How Argonne National Lab Will Make Electric Cars Cheaper 143
ashshy writes Argonne National Lab is leading the charge on next-generation battery research. In an interview with The Motley Fool, Argonne spokesman Jeff Chamberlain explains how new lithium ion chemistries will drive down the cost of electric cars over the next few years. "The advent of lithium ion has truly enabled transportation uses," Chamberlain said. "Because if you remember your freshman chemistry, you think of the periodic table -- lithium is in the upper left-hand corner of the periodic table. Only hydrogen and helium are lighter on an atomic basis."
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That's right, it's called nullithium and its nucleus contains zero protons.
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It's zero protons held together with magnets.
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I think you mean "fucking magnets" - how do they work?
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I don't know what the parent was thinking but what if there ended up being two elements with the same number if protons but different phisical properties due to some yet to be discovered reason.
How would something like that be treated? I mean for instance, a noble gas which is solid at room temperature and becomed a superconductor at the same time. Lets run with the fucking magnets and say something with the neutron bond causes the different behavior.
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Since we define elements by the number of protons, that would be basically impossible.
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An interesting thing to think about is what would happen if we were able to exchange all the electrons with another particle that had negative charge. The chemical properties of a material are actually due to how electrons interact with each other. There are "muonic atoms" that have nuclei of muons instead of protons, but the electrons are still the same and the atom behaves similarly to it's protonic counterpart. I'm guessing that if there is another fermion with a negative charge, it would behave similarl
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I also just realized I got some points wrong about the muon, since it too is a lepton. Building a nucleus of more than 1 muon would be problematic. The main point holds though. There are subatomic particles that contain charge that might be used to build "atoms". However, I don't know if there are any stable configurations of them.
(Also, I posted this by mistake under someone else's message. Adding this to get it passed the "exact comment already posted" filter.)
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Re: Yeah, so? (Score:1)
There are positively charged muons or antimuons. They do capture electrons. However, as I stated in my correction, having more than one as the nucleus would be problematic.
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Re: Yeah, so? (Score:1)
And again here.... There are positively charged muons.
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I don't know what the parent was thinking but what if there ended up being two elements with the same number if protons but different phisical properties due to some yet to be discovered reason.
Well, we already have a word for atoms with the same number of protons but differences in some other property: isotope. Whether a difference in something other than number of neutrons would use the term "isotope" or some other new term is a decision that will have to be made if and when the discovery is made.
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What's it like, flunking high school physics?
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There might be another lighter element between lithium and hydrogen that we don't know about.
Lithium
Number of Protons/Electrons: 3
Number of Neutrons: 4
Hydrogen
Number of Protons/Electrons: 1
Number of Neutrons: 0
You are correct, there are quite a few possibilities for elements in between (whatever that really means), Many of those we call those Ions, but some are such unstable configurations (if they can exist at all) that as far as we are concerned, they don't really exist
Some of those possible combinations we refer to as Helium (or its Ions)
Welcome to 9th grade Chemistry.
Re: Yeah, so? (Score:2)
Isotopes are not considered chemically different from each other as they only differ in neutrons . As understood, the neutrons seem to help hold the atom together. It a
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I also just realized I got some points wrong about the muon, since it too is a lepton. Building a nucleus of more than 1 muon would be problematic. The main point holds though. There are subatomic particles that contain charge that might be used to build "atoms". However, I don't know if there are any stable configurations of them.
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Disregard. I posted this under the wrong post.
Re:Yeah, so? (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean? An African or European proton?
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Oh, c'mon, everyone knows that the ultimate power source will be an element with pi protons, e neutrons & 3i electrons
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Hmm, that was typed as sq rt 2 x i electrons but Slashdot made it a 3.
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I liked the "Thomas Covenant" series, too.
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Did you read all of them? I enjoyed them far more than I ever did any of the Dune books but I have mixed feelings about the way he ended it.
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I read all of the original six when I was in junior high/high school. I have not read the final 4. Would you suggest I give them a go?
As for the Dune series, I liked the first book, but they went downhill fast after that. The final one(s) was/were nearly incomprehensible. The only funny thing I got from them is that with Duncan Idaho being a ghola, everyone could have their "own private Idaho".
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Ah, I'm not sure.
