I'm scanning the paper really quickly. I'm not a chemist but I do know a thing or two about batteries and the standard caveats apply here:
When they say 3x volumetric energy density, that is the actual energy density, which is energy per liter (normal density is mass per liter). Normally people use energy density to refer to energy per kg. Because this is a solid state battery, it is much denser than normal batteries (which are roughly as dense as water). Solid state batteries are smaller but much heavier and this is no exception. It is 33% the size of a lithium battery, but for the same energy it's about 2.5x heavier. Weight is still a much bigger problem for batteries than size- batteries are much smaller than the exhaust, engine and transmission of a car, but also much heavier.
The main limit on specific energy(kwh/kg) for this battery and for solid state batteries in general is voltage. Li-ion is 3.7v nominal, this battery is 2.5v nominal.
1,200 cycles may seem low, but it is actually very good; around 3x the life of current batteries. This cycle life is the time to degrade to 80% maximum storage, at a certain discharge depth and speed. Current batteries only last 300-400 cycles at their specs, but last tens of thousands at 30% depth of discharge.
Problem with the above: in this particular battery, the chemistry breaks down very strongly after it reaches the end of life. Normal lithium does this too, but not as strongly. This stuff may potentially last longer, but it fails much less gracefully. Not in a dangerous way, but in the same way as a normal car often does; once its broken it'll just work worse and worse until it is barely limping.
The temperature capabilities may seem irrelevant, but they are actually a decent problem for li-ion and are the reason lead acid is still used in cars.
Another interesting possibility for glass solid state lithium batteries is that recycling would be very easy. In organic batteries the electrolyte burns or reacts pretty much no matter what you do, but with glass you can plate and unplate cells. Unfortunately due to specific energy, polymer solid state electrolytes are much more likely than glass (also much cheaper).
Edit: IMPORTANT NOTE: this is NOT a fundamentally new type of li-ion battery! Solid state batteries have been around a while (glass, ceramic and polymer), and have specific advantages but low specific energy and power. This particular implementation is a bit higher power and possibly lower cost, but it's just a little blip of progress. Solid state batteries are a good candidate for the future, but they aren't there yet.
If this thing really has significantly higher volumetric energy efficiency than existing Li-ion batteries, then it's already good enough to be used in cellphones, at least according to me. I don't care if it's 2.5x heavier; I want more energy storage in my phone so it lasts longer between charges. I really, really don't care if that means the phone weighs an ounce more. I'm sure the Otterbox case on it adds just as much extra weight, and I don't see many people complaining about those.
Yeah, for cars, the weight is a big issue, because that hurts fuel (well, battery charge in this case) economy significantly, and EV cars use a LOT of energy storage compared to a phone. But for phones, I don't see the problem.
As for this battery failing harder, no problem: make sure the battery is easily replaceable by users, just like the Samsung phones up to the S5.
> I don't care if it's 2.5x heavier; I want more energy storage in my phone so it lasts longer between charges
I'm with you on this! But I'd clarify that I want more energy in any form. I would also not mind a phone that was a few millimeters thicker. But it seems the average consumer is swayed by a very thin phone, so more weight it is.
> Otterbox case on it adds just as much extra weight, and I don't see many people complaining about those
Irks me that not one single phone manufacturer dares to ship a product as indestructible as an iphone in an Otterbox. Sure it would be the clunkiest handset in the store, but compare it to other phones + case, there's room to make a superior final product. But no. Apple keeps shaving millimeters and Otterbox keeps slathering them back on.
Yeah... I'm not sure what that is. They also conflate mA and mAh a few times. It's kind of confusing.
I think that they are using the weight of lithium metal rather than the actual battery. That's the only thing that makes sense, as the specific energy of PURE LITHIUM is barely above that 10.5 Wh/g figure. The 10.5 must come from the energy drop to sulfur intercalation, which is at .4v. The 8.5 Wh/g figure comes from the reversable voltage range. It's either that or their numbers are off by 100x.
It seems like the biggest advance of this one is that the design allows the use of a metallic lithium anode rather than NMC/LMO/LFP etc. They say in the introduction:
"The organic-liquid electrolyte of the lithium-ion battery has an energy-gap window Eg ≈ 3 eV, but its LUMO is below the Fermi level of an alkali-metal anode, it is flammable, and it is not wet by an alkali-metal anode..."
The actual design is lithium metal plated directly onto lithium-doped glass, placed onto sulfur ink on copper as an electrode.
My translation is "The organic-liquid electrolyte will start to spark above 3eV, which is lower than the electron energy if lithium were directly touching it as a metal. Plus, hey, the electrolyte won't wet the metallic lithium anyway so contact is poor."
