Power Pioneer Invents New Battery That's 90% Cheaper Than Lithium-Ion (bloomberg.com) 138
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lithium-ion batteries play a central role in the world of technology, powering everything from smartphones to smart cars, and one of the people who helped commercialize them says he has a way to cut mass production costs by 90% and significantly improve their safety. Hideaki Horie, formerly of Nissan Motor Co., founded Tokyo-based APB Corp. in 2018 to make "all-polymer batteries" -- hence the company name. The making of a cell, every battery's basic unit, is a complicated process requiring cleanroom conditions -- with airlocks to control moisture, constant air filtering and exacting precision to prevent contamination of highly reactive materials. The setup can be so expensive that a handful of top players like South Korea's LG Chem Ltd., China's CATL and Japan's Panasonic Corp. spend billions of dollars to build a suitable factory.
Horie's innovation is to replace the battery's basic components -- metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes -- with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as "buttering toast." It allows for 10-meter-long battery sheets that can be stacked on top of each other "like seat cushions" to increase capacity, he said. Importantly, the resin-based batteries are also resistant to catching fire when punctured. In March, APB raised $74 million, which is tiny by the wider industry's standards but will be enough to fully equip one factory for mass production slated to start next year. Horie estimates the funds will get his plant in central Japan to 1 gigawatt-hour capacity by 2023.
Horie's innovation is to replace the battery's basic components -- metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes -- with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as "buttering toast." It allows for 10-meter-long battery sheets that can be stacked on top of each other "like seat cushions" to increase capacity, he said. Importantly, the resin-based batteries are also resistant to catching fire when punctured. In March, APB raised $74 million, which is tiny by the wider industry's standards but will be enough to fully equip one factory for mass production slated to start next year. Horie estimates the funds will get his plant in central Japan to 1 gigawatt-hour capacity by 2023.
As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I'm holding it in my hand.
Re:As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts... (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. I keep reading about giant breakthroughs of efficiency or costs in batteries and solar panels, but they never materialize as real products.
One of these days fusion, flying cars, powerful cheap batteries, and my missing sock pairs will all show up at the same time and we can all dance around and sing happy futuristic songs in silver jumpsuits with paired socks.
They do make it into products (Score:5, Interesting)
It is just that by the time the breakthrough makes it through the process of adapting it for production, it becomes a little less magical, and it is improving on the results of other magical breakthroughs that entered production in the meantime.
The battery in your phone, that tiny battery that keeps it going all day, is an amazing tech. And the batteries have become so cheap that they are sitting in all sorts of throwaway products. They are even making disposable e-cigs, single use, with a rechargeable LiPo cell in them - because LiPo cells have become so cheap that they can't make a cheaper primary cell.
It's madness, and it is because of many of those amazing new battery breakthroughs, all implemented in the device in your hand.
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Are LiPos that avaialble to the end user? I would love to replace some of my AA batteries with LiPo cells. Or otherwise build little things like a Raspberry Pi UPS.
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Check out either alibab or adafruit. Both carry lipo cells in a variety of shapes and sizes.
There are others too, not sure if mouser carries them or not.
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Also note that quality control can be extremely spotty on aliexpress and similar sites, and that poorly made lithium batteries have a tendency to over-discharge and break, or spontaneously burst into flame.
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Re:They do make it into products (Score:5, Informative)
You can't really just drop a 3.6 volt LiPo or Li-ion battery into a device or application designed for a 1.5 volt (or multiples thereof) alkaline battery without damaging the battery or the device being powered. However, you can use a DC to DC converter. Just keep the Li batteries in their specified operating voltage, generally between 3.2 and 4.2 volts, and they'll have a nice long life.
I've used a block of Li-Ion 18650's with a DC to DC converter to power Raspberry Pi for years. Here are a couple that might work for you:
https://www.amazon.com/DROK-Co... [amazon.com]
https://www.amazon.com/DROK-Ad... [amazon.com]
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Also, don't charge them at low temperatures, or if you do, strictly limit the rate. Graphite intercalation rates at low temperatures are terrible.