Some of it is fascinating but a lot of it smacks of "deus ex machina". And I don't like that he incorporated time travel although one of the ways that it was done was interesting. If the 2 Chronicles trilogies are all that you've read of his work, I'd sooner recommend his Gap series, which is sci-fi, not fantasy, the 2 Mordant books or even his short stories collection Daughter of Regals, which includes a story he deleted from the Illearth War called Gilden-fire that features the Bloodguard
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So you do not think there could ever be anything discovered that has the same amount of protons but completely different properties due to some yet unknown reason? Is it that everything in this area of science has already been discovered, the concenssus is in and we should ignore it all except for how we use what we already know?
I think this was the case once before when some idiot tried to claim there was some special theory of reletivity or something nuty like that. Its a good thing nobody took him seriou
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...but completely different properties ...
Properties that as yet we have not encountered, have no way to experience, or measure.....possible, sure. But then if they did, this would introduce a different classification system. So rather than refer to these things as Elements we might call them Smelements...........
Hmmm, I think you're on to something here.
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The universe is big- something on a quantum level could possible make this happen. A proton is not the smallest part of an element. If this was to happen, it is possible it could be introduced via comet and we would have a way to encounter, experience, and measure- although it msy take time to understand.
Like i said, we thought we knew everything about physics once then it was turned upside down by Einstein. I do see how we would classify it differrently but i doubt anything would be renamed.
Economic risk (Score:2, Flamebait)
Some new game changing battery/supercapacitor breakthrough might be just around the corner. If so, all that investment in the battery megafactory could get wiped out. Ditto with investing in lithium mining.
So the megafactory might be still happily minting money 25 years from now, or it might be nearly worthless 5 years from now. Presumably this means we'll be paying a risk premium on lithium and lithium batteries. It seems to me that it would be smart for Tesla to be investing in the very technologies that
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Re:Economic risk (Score:5, Informative)
Some new game changing battery/supercapacitor breakthrough might be just around the corner. If so, all that investment in the battery megafactory could get wiped out. Ditto with investing in lithium mining.
It's not much of a risk. Every single battery chemistry has been played with, at one time or another. And by that I mean rigorously and exhaustively scientifically investigated. In consequence, not only has everything been tried, but we now know what works and why it works. That's why it's science, and not merely engineering.
Lithium will always remain a preferential element because it's the element that is the strongest reducing agent in the periodic table, short of hydrogen, which is too hard to hold on to. The stronger the reducing agent, the higher the voltage a cell can develop and the better a battery can be. At the other end, you want a strong oxidizing agent. Fluorine would be ideal, if it wasn't such a viciously strong oxidizing agent that it eats your whole battery, not just the electrons you want it to. Presumably this situation is what the spokesdroid was referring to, without explaining what the hell he was talking about.
Lithium is the cathode of choice since it's a metal that can be conveniently nailed down while still possessing a very good electrode potential. As an ion, it's nicely compact, being the lightest of metals, so it migrates through a battery most conveniently. What to pair it with is a little more complicated, and the subject of much research. This is where manganese, cobalt, and carbon come in. Various combinations of those elements and their immediate neighbors on the periodic table are used to make anodes. Some work better than others. Some may work better yet depending on how they're assembled.
Rest assured, whatever develops in terms of battery assembly, lithium will remain the cathode, and much of the macroscopic assembly will be the same or close enough to the same that the gigafactory will always be busy. The assembly and packaging to be done is fairly common, regardless of chemistry.
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Nicely written post, but you don't know what you're talking about.
Hydrogen is not the strongest reducing agent amount the stable elements. If you go by electronegativity it is cesium [thecatalyst.org]. Cesium is rather heavy, though.
Lithium would make a very good cathode (if we could just control the dendrites), but it's not what lithium-ion batteries use. Transition metal compounds are far from ideal for cathodes, but they have the advantage that we can make them work pretty well.
Lithium-sulfur is potentially the next ba
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Calcium-ion looks like it has potential. -3.8V E-sub0.
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http://www.greencarcongress.com/2014/07/20140725-kyoto.html [greencarcongress.com]
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This means the half reaction is very exotic and Ca+ is not stable at all.
The late Prof. Van Vaeck told me he observed Ca+ (at m/z 20) in dynamic SIMS but since transmission times of secondary ions to the detector are in the order of nanoseconds this might well be possible.
