'World's Fastest Electrodes' Triple the Density of Lithium Batteries (newatlas.com) 81
French company Nawa technologies says it's already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long. NewAtlas reports: Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits. It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today's typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they're typically stuck on in a jumbled, "tangled spaghetti" fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.
Nawa's vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else. The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions -- the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery -- since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. "The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometres through the lithium material," Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, "instead of micrometres with a plain electrode."
Nawa's vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else. The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions -- the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery -- since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. "The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometres through the lithium material," Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, "instead of micrometres with a plain electrode."
"Already in production" (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this The One?
Re:"Already in production" (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Is this The One?"
Yeah, really. Seems like every month there is another earth-shaking major discovery in battery technology that is the "game changer." Year after year after year. After a while, I kinda just think the same thing many people do- "I will believe it when I can buy something with it."
That is not to say battery technology hasn't improved, but it has been way slower than one might think based on the seemingly endless "breakthroughs."
Re:"Already in production" (Score:4, Insightful)
That is not to say battery technology hasn't improved, but it has been way slower than one might think based on the seemingly endless "breakthroughs."
A factor of over 100 in the lat 50 years is "slow" for you? Seriously?
Re: "Already in production" (Score:3, Interesting)
Uum, yes?
First of all, it is not remotely a factor of 100.
Second of all, a much higher factor is promised alomes every single damn day, but not delivered.
Third, we need much more than current battery tech can manage.
Fourth, compared to hydrocarbons, all batteries have densities that are complete ridiculous jokes. (Synthetic recycled hydrocarbons in fuel cells have none of the problems of fossil fuels.)
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Second of all, a much higher factor is promised alomes every single damn day, but not delivered.
Can you link me that "battery magazine"? I wold like to be informed, too.
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It depends how you define the improvement factor.
50 years ago the most common type of rechargeable, high output battery was lead acid. Modern lithium polymer batteries have about 10x the energy density by volume. They are also lighter.
But energy density isn't the only factor. They also charge faster. Lead acid is recommended to be charged at 0.1 to 0.3C. LiPo can be charged at 1C to 3C depending on the construction so again it's 10x better.
So in terms of what is widely available and affordable for consumer
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"(Synthetic recycled hydrocarbons in fuel cells have none of the problems of fossil fuels.)"
No, they have mostly different problems, with fuel cells. They do also have in common the energy cost of fuel production, though.
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I question your assertion that “we need much more than current battery tech can manage”. We need it for what, exactly? I mean Converting the automotive fleet is the immediate, huge undertaking, and today’s batteries are adequate for that. We’ve got cars going over 300 miles on a charge, and we’ve got charging stops in the 20–30 minute range. More energy and faster charges would always be nice, but it’s hard to see how we desperately “need” that now.
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A factor of over 100 in the lat 50 years is "slow" for you? Seriously?
I'm old enough to remember when a battery-operated toy on Christmas morning would need new ones by noon.
That was due to the power draw of the toy, not the battery.
Re:"Already in production" (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought my first Renault Zoe EV in 2015 and it had a range of about 90miles. I bought my third in 2020 and it has a range of about 240 miles. The car is the same size and the battery packs are the same weight. That was a pretty fantastic rate of improvement. So it was good to see that these guys are talking to Renault (unsurprising, given they're both French companies).
Re: "Already in production" (Score:2)
They are French. :)
They won't sell themselves to an American company, just like you would never sell yourselves to a French company.
If necessary, the state wold intervene.
A bit sad, given both nations once were good friends. (See: Satsue of liberty & Eiffel tower.) ;)
I mean to us Germany, you guys are badically in an arrogant imperialists contest, calling each other out for what you are doing yourselves. (Don't worry. You won. Frwnce is our bitch now
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I dunno, Fiat Chrysler just merged with Peugeot...
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The very post you're commenting on shows that the scenario you're painting does not always happen, else my Zoe wouldn't have seen the improvements it did, over the last five years. And given Tesla's recent battery didn't mention this tech at all, it seems quite likely they've evaluated it and decided it's not the way forward for them, for whatever reason.
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So a 266% gain in range for the same size/weight over a 5 year period? I don't see any internal combustion engines getting that kind of improvements.
