Silicon As the New Lithium 211
hduff writes "While lithium-ion batteries offer better performance than lead-acid or ni-cad batteries, the supply of lithium is limited and the batteries can pose problems. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute are building a better battery with easily obtainable sand and air."
What would be fun (Score:2)
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Chile has half the world's lithium and they're gearing up to play hardball over it. This will hopefully deflate those plans.
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Oh and the commies are back already. And finished nationalizing the critical mining industries several years ago.
And they openly traded weapons with Iran and North Korea, boasted their strength and are currently dominoeing all neighboring countries to follow a socialist agenda. With Maoist rebels operating in the border territory against the still-capitalistic neighbor and all that.
Just like the good ol' times.
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I think you're confusing Chile with Bolivia. Chile has one of the strongest growing economy in South America and is a capitalistic country alright. Bolivia, on the other hand, has a socialist government and has been playing hardball with their lithium reserves.
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I was of course thinking of Bolivia, which currently instigates all sorts of quarrels along their borders. They successfully installed metastases in neighboring countries and are clamoring for more, hence the term "Domino".
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Re:What would be fun (Score:5, Funny)
Of course we can always wait for the socialist dictatorship to snuff some *millions* in their inevitable joy camps and then just build a memorial. This would be sensible, cheap, safe, environmentally-friendly, politically-correct and deeply respecting the local culture and religion.
You can still do a lot wrong when you're doing nothing. I suggest we print more money and send it to them, that's what my great European Union does all the time - and boy, it works sooo well, just look at Somalia, where an entire new industry with thousands of jobs was created by paying hundreds of millions to free a few ships.
Deep breath and settle (Score:2)
Phew!
I thought I was going to have to inject silicon under the skin on my shoulder. Funny, didn't think all those implant leakages produced well adjusted, although a little quiet and drooley, bar wenches.
"Turn the desert green" backfires (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't you know it. You turn the desert into an environment that supports agriculture and the very thing you got rid of in mass quantities turns out to be the main ingredient in the technology of the future. Doesn't that just rub you the wrong way.
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Actually at the moment things are going from green to desert. Desertification is a major problem around the world, including Africa and China, where arable land is being lost to the expansion of major deserts.
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And just to throw it in. It is man cause desertification. There isn't any question of this because it hasn't been made into a political issue. Goes to show that man can fairly easily and inadvertently change the face of the earth.
Environmental warfare (Score:2)
Man also deliberately changes the face of the earth in an adverse manner, for purposes of warfare. In the ancient world, invading your neighbor's territory and destroying crops was a routine practice. See also: Salting the earth [wikipedia.org], Entomological warfare [wikipedia.org], Weather warfare [wikipedia.org].
Marketing/advert submissions (Score:5, Insightful)
While new battery technology is very important in our current time, the sheer number of duplicate stories and borderline advertisement/marketing stories on Slashdot about these new batteries, WITH a combines lithium FUD scare at the same time no less, sours these stories.
Re:Marketing/advert submissions (Score:5, Informative)
While new battery technology is very important in our current time, the sheer number of duplicate stories and borderline advertisement/marketing stories on Slashdot about these new batteries, WITH a combines lithium FUD scare at the same time no less, sours these stories.
Seconded. Does anyone else remember when Slashdot stories linked to journals and essays rather than blogs and press releases? Hopefully the click-through counts reflect the /. reader's ability to avoid anything with "blog" or "gadget" or perhaps these days even "google" in the URL.
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Just a thought....
Re:Marketing/advert submissions (Score:4, Insightful)
I had that thought once but when I tested it I found UID's and IQ's are not inversely related.
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Disclaimer: I agree with your sentiment if not your statement.
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Ah, here we go. The "good ol' days!" effect rears its ugly head. Nothing satisfies like an unfounded bias.
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Yes, be careful what you wish for. Remember, in the "good old days" we routinely got stories from Jon Katz, whose skill for hyperbole eclipsed even that of kdawson.
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The most frustrating submissions to me lately are ones that link to fluff articles ABOUT a real journal article, but don't actually link the journal article in question. Meta-meta-discussions tend to quickly devolve into chaos.
