotic rare earth material to make. Assuming the actual creation process isn't exotic or complex, IE can be economically scaled, this could actually be the coming of the affordable electric car/smartphone battery that actually lasts all day/etc. that's been promised for a while now. Here's fuckin hoping.
That might be an exaggeration... but seriously. After 15 years of reading amazing stuff on Slashdot, the amount of that stuff that actually becomes something beyond "University discovery" even 5+ years out from the initial story is depressingly tiny.
Well this one uses oil as a base component, so it confuses the fuck out of everyone.
Steve Bannon posts to slashdort?
And all those socialized medicine countries without for-profit medical systems?
Nope, it is a story about America. Praise asphalt and gasoline!
By the way, David Bowie says god is an American so you better get used to it:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyric...
Another good one involving gasoline:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyric...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Come on-- even the header says it prevents fire and explosions.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
BENGHAZII!!!11
You really got up today and said to myself, I'll show the world today what I am capable of..... then grabbed the keyboard and barfed this comment out. What the hell? What was the purpose? Did it just make you feel better and that's all.. or what?
There shall be no discussion of common sense here!
Over the last decade batteries have improved dramatically in capacity, reliability, charging speed, and (especially) cost. This is a result of the very breakthroughs that you so flippantly denigrate.
If you aren't interested in reading about leading edge research, then what are you doing on Slashdot?
Welcome to the world of research! The gap between physical possibilities and economical viability is large, but without sufficient breakthroughs on physical possibilities we will never find one that is economically viable.So, regardless of the chances being slim that we will reap the benefits of all these breakthroughs anytime soon, I am still happy to see such breakthroughs happen.
Not only that, but reading that they used asphalt for this makes me think I'm driving on the biggest darn battery everyday (I know, it's not true... still...;)
2017 already, man. Learn to not feed the trolls or GTFO.
It has, constantly.
Or did you think you've always had 3Ah batteries capable of producing an insane amount of current and being charged in 30minutes sitting in a device that is 7mm thin in your pocket?
Really? Because 15 years ago I certainly didn't have 3Ah battery capable of being charged in 30min and only 4mm thick sitting in my pocket.
Yes, and then you will say "This is old news .... what is it doing on Slashdot?".
If you aren't interested in reading about leading edge research, then what are you doing on Slashdot?
I'm here to read the hilariously bad "women in STEM" flamebait articles (+ even worse comments) and the Dunning-Kruger Effect poster children arguing about politics and economics because they think having a comp-sci degree makes them experts in every field that exists. Slashdot being "News for Nerds" died long before the site's byline did. It should be no surprise that the remaining dregs of Slashdot tend to react poorly to the occasonal tech-related article that pops up.
He is here to post, not read anything he posts about.
Tell me again about this if it ever reach the market.
Try enabling the "This Day on Slashdot" sidebar, if you have not already. It shows you five most commented stories from previous years, and it's fascinating to see what we were concerned about back then.
Today we have "A Car With A Mind Of Its Own" from 2004. Thirteen years later and self-driving cars are still not ready.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Meanwhile, cell phone batteries keep shrinking while their amp hours keep growing.
No, any given announcement isn't likely to ultimately play out. But some fraction of them do, and they change the world behind the scenes. The classic example is silicon anodes, which were the subject of big news stories on Slashdot years ago, then there was nothing.... but today they're commonly used in high-capacity li-ions.
As for this specific research: I read the study, and I have to admit, it's pretty impressive. One of the big things is that not only is the ion mobility high, but the coulombic efficiency is also very high (95-96% at high charge rates, 99% at low rates). If you want fast charging, having both is critical; otherwise, you'll never remove all of the waste heat at a fast enough rate.
After having read the paper, I have to add some caveats about this:
This is for the active materials only, not for whole cells, and only at low power density. First, the cell capacity is quite sensitive to how fast you charge it - if you charge it fast, the peak capacity is significantly reduced. That said, it's not a permanent difference; if the next time you charge it's a slow charge you go right back to the higher capacity. Secondly, when you include the inactive materials, they show about 450Wh/kg at low charge rates, and around 300Wh/kg at high charge rates. That said, it's still nice - and further refinement could probably reduce the inactive mass.