Re: They do make it into products (Score:3, Informative)
There are interesting 1.5V and 9V batteries in AAA and other formats which have a lithium cell and a regulator/charger circuit inside and an USB micro port for charging. Maybe they don't work for all applications, but certainly fine for flashlights etc.
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They're easily available online. For some reason, not so much in brick and mortar places you might normally buy batteries.
You'll have to modify your AA powered devices for them. You can get a form factor very close to AA, but the voltage is all wrong.
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It's not that simple. A regular AA battery is 1.5v while the same physically sized lithium is 4.2v fully charged and 2.8 when "dead". You'll need some management circuit to cutoff the voltage when it gets too low or you risk damaging the batter. LiPo packs usually have some circuitry built in.
Re:They do make it into products (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth noting that there is no inherent relationship between battery size and voltage (ignoring the fact that batteries are typically made in standard sizes and capacities). Instead there's a native voltage for a battery *cell* (one cathode-electrolyte-anode "sandwich", often contsructed a long narrow strip rolled up into a cylinder) based on the chemistry being used. For alkaline batteries (AA's etc) that's in the range of 1.5 to 1.65 volts when unloaded depending on component purity, while LiPo is 4.2V.
Since the voltage is determined by the chemistry, a battery's (fully-charged) voltage can only be an integer multiple of the cell voltage, no matter how large or small it is. The battery voltage is a function of how many cells it contains - when making a battery twice as large you have two options - you can make a bigger "sandwich" so that you have twice the stored amp-hours at the same voltage (electrically equivalent to connecting two cells in parallel) , or you can make a "Big Mac" stacked sandwich so that you have the same stored amp-hours with twice the voltage (equivalent to connecting two cells in series).
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LiPo 18650 cells are not necessarily a drop in replacements for AA, as they are a different voltage.
Also, circuitry that uses a AA/AAA battery is designed to drain battery until it is dead, which would kill a Li cell permanently.
You can get more expensive batteries with a cut off circuit built in, or better, a separate battery management system that can even deal with charging. There are plenty of tutorials on how to integrate them safely.
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Especially because "cost" has to be balanced with physical size, physical weight, expense, and durability for recharging.
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Single use batteries should be banned except for situations where there is a good technical reason for using them. Also ban non-replaceable batteries.
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One of these days fusion, flying cars, powerful cheap batteries, and my missing sock pairs will all show up at the same time and we can all dance around and sing happy futuristic songs in silver jumpsuits with paired socks.
Have you used a modern battery?
Those things are amazing.
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They're limited by the energy stored in the chemistry. They can only approach using it all efficiently and inexpensively and safely, but you can run thermodynamic and chemical questions about the available energy to onderstand the boundaries.
Re:As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts... (Score:5, Insightful)
A breakthrough in a lab doesn't necessarily mean a new or improved product in your hand. What works on a one-off basis might not scale, or may be too costly to manufacture. Some of them will turn out to be dead ends, others are just stepping stones along the way to a better technology.
But if you look at your phone you can see the result of hundreds of these 'breakthrough' technologies. I'm thinking of
* OLED displays
* Long life Li-ion batteries
* Folded antennae
* Processors and RAM with 10nm geometry
* Stackable silicon modules to build a SOC
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Indeed. I keep reading about giant breakthroughs of efficiency or costs in batteries and solar panels, but they never materialize as real products.
Except of course when they do, like how a modern solar panel is orders of magnitude more efficient than they were 20 years ago, or how a modern LIon battery doesn't implode after 50 uses, or how my wafer thin phone has more battery capacity than a giant brick of a battery that used to be in laptops of years gone by despite the label saying Lithium Ion on both of them.
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So, modern solar panels are nearly 100% efficient, and 20-year-old solar panels were less than 1% efficient?
I suspect that you don't know what "orders of magnitude" means (hint: ONE order of magnitude is a factor of 10)...
