You can fuse anything lighter than iron and it will release energy. The process with tritium is just easier. Stars can extract the nuclear potential energy from hydrogen and oxygen just fine.
The oxygen would be the hard part. You'd want a temperature of about 2 billion degrees Kelvin and have it compressed to a density of about 4 million kg/ml.
That's a lot of activation energy, but it takes money to make money. Err, takes energy to make energy.
In the parlance of this space, energy density usually means specific energy. "Volumetric energy density" is the term normally used if research is highlighting a material that achieves high energy-per-liter storage from its high specific gravity.
> A conventional graphite cathode, in a process known as intercalation, can only transfer a single electron. But compounds like iron trifluoride can transfer multiple electrons.
Flourine is difficult to work with, so these batteries may cost more. Hopefully the energy density offsets the cost.
This is not nastiness like pure fluorine or hydrofluoric acid, but a salt. It may be somewhat toxic, but it does not require extraordinary handling precautions.
I'm sure it burns just like regular lithium-ion batters.[0] The addition of FeF3 probably doesn't change the correct response to the hazards much -- put out the fire if you know how to safely do so with the proper personal protective equipment, otherwise get the heck away.[1]
They don't have a battery yet. Just a "half-cell".[2] They have the cathode side, but not the anode side, apparently.
This group has access to all the good toys. They're doing X-ray crystallography with a synchrotron beam line. They have a scanning tunneling microscope with a 3-axis nano-manipulator.
I believe in battery research a half cell is a perfectly acceptable test bed for quantifying cathode performance, given that the anode material is not the bottleneck in the device. Researchers shouldn't have to spend their time doing full-device optimization every time they want to demonstrate improvement in a material.
The lithium is also in the anode and cathode, the electricity is generated by lithium traveling from one to another through the electrolyte. The electrolyte is heavier and bulkier but is picked for the ability to let lithium get through without letting electrons get through. I guess you could call it a lithium solution since lithium passes through it to get between the anode and cathode.
The anode and cathode need to be electrically insulated from one another requiring a substantial gap, or else the battery will short out internally or self-discharge if the electrical resistance is too low. That's why it's so big. Of course, reducing that gap is a big area of research. Solid electrolytes in principle might be easier to do this with since they stay put, but stuff cracks when lithium concentrations go up and down. The materials literally swell with lithium at the nanometer scale and then break apart. It's pretty hard, you can't unfortunately just vapor deposit a thin film of a solid electrolyte on the cathode since the materials are a bit too fragile to maintain the electrical resistance required for it to work.
"Typically, FeF3∙3H2O and CoF3 were ball milled at a molar ratio of 9:1 for 30 min to reduce the particle size and get a homogeneous reactant mixture. Then, 170 mg of such mixture was dispersed in 1-propanol (75 ml) and stirred vigorously at room temperature for half an hour. The resulting suspension was transferred into a Teflon-lined 100 ml stainless-steel autoclave reactor, and subsequently sealed and heated at 210 °C for 24 h in an oven. For comparison, FeOF was also synthesized by the same procedure using pure FeF3∙3H2O as the starting material dispersed in butyl-alcohol. FeF3 was prepared by ball milling the as-purchased FeF3 for 6 h. The pre-lithiation of Fe0.9Co0.1OF is synthesized by ball milling Fe0.9Co0.1OF and LiH at a molar ratio of 1:2 for 10 h."
This is standard ceramic slurry processing, they mix the powders with some liquid and then heat the two ceramics together to do a solid state reaction. I am somewhat impressed that the reaction went suitably at 210C, but that's not particularly hot. I'd think that the raw material costs would dominate here.
EDIT: Ball milling is when you spin a jar on rollers with the ceramic powder and big teflon beads that crush it gradually over a long period of time. It can be done dry or wet, but it's not a fancy procedure.
It's was about time we moved on to the next energy-storage technology for mobile devices. I can't believe in 2018, battery is still the main issue of all flagships.
Won't it always be an issue? I have a feeling they'll just put in more and better power-hungry hardware and software and we'll be back in the minimally acceptable battery life range.
Right. And if they don’t do that, then the phone will just get thinner. We already have incredible energy density compared to a decade ago, but that budget is used up by shaving millimeters off the thickness.
Many phone models do have expansion options like this, even iPhones. I for one am appreciative of “low power mode” so I get to choose efficiency over app freshness.
Yeah, but that (1) feels like the hardware equivalent of DLC, and (2) the resulting unit is much thicker than it would be if the battery were designed into the device from the start.
I get why some people prefer thinness over battery life. Not all use cases are the same. Just wish that there was an option when choosing a model to go with svelte or chunky.