The glass has a much higher band gap, wets lithium (and sodium, which they also talk about) metal, diffuses sodium and lithium pretty fast, and manufacturability is super high since now you can use all kinds of standard metal working techniques rather than powder handling and sintering -- lithium even melts at 180C, so processing temperatures might be way lower and less costly.
In any case, in this context, the weight density is probably just normalized to anode mass. That would be better to explain clearly what they meant, but it seems fair since the energy density really is higher if you have more lithium in there and that's often the energy density limiting component.
Thank you for the awesome summary. I still think super capacitors for batteries would be a better future. If we need it to last longer we can carry solid state battery power bank.
The issue is how long does it take to charge as opposed to how long for most instances if phones only took 20 seconds to charge but lasted hours, especially if it was wireless it would be more practical.
Advantages of Super Capacitors:
Long Life - Supercapacitors have many advantages. For instance, they maintain a long cycle lifetime—they can be cycled hundreds of thousands times with minimal change in performance. A supercapacitor’s lifetime spans 10 to 20 years, and the capacity might reduce from 100% to 80% after 10 or so years.
- Temperature performance is also strong, delivering energy in temperatures as low as –40°C.
And then the TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE UCF story "You could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week," says UCF postdoctoral associate Nitin Choudhary.
Anywhere you need a small but longer lasting battery and don't care about mass. The primary issue with a larger mass is accelerating and decelerating it. However with the larger capacity, it would be less efficient but perhaps could still lead to longer range in the car if the extra energy stored overcomes the added cost of moving it around. Probably not a good thing but could be useful then in something like an electric race car or something.
Submersibles (which may not care about weight due to ballast anyhow), Batteries for Solar Storage (price dependent likely bad at first), Pacemakers, Hearing aids, once it's invented if robotics outpace man engineered human biology, maybe smart blood.
Perhaps also Nanobots, Active 3d Glasses, Cell phones, Laptops, Tablets, Smart Watches that go for smaller space vs weight.
Outside of that perhaps home appliances like a portable bread machine, or a hand-held wireless electric apple peeler, very small things like a rock that has a hidden microphone / camera in it for spycraft, perhaps a heated travel mug to keep your cider warm, or an electric bowl for keeping great-gravy from coagulating on the dining room table, maybe a warm pie plate because who doesn't like warm cherry pie? Perhaps some sort of autonomous mud tunneling microbots, rather have a large boring machine just let these small guys go and be patient and in a decade or two you'll have your tunnel, electric candles in churches could cut down on unnecessary wax use, and helmet lamps used for stuff like lead mining could also find a use (added neck strain not withstanding). Not sure if the added weight would be too much for a target-practice duck that swam around in a lake or not, but if not, that might be the right answer.
I'm curious if these would work well in uninterruptible power supplies (whether under your desk or in the electrical room in your datacenter). As I understand, the potential explosive danger of Li-ion batteries makes them unfeasible for UPS applications due to the costs of meeting the hazmat regulations upon them, in addition to higher cost of lithium itself. If this solid state battery can be handled much safer than Li-ion batteries, and be made significantly cheaper, then perhaps we'll start seeing them in applications where LA batteries are usually used.
I'm no expert on this, but as a consumer, I wouldn't mind having a heavier phone if it meant a longer battery life. In fact, I much prefer a device with some heft.
Maybe electric bikes and mopeds/scooters? Space seems to be a bigger issue for those than cars. And in the early days (and in some cases today) lead acid batteries were used. Lead acid had similar weight issues, but are much worse in terms of size and power, so seems like if folks were able to make that work, then a bike or scooter with this solid state battery could work.
I went on amazon to look at some product weights. There is an e-bike battery that weighs 6.5 lbs[1], and an e-bike that claims to have a shipping weight of 60 lbs[2]. So assuming 3x battery weight for roughly the same power, that means an extra battery weight of 13 lbs and a total bike weight of 73 lbs for a battery that could possibly fit in the frame (as opposed to be mounted on the down tube). So that is definitely getting on the heavy side for a bike but the bike in question is also relatively 'over-powered' as far as e-bikes go (25 mi self-powered range, 350 watt motor). A lot of the sleeker/higher end e-bikes are 'pedal-assist only' and already hide the battery in the frame. These bikes can get in the sub 40 lb range, and probably use 1/2 the battery that the one in the link does. So an extra 10-15 lbs is probably manageable and it would result in a bit more range while still being able to hide the battery in the frame (assuming a li-ion battery weight of ~3lbs, you would add an extra 6lbs to 'break even', or an extra 15 to double the power).