E0 of Ca2+ + 2e- = Ca is -2.869 V (compared to standard hydrogen cell).
Pretty decent still but... earth alka
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The lithium in a modern battery is not aqueous, which is the default in your table. What the result would be in a modern electrolyte, I don't know.
where are we headed 5, 10, 15 yrs from now? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think electric cars are the future. Some will debate me on that, but I'm not interested in that debate.
Where are we likely to be in 15 yrs? 2x current capacity? 4x current capacity? 10x current capacity? Where are the growing pains?
How much better/cheaper can lithium ion batteries get? What will they be replaced with? What's the end game?
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Lithium-ion chemistry will go on for another 5 to 10 years according to Tesla, CTO. Elon Musk when asked if they could get a costs down to $100 a KwH within 10 years, he responded that he would be very disappointed if Tesla didn't. At $100 a KwH electric cars cost the same as gasoline powered cars. Tesla's current kWh cost is less than $300 currently according to the economist. My very wild guess would be in 10 years batteries will cost $50 a killowatt.
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I've heard this discussed before, and I can see a use case for it, but it seems like there are more efficient means to storing energy. Mechanical compression of gas, heating of water, kinetic motion like a flywheel, compressing a spring, etc. OTOH, the cars themselves can function as large scale grid storage, once they have sufficient excess range.
re: where are we headed 5, 10, 15 yrs from now? (Score:1)
The BMW i3 BEV uses Samsung Lithium batteries.
Interesting technology roadmap as summarized:
2013 / Convention LIB / NCM / 130Wh/kg / EV range 160 km
2016 / Advanced LIB / New NCM / 130Wh/kg / EV range 240 km
2019 / Innovative LIB / NCM / 250Wh/kg / EV range 300 km
2020+ / Post LIB / Li-Air Fuel Cell / GT 300Wh/kg / EV range GT 300 km
http://www.samsungsdi.com/automotive-battery/battery-cells
Hence your 2014 BEV with 160km range, when it needs a battery refresh post 2020, will travel 300km for same weight. So expe
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I have one in my garage too. But the present is still gas powered cars.
oh sure! (Score:2)
They'll make electric cars dramatically cheaper just like they brought us fusion reactors!
I'll believe it.... (Score:2)
Re:I'll believe it.... (Score:4, Insightful)
... when I can buy an all-electric car that is just as sexy and just as performant as the Tesla Model S for under about $45k in today's dollars.
By the time they do that driving a car manually will be illegal and you might not even own a car - just call one for each trip.
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You do know that the Model S right now, is the cheapest car in it's class right ?
Or do you think "floor price" is the only price that comes into calculating the price of a car. Nearly all cars have higher maintenance costs over their lifetime than the floor-price, the second-hand price is a huge factor (the more value lost, the worst it works out when you want to upgrade) and of course the fuel cost.
Factor all those in and the model S is cheaper than any other car in the luxury sedan class - and offers out-
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The main thing that the Tesla model S offers over any other electric vehicle is its range. Over much less expensive electric vehicles, the main things are that it has a respectable size, and that it doesn't look like a piece of shit *cough, prius, leaf*. However, the *ONLY* thing that it would offer me over absolutely any other kind of brand new car that I could go out buy for roughly half that price is that it is electric.
In other words, although I don't dispute that the Tesla model S is a luxury auto
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So you want a non-luxury electric car and you think that's unlikely ?
Except Tesla has already announced plans for one.
The Model-S just isn't the right one to look at.
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A smaller car, with less range.
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What a terrible article.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The weight of lithium is pretty irrelevant. There are no currently existing battery technologies where Li is more than 10% of the total weight of the battery, and standard battery types are significantly below that. If the active ion weight were the prime factor, there would be more interest in beryllium batteries (just 30% more weight vs. twice the charge per ion).
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The weight of lithium is pretty irrelevant. There are no currently existing battery technologies where Li is more than 10% of the total weight of the battery, and standard battery types are significantly below that.
He was probably referring to the elemental weight, not the weight used.
Slashvertisement for Tesla (Score:3)
Tesla Motors, Inc. Is Itching for More and Better Batteries by: Anders Bylund
And then at the very bottom of the article:
Anders Bylund owns shares of Tesla Motors. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors and Tesla Motors. The Motley Fool owns shares of Tesla Motors. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days.