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Re:"Already in production" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Funny how we never saw this comment posted until Elon said it, and now you can't avoid it.
Remember that Elon refused to hire people with auto industry experience because, apparently, experience wasn't worth the downsides. Now, experience is absolutely crucial. The difference? Who's experience it is.
Getting things into production may be hard and it may not be, but one thing is certain...that Tesla isn't very good at getting things into production yet. If they'd consider hiring people with experience doin
Re:"Already in production" (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one have been saying this for years. It's the fundamental reason why I'm not bullish on new auto startups. As I've said for a long time, it took a massive gap in the market for Tesla to be able to muscle its way in (at the time of the original Roadster, people were paying $80k for used RAV4EVs and the like; people were desperate for the EVs which big players weren't providing). And even then, it repeatedly faced death trying to scale, only achieving true mass production scales with the Model 3.
Anyone can make a prototype. Teams of college students make prototypes. Mass production is an utterly different beast.
By all means, don't look up Jérôme Guillen's backgroud. Or Franz von Holzhausen. Or other major players at Tesla who were brought in early in the company's history.
Not "may or may not". IS. Period.
What on Earth are you talking about? Tesla has grown at ~50% CAGR every year for a decade. That's growth the automotive industry hasn't seen since the Model T. Most automakers have a loss or minimal margins on EVs. Tesla's is ~25%. Model 3 - and increasingly Y - dominate global EV sales. Last year Model 3 sales were three times as high as the next-highest contender (BIAC EU-Series), and four times higher than the third highest (Nissan Leaf) - despite local production in China only starting to come online near the end of the year. Tesla absolutely crushes in its domestic EV market in the US (Europe hits it with heavy import tariffs... for now), despite the fact that Teslas don't qualify for federal EV tax credits. The feds literally give everyone else (except GM) $7500 per sale to NOT buy a Tesla, and they still fail to compete with their low-to-negative margin EVs.
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Or are you trying to claim that "every model Tesla makes is delayed"? Why don't you check out the timeline for their most recent release, the Model Y? It went into production half a year ahead of schedule. Or are you talking factories? Giga Shanghai started Model 3 production a quarter ahead of schedule. Model Y production looks to be starting there this quarter, which is again, a quarter ahead of schedule. Giga Berlin is running ahead of schedule, even though pretty much everyone, including hardcore Te
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On the other hand, dismissing conventional auto designers and forging their own path has paid off in some ways. Teardowns by German and Japanese carmakers showed Tesla's technological advantages: battery chemistry that has greatly reduced the amount of cobalt in the batteries and the full integration of the car's electronic systems. Those add up to thousands of dollars in reduced manufacturing costs.
Sources:
https://electrek.co/2020/02/17/tesla-teardown-6-years-lead-over-toyota-vw/
https://electrek.co/2018/
Re:"Already in production" (Score:5, Informative)
This is the annoying thing. People get drowned in a wash of early-scale lab techs and unscalable Gee-Whiz which drowns out which changes are actually meaningful.
Take this article, for example:
No. They're talking specifically about the anode. The anode is the easy part to increase the energy density on, as graphite / amorphous carbon has terrible storage density. But it's a minority of the mass of a cell. You cannot increase the overall cell energy density (let alone pack density) by 3x with an anode improvement. And while a half an order of magnitude improvement (over some unstated baseline) may sound like a lot, other improvements like silicon or metal anodes are an entire order of magnitude improvement.
These sorts of statements are ridiculously vague. You can already get li-ion cells that charge faster than their claimed 0-80% in 5 minutes - for example, the most power-focused end of the SCiB line - and they're also very long lifespan. But they're also expensive and not as energy dense as the sort of cells that go into EVs.
Meet Nawa's "way too expensive batteries"!
Price is the limiting factor for EV adoption. EV manufacturers can make EVs with nearly double the range, power, charging power capacity, lifespan (by halving cycles per unit distance), etc by using double thickness packs; the extra mass and volume is in no way prohibitive. They don't because EVs already cause sticker shock for some, and you'd destroy your market at those prices, as well as halving how many vehicles you could build (there are limits to how quickly you can scale production capacity).
