New Aluminum-Sulfur Battery Tech Offers Full Charging In Under a Minute (mit.edu) 116
According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT describe new aluminum-sulfur batteries that are made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials and can be charged in less than a minute. "The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee," reports MIT News. The caveat with this new kind of battery is that it requires a variety of molten salts that need to be "close to the boiling point of water." From the report: In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F). Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. The chloro-aluminate salt they chose "essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging," Sadoway says. "We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting."
What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.
For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.
If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.
What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.
For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.
If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.
Important questions (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Watts per volume?
2. Watts per weight?
3. Degradation over 1000 cycles?
Re:Important questions (Score:5, Insightful)
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You forgot 5: can they actually manufacture the thing at scale? There are all kinds of really nice battery techs out there, but none of them ever see mass adoption because they're missing that, and only that.
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There is #6: Safety. Ideally, thermal runaway protection, and general high idiot resistance.
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I was gonna say this feels more like a household-battery tech than a car-battery tech; after all, if you charge it up and then don't drive it for a week (e.g. vacation trip), it's not going to discharge and stay warm. But as long as it still can delivery enough power to get going, that's probably okay.
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Why would you replace a perfectly functional battery pack in an existing car?
It's kind of annoying that I don't have access to the article (and neither does SciHub) so I can't get get into the details. It's interesting to see that while reaction kinetics are much slower, it still is capable of charging - and I presume discharging - at much lower C rates at 25C. But how low? Because EV batteries have to be stored and you don't want to have to maintain the batteries in molten state (this was done with the
Re:Important questions (Score:5, Insightful)
ED: Actually, we can find out a lot more from the external tables.
* The cathode is just elemental sulphur. Nothing more. They just assemble it with elemental sulfur on alumium foil (seems to be bound by PVDF, which is bog-standard, even old-school li-ion electrode binding), assemble the anode as consumer-grade alumium foil on molybdenum foil. The separator membrane is just glass fibre, just to prevent a contact short. Nice!
* Molybdenum foil is expensive, but they note that and say the choice was "not optimal". Rather, a practical cell would use molybdenum-coated alumium foil, TiN-coated alumium foil, or graphitic foil. Good, but you still have to test those configurations, you can't just assume that they'll behave the same as molybdenum foil. Probably will, but.. have to test. They use Mo-coated Al foil as their baseline.
* Volumetric energy density is surprisingly not that great, about 500Wh/l, even less than today's NMC/NCA (but better than LFP). Still, "good enough". Gravimetric isn't listed.
* Cost estimates are extremely low, about $20/kWh, vs. ~$80/kWh for LFP and ~$95/kWh for NMC/NCA at today's prices (which to be fair are highly inflated, mainly due to a shortfall of lithium refining capacity).
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That makes me curious, can one of these be revived by heating until it re-liquifys the electrolyte, or is it dead, return for recycling?
Re:Important questions (Score:5, Informative)
Operating temperature 110 C, so quite do-able for a stationary power source and very small overhead with good insulation
After 500 cycles battery capacity is over 80% of initial spec
Energy capacity similar to Li-ion
and don't mix with water -> H2S (poison and flammable) noted now so can be part of good design
Lots of opportunity for use, as a storage as part of wind and large scale solar panel farm
Re:Important questions (Score:4, Funny)
OT: Johnny was a chemist; he isn't any more, for what he thought was H20 was H2SO4.
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Where does the energy come from to keep the battery at that temperature?
Massive heat plus flammable poisonous fumes. Great idea! What happens when one of these cracks open in a vehicle crash or in your flashlight?
Keep working my dude, you haven't solved anything yet (FYI this particular researcher has made like a hundred different battery chemistries in the past, all failures in the market).
Re:Important questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Where does the energy come from to keep the battery at that temperature?
From the electrical grid of course.
Massive heat plus flammable poisonous fumes. Great idea! What happens when one of these cracks open in a vehicle crash or in your flashlight?
These batteries are not for the vehicles, they are for the vehicle chargers. The headline is misleading. I caught on to this because I've heard of this professor Sadoway before and thought in no way these batteries are practical for vehicles. It's easy to miss but in the article the proposal is to have these batteries at the EV chargers to better manage the power draw from the grid. The "fully charge in under a minute" is from having a big battery at the charging station able to dump power into the EV batteries without overloading the grid. The batteries at the charging station can then use the time between cars stopping to charge to "trickle charge" the big massive batteries at the station.