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Does anyone else remember when Slashdot stories linked to journals and essays rather than blogs and press releases?
I'm no fan of blogs with one page of ads per paragraph, but the last time I checked, most scientific journals have a paywall in front of them. I thought the internet would eliminate the need for publisher middlemen between scientists, but most science is still locked away from society this way.
Natrium batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
Chemically very similar to Lithium. Plenty of Natrium around.
Re:Natrium batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Natrium is called SODIUM in English. (Not sure, but I think that English is the only language that does not use the word "natrium" for Na).
And it might not be able to form the components that you need for the battery (it's not pure lithium).
Read more here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Electrochemistry [wikipedia.org]
Also, if it would work, sodium is much heavier than lithium.
Re:Natrium batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure, but I think that English is the only language that does not use the word "natrium" for Na.
Natrium was the original Latin name for the element but it's Sodium in English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium [wikipedia.org], sodio in Italian http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodio [wikipedia.org], sodium in French http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium [wikipedia.org], sódio in Portuguese http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B3dio [wikipedia.org], sodio in Spanish http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodio [wikipedia.org] and I stop here because I don't want to enter into languages I don't know.
Google gives 12,500,000 occurrences of Sodium and 730,000 of Natrium.
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Interestingly it's natrium in both Finnish and Swedish.
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Interestingly you can say kaustik soda for sodium hydroxide in Swedish. Dunno if soda is an old name for natrium or if it's just that specific combination that is imported (swedish wikipedia didn't say and I'm to lazy to check elsewhere).
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It seems that sodium is a newer name for natrium. Some languages kept the old one and others switched to sodium.
I found an explanation at http://takimika.liceofoscarini.it/sostanze/etimelementi.phtml?periodo=3&gruppo=1 [liceofoscarini.it] I translate it from Italian:
Re:Natrium batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Natrium is called SODIUM in English. (Not sure, but I think that English is the only language that does not use the word "natrium" for Na).
No, both are used very widely, actually: "Sodium" (from arabic suda: soda headache tablets) is used in most Romance and Slavic languages and "Natrium" (from ancient Egyptian natron: baking soda/soda ash) is used in Germanic languages and Hungarian/Serbocroatian, mostly due to the influence of Berzelius (who was a Swede).
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Also, if it would work, sodium is much heavier than lithium.
and much lighter than nickel.
English is wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
Natrium is called SODIUM in English.
The chemical name is Natrium. Clearly English is wrong.
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The chemical name for mercury is "hydrargyrum" and I'm glad nobody uses that regularly. "Quicksilver" could follow the latin word best without bending the tongue of scientists and technicians beyond repair.
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You must be from München.
I'm from Munich, and I call it Sodium.
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Actually, Spanish word for sodium is "sodio". Funny thing, as one would have expected it to be "natrio" instead (just substitute "o" for "um" and there you have a Spanish version of a Latin word). Which makes me wonder if someone at sometime forgot that sodium probably comes from Arabic, as per Wikipedia, and thought it was Latin instead.
Perhaps Spanish was influenced by the Arab presence in Spain during the Middle Ages?
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yup. Natriumklorid to be exact. Natriumhydroxid is sometimes called kaustik soda though.
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That's a lye!
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Hmmm yes but no.
And yet it's being worked on.
e.g.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.elecom.2006.08.029 [doi.org]
Lithium limited? (Score:5, Informative)
And there is the fact that salt water has lithium. In fact, some startups are trying to extract it now [wired.com]. If the price goes high enough, it will be practical to extract lithium from the ocean.
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To say that the supply of lithium is limited, is like going back 150 years ago and saying that the supply of oil is limited.
So when can we expect Peak Lithium?
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depends. right now were're surface mining lithium salts from exposed salt flats. theres no telling how many rich veins of lithium salts are hiding in valleys or near aquifers. i'm sure someone is working on that, but until someone runs analysis on where those veins might be i doubt anyone could tell you. more than likely battery technology will move beyond lithium long before (100 years?) we run out of lithium "ore" you can just shovel off the ground and into the back of a truck (Seriously, do a google imag
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A few weeks after Peak Copper, Peak Oil and Peak IQ.