God I hate these ad pieces disguised as news.
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That's just a standard disclaimer. Who doesn't own shares of Tesla Motors? The Motley Fool probably owns some shares of almost every company they'd report on. That doesn't make it an ad.
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Founded in 1993 in Alexandria, Va., by brothers David and Tom Gardner, The Motley Fool is a multimedia financial-services company dedicated to building the world's greatest investment community.
And these guys put up an article about the bright future of the technology of a company they hold stock in. Don't you see that as a bit of a conflict of interest? Of course they're not terribly motivated to mention the potential downsides and limitations of the technology. From where they're standing, it's all peaches and roses!
This isn't news for nerds, it's a promotional piece for a product (Tesla stock).
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Motley Fool gets points for being upfront and disclosing their investments, so you can judge for yourself. A lot of news places don't do that.
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Motley Fool gets points for being upfront and disclosing their investments, so you can judge for yourself. A lot of news places don't do that.
Agree there, I don't like it when journalists take positions without declaring it and trying to put up an objective pretense.
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I sure as hell don't. I'm a fan of Tesla's cars, but their financials are completely upside-down. They're practically a Ponzi scheme that makes cars on the side.
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They're not advertising pieces. Motley Fool is a financial advice site, and thus all their articles contain the appropriate disclaimers.
They are a bit nutty.... (Score:3)
The battery pack is not the bulk of the price of an electric car. It's all the other bits.
So it is not going to drive down the price, not by any reasonable amount.
What is needed is a single company making the motors and standardization. If the Govt demanded that all cars follow a standard motor design then suddenly costs will drop. Ford,GM,Toyota,Honda are NOT going to standardize unless forced to. And prices will not drop until there is a standard that is interchangeable.
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You're wrong there. The VW Up exists as both a pure electric and pure gasoline version. The difference in price? 10,000€
That's the price for the battery. In the case of the Up it almost doubles the price (from 12,000€ to 22,000€). And "all the other bits" being expensive? Seriously?
With the switch to pure electric you just god rid of the following: The alternator which provides the energy for all the gizmos in a normal gasoline car. And, more importantly, the transmission, one of the most com
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The battery pack is not the bulk of the price of an electric car.
Yes it is.
Lithium shortage (Score:2)
Won't we run into some kind of lithium shortage if the demand for li-ion batteries raises ?
Or at least a increase in raw material price offsetting the decrease in manufacturing costs.
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Your second question suggests a basic understanding of supply-demand. Good.
As the demand for lithium increases, the price WILL go up in the short-term, which will stimulate inves
so, moving left, the Helium-Cycle Battery? (Score:2)
"Hell, Dr. Fred, if we put enough energy into the damn stable thing, just think how big an instantaneous charge we can drain out!"
where's the Kickstarter link?
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...which is why we put them in self-driving cars that communicate with each other to avoid accidents.
Re:Fire (Score:5, Informative)
So does Sodium. But do you notice how table salt doesn't burn in water?
There's no lithium metal in lithium /ion/ cells. The whole lithium catching on fire thing is to do with them having a rather volatile solvent as part of the electrolyte (something similar to ether).
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Stop ruining his outburst with science.
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I missed that it was lithium *ion* cells.
-- hendrik
Re:Fire (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA
It mentions they are trying to replace the lithium ion anode with "pure lithium" - i.e. lithium metal.
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Yes, so it does. I stand recorrected.
-- hendrik
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So does Sodium. But do you notice how table salt doesn't burn in water?
There's no lithium metal in lithium /ion/ cells. The whole lithium catching on fire thing is to do with them having a rather volatile solvent as part of the electrolyte (something similar to ether).
That's not necessarily true. When lithium batteries are charged at a low temperature, lithium metal plates the anode. This could certainly be a problem for electric cars, as they may not be in a warm garage as they are charging.
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Elemental lithium does, yes.
Lithium compounds in batteries, not so much.
Re:Fire (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nuh uh! There are also compressed air cars - they only explosively decompress upon tank failure! ;)
At least with batteries, flammability or explosiveness aren't a fundamental requirement of how you're trying to propel the vehicle, just an unfortunate side effect of some variants of the technology (even not all types of li-ions are flammable). There's lots of people who assume that flammability is a consequence of electrical energy density, but that's just not the case. The actual charge/discharge lithium ba
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I propose that we go back to foot-powered automobiles as shown in that documentary called The Flintstones. Bonus: We'll save energy by getting all sorts of trained animals to do things for us instead of powering machines to do them.