For scooters/mopeds, the math probably works out even better, as these are already over 100 lbs, and an extra 30-40 lbs won't really matter that much. And if you want to build a electric scooter or motorcycle that can go highway speeds, that extra weight can help with stability.
Laptops, maybe? The voltage is too low for phones, as is the power. That's why solid state batteries aren't used yet, they (non-research) can't match the power that phones and computers require.
> The main limit on specific energy(kw/kg) for this battery and for solid state batteries in general is voltage. Li-ion is 3.7v nominal, this battery is 2.5v nominal.
Forgive my limited electronics knowledge, but would something simple like throwing a boost converter on the end of this not be sufficient for many applications? Is the maximum current output too low to reach sufficient voltages too?
Op's point is that the lower nominal voltage is the culprit in the battery's lower energy density. If you and I each have a 1 kg battery that stores 1 amp hour, but yours puts out 3.7v and mine puts out 2.5, then your battery is storing more total energy than mine. We can both manipulate that output voltage (via boost converter, or more commonly just using multiple batteries in serial) to get whatever we need, but given the same load, my battery's just going to drain faster than yours.
You may be leaping to conclusions here about the energy density. I have seen no info that says the battery is 2.5 times heavier for a given energy capacity. The article from UT only said that the volumetric energy was higher. There is no information about the specific energy (wh/kg). Throughout the rest of the article they only refer to energy density without specifying Wh/liter or Wh/kg. I think it is a huge leap to deduce that this technology will be 2.5 times heavier for a given energy density.That does not make sense. A glass electrolyte will be very thin and is not likely to add much weight to the battery. The weight is much more likely to be dependent on the electrode materials and the weight of any necessary containment materials. Some battery chemistries require steel plates compressing every cell to prevent electrode expansion.
Unfortunately solid state batteries can't provide enough power for a smartphone. I would absolutely buy a phone that browsed slower for longer battery life + the ability to work below freezing though.
Thank you for spotting the trick. The article says:
> The researchers demonstrated that their new battery cells have at least three times as much energy density as today’s lithium-ion batteries. A battery cell’s energy density gives an electric vehicle its driving range, so a higher energy density means that a car can drive more miles between charges.
I believe this is misleading enough that the article should be flagkilled, since the "energy density" they are talking about, volumetric energy density, is not what gives an electric vehicle its driving range, and on the metric that really matters - mass energy density - it does worse than regular Li-Ion batteries.
I think part of the confusion comes from the paper doing all of its energy and power comparisons to the mass of pure lithium in the battery- that leads to a lot of numbers being 10-15 times what they should be. Reading the paper is kind of confusing because of it. They also have a couple things that appear to be switched up and finally it doesn't help when they say things like this:
>Replacement of a host insertion compound as cathode by a redox center for plating an alkali-metal cathode provides a safe, low-cost, all-solid-state cell with a huge capacity giving a large energy density and a long cycle life suitable for powering an all-electric road vehicle or for storing electric power from wind or solar energy.
Why do you say that if it's 3x the energy density per volume and "only" 2.5x heavier? That should give it at the same volume as Li-Ion 82.5% of the weight.
I agree this doesn't solve the weight problem for EVs, except only a little it seems, but if these batteries can be made competitive on price with Li-Ion (Eventually), and unless we find a much better alternative weight-wise, then this sort of battery would still be very useful for EVs because of the safety they give.
"batteries are much smaller than the exhaust, engine and transmission of a car, but also much heavier."
Excuse me, have you tried lifting an actual engine, lately? I want you to find me a car battery that weighs more than even the engine block alone, no pistons, cams, heads, nada.
He is referring to the battery packs used to drive EVs. Those are in the range of 100kg to past 400kg. Auto manufacturers have been desperately trying to shed weight from cars. it is one reason why most are slowly moving if at all into pure EV and still moving on hydrogen or other fuel cell.
plus many small engines stripped of power accessories can be carried on carry on luggage
Wait...is this type of battery at all related to EDLC supercapacitors? Those have the same upper limit of 2.5-2.7V, which seems like an odd coincidence.
The greatest travesty in the world right now is there doesn't exist a multi-government 10xManhattan sized project to develop a really really good battery.
It would enable a huge reduction in CO2 emissions(bye gasoline), allow developing countries have stable electrical sources and low cost renewable distributed generation, cut costs(good includes cheap), and enable renewable energy sources to make up a larger mix of our energy production.
Always exciting read about new developments, wish I knew more about chemistry/physics, hopefully we get there sometime soon!