Keep working my dude, you haven't solved anything yet (FYI this particular researcher has made like a hundred different battery chemistries in the past, all failures in the market).
Yep. Professor Sadoway has been at this for at least 10 years.
Sadoway has tried all kinds of chemical reactions to make this economical for someone to build. It's still cheaper to overbuild wind and solar power then "curtail" (a fancy word for "waste") the excess than build batteries to preserve that energy for later. If we do get big cheap batteries for grid storage then that makes wind and solar less attractive. Wind and solar power aren't competing with fossil fuels, everyone is already convinced that fossil fuels are bad. Wind and solar are competing with nuclear power. The problem with nuclear power is that any time they "curtail" output that costs a lot of money. Put cheap storage on the grid and they don't have to worry about waste... I mean curtailment, of that output nearly as much. That changes the math on operating costs.
The headline is very misleading. This technology has very little to do with EV charging, but then if the headline were not so misleading then fewer people would click to read more.
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One step at a time.
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It's in the fucking summary.
Keep working at writing comments, dude. Eventually you'll get it.
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Sounds a lot like sodium sulphur batteries, which have been used for grid scale storage for quite a while now, only lower temperature and less corrosive. 500 cycles is half that of a typical sodium sulphur battery, but if it isn't corrosive it might more than make up for that.
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Actually making progress on power generation and storage is quite the opposite of the "eat the bugs" future.
If you can cut the carbon emissions enough, they no longer have an excuse to force you into that reduced state.
And with a bit more of power, you can protect your property with a railgun or two
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Re:Important questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon emission have already been drastically cut in the US and Canada a long time ago.
4.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. Yes, that's a slight decrease from the record year, 2007 (6 billion metric tons), but not really a "drastic" decrease. (And the decrease is mostly attributed to the pandemic.)
As well, you can now swim in most rivers that used to be open sewers in 1970.
Not really relevant, but, yes, it shows that laws against pollution do work.
What north America will do will have very negligible impact on carbon emission compared to the dominant input where it is business as usual with coal plans; China and India.
Give it a rest.
The US is number two in the world in total carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, China is higher, but we emit nearly double the carbon dioxide of India, despite having a quarter the population.
So instead of pressuring its own citizens, north American government should put efforts in using diplomacy to make things really change for the best.
You can do both
There is absolutely no problems with north American carbon emission currently.
We have the second highest emissions in the world. If you're saying that's not a problem, you are saying that you don't think the problem is worth solving.
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All good points. In addition it is simplistic to point to China if so much of the world's production is outsourced there.
It's also quite disingenuous. "China" is nothing more than a boundary we draw around a group of people arbitrarily with a pen. Inside that boundary are 1.4billion people. Maybe if we drew the borders more "fairly", say around individual provinces (some of which would qualify in the top 15 most populated nations in the world if they were their own country) this idea of it being a "China problem" would finally die.
We can arbitrarily draw lines around any groups of people to fit the narrative, and we can take
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China" is a government that sets its own policies regarding manufacturing
Indeed so let's look at the policies. China is building out nuclear, has the largest EV fleet in the world, the largest installation of wind and solar in the world and a virtually endless string of projects in the timeline.
You can cut it however you want, USA still playing catch-up on policy, playing catch-up on emissions per capita, and will never lose the title on historical emissions.
But keep trying to play a blame game. The planet doesn't care where you drew your line.
Re: Important questions (Score:2)
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Not really relevant, but, yes, it shows that laws against pollution do work.
No, it shows that the company owners would rather send the jobs overseas than clean up the manufacturing process to stop pollution.
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4.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. Yes, that's a slight decrease from the record year, 2007 (6 billion metric tons), but not really a "drastic" decrease.
18% reduction seems like a little more than a "slight" decrease.
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More than "slight" but less than "drastic."
But it's not clear that these reductions are going to stick, and aren't just a lingering effect of pandemic shutdown.
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Also it can be argued that china would lower its pollution with good enough battery tech as well.
Power wasted is money, manpower and general time wasted.
Re:Important questions (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of pressuring its own citizens, north American government should put efforts in using diplomacy to make things really change for the best. There is absolutely no problems with north American carbon emission currently.