Peak Oil is scheduled since thirty years to happen any minute.
Peak Copper is currently underway in Europe because valuable non-ferrous metals are pilfered where and whenever the police isn't looking for a second.
But Peak IQ already happened in 1990 (google for "Flynn Effect", if you doubt it) but I think it was some sort of a pre-requisite for the other Peaks - with the exception of Peak Climate, which curiously follows the inverse of the Flynn Effect tren
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The situation is completely different.
A non-renewable energy resource such as oil is consumed by the process of using it as fuel -- i.e. it is destroyed (unless you're willing to wait millions of years for the carbon cycle to do its job). It also has a well-defined theoretical endpoint that would never be crossed: once it takes more energy to extract it than the oil contains, there's no point in extracting it. It's simple physics. And the practical economic threshold will be reached well before that poin
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Would extracting lithium from the sea impact sea-life? I imagine if we started doing that and relying on it, our consumption would just keep spiralling upwards while there was a drawn-out global debate about what effect it is having, which gets resolved just in time to stop the human race dying out, but not in time to stop significant destruction to the marine ecosystem.
but i might just be being paranoid/pessimistic as i don't know anything about it.
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We are already extracting sodium and chloride from sea water and it's a boon to people and Golf courses in the Middle East.
But we could start mining lithium in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and filter out all the plastic nurdles there and sell them as a cheap by-product, would that appease the Greens?
Re:Lithium limited? (Score:5, Informative)
There are some important differences though. Oil is used as an energy source, while lithium is used to store energy. When a battery reaches its end of life, the lithium can be extracted and used to make a new battery.
Also, a rising price of lithium means more lithium ore will become economical to mine. Because extracting oil takes energy, there is a point at which it is not worthwhile to extract the oil since you would have to burn more oil than you extract.
Besides, the price of lithium is currently a very small portion of the price of a battery. The price of lithium could rise to 10 times its current level and batteries would still be affordable. If the price of oil would rise to 10 times its current level, the impact would be huge.
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Of course, worldwide auto production is a lot closer to 10,000,000 per year....
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Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Still, it's kind of cool that you can make a battery out of sand.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
First of all (I'm a researcher in power MEMS/micro power sources), I must say that a battery that has been tested for 600 hours count as an excellent proof of concept. Most of the stuff we develop we're happy if it works for minutes, let alone hundreds of hours. This is in advanced stage. Second: so what if it's "only" a primary battery? The market for primary batteries is HUGE and because they are disposable, making them cheap and environmentally friendly is just if not more important, than with secondary batteries.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Still, it's kind of cool that you can make a battery out of sand.
Yep, and to charge it you just turn it over!
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My car still burns non-rechargeable hydrocarbons and one tank barely lasts 600 hours.
If the energy-to-weight and energy-to-cost ratios of that battery could reach even the general vicinity of gasoline, everything else concerning click-in systems or replacement is peanuts and will be invented less than one second after the battery itself. Of course we will have BluBattery and HD-Battery warring for dominance, but that's only a minor nuisance compared to the fact that we now could power cars, trucks, boats an
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It can't.
It's not possible to recharge in its current form, and will be comparatively expensive.
Even neglecting that - and the poor discharge rate - it can probably only be discharged at a slow rate due to the design - it is a better hearing aid battery that might last - say - 20 days instead of 10, and be a bit less toxic.
You _could_ put it into your car - but it would require a truly massive battery.
charge my batteries (Score:2)
in a daze 'cause i found juice
does this mean (Score:4, Funny)
they'll be treating manic depression with silicone?
Then again, I guess they've been doing that for years with breast implants...
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And what's this sexism bs? Why not femic depression? Or Femalic?
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Understand how it works - and then applications (Score:3, Informative)
The article does not help understand how it actually works, so I read around and went to the Technion-friends website.
Basically normal sand is Silicon-Dioxide. If you take pure silicon and build a battery from it, and expose the battery to air, the silicon will interact with the oxygen in the air. So the pure silicon will become silicon dioxide - sand. In the process, it releases energy.