People don't have great ideas on what they'd do with new monies that would come a 10xManhattan size project. Tesla, VW, Toyota, Dept of Energy, DARPA, NSF, Energy Companies, Industrial Conglomerates like GE, Panasonic, etc. all work on battery research. (& many more)
The actual Manhattan project could spend the funds by building reactors with desirable end-products (uranium etc.) and building a lot of centrifuges to refine it further - along with engineering teams to design, build, and operate these things, various bomb and delivery mechanisms etc. It was the very beginnings of nuclear science, so there were many fundamental ideas to be discovered and tested out - it meant sense to spend a lot of money to travel and explore this newly discovered branch of the tree of knowledge.
Efforts are underway. Unfortunately, it's a tedious slog.
There's a book by Steve LeVine, The Powerhouse, that describes the current environment of battery research and some of the main players (Argonne national lab, DoE, Startups, Korea, Japan, etc.). (It features Goodenough.)
Actually, you could not be more wrong. If you read The Entrepreneurial State from Mariana Mazzucato[1]. It argues that most inventions are coming from public funding. Companies are the ones that customize to the users need and then monetize it.
He's also well known in solid-state physics for the "Goodenough rules" [1] (more commonly called the Goodenough-Kanamori rules, but that has less of a ring to it).
What's really astounding is reading that, and looking at the dates. He first formulated this rule in 1955. And he's still working and making real contributions!
We really need to work on greatly extending human lifespans, if for no other reason than to keep people like this alive.
On the other hand, an engineer needs to know when to say "it's good enough" and release it. An invention in the hands of a perfectionist may never be released.
The press release says "the researchers’ cells have demonstrated more than 1,200 cycles with low cell resistance." That's nice, but rising cell resistance is just one way the battery might cycle poorly over time.
Skimming the actual paper, I don't think they demonstrate 1200 cycles for any parameter. Eyeballing the graphs, it looks like they did charge/discharge testing for maybe 1200 hours (Figure 3a), but with really slow charge/discharge cycles of 10 hours each. Anyone publishing in this space would highlight 1200 cycles of stable cycling in the actual paper, if they had data to demonstrate it. They'd also show off faster cycles if high-rate performance looked good.
Looking at the data the authors did not present in the actual paper, I'm guessing that this battery doesn't handle rapid charge/discharge cycles well. (Their cycling test is at only 0.1C, paper claims "acceptable charge/discharge rates" but does not further quantify it... implication is "not a strength of this design.") It may not have great capacity retention either. I don't see any graphics specifically highlighting capacity retention vs. cycles. So at present I'd call this a solid research effort, but even if it could be commercialized immediately it's not clear that it would be a winner. The demonstrated charge/discharge rate is too slow to be practical for EVs or portable electronics. The demonstrated cycling stability is too low to be attractive for grid tied storage.
People who found this paper interesting may also be interested in this related publication about solid state sodium ion batteries that Goodenough was also involved with: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5269650/
I really wish they'd publish more of the limitations as well in the paper. I wonder how much of it got cut out in editing.
Publishing limitations and negative results that lead to dead ends can help other scientists when they attempt to replicate and improve on tech like this.
I agree that publishing negative results would help the whole enterprise of science, but the prisoner's dilemma is pretty clear. I would guess that the authors have been "trained" well enough by publication incentives that they didn't bother to highlight limitations even in their original manuscript. That kind of information shows up in the paper only by absences and implication; it's only informal chats with peers where people talk honestly and thoroughly about the negative results and limitations of their approaches. It's a shame that scientific publication ended up this way. It's one of the reasons I left research to write software.
I have put a note in my calendar a year from now, and a year after that to read the story about how these laboratory curiosities could not be made in production quantities.
Something I would really love to see would be a solid state battery that exploited the fact that we can draw silicon features at 7nm. How about a couple trillion equivalents of a FLASH cell which we can drain in rows or fill in rows. Sort of a bucket brigade of capacitors at that point but it would not have any recharge issues and since its just charge flying about no dendrites to speak of. At some point I predict that will become a useful way to build energy storage devices.
It is more battery breakthrough fatigue. Last time I looked there was something like 17 - 18 battery "breakthroughs" over the last 8 years of which exactly one made it into production for a relatively small (10%) improvement in charging performance.
These laboratory curiosities usually fail because either you can't reliably manufacture the precursor material or reliably make the structures needed at production rates (which translates into the cost of the resulting battery)
It came up in a discussion with some Tesla enthusiasts on the ground breaking of the Gigafactory where I wondered if there would be a break through that would make the batteries the Gigafactory would produce obsolete before they finished building the factory. That didn't happen :-).