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I saw that too but charitably interpreted it as increased efficiency of produced power per US fiat dollar ration unit token invested :-)
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You're holding one in your hand right now (Score:3)
You probably are holding an amazing new battery in your hand right now.
I have an older battery for my cordless drill that's 3000 mAh. I'm measuring it now and it's 5in x 4in x 2 in. Ot weighs about a pound. It's similar to this one:
https://batteries.factoryoutle... [factoryoutletstore.com]
My phone also has a 3000 mAh battery in it. The newer battery with the same capacity is about 0.1in x 2.5 x 1.5 and weighs 80 grams.
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/A... [ifixit.com]
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Yeah, I *really* wish battery capacity was normally listed in Wh instead of Ah. Practically everything in the electronics world lists their power consumption (or supply) in terms of power (aka Watts). Having batteries use a different convention for energy storage makes comparing the two inconvenient at best, and completely impossible without at least a little basic knowledge of electricity (or a lot of scouring through the fine print on labels)
The cynic in me wonders if that inconvenience isn't a form of
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I'm holding out for 3d holigraphic storage!
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Ah, but if the universe is really a hologram on the surface of a singularity, isn't *all* storage holographic storage?
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In all seriousness, look at the improvements over time. Most of the general promises have been made good. Maybe 3 different companies at the same time claimed 30% reductions and we didn't get all 3, because they were pretty much all the same, or some headline catching improvements were trade-offs, but if you look at price, capacity, longevity, and sustainabili
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Indeed. I keep reading about giant breakthroughs of efficiency or costs in batteries and solar panels, but they never materialize as real products.
One of these days fusion, flying cars, powerful cheap batteries, and my missing sock pairs will all show up at the same time and we can all dance around and sing happy futuristic songs in silver jumpsuits with paired socks.
I think what happens is that every time there's a new battery tech announced, Li-Ion and Li-Po just get cheaper instead.
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The "tremendous progress" tends to be in quite small increments. Can you think of an genuinely ground-breaking advance in renewable technologies since phtoto-electric cells were invented in 1883?
Re:As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts... (Score:5, Informative)
And even when there is a really ground-breaking advance, it's not birthed at maturity; it takes time to take over the market.
Li-ion really was a groundbreaking advance over NiMH. It's energy dense and power dense and highly efficient and has good cycle life and is cheaper per kW and per kWh. Such a clever approach, too - make use of intercalation so that ions repeatedly slot into a fixed scaffolding. But early li-ions were expensive, nowhere near today's capabilities, and suffered from poor cycle lives and shelf lives (note that you can also get li-ions today that also have short lifespans, but that's generally as part of a tradeoff for maxing out certain other properties, such as energy density or minimizing costs; it's not fundamental to the general li-ion family of chemistries).
I think where we're headed in terms of near-term battery advancements first off is powder binders rather than solvent-based ones. It seems to be maturing rapidly, it seems to have strong benefits for both cell quality (cycle life, energy density, etc) and manufacturing cost... I expect this to take over over the next few years.
Monocrystaline cathode powders rather than polycrystaline appear to be the next big thing there. More storage, less degradation, greater stability. Still seem to be stuck with primarily-nickel mixed metal oxides however if you want good energy density alongside good cycle life. Cobalt's fraction has significantly decreased; hopefully it's on it's way out, or at least down to low enough that you can just get it as a nickel impurity.
I don't think we're very far off from metallic lithium anodes, though I'm not sure it's as near-term as the above two. But it's seeming increasingly clear that you don't need solid state to achieve it. This would be a great leap forward in energy density, and also improve power density even more.
Current collector foil fractions decrease proportional to electrode thickness, so that's a key aspect to focus on (such as via powder binders) but a design where current flow paths become vertical rather than spiraling outward could reduce internal cell resistance and allow for thinner foils (down to your tensile strength limits).