The capacity loss over 500 cycles - perhaps I'm not reading clearly, as I'm not seeing where that figure is given out. One of their graphs appears to show something like 10-15% loss over 130 cycles at 0,5C charge rate. It's hard to say how the curve will continue from there. A caveat is worth adding, in that the higher your maximum capacity, the fewer cycles you actually need, since for a given task you put fewer cycles per unit time on a higher capacity battery than a smaller capacity battery.
I see nothing about accelerated aging tests to see if there's any particular aging effect. Then again, I don't expect much of one, given their chemistry.
As for manufacture, it's a simple process, and requires no (relatively) expensive mined materials (e.g. no cobalt or the like). That said, one of their components - graphene nanoribbons - I have no clue what the current manufacturing costs are, nor what the potential is to bring them down in mass production. In theory, for something that's pure carbon, the cost should be able to go way down, since basic organic feedstocks are dirt cheap compared to most inorganic feedstocks. But that doesn't mean we've gotten it down that much at this point.
Just my takes from reading the paper :)
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Mining Buttcoins.
The problem is batteries improve at a linear rate, while technology improves at an exponential rate. We get these improvements all the time, But the time it goes from the Lab to the consumer takes years. So by the time we get this technology in place the Recharge time change would not be as noticeable, as improvements from other labs in the past start getting implemented.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Carbon! In its many forms, what can't it do?
Soon, it will be simply to valuable to leave sitting around in the atmosphere.
It does seem fitting to use the stuff we drive over inside the vehicle as well as outside.
The speed limit here is 80 mph. 450 miles is just under six hours of actual driving when you keep to the limit (and a lot of people drive a few mph faster.) Which will be interspersed with food stops at the very least.
Also, people are different. Your and my personal safe driving range really doesn't define the same thing for everyone else. For myself, I have vehicles I really enjoy driving, a companion who engages me in interesting conversation, a great entertainment system, and an abiding interest in both scenery and people-watching. Someone else may lack some or all of that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Cool, so now we need Alberta's oil sands to make batteries.
Thick oil is not used to make fuel. It is mostly used for waxes, plastics, roads, waterproofing, roofing, etc. So the oil sands will remain in production for the next 100 to 200 years. Only about 20% of oil is used for fuel, so even if everyone switches to electrics by next week, the oil industry will barely blink.
To be fair, you also didn't have a phone that was so thin it needed one, so power-hungry it needed one, and you could actually replace the battery if you needed to so it wasn't an outright horror if it couldn't make it through the day. Oh, and you could also opt for a higher-capacity aftermarket battery and back. You know, because the battery was replaceable.
Welcome to the future, where "better" means "we milk the consumer ever harder."
Also, goodbye 3.5mm audio jack. You won't be needing that. Here, have this nice profitable dongle instead - signed Apple, and now Google.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Gilsonite might technically be Asphalt by definition,but it's a unique natural bitumen composed of a mix of light but solid hydrocarbons. It only occurs in one spot on the planet (the Uinta Basin in Utah).
It's believed to have been created when a few million years ago a geothermal event warmed up the Uintah oil shale (the same stuff they frack) and liquefied a bunch of the hydrocarbons into a slurry that then oozed up the cracks and solidified. It's a solid, actually looks quite a bit like obsidian (glossy and black) but is super light weight and obviously not glass. It's so light weight they mine it by hand with air hammers and use vacuums to collect it and bring it to the surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Welcome to the world of research! The gap between physical possibilities and economical viability is large, but without sufficient breakthroughs on physical possibilities we will never find one that is economically viable.So, regardless of the chances being slim that we will reap the benefits of all these breakthroughs anytime soon, I am still happy to see such breakthroughs happen.
Also, I got the impression from this one that it's not "aha, we've developed this new, fragile thing that can't yet work outside of a lab," but more "aha, we've found a way to solve some of those annoying economic viability problems! And it charges really fast!"
Wake up, chump. Rapid charging is highly dangerous. Batteries which take a long time to charge are much safer. Any time you speed up charging, you get more heating and pressure buildup. Sorry, but TANSTAAFL.
How long will it be before these batteries catch fire or blow up? Isn't that the norm for today?