Nawa responds to pricing criticism by saying that it's cheap to make anti-reflective coatings on glass with nanotubes. As if using immeasurably small quantities to create an imperceptibly thin layer on a piece of glass is the same thing as making macroscopic bulk anodes for cells.
Furthermore, they're heavily hyping "a" battery tech. Making radical changes in li-ion batteries is not about a tech. There's many aspects of both the cell and the pack that you have to evolve simultaneously if you want to see major improvement.
This article is heavy on hype and short on actual meaningful changes.
(For those who care, Nawa is not "already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market". They're a startup formed in 2013 which is still so small scale that their last funding round from February was only €13M.)
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Pension funds under threat invested in non-renewables are going to be forced to invest into startups/companies driving the monetization of some of these breakthroughs. The startups trying to take these to market need their customers - Other EV manufacturers and some sort of company/vehicle that can deliver at scale. I suspect this is where the gap is in the western world. Scale in china is usually either government backed or a necessity and likely they will try and steal/copy some of these ideas.
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We are too use to Moore's Law for electronics, Battery Development is far more linear than exponential.
Being that I have a battery in my phone that lasts for about 5 years, and powers a computer that is more powerful than the previous generation laptop. Being exposed to heat, shocks, and a bunch of other stuff that isn't normally good for batteries.
Compared to the bulky battery on my first Cell Phone (candy bar style) which was a bit more powerful than a calculator watch. Which if used the same amount, woul
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There are some statements in this article which do not ring true. They talk about nanotubes as being indestructible for example. This is false. Indeed nanotubes are tough and it takes a lot to tear them apart but the bigger issue is that you can fairly easily introduce defects into the carbon lattice. It is therefore not that hard to dramatically alter nanotube conductivity and mechanical properties. Also, any impurity or extra atom or atoms you put on a nanotube will alter its electronic band structure and
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Once they get something off the production line and can quote the spec for the exact battery chemistry, then we are talking. As far as the article reveals, all they have is tech for making supercapacitors. My point was that on the nanoscale, even the smallest change can matter - move around a few carbon atoms and the heptagon-hexagon defect pops up seemingly out of nowhere. Get the annealing temperature slightly off and you can get tons of issues including water in your nanotubes. Put a lithium atom on the
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Again, my point is that you cannot jump from having an electrode to having a battery. Them having an electrode is nothing for the consumer to get excited about. It's kind of like humanity since the beginning of time understood that many body organs like limbs are similar between people and had some vague dream of organ transplantation. But just because you have something that could work does not mean you have the technology to integrate parts together. Fast forward millenia and tons of R&D and we do now
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I'm sorry, but there's a ton of flashing red lights going off for me with both this company and this tech.
You can start with how they try to portray themselves as some major player in ultracapacitors when they're actually just a tiny startup.
Re: "Already in production" (Score:2)
"Says".
That's usually the opposite of "does".
If you do, you do not need to say. You show.
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They would have been more credible if they got a prototype working before going public with the idea. ... in their super capacitors, rofl. Learn to read.
Facepalm. They are selling it already
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But not in lithium chemistries. I would advise you the same skill but I do not have that much hope for your learning abilities.
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Despite how they try to paint themselves as an industry giant, Nawa is a tiny startup with less than 10 employees and less than $1M in annual sales [owler.com]. How much less is unclear.
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Despite how they try to paint themselves as an industry giant, Nawa is a tiny startup with less than 10 employees and less than $1M in annual sales [owler.com]. How much less is unclear.
I don't know the truth of it, but I suspect that Owler reports those low numbers when it has no information. Nawa's company brochure [nawatechnologies.com] has a photo with about 20 people in it. Could be a stock photo though...
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Well...
"The company has moved past its pilot unit and now has a full production unit up and running, supplying vertically aligned carbon nanotubes for its ultracapacitor devices. Nawa says the electrode technology is more or less agnostic; it can be used on cylindrical cells or flat cells of all sizes."
Ultracapacitors are great and all, but it'll be a while before they start manufacturing a 12,000mAh battery for your phone...
Mean Free Path (Score:4, Informative)
The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions -- the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery...
That's not what mean free path [wikipedia.org] means. He seems to be talking about the mean path. The mean free path is the distance between collisions and when you decrease it energy losses will increase because you get more random collisions.