Alternative chemistries.... lithium sulfur is already on the market, but niche uses due to its limitations... and while it does keep improving, I don't see it moving beyond niche anytime soon. But rapid improvements on it could be a nice surprise. Lithium air is even further from mature, although it would be amazing. Best results so far seem to be if you use higher temperatures (~150C) to shift the thermodynamic optimums, which is kind of annoying. There's a ton of others, including unusual cathode materials, use of other monovalent ions (namely sodium) or even polyvalent ions instead of lithium, etc - but nothing particularly mature.
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I have to say, I like Jack Rickard's description of li-ion batteries as being "magic rocks". Conceptually, they're almost mind-bogglingly simple. You have mixed metal oxides on one side (e.g., a rock), graphite on the other (a different rock), you soak them in liquid, and the act of charging / discharging them is just encouraging lithium ions to slot between the gaps in the chemical structure on one side or the other.
But there's so much nuance at the small scale....
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Lithium batteries are up there, but the last truly ground breaking discovery was the semiconductor. Everything today is incremental improvements on that basic design.
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And the sum total (or, in practice, the compounding total) of all those increments is, in fact, "tremendous". People have been spoiled by Moore's Law, and think anything less than dizzying exponential growth is a failure.
For instance: since its introduction in the 1990s, capacity-per-volume has increased 2.5-3.0x. On its face, that's pretty good, considering that the fundamental chemistry involved. I could not find what the cost-per-c
Re: As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts.. (Score:2)
Batteries have improved a lot. There has been constant evolution. The results are visible.
Solar? Mmm... which solar? Not so much at the consumer level.
Re: As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts.. (Score:5, Informative)
Solar? Mmm... which solar? Not so much at the consumer level.
I have two batches of solar panels on my roof. One set of 4 panels was installed around 2013, one set of 7 panels was installed last year. Those 7 panels produce 15% more power (320Wp per panel vs 275Wp at the same size) and they cost me LESS than the first four.
So, really, in just 6 years, consumer-level solar power has roughly doubled in power-per-euro. I'd call that a pretty huge leap.
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So, really, in just 6 years, consumer-level solar power has roughly doubled in power-per-euro. I'd call that a pretty huge leap.
And add on that those euros are today only worth about 80% of what they were 6 years ago because of inflation, so in real terms the improvement is even larger.
Re: As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts. (Score:2)
How much less? And how much less was install cost vs panel cost? And what's the estimated life span and power loss curve? How much of that less is government subsidized?
In my area panels produce a bit more than 10-15 years ago, prices have gone up to more than match.
pics or it didn't happen (Score:2)
So many battery breakthroughs that never reach the market. All organic batteries that recharder to 80% in ten minutes were announced by Toshiba and Fujitsu ten years ago. And ....? Every year we hear about Lithium Poly that won't cathc fire. and....??? I keep wondering why LiFePO4 are not sweeping the market with their better voltage drop characterisitics and lack of overcharging problems.
I'm thinking that all the batteries developed in the next two decades are place holder for Flow batteries to come.
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It depends on the role. LFP is great for roles where you need passive simplicity. Not great for where energy density matters. The chemistry is fundamentally lower voltage than nickel-based chemistries.
Re:pics or it didn't happen (Score:4, Interesting)
"Every year we hear about Lithium Poly that won't cathc fire."
And this year I've installed five battle borne LiFePo4 batteries in customer's vehicles, three in one new install and two as replacements for a pair of flooded batteries. And the customers brought them in, which means that even non-technical people are aware of their existence.
" I keep wondering why LiFePO4 are not sweeping the market with their better voltage drop characterisitics and lack of overcharging problems."
You can still overcharge them. These batteries for example won't tolerate voltages over 14.4v. they don't sweep the market because they are expensive. You can get ordinary lithium packs for half the price. Or recycled leaf cells for about a third the price...
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https://about.bnef.com/blog/be... [bnef.com]
So the question now is not how to set that pace, but how to maintain it.
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And high energy density per both volume and weight, allowing it to store power compactly?
And high power density, meaning it needs to deliver a lot of power at once to actually move like, a car.
