IBM Creates 'Breathing' High-Density Lithium-Air Battery 582
MrSeb writes "As part of IBM's Battery 500 project — an initiative started in 2009 to produce a battery capable of powering a car for 500 miles — Big Blue has successfully demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery. In it, oxygen is reacted with lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released — in the words of IBM, this is an 'air-breathing' battery. While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in a lithium-air battery comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter. The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries: the max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline."
Air isn't new (Score:5, Informative)
The summary makes it sound like they've never used air in batteries before. Most small batteries, including hearing aid batteries, are zinc-air. This is why they come with a small sticker on one side - you remove the sticker and give the battery a minute or so to take in air. That said, I don't believe the zinc-air batteries "breathe" like how the article describes, and they're certainly not rechargeable so kudos to IBM.
Re:Comparable? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Comparable? (Score:5, Informative)
1. It's the same order of magnitude. Yes, that's comparable.
2. The AC above you actually gives you the exact reason it's better than that. A gasoline internal combustion engine will be 20%-35% efficient at translating that 47.2 MJ to rotary motion of the wheels. A lithium air powered electric motor, however, is 80%-90% efficient. So you're looking at 9.4-16.5 MJ at the transmission versus 7.2-8.1 MJ at the wheels. Assuming a 95% efficiency drivetrain from flywheel to wheels that gas power goes down to 8.9-15.7 MJ. Yeah, that's pretty comparable. Of course, gasoline engines are over 100 years old and lithium-air battery systems less than a decade old, so I think there's some room for improvement there.
Premature Article AGAIN!! (Score:5, Informative)
According to the video we won't see these batteries in cars until "2020 or 2030". That seems like a long way off considering the summary says "demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery" As far as I can glean from the vague articles is that all IBM has done is demonstrate the fundamental chemistry on a supercomputer. As far as I can tell they have not actually built a working battery of significant size and definitely not one of a size that would power a vehicle. There have been may technologies that work well in pristine laboratory environments but fail when they attempt to scale and/or have to deal with the dirty environment. Sure the battery may even work on a small scale when exposed to pure oxygen but how does it deal with the other elements in the atmosphere? Take a look at this [wikipedia.org]. I do not see where IBM shows how that deal with any of these issues.
Re:Gasoline-like energy density (Score:5, Informative)
Liability of the swap station. Large propane cylinders are leased and are not cheap to buy. Return one undamaged and get a certified good one. If it dies outside of an accident the swapping company replaces it.
Solvable.
Re:Gasoline-like energy density (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly a Leaf cant make my 40 mile commute and back. not when the weather is below 70 degrees F which is 70% of the year.
Oh and it costs more than a Honda Civic + 10 years of gasoline at $5.00 a gallon.
Re:Gasoline-like energy density (Score:5, Informative)
My bullshit meter is being pegged off the charts to even consider this. Yes, there might be some supposed "automated facilities' that could pull this off, but I shudder to think of the potential accidents, lawsuits, and other issues that could come from such a "fast recharger". "Training" might be able to help with the technicians who are at a filling station performing this task, but any kind of casual attitude will result in a great many deaths.
I'll also note that the example of a Nissan Leaf is hardly the best one to use as well, as it certainly isn't going to have this magical "500 mile range" as suggested in the original article.
As for grid impact.... I've seen first hand what the current infrastructure of California has for any kind of significant grid impact. I was involved with a.... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it.
The interesting thing about it for the purposes of this discussion is that it used 1 MW of energy off of the existing power grid in downtown San Francisco, and I was on the engineering team to get it set up. As a part of our testing process, we would "turn it on" and often use that full rated capacity of sucking the 1 MW off of the grid for relatively short periods of time and then turn it off after the test (usually about 15-20 minute test for what we were doing). At the same time we had the radio on tuned to a local station, and it made us sick to realize that when the device was turn on that it triggered blackouts throughout the city and those blackouts ended when we turned the device off.
Even if you use a power buffer like a huge capacitor bank to store the amount of energy needed to recharge a vehicle like a Tesla Roadster (which has roughly the quoted 500 mile range suggested in the original article) in a short period of time, that capacitor bank will need to be recharged in roughly a similar amount of time... with a power load for a heavily used recharging station to be roughly equivalent to this device I was using in San Francisco. I could easily see such a filling station be in the MegaWatt range for power consumption. In other words the overall electrical transmission infrastructure to get a whole series of stations like this built would require a substantial construction effort just to get those power transmission lines put to all of those station.
So do you like a future with high voltage power lines being built in your backyard? That is the future you are asking for here, where those become a much more common sight in almost everybody's neighborhood. The grid impact of these stations is going to be enormous with any kind of electric vehicle future.
Re:Gasoline-like energy density (Score:5, Informative)
This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)
For a website filled with electrical and computer engineers, the entire notion that you can recharge an electric battery quick with enough energy to be able to send an automobile over 500 miles in less than 15 minutes should seem totally ludicrous.
No, it should seem feasible, but difficult. I don't expect computer engineers to necessarily have a clue, but as an electrical engineer, I've previously run the numbers, and will proceed to redo them quickly for your benefit:
Going off my general knowledge of gasoline-powered automobiles, a "typical" car might get 35 mpg cruising at 55 mph using only 50 hp (not engine rating, actual horsepower used at cruise), and has a fuel capacity of 20 gallons.
Using these figures in the obvious way, I come up with about 1.7 GJ of mechanical energy at the crankshaft. Permitting 90% electrical->mechanical efficiency, that'd be 2GJ of battery required for equivalent performance. (Quibble with my typical values if you like, but I think I'm correct to order of magnitude.)
The sheer amount of energy to perform this kind of action is going to require connectors to the recharging equipment to be in the kiloVolt range, or perhaps MegaVolt and have amperage with that voltage that can only be supplied by a direct power line to a nuclear power plant.
Charging a 2 GJ battery in 15 minutes requires on the order of 2 MW, plus charging inefficiencies. While this is certainly infeasible for a standard home installation, it hardly requires a nuclear power station; Wikipedia says the world's largest coal-fired power plant is 4GW. 2MW is feasible for recharging at highway stations, provided that electric cars are mostly recharged overnight at home (at much lower rates, manageable by household wiring), reducing demand from every vehicle, all the time (as with filling stations) to only those vehicles needing a top-up during the day (mostly road trips). Then you can get away with a single 2MW service at each station, ~20 MW to match the 8-12 gas pumps needed to service the gasoline fleet during rush hour.
(This is not to say our electrical infrastructure won't need significant upgrades -- distributing it to homes and over a longer time doesn't change the total energy required; but that's a separate issue.)
Worst case, suppose electric infrastructure can't be extended to supply some filling stations for whatever reason -- maybe they're off in the boonies somewhere. What would it take for my neighborhood gas station to set up the ability to recharge electric cars from its liquid fuel supply? Well, as it happens, producing 2.6MW from diesel fuel is a solved problem [wikipedia.org] with significantly improved fuel efficiency from vehicle engines, which combined with the elimination of road tax on fuel consumed by the generator, makes it economically feasible. (Yes, this takes away much of the supposed "green" benefit of electric cars, but if the car runs on overnight charging from nuclear power 90% of the time, with the occasional diesel-fueled quick charge for road trips, I'd call that a win; it's certainly better than running a gasoline car all the time because there was no quick-charging option.)
Re:Gasoline-like energy density (Score:5, Informative)
The plug performs a "handshake" and won't go full power without a safely mated connection. There are people who think of these things.
Re:off by 150 (Score:4, Informative)
Tesla model S: 42 kwh / 160 miles =~
Again, perhaps a bit low, but fairly close.