I have an LG V20 with a 6700mAh battery. Goes for DAYS with moderate use, and will easily make it all day with extremely heavy use. I managed to kill it exactly once, with 4 hours of screen-on nav + steaming spotify, another 3 hours of youtube, and probably some misc usage. It's fantastic, and I keep wishing that somebody would release another phone with a user-replaceable (and upgradeable) battery so that I could move on. I actually bought this V20 after the V30 and S9 were out specifically for the removable battery. sigh, I blame apple.
I think the issue is still all the background activity. My phone (moto x pure) lasts multiple days in airplane+battery saver mode. It was 30% charged after using it for GPS/maps and occasional music on a 4-day backpacking (hiking) trip.
Isn't there a new cathode material promising manyfold improvement announced about every three weeks or so?
I'd like to see one of them actually deliver in new batteries. But instead, the 50% or so improvement we've seen over the last ten years have all been because of incremental refinement.
Color me skeptical until it's proven in production.
There has been an enormous amount work on battery technology for the last 30 years. Probably 99% of it leads to dead ends.
Standard rule of battery development, if everything goes right it takes ten years to market. And another ten to get market share. In the late 90's early 2000's there was paper after paper published on lithium iron phosphate batteries and dick all nothing for sale until ~2010. And ten years later market share is growing slowly.
I'm assuming twofold; engineering for scale and marketing.
Once you've sort of proven something in research you need to develop processes for manufacturing at scale. Those processes are often radically different than the one used during initial development. 10X rule applies. Take ten times the resources to bring something into production than to just design it. And worse with batteries you're dealing with primary materials. You may have needs for material inputs that simply do not exist at scale. No one makes material X in 100 metric ton quantities. The only source is a post doc making 100 gram batches. Sometimes the batches are bad for reasons unknown.
Well, the power of a battery the size of a brick in the 80’s is now available in a AA form factor. I’d say the improvement has been profound, if not quite as profound as Moore’s law is for CPUs.
Sadly, it isn't remotely that good, closer to a change from C to AA. NiCad rechargeables have been around for over a century and LiPo only has a density about 3x higher. Overall we've only increased the energy density of the average rechargeable battery about 5x in a century, with most of the increase from introduction of NIMH then LiPo
Improvements in power efficiency have made battery advancements seem better than they are.
I think most people are looking at flashlights for comparison, and LEDs were a massive leap in efficiency there.
Didn't we make it all a great deal cheaper, though? I'm noticing lately that now even very cheap devices - the kind you can buy on eBay for a couple bucks - that used to be powered by AA batteries and such, are now coming with an integral lithium battery (and usually an integral micro-USB charger).
I was going by rated MAh comparing RC batteries from the 80's to the best (rechargeable!) AA battery I can find today. "A brick" might be overstating it, but 10x by volume isn't. It's more like 6 C down to 1 AA.
If even half of these amazing battery technologies had come true, my car would be driven by a D cell battery.
But I'm ok that it hasn't, because I once heard a battery chemistry guy say that "the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb." I can't find the reference any more, but with all the Samsungs and Teslas catching fire, it rings true.
They have everything to do with increasing power density. By definition power density is potential energy and when you release that energy you get waste heat.
The probability of an event could be related to density. High chemical density possibly required for capacity could mean higher gradients which also could have implications on not only intensity of an event, but also on its probability.
Right but worse when batteries contain the “oxidizer”. If the battery uses atmospheric oxygen (e.g. as with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) then it’s exactly like gasoline.
Or even a flywheel. Any energy storage device is going to be energetic when things go wrong. One of the many challenges is in assessing and managing the risk of such an outcome.
U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 152,300 automobile fires per year in 2006-2010. These fires caused an average of 209 civilian deaths, 764 civilian injuries, and $536 million in direct property damage.
Facts and Figures
Automobile fires were involved in 10% of reported U.S. fires, 6% of U.S. fire deaths.
On average, 17 automobile fires were reported per hour. These fires killed an average of four people every week.
Mechanical or electrical failures or malfunctions were factors in roughly two-thirds of the automobile fires.
Collisions and overturns were factors in only 4% of highway vehicle fires, but these incidents accounted for three of every five (60%) automobile fire deaths.
Only 2% of automobile fires began in fuel tanks or fuel lines, but these incidents caused 15% of the automobile fire deaths. https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/By-topic/Property-type...
> the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb
A battery is a package containing the reagents necessary for a highly energetic reaction. A bomb is a package containing the reagents necessary for a highly energetic reaction. A high-capacity battery is effectively a bomb, pretty much by definition.