And has a long use life, nigh all battery technologies degrade in energy density as they're charged and discharged.
And you need every last one of those things to compete against current li-on batteries.
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I understand they want to test the production process, but a 3-year roadmap for a new technology sounds like a riskfull plan, just from a business perspective and unrelated the the invention itself.
But if his invention is so revolutionary, why not license it to Panasonic and the likes and sit back and watch how the big dudes that know how to set up battery factories do it and pay you the royalties.
Re:As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the media has no understanding of what's a meaningful development and what's silly hype.
Digging up what's actually being discussed here, I find this [google.is] from the battery's developer.
Your basic li-ion cell is layers of, in order:
* Alumium cathode foil current collector (any metal will be oxidized under these conditions, but not only is alumium cheap, light, and highly conductive, but it also forms a durable protective oxide coating)
* Cathode intercalation material. The two main ones for EVs today are NMC ([lithium] nickel manganese cobalt oxide) and NCA ([lithium] nickel cobalt alumium oxide), but LFP ([lithium] iron phosphate) also has a role where energy density isn't as critical. When discharged, this material is fully loaded with intercalated lithium (that is, lithium slotting into the gaps in the chemical structure)
* Liquid electrolyte (penetrates into all the gaps in the cathode and allows the free flow of lithium ions)
* Separator membrane (allows dissolved lithium ions across)
* Liquid electrolyte (same, for the anode side)
* Anode intercalation material (graphite or other forms of carbon, often with some silicon these days). When charged, the material is fully loaded with intercalated lithium
* Copper anode foil current collector (can't use alumium, need to use copper because it resists being intercalated with lithium)
This person's design is:
* Conductive polymer containing cathode intercalation material and also allowing for the migration of lithium ions
* Conductive polymer containing anode intercalation material and also allowing for the migration of lithium ions
Their idea is to remove components. But there's a number of problems to this that stand out.
The first is that what they're calling safety - that a puncture won't lead to rapid heating - is just trying to spin a disadvantage as an advantage - that disadvantage being that this design can't handle high powers (puncture or not), because conductive polymers are way less conductive than metals. You're talking much lower peak powers and much higher internal resistance.
Secondly, just like with the (way overhyped) technology of solid-state cells, if you move away from liquids and toward solids, you tend to drastically reduce lithium ion mobility. Same problem, plus some new ones. Liquids are great in that they fully wet the surface and allow for very high ion mobility.
One of the author's justifications is to reduce manufacturing costs. Except that what he describes as how current cells are manufactured is, while true, becoming obsolete. Most of the energy in cell manufacture, and a ton of capital cost and space requirements, is for the football-field-length vacuum ovens (and their corresponding solvent recovery systems) to evaporate and recover the solvent from the anode and cathode intercalation materials after you deposit them onto the foils. This becomes increasingly hard the thicker you want your coating (thicker coatings = higher energy densities, though lower power densities). But for next-gen cells, the industry is moving in the direction of ultrafine thermoplastic or thermoset powder binders rather than soluble binders; everything is mixed and the heat from the calendaring process combines them. No vacuum ovens. No solvent recovery. And it produces better electrodes, too - instead of slathering the active materials in binder, the particles act like tiny "tack welds", allowing electrolyte to easily wet the surface, and making it harder for SEI and degradation products to block flow. Tesla acquired Maxwell last year specifically to gain their technology on this front - the result o
Re:As with all "amazing new battery tech" posts... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes I wonder why I visit /. anymore but then I bump into people like you. Thank you, that was very interesting
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I agree. /Posted from a device with battery tech you would not have believed 10 years ago.
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*and it is not on fire.
In six hours... (Score:2, Funny)
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If this company can produce Li-ion batteries in standard voltages and form-factors, then how are they going to be kept out of the hands of consumers and other manufacturers?
What about energy density? (Score:2)
Re:What about energy density? (Score:4, Informative)
The focus is on manufacturability, by reducing environmental dependencies on strictly controlled humidity, temperature, etc..