As a result I recognize its a really hard slow slog through chemistry which is well understood to change batteries. And you're correct there have been a number of improvements in manufacturing which have resulted in incrementally better batteries and that is all good, but so far, starting with a basic battery and making a new battery that is significantly better, has been disappointing.
A comment that I think is relevant in a community of startups that often, explicitly or de-facto practice age discrimination:
This engineer is 94 years old. Few, if any, SCV startups would have hired him. Yet, here we are, he might have just developed the key technology to push electric transportation through the hockey stick curve past the inflection point.
Three times the energy density, many times more cycles, no shorting, high charge and discharge rates. Yeah, this is more than just about laptops and cars, this is about planes, boats, trucks and ships.
Think about that before you reject a 50+ year old. Experience has real value.
I don't want to take anything away from Dr. Goodenough, but there is a slight caveat with respect to academia. Older, established, and respected researchers are able to attract large teams of of highly talented people. They are also able to secure funding. It is usual that this leader is given top billing on all papers and press interactions, even if they are mostly coordinating the work. This is good for everybody because the lab can continue to attract good talent and especially it can attract funding. Brilliant young researchers working by themselves in obscurity can't really make much headway because they have neither the man power, nor the money to tackle big problems.
So, while I agree with you in principle, older researchers offer more in academia than just their experience.
> Braga began developing solid-glass electrolytes with colleagues while she was at the University of Porto in Portugal.
Slightly orthogonal to the content: this is why it's important for the US to allow people to come to this country. Continuing research and development with the worlds best gives the US a leg up. Past ease of immigration is the reason the US has led in so many areas, constant flow of new and innovative ideas.
This is why it's important for the US to allow scientists and engineers to come to the US. Immigration is not an all or nothing thing. You can pick and choose who you let in.
Literally no one is arguing to the contrary. The problems people have with immigration into the US typically involve the sheer scale of it, the fact that many people who come to the United States do so illegally, difficulty with integrating, and difference in values from native citizens. Nobody is arguing against small-scale immigration of highly skilled scientists, there aren't even enough of them to make a demographic difference.
I'd say the current stories about people enforcing poorly written rules at the border prove you wrong.
People say yes to scientists, but not if they're from certain countries. On top of that we have scientists from Europe being stopped at the border, making it unlikely that they or their compatriots may try to make the trip in the future. I know of at least one computer conference that has discussed moving the venue outside the US to try and mitigate the issues at the border.
While you may be right that no one debates elite people in their respective fields from moving or coming to the US, the enforcement is causing exactly the opposite to occur.
So, I respectfully disagree with you that what you suggest would be acceptable.
A few days ago some Indian engineer was shot dead because he "looked Iranian". There is a very strong political reason why people like this killer do what they do.
Readit News
When they say 3x volumetric energy density, that is the actual energy density, which is energy per liter (normal density is mass per liter). Normally people use energy density to refer to energy per kg. Because this is a solid state battery, it is much denser than normal batteries (which are roughly as dense as water). Solid state batteries are smaller but much heavier and this is no exception. It is 33% the size of a lithium battery, but for the same energy it's about 2.5x heavier. Weight is still a much bigger problem for batteries than size- batteries are much smaller than the exhaust, engine and transmission of a car, but also much heavier.
The main limit on specific energy(kwh/kg) for this battery and for solid state batteries in general is voltage. Li-ion is 3.7v nominal, this battery is 2.5v nominal.
1,200 cycles may seem low, but it is actually very good; around 3x the life of current batteries. This cycle life is the time to degrade to 80% maximum storage, at a certain discharge depth and speed. Current batteries only last 300-400 cycles at their specs, but last tens of thousands at 30% depth of discharge.
Problem with the above: in this particular battery, the chemistry breaks down very strongly after it reaches the end of life. Normal lithium does this too, but not as strongly. This stuff may potentially last longer, but it fails much less gracefully. Not in a dangerous way, but in the same way as a normal car often does; once its broken it'll just work worse and worse until it is barely limping.
The temperature capabilities may seem irrelevant, but they are actually a decent problem for li-ion and are the reason lead acid is still used in cars.
Another interesting possibility for glass solid state lithium batteries is that recycling would be very easy. In organic batteries the electrolyte burns or reacts pretty much no matter what you do, but with glass you can plate and unplate cells. Unfortunately due to specific energy, polymer solid state electrolytes are much more likely than glass (also much cheaper).