The neat trick in the battery - is that they set it up so that the energy is released NOT as heat (which is the usual thing), but some of it as electricity. They do this with some kind of membrane that allows oxygen ions to flow through, but electrons must come the other way - hence an electric flow.
Like any innovation, will take some years to be fully researched and commercialized. Small batteries will probably come first, bigger ones (for cars) later. And how to recharge does not seem obvious - at least not from the description so far.
A lot of people above are skeptical - but really this kind of innovation is what science and engineering are all about. Innovation goes hand in hand with raising ever more questions; we should be used to that by now.
Really really cool. And smart. My hat off to the Israeli guys and their collaborators in USA & Japan.
(Electro-)Chemistry is quite fuzzy (Score:5, Informative)
I have read the original publication (doi:10.1016/j.elecom.2009.08.015) and cannot understand much of the (electro-)chemistry of it.
The electrode potential is strongly dependent on the doping of the silicon, which makes sense, but the I/V curve looks less than impressive. It's mostly a bad fuel cell, at the moment.
Also, the chemistry of the electrolyte is not clear to me. In principle the battery should work according to dissolution of Si from the anode, transport through the electrolyte (an ionic liquid with fluorine) and reaction with oxygen at the air cathode. The researchers claim that they observe a white deposit at the cathode, and that this deposit is SiO2.
Silicon-fluorine chemistry is quite complicated, IIRC, and I cannot for the life of me imagine transport of Si4+ ions in the electrolyte. Also, HF as such does not dissolve Si, but it need some strong acid to start the etching. How this phenomenon can happen in the ionic liquid is beyond me.
Also, in the introduction, the researchers claim that the battery has an "infinite shelf life", but then talk about corrosion currents in the paper. If there is corrosion (i.e. self discharge), then the shelf life is quite limited.
Cherry on top, they claim that SiO2 is easily reducible to reobtain Si. I am not familiar with silicon metallurgy, but I am not sure it is easy to do it electrochemically, let alone replate Si at the anode upon recharge.
On the plus side, they used metallurgical grade Si, which is dirt cheap when compared to semiconductor grade Si.
I would love for this to work, but at the moment the authors have omitted quite a bit of information. If I were the referee, I would have asked at least the questions above. Think of it, there is a corresponding author for a reason.
Disclaimer: I work in battery research, and I am hence jealous that they made it to the front page of Slashdot.
Specialty (Score:3, Interesting)
If this is your specialty, then please contribute more good articles about new batteries. It's hard to sort through the "coming soon in 10 years to never" from "coming soon, works pretty dang good now, perhaps on sale as early as next year" from "on sale now, here is a link" stuff.
Battery tech to me today is sort of like solar PV tech. I've read hundreds of articles of new amazing break throughs, yet when I go check prices, the PV panels I got ten years ago are still a deal compared to what I see offered fo
Figuring out how it works (Score:5, Informative)
To better understand how this works, I went to the Tehnion website.
Sand is actually Silicon-dioxide (combined silicon and oxygen). Pure silicon interacts with oxygen form the air to create sand. That's first-year normal chemistry. Usually such an interaction produces heat not electricity.
They built the battery from pure silicon, and the trick is that Oxygen from the air has to pass through a membrane to get to the silicon and oxidize it. The membrane will allow only oxygen ions through, so electrons have to flow the other way to match up with the ions and maintain overall neutrality. Hence you get a current instead of only heat.
Of course it will take some years to commercialize. Small applications will come first (small batteries), only later will we get big batteries (for cars?) and even later rechargeable stuff (if at all). I noticed many people are skeptical - but this is normal in science and engineering. Any real innovation raises new questions that must be answered. Kudos to the Israeli team, and their collaborators from USA & Japan.
But notice the caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonderful, but there are an awful lot of warning signs that this thing is not a world-beater:
* It's not rechargeable. And I don't know of any simple electrochemical process that reverses the oxidation of silicon.
* It requires a Flourine-carrying electrolyte! Lithium is bad enuf, but Fluorine is really bad stuff.
* Usually "air-powered" batteries are limited to very low current, slow discharge applications, such as hearing-aids.
So it's very unlikely these could ever work like in a laptop or car, where you need amps, not microamps.