It has zero to do with resultant capacity or lifespan.
Re:What about energy density? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA (which I had no trouble accessing):
"But the technology is not without its shortcomings. Polymers are not as conductive as metal and this could significantly impact the battery’s carrying capacity, according to Menahem Anderman, president of California-based Total Battery Consulting Inc."
Re:What about energy density? (Score:5, Informative)
The article mentions that this is being targeted at stationary uses, i.e. backup power supply for a renewable grid. That makes sense. There doesn't have to be one power source or one battery to rule them all; it's okay for this to be in the buildings, and another kind of battery in phones and electric cars.
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For my phone, not so much.
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That's not energy density, that's its ability to deliver current.
High performance cars use cylindrical cells because they deliver a lot of energy and are easier to cool. Normal cars (still with excellent performance mind you) often use cheaper pouch cells which can't deliver as much current but are still more than adequate a few hundred kilowatts needed in a car. For example the Kona, eNiro and Leaf are all somewhere around 180kW peak (about 150-160kW to the motor, plus heating/aircon etc.)
Also keep in mind
Re: What about energy density? (Score:2)
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Alternate link: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/07/09/business/tech/hideaki-horie-invents-new-battery/
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Looks like it's price competitive but not density competitive, could be good for grid storage perhaps and the article states it's market is "buildings, offices and power plants".
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PS, internet archive version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Interesting analogue (Score:5, Funny)
'Horie's innovation is to replace the battery's basic components -- metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes -- with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as "buttering toast."'
So if you drop this new battery, does it always land resin-side down?
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'Horie's innovation is to replace the battery's basic components -- metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes -- with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as "buttering toast."'
So if you drop this new battery, does it always land resin-side down?
Where are those Mythbusters when you need 'em?
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Not if you tie it to a cat
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Missed a trick with the name.
Instead of APB it should be Buttery Battery.
ABC invents new battery tech XYZ that promises NNN (Score:3)
And so go countless headlines from the past 20 years. We know better than to get too excited. Wouldn't we be better served if these headlines were announcing the first delivery of new tech, so that we could actually follow it's progress and success or failure on a realistic timeline? Maybe I'm getting old, but this kind of thing is starting to bore me.
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In their defense, the article does make an important point:
“Lithium-ion with liquid electrolyte will remain the main application for another 15 years or more. It’s not perfect and it isn’t cheap, but beyond lithium-ion is a better lithium ion.”
Horie acknowledges that APB can’t compete with battery giants who are already benefiting from economies of scale after investing billions.
And there's the rub.
Yes, all these new and innovative batteries are quite remarkable. But companies have already spent billions of dollars building factories to produce lithium-ion batteries. They're not going to throw those factories out until they get their money back. So we're in the area where we'll see incremental improvements in lithium-ion batteries that can fit nicely into those factories. And when those incremental improvements become h
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It's not that simple. They might decide to set up a new factory that produces these low cost batteries so they can capture the budget end of the market. EVs are still expensive compared to fossil cars so there is a huge untapped market there.
Then they can keep their existing factories for higher end vehicles that need higher performance batteries. Remember that EVs are still only a few percent of the market so there is massive room for growth. Just like with fossils there will be demand for high end parts a
Has great potential. (Score:5, Insightful)
“The problem with making lithium batteries now is that it’s device manufacturing like semiconductors,” Horie said in an interview. “Our goal is to make it more like steel production.”
Instead of targeting the “red ocean” of the automotive sector, APB will first focus on stationary batteries used in buildings, offices and power plants.
If these batteries can be made in cheap-ass factories then it doesn't matter if they aren't the best or even second best because they would still be ideal for mass energy storage. It sounds like it has the potential to reduce the price of energy storage to match the "recently" reduced price of solar cells.
Re:Has great potential. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's how LG has been under-cutting Panasonic/Tesla battery costs.
Panasonic/Tesla will make a 47.5kWh usable (55kWh total) capacity pack using cylindrical cells. Quality is very high and they can deliver a large amount of current for high performance cars but they are expensive.