Actually a bomb is something that is programmed to detonate intentionally under certain conditions. There are plenty of other similarly energetic chemicals around the house, like gas in cylinders. The problem with some batteries is, unlike a bomb, the detonation conditions are hard to control. Luckily battery ignition, as enegetic as it is, is low velocity.
This sounds reasonable but I think it's actually pretty silly. In physics everything is at some high energy level rolling doesn't to some lower state. Your body has tons of energy. If we threw you into the right sort of fusion reactor or dropped you down a giant well you'd release massive amounts of energy.
It's not about "high energy" "low energy" or even "by definition an explosive" it's about how likely and favorable the pathway to releasing that energy in a bad way is. Just because you can release it slowly doesn't mean you can release it quickly. Some radioactive materials have lots of energy and a long Half-Life, try making a bomb out of them. It is not a simple question it's a lot of chemistry physics and engineering to answer.
The problem is even though we have gotten miraculously stable lithium batteries, they still aren't 'bulletproof' enough that explosion and fire risks are negligible. Add 3x more energy to it and it starts becoming a really big problem. This is what has kept 99.9% of these miraculous battery technologies we always hear about, too dangerous to use in consumer devices.
If it is as stable, or preferably more stable, than current tech, great! If it is anything less, you will never see it except in maybe industrial applications.
Industrial Applications, as Tesla has shown in Australia & Puerto Rico, are still a magnificent boon to society, so I hope they roll-out the more dangerous iterations sooner than later.
... like the DOE, ARPA, USDA, and NSF? They all are, I've personally worked on projects funded by these organizations to make carbon neutral petrol replacements. Heck, even the oil majors are funding that kind of work, they see the writing on the wall even if politicians play-act that the fossil fuel party will continue indefinitely.
Yes, it requires oxygen, which happens to be all around and inside a vehicle typically. I'm not sure what your point is. If a fuel tank is ruptured it can lead to fire and/or explosion. If a battery is ruptured the risk of fire is a lot less. Maybe batteries carry a greater risk of spontaneously combusting, but I don't think that makes them more dangerous than carrying a tank of flammable liquid around
Petrol is very safe for the energy density it has due to the relatively slow rate at which outside oxygen gets fed into the flame causing a burn rather than explosion. TNT is far less energy dense (1/5 iirc) but because it contains oxygen it is far more dangerous and explosive. A very high energy density battery is likely to be closer to TNT in its reaction and not have the requirement of needing outside oxigen to keep the reaction speed in check (but really this depends on the exact technology of the battery)
Please don't let this become news until there's a production ready design.
There are lots of these battery innovations promising multiple x of improvement, yet never delivering anything. Maybe it's actually interesting to battery chemistry enthusiasts, but you can't give them headlines like this either.
Is it just me or have we been fed stories about potential improvements in battery life for over a decade now with no real improvements? There seems to be a vortex out in space where all these promises about CPU and battery improvements somehow get swallowed up. Take graphene, for example. Discovered in 2004, it was touted as something which was going to change the world and replace silicon in CPU production. Yet a recent article (https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/what-is-graphene-and...) concluded: "Unfortunately, this is all theoretical. Current graphene cells are not yet up to par with silicon cells".
Another thing to keep in mind: It makes no difference if battery capacity grows but power consumption goes up as well. When you have hungry apps (say, Chrome) hogging resources with no regard to the user's device, there is little to be gained from having denser batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries have been slowly improving over the last 30 years. Every year they get a little cheaper, a little higher capacity, a little more reliable, a little higher discharge, over a few more charge cycles.
> In 1994, the cost to manufacture Li-ion in the 18650 cylindrical cell was over US$10 and the capacity was 1,100mAh. In 2001, the price dropped to below $3 while the capacity rose to 1,900mAh. Today, high energy-dense 18650 cells deliver over 3,000mAh and the costs are dropping.
I see the Silicon Valley mentality of "it's not news until the product ships" is pretty prevalent here. News flash: this is how R&D works on physical products. Most advancements are incremental. Some are larger than others, but are always built on years of other incremental advancements. This one appears to be larger than usual, so it's news. Your phone battery will continue to grow incrementally in energy density in order to run the increasingly bloated software shipped by the "true innovators". Life goes on.
87 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadThat's a lot of activation energy, but it takes money to make money. Err, takes energy to make energy.
Which was the very point of my example.
Flourine is difficult to work with, so these batteries may cost more. Hopefully the energy density offsets the cost.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLc74Qpvweg
[1] http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appli...
[1] table salt
They don't have a battery yet. Just a "half-cell".[2] They have the cathode side, but not the anode side, apparently.