Edit: IMPORTANT NOTE: this is NOT a fundamentally new type of li-ion battery! Solid state batteries have been around a while (glass, ceramic and polymer), and have specific advantages but low specific energy and power. This particular implementation is a bit higher power and possibly lower cost, but it's just a little blip of progress. Solid state batteries are a good candidate for the future, but they aren't there yet.
Yeah, for cars, the weight is a big issue, because that hurts fuel (well, battery charge in this case) economy significantly, and EV cars use a LOT of energy storage compared to a phone. But for phones, I don't see the problem.
As for this battery failing harder, no problem: make sure the battery is easily replaceable by users, just like the Samsung phones up to the S5.
1. https://habrastorage.org/files/502/9db/168/5029db1688a747518...
I'm with you on this! But I'd clarify that I want more energy in any form. I would also not mind a phone that was a few millimeters thicker. But it seems the average consumer is swayed by a very thin phone, so more weight it is.
Irks me that not one single phone manufacturer dares to ship a product as indestructible as an iphone in an Otterbox. Sure it would be the clunkiest handset in the store, but compare it to other phones + case, there's room to make a superior final product. But no. Apple keeps shaving millimeters and Otterbox keeps slathering them back on.
Deleted Comment
The paper itself [1] does mention specific energy, in a form:
>The energy density of the full discharge was 10.5 Wh/g (Li metal); but for the reversible voltage range V_dis > 2.34 V, it was 8.5 Wh/g (Li metal).
That's 8500 Wh/kg, which is absolutely off the charts compared to typical lithium ion, with Wikipedia listing 265 Wh/kg.
That's so off the charts, and and not touted at all, so I wonder if I'm misreading that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778602
I think that they are using the weight of lithium metal rather than the actual battery. That's the only thing that makes sense, as the specific energy of PURE LITHIUM is barely above that 10.5 Wh/g figure. The 10.5 must come from the energy drop to sulfur intercalation, which is at .4v. The 8.5 Wh/g figure comes from the reversable voltage range. It's either that or their numbers are off by 100x.
It seems like the biggest advance of this one is that the design allows the use of a metallic lithium anode rather than NMC/LMO/LFP etc. They say in the introduction:
"The organic-liquid electrolyte of the lithium-ion battery has an energy-gap window Eg ≈ 3 eV, but its LUMO is below the Fermi level of an alkali-metal anode, it is flammable, and it is not wet by an alkali-metal anode..."
The actual design is lithium metal plated directly onto lithium-doped glass, placed onto sulfur ink on copper as an electrode.
My translation is "The organic-liquid electrolyte will start to spark above 3eV, which is lower than the electron energy if lithium were directly touching it as a metal. Plus, hey, the electrolyte won't wet the metallic lithium anyway so contact is poor."
The glass has a much higher band gap, wets lithium (and sodium, which they also talk about) metal, diffuses sodium and lithium pretty fast, and manufacturability is super high since now you can use all kinds of standard metal working techniques rather than powder handling and sintering -- lithium even melts at 180C, so processing temperatures might be way lower and less costly.
In any case, in this context, the weight density is probably just normalized to anode mass. That would be better to explain clearly what they meant, but it seems fair since the energy density really is higher if you have more lithium in there and that's often the energy density limiting component.
Note: Here's something from just 2014 with a better explanation of why it matters, and a much more complicated sounding solution. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pure-lithium-in-b...
The issue is how long does it take to charge as opposed to how long for most instances if phones only took 20 seconds to charge but lasted hours, especially if it was wireless it would be more practical.
Advantages of Super Capacitors:
Long Life - Supercapacitors have many advantages. For instance, they maintain a long cycle lifetime—they can be cycled hundreds of thousands times with minimal change in performance. A supercapacitor’s lifetime spans 10 to 20 years, and the capacity might reduce from 100% to 80% after 10 or so years.
- Temperature performance is also strong, delivering energy in temperatures as low as –40°C.
http://electronicdesign.com/power/can-supercapacitors-surpas...
And then the TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE UCF story "You could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week," says UCF postdoctoral associate Nitin Choudhary.
> https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/22/super-capacitor-battery-...
What applications, if any, would this kind of battery be useful for then?
Submersibles (which may not care about weight due to ballast anyhow), Batteries for Solar Storage (price dependent likely bad at first), Pacemakers, Hearing aids, once it's invented if robotics outpace man engineered human biology, maybe smart blood.
Perhaps also Nanobots, Active 3d Glasses, Cell phones, Laptops, Tablets, Smart Watches that go for smaller space vs weight.