LG make a 64kWh usable pack, total capacity unknown but likely in the 66-68kWh range. It's cheaper than the Panasonic/Tesla one even though the capacity is much higher. Can't deliver quite as much current but more than enough for most cars.
LG offer a better warranty too, unlimited time and miles on their pack. Panasonic/LG is 8 years and 120k miles.
In other words cheaper and slightly lower quality cells actually end up being more reliable as well as more affordable.
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because they would still be ideal for mass energy storage.
Indeed. Price per KwH is king when it comes to static storage, while mass then volume matter for vehicles and portable equipment.
That said, efficiency in storing and releasing the electricity does matter, if it's only 40%, that makes providing solar power at night much more expensive because you need more panels than if it's like LiIon and closer to 90%.
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Efficiency isn't [supposed to be] the problem [here], the drawback is C rate. But that's only a problem in that it increases complexity of wiring. You get a higher C rate by going parallel, the same way you get more Ah. That increases pack costs, but not as much as you might think. Tesla did it with round cells and still came up with an affordable battery pack! When you're talking about just adding more layers to a battery, it's even cheaper than having to tie together all those little cells.
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One issue is power delivery is probably limited due to higher IR... which also means a less efficient charge/discharge cycle as well.
Still probably a win for lots of cases where energy would be wasted or windmills feathered, and as long as the efficiency is better than PbA (and cheaper per kWh!). But... I wonder what the longevity is like. The article gives no hint on cycle or calendar life.
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Safer than Lithium batteries. (Score:4, Interesting)
Each time someone comes with a new battery they claim it is much safer than lithium batteries.
This cannot be true. The reason the batteries can be dangerous is because they contain energy. It's the same with fuels. It doesn't matter if you have gas, diesel, kerosine or RP1. under the right circumstances it can burn/explode.
It is the same with batteries. The energy density is such that things can get very very hot. Only the lowest energy densities are immune to "catching fire". Think lemon and two metal strips. Things that are "useful" for the future simply have enough energy to get hot enough to ignite.
Re:Safer than Lithium batteries. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no. You're absolutely correct in that if they have enough energy to do anything useful, then there's going to be a way to release that same energy in an unwanted fashion. That said, there are various ways of making batteries much safer than the current ones. For example, making them more durable such that crush damage won't as easily cause a short-circuit, or by making them have a higher internal resistance to slow the discharge and keep it below a threshold where it won't cause more heat than the battery can handle.
Now it's not a simple matter to do these things, there are tradeoffs, and inherent characteristics of the materials involved, however "safer than lithium ion" certainly can be true, and without meaning "impossible to catch fire" or "perfect safety". "safer" isn't claiming an absolute, only a relative.
Re:Safer than Lithium batteries. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that they are flame-proof. It's that when punctured they won't produce hundreds of amps of current and it won't jump to 700 Centigrade. Similar to how Diesel doesn't produce volatile fumes, but Gasoline does. Yet both are fuels that can burn. Just different levels of disaster.
Re:Safer than Lithium batteries. (Score:4, Interesting)
You can throw a cigarette in a puddle of diesel and nothing happens, except extinguishing the fire.
To combust diesel you need a combination of fine mist and high pressure and elevated temperature. Under atmospheric circumstances no chance it will ignite by itself.
It'd be like igniting sunflower oil. It'll not really burn by itself unless you heat it to hundreds of degrees. But you can make it burn with a wick, just like you can burn paraffin.
Kerosine - same story. Gasoline - almost same story, combusting fuel tanks that explode on first impact are limited to Hollywood.
So yes, there is energy storage. But the reason traditional Li-ion are dangerous is because an inner shortcut might cause excessive heating and thus a run-off effect. It's preventable, in theory, by limiting the maximum possible current. However, such increased resistance counters efficiency especially in high-power applications.