* Any practical and competitive battery would have to have a good power-density and be stable and manufacturable at a reasonable price.
Re:But notice the caveats (Score:4, Informative)
All Li-ion batteries carry a fluorine containing electrolyte. In particular, LiPF6 is the salt used, dissolved in organic solvents. Plus a whole bunch of additives. The ideal salt would be a perchlorate, but being explosive it's not allowed.
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It's not rechargeable. And I don't know of any simple electrochemical process that reverses the oxidation of silicon.
Neither is gasoline. No wonder we don't use the stuff. ;-)
Sion (Score:2)
i wish calling Lithium batteries "Li-on" (Li + ion) had taken root. Maybe we'll get it this time with Si-on.
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Your friends are cool, then!
Most of the commercials i see/hear insist on calling them Lithium-ion. *shrugs*
One question (Score:3, Funny)
The Energizer Bunny is not gonna like this! (Score:2)
No lithium?! Here they are talking about taking him off his meds again... it's gonna make him anxious, and you don't wanna make Bunny anxious!
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If you are talking about wiring, aluminum is reasonably plentiful and conductiveand was used in the past.
Re:What about copper? (Score:5, Informative)
Next, greatly varying expansion/contraction properties make aluminum still more likely to work loose when terminated to a dissimilar metal like a lug or screw of brass, steel, etc..
Lastly, all aluminum has a coat of oxide that has high electrical resistance, and it reforms very quickly when it is cleaned off. Proper cleaning and antioxidant paste are critical to avoid failures in such home applications as the line dropping from the service weather head to the meter socket of a dwelling (a common application).
Once the circuits are in the walls of a dwelling you do not want aluminum because of the fire danger. While it has been used for mobile home wiring in the past during times of high copper prices, it is currently hard to insure one of those homes. If you DO have aluminum wire inside your walls you should be checking the torque (but don't over tighten) of every connection at six month intervals... forever...
To sum up, you only want aluminum where you can easily inspect and adjust any connections on a regular basis.
Re:What about copper? (Score:5, Informative)
Once the circuits are in the walls of a dwelling you do not want aluminum because of the fire danger. While it has been used for mobile home wiring in the past during times of high copper prices, it is currently hard to insure one of those homes. If you DO have aluminum wire inside your walls you should be checking the torque (but don't over tighten) of every connection at six month intervals... forever...
No, you retrofit it with copper ENDS (which attach with conductive epoxy) which don't have this problem. Guess what? We no longer use wires poked into holes in automotive applications anyway; all connectors are terminated somehow.
Re:What about copper? (Score:4, Informative)
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His faculty page [technion.ac.il]
Stuff his group has done regarding copper [technion.ac.il]
Although it looks like he has done stuff to do with corrosion, most of this is over my head... go go Physics Nerds!
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Just use gold instead!
But really, we have a lot of otherwise useful metals being punted around in the form of money at the moment. We should use digital money and put the metal stuff to better use.
Re:What about copper? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's so little gold in the entire world that even if we spun all of it unto wires the contribution would be negligible.
Re:What about copper? (Score:5, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
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Aluminum is the third most abundent element on the planet and makes up 8% of the earth's crust, which is enough to ensure that we will never run out of the metal for electrical or structural uses.
We just need an ample supply of energy in order to refine it.
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Re:What about copper? (Score:5, Interesting)
For Uranium isotope separation, they needed some large electromagnets. Unfortunately, WW2 was weighing rather heavily on the copper supply. Instead, they borrowed 13,000 tons of silver from the treasury.
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Just use iron. It's not like the wiring is all that long.
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There's also a lot more to worry about than electrical conductivity. You're passing a DC current through this which means you will have oxidation where this metal meets other metals if you aren't very careful.
This is why aluminum wiring in houses is a problem. The aluminum wiring is fine by itself, but if you try to use copper in the same house then you'll end up starting a fire in short order. In houses that DO have both Al and Cu in the walls, electrici
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This is why aluminum wiring in houses is a problem. The aluminum wiring is fine by itself, but if you try to use copper in the same house then you'll end up starting a fire in short order. In houses that DO have both Al and Cu in the walls, electricians have to install special junctions that allow the two to meet without literally corroding each other.