Outside of that perhaps home appliances like a portable bread machine, or a hand-held wireless electric apple peeler, very small things like a rock that has a hidden microphone / camera in it for spycraft, perhaps a heated travel mug to keep your cider warm, or an electric bowl for keeping great-gravy from coagulating on the dining room table, maybe a warm pie plate because who doesn't like warm cherry pie? Perhaps some sort of autonomous mud tunneling microbots, rather have a large boring machine just let these small guys go and be patient and in a decade or two you'll have your tunnel, electric candles in churches could cut down on unnecessary wax use, and helmet lamps used for stuff like lead mining could also find a use (added neck strain not withstanding). Not sure if the added weight would be too much for a target-practice duck that swam around in a lake or not, but if not, that might be the right answer.
Your solar and wind generation facilities now go to 100% capacity factor.
I went on amazon to look at some product weights. There is an e-bike battery that weighs 6.5 lbs[1], and an e-bike that claims to have a shipping weight of 60 lbs[2]. So assuming 3x battery weight for roughly the same power, that means an extra battery weight of 13 lbs and a total bike weight of 73 lbs for a battery that could possibly fit in the frame (as opposed to be mounted on the down tube). So that is definitely getting on the heavy side for a bike but the bike in question is also relatively 'over-powered' as far as e-bikes go (25 mi self-powered range, 350 watt motor). A lot of the sleeker/higher end e-bikes are 'pedal-assist only' and already hide the battery in the frame. These bikes can get in the sub 40 lb range, and probably use 1/2 the battery that the one in the link does. So an extra 10-15 lbs is probably manageable and it would result in a bit more range while still being able to hide the battery in the frame (assuming a li-ion battery weight of ~3lbs, you would add an extra 6lbs to 'break even', or an extra 15 to double the power).
For scooters/mopeds, the math probably works out even better, as these are already over 100 lbs, and an extra 30-40 lbs won't really matter that much. And if you want to build a electric scooter or motorcycle that can go highway speeds, that extra weight can help with stability.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/36V-11AH-Li-ion-E-Bike-Battery/dp/B01... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Addmotor-HITHOT-Electric-Bicycle-Susp...
Forgive my limited electronics knowledge, but would something simple like throwing a boost converter on the end of this not be sufficient for many applications? Is the maximum current output too low to reach sufficient voltages too?
> The researchers demonstrated that their new battery cells have at least three times as much energy density as today’s lithium-ion batteries. A battery cell’s energy density gives an electric vehicle its driving range, so a higher energy density means that a car can drive more miles between charges.
I believe this is misleading enough that the article should be flagkilled, since the "energy density" they are talking about, volumetric energy density, is not what gives an electric vehicle its driving range, and on the metric that really matters - mass energy density - it does worse than regular Li-Ion batteries.
>Replacement of a host insertion compound as cathode by a redox center for plating an alkali-metal cathode provides a safe, low-cost, all-solid-state cell with a huge capacity giving a large energy density and a long cycle life suitable for powering an all-electric road vehicle or for storing electric power from wind or solar energy.
Similarly for power.
Why do you say that if it's 3x the energy density per volume and "only" 2.5x heavier? That should give it at the same volume as Li-Ion 82.5% of the weight.
I agree this doesn't solve the weight problem for EVs, except only a little it seems, but if these batteries can be made competitive on price with Li-Ion (Eventually), and unless we find a much better alternative weight-wise, then this sort of battery would still be very useful for EVs because of the safety they give.
7.5 times heavier than water, heavy stuff indeed…
I believe you meant kJ/kg.
kw isn't even a unit, that would be kW.
In mks units it would be J/kg.
Excuse me, have you tried lifting an actual engine, lately? I want you to find me a car battery that weighs more than even the engine block alone, no pistons, cams, heads, nada.
plus many small engines stripped of power accessories can be carried on carry on luggage
I would take this in my next cell phone. The weight is not as big of an issue as safety.
It would enable a huge reduction in CO2 emissions(bye gasoline), allow developing countries have stable electrical sources and low cost renewable distributed generation, cut costs(good includes cheap), and enable renewable energy sources to make up a larger mix of our energy production.
Always exciting read about new developments, wish I knew more about chemistry/physics, hopefully we get there sometime soon!
The actual Manhattan project could spend the funds by building reactors with desirable end-products (uranium etc.) and building a lot of centrifuges to refine it further - along with engineering teams to design, build, and operate these things, various bomb and delivery mechanisms etc. It was the very beginnings of nuclear science, so there were many fundamental ideas to be discovered and tested out - it meant sense to spend a lot of money to travel and explore this newly discovered branch of the tree of knowledge.