You may have said that as a joke, but you might not be that far off.
There are processes now using molten-lithium carbonate electrolytic cells to pull the carbon out of the air. The real innovate though is the electrode has nucleation sites that allow for the growing of carbon-nanotube whiskers long enough to be harvested and spun into a carbon fiber with not much more processing (compared to current forms of carbon fiber manufacture). The other component to making useful carbon fiber materials is epoxy resin. Resin is pretty much all organic, read-carbon!
This coupled with cheap PV solar and focused solar heating (for the carbonate cells) we could really be pulling truly significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Not just sequestering, but providing true value-added structural materials (ie market driven!!)
I have a pack of AA 2800mAH rechargeable batteries at home that can give me something quite similar.
I bought them for my GP2X back in.... hold on... 2008, according to my emails from the person I bought it from. They will happily fry themselves if you short-circuit them, the current available is unbelievable.
They could fast-charge in a little over an hour, I think, but I never bought ridiculous chargers, I just bought more of those batteries. I reckon there were fan-cooled chargers that would do it in 30 minutes back then too.
The charge time is about the only part I'm absolutely GUESSING on. The rest is something I could show you, and dig out the purchase emails for, with dates.
Sure, they may have got a tiny bit cheaper, and a tiny bit slimmer (but my currently mobile phone battery is at least the size of a single AA battery, and only 2.1Ah). But in the last ten years, the technology, capacity, size and charge times have barely changed.
Ten years is a long time in computing. In anything, we now enjoy the benefits of lower-powered computers (my GP2X needed 2 x high capacity AA's to run an ARM 200MHz), not better batteries.
More "better/faster/gooder" battery news....story number 3,402 that STILL isn't in mass production. LOL.
Rapid charging with current technology is highly dangerous.
FTFY, chump.
Order explosion- and fire-proof bags to store your batteries while traveling.
Just because we're aiming to stop using "fossil fuels", that doesn't mean we're going to stop "raping our Earth for oil." There are a thousand other uses for oil that do not include processing/burning it as fuel.
...we should be pushing to find ways to put compounds based on it into batteries to make them charge more quickly. Better electric cars. What's not to like?
I reckon there were fan-cooled chargers that would do it in 30 minutes back then too.
Recharge efficiency and heat dissipation are two areas that these batteries specifically improve.
Smart phones and laptops have already benefited from faster recharging---as recently as 2-3 years ago. They can't just throw better cooling into the mix, so they rely on improvements like this.
But in the last ten years, the technology, capacity, size and charge times have barely changed.
The improvement of ~20% is much less than what we get in the microprocessor industry, but every bit helps.
And as far are charge times are concerned--- that is straight up wrong. You can now charge a phone from ~25% to ~75% in about 15 minutes, and that was not possible a decade ago. Fast-charging has quickly but quietly become the norm.
The ability to squeeze more energy into a smaller volume is what makes modern smart phones possible at all. Android could not exist if we still used 1980s-era battery tech.
There are other factors. LiPo batteries are about 1/5 lighter than traditional lithium ion batteries (of equal capacity). This is hugely advantageous for drones and other markets where weight really matters. And everyone likes lighter laptops/phones, even if the difference is not critical from a design standpoint.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
No. You didn't fix it. Any transfer of concentrated power is highly dangerous.
I asked my son to plug in my air compressor one day when he was about 12. I didn't realize the compressor was switched on, and he dallied when pushing the plug into the socket. But, I know there was something wrong when I heard him scream and looked up just in time to see six inches of flame shooting out of the the electrical socket. The stalled compressor looked like a short to the socket, and when the plug came in slowly it set up an electric arc that melted the tab off the plug in a split second.
I repeat:
Any transfer of concentrated power is highly dangerous.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
This. 100 times this.
They are not out on some limb exploring new concepts that requires all sorts of supporting context. They have discovered a way to fix problems with current tech using CHEAPER processes and materials to get BETTER batteries.
Expect this to be scarfed up and put into production with the utmost haste.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Read "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson.
E.C.P.