That's great! So what you can do now is add/increase a carbon tax on all goods (manufactured and imported) and those items imported from countries that are emitting heaps of carbon will become more expensive - making it lucrative to insource more manufacturing. That lowers external demand to those nations and they'll either reduce production or emissions. Win-win.
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I think you wanted watt/hr instead of just watts, but yes, these are the typical battery tradeoffs.
You're almost always sacrificing weight, volume, capacity, discharge rate, and/or lifespan, in order to meet some optimistic magic-quadrant criteria that the sales goons swear is why their sales funnels aren't reaching completion. Quite often, you'll end up sacrificing several useful properties in order to meet just one criteria -- that's just how battery chemistry always seems to work out.
What I find more int
Depends on application [Re:Important questions] (Score:4, Interesting)
The usefulness of high operating-temperature batteries depends on application. For baseload power load-leveling, no problem. Heat leak goes as the surface to volume ratio, so for huge applications, the heat loss is insignificant. For cars, no. You'd have to heat the batteries up before they start producing power. Nobody wants a car where you have to warm it up for ten minutes before you can drive.
(the article handwaves right over that point. It says that the batteries self-head, but no, only when charging or discharging... but most of the time a battery is just sitting there, and want a battery to be able to hold charge when it's neither charging nor discharging.)
For cell phones and laptops, hell no.
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For cell phones and laptops, hell no.
Well, maybe on Venus.
Watts AND watt-hours (Score:3)
I think you wanted watt/hr instead of just watts
No. Watts per hour has no physical meaning - watt-hours (watts times hours) is a unit of energy that are often used for batteries so that would be useful. However, you also want watts as well since it is not enough for a battery to just store energy it also has to be able to provide it with a reasonable rate which is what watts, as a unit of power, measure: energy per unit time.
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Watts per hour has no physical meaning
It has.
I suggest to check your power bill.
Re: Watts AND watt-hours (Score:2)
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You are right, I misread his comment.
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Power is energy over time, not energy times distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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wrong... a Joule is a Newton-Meter
What you meant to say is _force_ times distance. What you actually said was _energy_ times distance.
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Which is why watts/sec is not an actual thing (the point of the thread someone started)
Yes - I get that because I was the person who started this thread! ;-) However, what you said was that:
A watt is a unit of power which in physics is an energy times distance.
and this is not correct. If you mean mechanical power then it's force times velocity and if you meant energy then it's force times distance but there is no way that you can get energy times distance to give you a power - it's dimensionally wrong. I'd also be a bit careful about newton-metres. While you are correct that a joule is technically a newton-metre, the units of newton-metres (Nm) are used to mea
Re: Watts AND watt-hours (Score:2)
However, the difference is apparent if you look at the vector/tensor types.
Loosely speaking, energy (J joule) is a scalar derived from dot product of force (N newton) with displacement (m metre). It requires a single real number to represent.
Torque is a vector derived from cross product of force with displacement. It requires three real numbers
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Moments also only transform differently to vectors for specific transformations, not in general. Two of the common ones are parity and lorentz transforms. However, under a translation or rotation transform it will behave exactly like a
Re: Watts AND watt-hours (Score:2)
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Hey, if you disagree with the wikipedia article then go edit it. But don't forget to cite your primary source(s).
"In physics, power is the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time."
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"Over" in the mathematical sense; divided by; energy / time.
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So you agree this was an incorrect statement? "A watt is a unit of power which in physics is an energy times distance."
Re: Watts AND watt-hours (Score:2)
Total energy is instantaneous power INTEGRATED OVER time: E = integral(P dT)
For constant power, total energy is power TRANSFERRED OVER (multiplied by) time: E = P * deltaT
Average power is energy OVER (fraction, divided by) time: P = E / deltaT
Instantaneous power is the time derivative of energy, i.e. dif
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I don't know what US power bills are like, but mine in the UK show the number of kilowatt-hours (also called "units") that I've used. That's a unit of energy, equal to 3.6 megajoules, so makes sense that it's on the bill.
Watts are a unit of power, the rate that I'm using energy - and the same thing as joules per second.
Watts per hour is a rate of change of power, the rate of change of the rate I'm using energy - and equivalent to 3600 joules per second per second.
Might be useful in some cases - "Energy use
Re: Watts AND watt-hours (Score:2)
J/t*t = J (Score:2)
Watts/hr is just Joules.