This group has access to all the good toys. They're doing X-ray crystallography with a synchrotron beam line. They have a scanning tunneling microscope with a 3-axis nano-manipulator.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04476-2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-cell
The anode and cathode need to be electrically insulated from one another requiring a substantial gap, or else the battery will short out internally or self-discharge if the electrical resistance is too low. That's why it's so big. Of course, reducing that gap is a big area of research. Solid electrolytes in principle might be easier to do this with since they stay put, but stuff cracks when lithium concentrations go up and down. The materials literally swell with lithium at the nanometer scale and then break apart. It's pretty hard, you can't unfortunately just vapor deposit a thin film of a solid electrolyte on the cathode since the materials are a bit too fragile to maintain the electrical resistance required for it to work.
Could someone who knows this area comment whether this sounds expensive to manufacture?
This is standard ceramic slurry processing, they mix the powders with some liquid and then heat the two ceramics together to do a solid state reaction. I am somewhat impressed that the reaction went suitably at 210C, but that's not particularly hot. I'd think that the raw material costs would dominate here.
EDIT: Ball milling is when you spin a jar on rollers with the ceramic powder and big teflon beads that crush it gradually over a long period of time. It can be done dry or wet, but it's not a fancy procedure.
I wish they didn't do that, I would gladly carry around a slightly bigger phone if it had much better battery life.
I get why some people prefer thinness over battery life. Not all use cases are the same. Just wish that there was an option when choosing a model to go with svelte or chunky.
I'd like to see one of them actually deliver in new batteries. But instead, the 50% or so improvement we've seen over the last ten years have all been because of incremental refinement.
Color me skeptical until it's proven in production.
Standard rule of battery development, if everything goes right it takes ten years to market. And another ten to get market share. In the late 90's early 2000's there was paper after paper published on lithium iron phosphate batteries and dick all nothing for sale until ~2010. And ten years later market share is growing slowly.
I'd assume conservative and long-design time downstream users mean there isn't a volume market for new battery tech.
Once you've sort of proven something in research you need to develop processes for manufacturing at scale. Those processes are often radically different than the one used during initial development. 10X rule applies. Take ten times the resources to bring something into production than to just design it. And worse with batteries you're dealing with primary materials. You may have needs for material inputs that simply do not exist at scale. No one makes material X in 100 metric ton quantities. The only source is a post doc making 100 gram batches. Sometimes the batches are bad for reasons unknown.
Improvements in power efficiency have made battery advancements seem better than they are.
Didn't we make it all a great deal cheaper, though? I'm noticing lately that now even very cheap devices - the kind you can buy on eBay for a couple bucks - that used to be powered by AA batteries and such, are now coming with an integral lithium battery (and usually an integral micro-USB charger).
But I'm ok that it hasn't, because I once heard a battery chemistry guy say that "the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb." I can't find the reference any more, but with all the Samsungs and Teslas catching fire, it rings true.
Are there really a lot of Samsungs catching fire though, in the grand scheme of things?
You mean like gasoline?
When was the last time you read about battery explosion?
Facts and Figures
Automobile fires were involved in 10% of reported U.S. fires, 6% of U.S. fire deaths. On average, 17 automobile fires were reported per hour. These fires killed an average of four people every week. Mechanical or electrical failures or malfunctions were factors in roughly two-thirds of the automobile fires. Collisions and overturns were factors in only 4% of highway vehicle fires, but these incidents accounted for three of every five (60%) automobile fire deaths. Only 2% of automobile fires began in fuel tanks or fuel lines, but these incidents caused 15% of the automobile fire deaths. https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/By-topic/Property-type...
A battery is a package containing the reagents necessary for a highly energetic reaction. A bomb is a package containing the reagents necessary for a highly energetic reaction. A high-capacity battery is effectively a bomb, pretty much by definition.
It's not about "high energy" "low energy" or even "by definition an explosive" it's about how likely and favorable the pathway to releasing that energy in a bad way is. Just because you can release it slowly doesn't mean you can release it quickly. Some radioactive materials have lots of energy and a long Half-Life, try making a bomb out of them. It is not a simple question it's a lot of chemistry physics and engineering to answer.
If it is as stable, or preferably more stable, than current tech, great! If it is anything less, you will never see it except in maybe industrial applications.
There are lots of these battery innovations promising multiple x of improvement, yet never delivering anything. Maybe it's actually interesting to battery chemistry enthusiasts, but you can't give them headlines like this either.
Bring the down votes.
> In 1994, the cost to manufacture Li-ion in the 18650 cylindrical cell was over US$10 and the capacity was 1,100mAh. In 2001, the price dropped to below $3 while the capacity rose to 1,900mAh. Today, high energy-dense 18650 cells deliver over 3,000mAh and the costs are dropping.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_based_bat...
It's not the revolution we may want, but it is the successful application of battery research.