First, the cell capacity is quite sensitive to how fast you charge it - if you charge it fast, the peak capacity is significantly reduced. That said, it's not a permanent difference; if the next time you charge it's a slow charge you go right back to the higher capacity. Secondly, when you include the inactive materials, they show about 450Wh/kg at low charge rates, and around 300Wh/kg at high charge rates. ...As for manufacture, it's a simple process, and requires no (relatively) expensive mined materials (e.g. no cobalt or the like).
about 15 years ago, when batteries looked like they'd plateaued, I pretty much thought the future of batteries would be in a nano-structure. My thinking was more along the lines of super capacitors shrunk to nano size structures, allowing for virtually instant charging and regulated discharging. I'll admit some of this was based on Phillip Jose Farmer's description of the "batacitor" in his Riverworld series and thinking there wasn't a real reason we couldn't come up with something to make that sci-fi concept real.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You may have said that as a joke, but you might not be that far off.
There are processes now using molten-lithium carbonate electrolytic cells to pull the carbon out of the air. The real innovate though is the electrode has nucleation sites that allow for the growing of carbon-nanotube whiskers long enough to be harvested and spun into a carbon fiber with not much more processing (compared to current forms of carbon fiber manufacture). The other component to making useful carbon fiber materials is epoxy resin. Resin is pretty much all organic, read-carbon!
This coupled with cheap PV solar and focused solar heating (for the carbonate cells) we could really be pulling truly significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Not just sequestering, but providing true value-added structural materials (ie market driven!!)
I would love to believe this but... ... in order to pull all the carbon out of the atmosphere you would need to have an industrial demand equal to the amount of coal and oil we have burned over the last 250 years. The volume of which is truly staggering.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
There's been some interesting work with quantum capacitors, although it hasn't really gone anywhere. The concept is that at incredibly tiny scales, charge is quantized, and you can use this as an effective barrier to prevent dielectric breakdown. In theory, the only thing limiting the strength of your battery / capacitor is its internal tensile and compressive strengths. The unfortunate thing is that tensile and compressive strength limits are more limiting than we'd like, even if you could pull off such a quantum capacitor. In theory, you could get a good, but not "staggeringly awesome", battery with a quantum capacitor... but it's probably not worth the huge amount of research to try to bring such a thing to commercial production, if you even could.
There's also been some interesting conceptual work in storing energy in things like quantum electron traps, with electrons circling nanowires like particles in tiny particle accelerators - that one doesn't have the same sort of structural constraint problems. But that's again not gone past the conceptual stage.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Huh. On the one hand we have rice university researchers who say they have already done this successfully without problems.
On the other hand, we have a random person on the internet.
So hard to choose which side might be correct...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It wouldn't happen tomorrow, but the demand could be there if the energy/materials were.
Some combination of sequestration and transmutation (not literally, but CO2->carbon fiber) could be a winning ticket. Not to mention we could try and reforest areas. That'd have a pretty large negative carbon effect. I recall recently reading an article about how in the early 90s in Costa Rica they dumped tons of orange peels onto depleted scrub land. 30 years later the growth was so impressive that they couldn't find their original signs marking the experimental area!
Am I being optimistic? Of course. I'd prefer to waste my brain cycles on thought experiments like these vs the 'Subject of hate du jour' or 'Look what The Idiot said now' being peddled everywhere else.
Certainly there's lag between technology in the lab and consumer retail, however if one steps back and looks at consumer battery [or other] technology over a relatively short 10 year period the individual improvements are incremental, but occur often/quickly that are significant overall. If people don't notice the changes it's because they aren't paying attention (but that's typical).
No. You didn't fix it. Any transfer of concentrated power is highly dangerous.
I asked my son to plug in my air compressor one day when he was about 12. I didn't realize the compressor was switched on, and he dallied when pushing the plug into the socket. But, I know there was something wrong when I heard him scream and looked up just in time to see six inches of flame shooting out of the the electrical socket. The stalled compressor looked like a short to the socket, and when the plug came in slowly it set up an electric arc that melted the tab off the plug in a split second.
I repeat:
Any transfer of concentrated power is highly dangerous.
More like, any father who allows a child to work with potentially dangerous machinery without proper knowledge and supervision is an irresponsible dipshit. When it results in a fatality, this is called natural selection.
You're yelling at a bot.