Nanotubes also have very long mean free paths, (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure what type of nanotube they're usung. But according to Mean free paths in single-walled carbon nanotubes measured by Kelvin probe force microscopy [aps.org], single-walled carbon nanotubes have "one of the longest room-temperature ÎMFP [inelastic mean free path] values of any known material.
Which is not really surprising because single walled nanotubes (think "rolls of benzine-chicken-wire") are very strong, very straight, and have electron orbitals unified and spread out in the chicken-wire pattern for the full length of the nanotube. Having a conduction electron able to travel along the nanotube for many cells without bumping into anything would not be a surprise.
More from the paper: "The room-temperature mean free paths for optical phonon and surface plasmon-polariton scattering were measured to be 62 ± 20 nm and 260 ± 50 nm, respectively." Holy cow! At 0.14 nm carbon-to-carbon distance and twice that for the long way across a cell, you're talking 221 and 542 cells respectively.
"The optical phonon scattering length is significantly longer than inferred from previous measurements, and it resolves a longstanding discrepancy between SWNT theory and experiment ..."
I'll believe it when I see it hit shelves. (Score:2)
Until then, it's basically pie in the sky.
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when I see it hit shelves
Hope your cave does not get too cold in autumn. Nowadays, people use the Internet to buy stuff like that.
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Yes, and Amazon uses a replicator, and not stock stored on warehouse shelves. Right?
Show the battery cell (Score:3)
OK, just show us a battery cell and tell us its weight/volume and how many watt-hours it stores. It's that simple.
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Don't be silly. It's a battery technology. This article will be history in six months, during which ten other things will claim to do the same. No production battery will ever be produced with it, no marketable product will ever be available to consumers of any size (e.g. from electricity networks down to people wanting an AA), but some guy gets to write up his thesis about this ground-breaking tech that they can't reproduce consistently or cheaply or safely or robustly enough to actually put anywhere ne
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Why? Because it's got *latest buzzword* of course. (I mean carbon nanotubes / lithium battery electrode / blockchain / recyclable / AI / delete as appropriate).
<CookieMonsterVoice> Me think you have fundamentally misunderstood buzzword labeling process. </CookieMonsterVoice>
so choose any 4 but cost? (Score:2)
Power density, power output, charging speed, life span and...cost (not mentioned here??)
Re:so choose any 4 but cost? (Score:4, Informative)
Cost is not only mentioned in the article, but discussed. They give a rationale for why costs can be expected to be low when scaled up. The rationale seems plausible but I guess we'll only see if someone takes the plunge with this.
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Setting your hair on fire? (Score:2)
So, high-performance lithium batteries are placed in earbuds?
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And rapid charging is a headline feature for them, so... yes. High performance.
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New sooper battery (Score:2)
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Everyone else with a battery can stick up their luggage compartment.
Freeze, luggage compartment! This is a stickup!
And all we will get as a result... (Score:2)
... will be phones, so thin, you can slice bread with them (and maybe toast it too?).
Not that even a single person would prefer that over proper 30-day battery life, but hey, apparently, doing the most insane opposite of the optimal choice *is* the style of today...
Don't use that word (Score:2)
" to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits."
Don't use that word, nobody will believe you if you do.
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Another 300%? (Score:3)
Now about the cost (Score:2)
No specs, no truth. (Score:2)
It's hard to take seriously any article that claims X-times energy density, when it doesn't even have the word "watt" anywhere in it.
Making a battery with 3 times the energy density of a super-capacitor (12 Wh/kg) is trivial.
Making a battery with 3 times the energy density of NiMH AAA cell (300 Wh/kg) would be astounding.
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wait, this is from the first week! (Score:2)
Isn't the first monthly "new battery changes everything and makes all old ones obsolete" story supposed to come on the *second* week of the month?
Or is this to make room for an extra the third week of every month?
[hmm, can we make a mutual fund that shorts every company featured in these? We'd be wealthy by now . . .]
Reality Check (Score:1)
For decades we've been told that double or quad capacity batteries are shortly going to be available.
I'll believe it when I can buy a AA battery using this technology in my local shop....
When can I buy them off HobbyKing.com? (Score:2)
Until this stuff is commonly available, don't waste my time.