There's a book by Steve LeVine, The Powerhouse, that describes the current environment of battery research and some of the main players (Argonne national lab, DoE, Startups, Korea, Japan, etc.). (It features Goodenough.)
[1] https://www.demos.co.uk/files/Entrepreneurial_State_-_web.pd...
[1] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Goodenough-Kanamori_rule
We really need to work on greatly extending human lifespans, if for no other reason than to keep people like this alive.
On the other hand, an engineer needs to know when to say "it's good enough" and release it. An invention in the hands of a perfectionist may never be released.
In all seriousness, it's a wonderful step forward. Certainly for stationary situations it's a great leap forward.
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Skimming the actual paper, I don't think they demonstrate 1200 cycles for any parameter. Eyeballing the graphs, it looks like they did charge/discharge testing for maybe 1200 hours (Figure 3a), but with really slow charge/discharge cycles of 10 hours each. Anyone publishing in this space would highlight 1200 cycles of stable cycling in the actual paper, if they had data to demonstrate it. They'd also show off faster cycles if high-rate performance looked good.
Looking at the data the authors did not present in the actual paper, I'm guessing that this battery doesn't handle rapid charge/discharge cycles well. (Their cycling test is at only 0.1C, paper claims "acceptable charge/discharge rates" but does not further quantify it... implication is "not a strength of this design.") It may not have great capacity retention either. I don't see any graphics specifically highlighting capacity retention vs. cycles. So at present I'd call this a solid research effort, but even if it could be commercialized immediately it's not clear that it would be a winner. The demonstrated charge/discharge rate is too slow to be practical for EVs or portable electronics. The demonstrated cycling stability is too low to be attractive for grid tied storage.
People who found this paper interesting may also be interested in this related publication about solid state sodium ion batteries that Goodenough was also involved with: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5269650/
Publishing limitations and negative results that lead to dead ends can help other scientists when they attempt to replicate and improve on tech like this.
Something I would really love to see would be a solid state battery that exploited the fact that we can draw silicon features at 7nm. How about a couple trillion equivalents of a FLASH cell which we can drain in rows or fill in rows. Sort of a bucket brigade of capacitors at that point but it would not have any recharge issues and since its just charge flying about no dendrites to speak of. At some point I predict that will become a useful way to build energy storage devices.
Why would you just want to be cynical about fundamental battery research? This is how all big breakthroughs happen: in fits and starts.
These laboratory curiosities usually fail because either you can't reliably manufacture the precursor material or reliably make the structures needed at production rates (which translates into the cost of the resulting battery)
It came up in a discussion with some Tesla enthusiasts on the ground breaking of the Gigafactory where I wondered if there would be a break through that would make the batteries the Gigafactory would produce obsolete before they finished building the factory. That didn't happen :-).
As a result I recognize its a really hard slow slog through chemistry which is well understood to change batteries. And you're correct there have been a number of improvements in manufacturing which have resulted in incrementally better batteries and that is all good, but so far, starting with a basic battery and making a new battery that is significantly better, has been disappointing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire_battery
The reason why is different and it doesn't solve dendrites, but your conclusions are spot on.
[0] http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/EE/C6EE02...
This engineer is 94 years old. Few, if any, SCV startups would have hired him. Yet, here we are, he might have just developed the key technology to push electric transportation through the hockey stick curve past the inflection point.
Three times the energy density, many times more cycles, no shorting, high charge and discharge rates. Yeah, this is more than just about laptops and cars, this is about planes, boats, trucks and ships.
Think about that before you reject a 50+ year old. Experience has real value.
So, while I agree with you in principle, older researchers offer more in academia than just their experience.
Possibly more relevant than what he's doing now, at 94:
As far as I can tell, his main breakthrough that led to the Li-Ion battery was in 1979, when he was 57 (?).
Slightly orthogonal to the content: this is why it's important for the US to allow people to come to this country. Continuing research and development with the worlds best gives the US a leg up. Past ease of immigration is the reason the US has led in so many areas, constant flow of new and innovative ideas.
note that research scientists don't get paid SV salaries so please don't propose flying internationally every month
People say yes to scientists, but not if they're from certain countries. On top of that we have scientists from Europe being stopped at the border, making it unlikely that they or their compatriots may try to make the trip in the future. I know of at least one computer conference that has discussed moving the venue outside the US to try and mitigate the issues at the border.
While you may be right that no one debates elite people in their respective fields from moving or coming to the US, the enforcement is causing exactly the opposite to occur.
So, I respectfully disagree with you that what you suggest would be acceptable.
He was eventually able to enter after the ban was overturned, but these types of actions push the smartest people in the world away from the USA.