New All-Solid Sulfur Based Battery Outperforms Lithium Ion 322
olsmeister writes "The new all-solid battery design uses solid sulfur and lithium, and outperforms existing lithium-ion batteries with four times the energy density. The battery can maintain a capacity of 1200 milliampere-hours per gram after 300 charge-discharge cycles. More work needs to be done, but one would think this new technology could have applications in renewable energy storage, electric cars, and consumer electronics."
Re:...and device runtime with stay the same (Score:5, Insightful)
They will figure out how to use that extra power somewhere, leaving us at around the same runtime as before.
"They"? Either the device is doing work four times more consuming, your device can stand by four times longer, or your device's battery is approximately four times lighter. Sure, retarded marketing drones are going to figure out a way to stuff four times the amount of adware onto a new laptop, but let's face it, they were going to do that regardless.
Assuming a 4 times increase in battery life at all scales and no size decrease, this would quadruple the range of electric cars - all for a simple battery tech switch. And the batteries are made partly from waste in another industry.
Re: ...and device runtime with stay the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Battery runtimes have improved enormously in the past five years; the bottom-end machine I bought then could barely break two hours, my new low-end laptop easily manages four. However that's more due to improvements in the computer hardware's power efficiency than the battery's capacity.
Re: ...and device runtime with stay the same (Score:4, Insightful)
If the battery capacity increases as well then its a double win. Power efficiency in chip design is beneficial for all sorts of reasons, not just battery life, so will continue to improve. Having increased battery life will impact the current devices. It should also make others more practical as a given capacity battery will take up less space.
I think the GGP is overly pessimistic.
Re:...and device runtime with stay the same (Score:4, Insightful)
>all for a simple battery tech switch
Not so simple, except in terms of the mechanic doing the battery replacement. (which of course is one of the beauties of electric vehicles - really easy aftermarket mods to the power system) Battery tech is *the* bottleneck for electric vehicles, and so far it's proved anything but easy to improve on significantly.
Re:That is very energy dense (Score:4, Insightful)
Current density yes. Energy density no, it remains unchanged by combining cells in series.
Re:...and device runtime with stay the same (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I think I've been saying for around a decade "There's nothing wrong with EV's that a battery that lasts twice as long for half the price wouldn't fix'. Assuming this battery is identical to LiIon in cost per pound, the 4X energy density would mean that you could get 'extended range' Model S range at less than the price of a baseline one.
As is, the extended range batteries add so much weight to the vehicle that it adversely affects kwh per 100 miles - the 60 kwh battery is 35 kWh/100m, the 85 drops that to 38.
If an additional 25 kwh of battery currently does that, what happens if you 'only' double the total capacity, cutting the size/weight by half?
I really, really hope this becomes reality. Because I'd like to get an EV or a hybrid without breaking the bank, and it's my opinion that this is the last push needed.
Re:That is very energy dense (Score:5, Insightful)
Well thank you for that enlightened view on how other people can enjoy the same activities as you, with different purposes and/or opinions on how to go about enjoying those activities.
You complain about other people on the internet? You obviously don't get it. The idea of the internet is to encourage the free and open exchange of ideas. I can think of only a few legitimate reasons to complain about others on the internet (harassment, excessively inappropriate behavior, trolling, maybe something else I've missed), but seriously complaining about how someone chooses to go camping? Stop posting.
Re:...and device runtime with stay the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Now explain to me why all that work, which the typical user figures has been done by fairies or elves anyway, has any relevance to said user when he goes to get his battery changed? All he is going to care about is how much will it cost, how long will it take, and how much better will it be.
We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a "simple" hammer or wheel isn't simple any more. There is serious research in both of those. And yet, I can still take a cash equivalent of one to three hours of my time and buy this device which literally has thousands of hours of research applied to it. It really is quite simple. Just like the tech switch between two different battery technologies.