Having said that all, plenty youtube video's of people hammering a nail into a charged pack and apart some hissing sounds more often than not nothing happens. But when it happens it's spectacular ;)
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Plenty of people have blown themselves up welding near Gas tanks. They are very dangerous when empty.
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You can throw a lit cigarette into a barrel of gasoline and it will just fizzle out because the temperature isn't high enough to ignite. A spark is much, much hotter than a cigarette butt with more total heat energy, which is why it's more capable of producing ignition. That's why there's been so much paranoia about cell phones starting fires at fueling stations, and there's warning labels about not using your phone at the station, even though that's never actually happened. But you CAN ignite the fuel by g
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Re:Safer than Lithium batteries. (Score:4, Interesting)
Your logic is flawed. Consider 100 ml of nitroglycerin in a flask and 100 ml of nitroglycerin in a stick of dynamite. Now hold the flask your left hand and the dynamite stick in your right over a concrete floor. Now let's suppose that you have to open one hand and let the object in it drop. Do you pick your left hand or your right? There are definitely some systems that are safer than others, even if they both contain the same amount of energy.
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The potential hazard posed by lithium ion batteries exceeds the simple energy storage capacity normally used to rate the cell. In the worst case, the electrolyte gets so hot it boils, ruptures the cell, vents to the atmosphere and then ignites. So it releases additional heat energy that is not part of the normal capacity of the cell. Also, the liquid electrolyte is very flammable and the smoke it produces when it burns is very noxious. Visibility can be severely impaired also because the smoke is dense and
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It's not the energy density that matters, it's how easy it is to extract that energy. E=mc2 means that even an inert lump of rock contains a fantastic amount of energy, it's just really difficult to do anything useful with it.
Even petrol isn't that dangerous really. It's actually quite hard to ignite it. Mythbusters did an episode on it, it's pretty difficult to make car explode.
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Difficult to make a car explode? Please. Even a horse drawn carriage can explode under the right conditions [youtube.com].
Unit of factory capacity (Score:2)
What does " the funds will get his plant in central Japan to 1 gigawatt-hour capacity by 2023" mean?
Battery capacity is measured in mAh. I suppose a factory that can produce 24000 batteries a day each with 1000 mAh has a "capacity" (not a good choice of word probably) of 10^6 mA (or 10^3 A), so shouldn't we measure factory output in AmpÃres instead? Watts-hours are not equivalent to AmpÃres, not even assuming constant voltage.
Re:Unit of factory capacity (Score:4, Informative)
Large batteries are generally measured in kWh, not in Ah. The output of the factory is indeed planned to be 1GWh/year, or around 100kW.
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It's a bit like when the Americans quote units of power as BTU. BTU is a unit of energy (around 1050 Joules), so they actually mean BTU/h, but the 'per hour' is left off by almost everyone. If you know, great, if you don't, well tough - the dimensional analysis will fail.
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"Battery capacity is measured in mAh."
When I do solar sizing I convert everything to Wh because Ah means nothing without volts. Batteries may be sold as Ah and V but Wh are what you actually use. If all they told you was how many Ah but not how many V then they actually didn't tell you anything.
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What do you mean? African or European watts?
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Why would you assume that? Maybe they're producing a single 24kAh battery per day, which in USA #1 units would be ~0.02143 M1 Abrams tanks [wikipedia.org].
A Backwards Idea (Score:2)
These Batteries utilise Vinyl to make polymer Gels ( vinyl is made from crude oil )
and also Resin contaiining Acrylics - also from Fossil Fuels.
This is a fail from the beginning
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Surely there's plant-based resin alternatives to these?
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It's better to make the oil into plastic which sequesters carbon than to let someone just burn it.
YAMB (yet another miracle battery) (Score:2)
Bloomberg?! (Score:2)
Once again, linking only to a pay-to-read website.
Damn! (Score:2)
Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Informative)
Way worse. It's designed to be a much cheaper and fire-resistant tech for a powerwall/grid stabilization substations/solar storage at home. It's not competitive on the electronic car/cell phone/laptop market. Although who knows it may one day be.
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