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He was making the point that lithium is not heavy. Other than that, it's hard to know what else he was trying to say, because the article doesn't give much context.
Of course, it's also possible that since he's just a spokesman, he doesn't have much else to say.
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He was making the point that lithium is not heavy. Other than that, it's hard to know what else he was trying to say, because the article doesn't give much context.
I know it's not XKCD, but there's relevant SMBC [smbc-comics.com] and PHD [phdcomics.com] comics.
Roughly speaking, outside of very dedicated science reporting channels by the time you go from the scientist's representative trying to dumb it down, to the reporter trying to dumb it down, to the editor doing it yet again, accuracy sucks.
Maybe they're trying for a hydrogen battery?
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Maybe they're trying for a hydrogen battery?
lol because hydrogen is lighter than lithium?
If you read the article, it does at least make clear what they are trying for. Their first priority is to make batteries cheaper (the range is already good enough to sell a lot, they feel, if the price goes down). Their second priority is to increase range, and they have some ideas that could increase range 400%, but they are not ready for production yet (they have problems like short battery life or whatever). Those are the things I could gather from the artic
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I did read the article, though not before my comment. In it was really nothing new. We've known for ages that with the development of the lithium ion battery that the only thing stopping EVs from being the obvious choice 90% of the time was the cost of the energy storage. From my research, if the giga-factory does succeed at cutting the cost of LiIon in half it's going to be a real game changer, and not just for the EV world.
Why? Last time I checked LiIon was down to below double that of Lead-Acid. Tha
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I did read the article, though not before my comment. In it was really nothing new.
Oh sorry about that, I should have pointed that out; I forgot to mention that the article isn't actually worth reading lol
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> That $100 car battery? A lithium-ion equivalent that's 1/10th the weight for the same
> capacity and probably even more cold cranking amps might be $80.
Sheesh. Why not also demand it be made out of unicorn tails and magic dust?
Li-ion is 1/3rd the weight. 1/3rd, not 1/10th. It doesn't have to be any lighter.
Li-ion also has less *power*. Be sure you understand the difference between *power* and *energy*. A li-ion battery will have *less* cranking amps, not more.
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Li-ion is 1/3rd the weight. 1/3rd, not 1/10th. It doesn't have to be any lighter.
Did you factor in that you need at least 50% more amp-hours to avoid deep discharging the lead-acid battery because, as walshy007 pointed out, ones designed for cranking over an engine don't like being deeply discharged?
I will admit to rounding and making a bit of a WAG though - 1/7th would have been closer. Oh, and the battery wouldn't actually be cheaper, but it'd last longer.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up that a liIon will stop working at around -25C instead of -40C. Though there are chemistries that
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> I know it's not XKCD, but there's relevant SMBC [smbc-comics.com] and PHD [phdcomics.com] comics.
Minor complaint with the second: we know from studies that the problem is not the university PR departments, but the researchers themselves.
Light but reactive element = high energy density (Score:2)
"lithium is in the upper left-hand corner of the periodic table. Only hydrogen and helium are lighter on an atomic basis."
I'm wondering if this is a non sequitur for electric batteries.
Not a non sequitur at all.
An important factor for batteries is energy density: How much energy is stored per unit mass. This is particularly important for electric cars: The higher the energy density, the less mass you havce to haul around for a given amount of "fuel", which means the less "fuel" is spent hauling
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Lithium is a metal.
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Lithium is a metal.
Oops. Right. Sorry.
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It is a non-sequiteur. The energy density of a li-ion battery doesn't even approach the theoretical maximum storage for the element lithium shifting between ionization states. That's hardly the only way this article is terrible, mind you. My head hurt every time they said the word "efficiency", it's like they were using it to mean everything possible except for actual efficiency. And if I read it right - who knows, the article is such a total mess - the researcher isn't talking about reducing battery cost,
Re: Interesting news tibits (Score:2, Funny)
To be fair he wanted to shoot someone in the face while bird hunting, but apparently Martha's Vineyard doesn't have the same easy attitude about misuse of firearms that Wyoming does.
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Why post this anonymous? Now it won't be +5Funny.