Yeah, but the "special junction" is a copper wire with a butt connector filled with conductive epoxy and surrounded by heat shrink tubing. My mom has them installed in her 1970s double-wide, which of course has Aluminum wiring. You stick it on and heat it up and you're done. It would make more sense to go to 48VDC so that what metal the wire is made of matters less from every standpoint BUT corrosion, and then use stainless steel. Unlike Aluminum, you can reasonably solder it, provided you solder more stain
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And steel rusts like a bitch in training.
We could use stainless steel, but that would be more expensive than pure copper, I think.
Re:What about copper? (Score:4, Informative)
These alloys were cheaper if they are so easily obtainable, but I think there's a reason behind the price of stainless steel, which could be simple scarcity or high production costs.
A cursory glance at Wiki Grandma tells me that stainless steel requires a chromium content of 10 percent or more. And of course we have a singular dominant reserve: chromium is mined primarily in South Africa, harboring half the world's mineable reserves.
Not only that, but stainless steel is an even worse conductor than plain vanilla steel, having a resistance that is more than 30 times higher.
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So when you're trying to get your toast out of the toaster, use a stainless steel knife rather than a silver one.
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No?
I grew up a few hundred miles from a mine that shut down because other mines were more economical. As the price goes up, that sort of mine can start operating again (if they can convince people in the area to put up with the environmental impact).
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Is'nt the world reserve of copper basically mined out?
According to Wikipedia, "total amount of copper on Earth is vast (around 1014 tons just in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, or about 5 million years worth at the current rate of extraction)". Of course only small fraction of this is available using _today's_ technology.
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It's 10^14 tons. That's more like it!
Tom...
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Lithium in mineable concentration is pretty rare as it is and highly priced because of Lithium-Ion batteries - that's why everyone is searching for another battery type in the first place.
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Paper at http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1388248109003889 [elsevier.com] The capacity of the prototypes was very small, but they are hoping to acchieve 10 Ah/g.
So how much is that in potato batteries?
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Specific Ampere hours don't tell much about the energy content, which is the crucial value in battery development.
The paper talks about a 1-1.2V battery, so we could assume it gets about 1 Wh/g or 1kWh/kg. 1 kWh = 3.6MJ, so this battery could reach about 3-4MJ/kg.
Gasoline or diesel are in the range of 40-50 MJ/kg, but the engine and ancilliaries are much heavier than a simple electric motor. This electric motor has a much higher torque than four-stroke gasoline engines and can sustain short bursts of much h
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So you argue that National Semiconductor is a CIA front (having "National" in its name and being American)? American Express was founded in 1850 but the olderst three-letter agency I can think of, the FBI, is half a century younger. Who does AmEx work for?
Also, this battery is interesting but hardly going to revolutionize the automotive world. From the specs they have released it sounds more like a replaceme
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So we have "hey, let's use a company with a name that will immediately put all the conspiracy theorists on high alert to release research data about a somewhat nice but not very exciting new battery technology so they will let us get away with whatever we want". Sorry, but either the Israelis are complete idiots or this is not a scheme to somehow keep us from scrutinizing them.
You give the population of the Earth, (and certainly the internet), far too much credit, IMHO.
And I notice you had a hard time comin
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As much as I despise how Israel behaves as a nation, do not mistake the actions of it's government for that of it's scientists.
I'm sure the guy working on batteries is just a guy working on batteries, and more power to him. But it's the Israeli self-promotion machine using him which I am pointing out here.
Scientists have a long history of tunnel vision. I'm sure the guys making the atom bomb were fine people as well, but that doesn't mean politics aren't always present.
For one, I hope this battery works o
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So next time, before you write crap, make sure to clean your ass beforehand, ya stupid jerk!
Now buzz off before I scrape your ass from the sky.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Touched one of those nerves they hard-wired into you as a kid, did I? Maybe you should build a wall around me and tear up all my olive trees?
Denial when reality is right there saying the opposite. Cognitive dissonance will in fact tear your brain in half. Either that, or your soul. If you still have one.
-FL