Re: J/t*t = J (Score:2)
Even ignoring the constant (hour is 3600 seconds), watt/hour is NOT joules (or energy).
Your subject line is meaningless.
W/h (watt PER hour) = (power per time) = ((energy per time) per time) = (E/t)/t = (J/s)/s.
It is a rate of change of power, meaningless in most contexts.
The correct alternative unit for energy is (power TIMES time) = (watt*hour) = (joule per second)*(3600 seconds) = (3.6 million joules) = (energy).
Energy is NOT (power PER time), with a division.
Energy is (power TIMES time)
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Those aren't searing hot AAs that you're going to brand your skin with by picking them up, they are talking about industrial equipment that would be buried underground at a refueling station, or otherwise be made difficult to access. Besides which, we have these things called refractory bricks and insulation...
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Per the Ars Technica article:
" If the cell was discharged over two hours and charged in just six minutes, it still had a charge capacity per weight that was 25 percent higher than lithium-ion batteries and retained roughly 80 percent of that capacity after 500 cycles—well beyond what you'd see with most lithium chemistries."
The follow-up question is how much the capacity loss accelerates past the 80% point (and whether the failure rate does the same). 500 cycles is only about five years of twice-wee
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for an EV application this would be about the time you make the last payment of the purchase contract.
This isn't intended for EVs. Not that that means the charge cycle question is not important, but it's different.
Re: Important questions (Score:2)
#7 if it becomes fully discharged, is it bricked?
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1 minute to charge a 100 KWH battery is shall we say "dramatic"? 480 volt three phase for a 10 minute fill up is about 420 amperes per leg. (0.6 megawatts for ten minutes.) A real 1 minute fill up would require about 4200 amperes per leg. That's not your standard wall socket to say the least. I bet the surges when charging turns on and off will be dramatic - a localized EMP event?
{o.o}
Re:Important questions (Score:4, Interesting)
0. Is this patented and developed by single company?
Usually these new breakthrough batteries are and those companies die after couple years after running out of funds before they can bring the product to the market and compete with mass produced LiFePO4 etc batteries.
It would be so much smarter to develop these new batteries with multiple companies and just request tiny royalty, couple cents per battery at most. Inventors would make money for years and product would be on the market. Everybody would win. But all these inventors seem to think they can do it all, get billions etc. And almost always fail to bring the product to the market.
Re: Important questions (Score:2)
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Watts per volume doesn't really matter for a stationary application, and really watts per weight doesn't matter either.
Charge cycles are all-important. 365 charge-discharge cycles per year, and therefore 3650 (plus a couple more for leap years) in ten years.
Ability to recycle the materials is rather important too.
How much current will that take? (Score:2)
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I seem to remember that line so I'm going with yes. One of Doc Smith's? Maybe Spacehounds of IPC?
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I missed if the article talked about limiting discharge. Charging fast is cool. Discharging fast is dangerous! Bump into your battery and it explodes, catches fire, and can't be put out!
Re:How much current will that take? (Score:4, Insightful)
These aluminum-sulfur batteries are for managing the power surges at the grid side of the vehicle charging, not the vehicle side. This is a new chemistry for the large grid storage batteries so we aren't using valuable lithium ion batteries for grid storage. This means more lithium is available for making cars instead of big batteries out in Australian deserts.
Keep the batteries on a big concrete pad in the middle of nowhere and there's nobody going to bump into them. If by chance something or someone does bump into them and they start on fire then just let the thing burn, the thing would a total loss anyway if doused in water so save the water and just keep people from getting too close to the fumes and heat. Once it burns out then pour a new slab over the aluminum oxide ash and start over. Aluminum oxide is a major component of sand, it is the "sand" in "sandpaper", so not any real environmental hazard to just bury in place.
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Aluminum oxide is a major component of sand
It's a major component in sand used as abrasives, but that's almost all synthetic - most natural sand is primarily silicon dioxide. If everyday sand were aluminum oxide, it'd be cheaper just to use that than processing bauxite to extract aluminum, since conversion to Al2O3 is the first step in refining bauxite into metallic aluminum.
Something like between 500A and 5000A (Score:2)
Such battery packs will need some hefty connectors.
For every slashdot revolutionary battery tech (Score:2)
If I had a dollar for every slashdot revolutionary battery tech article that's ever been published, which never made it to mass production I'd probably be able to retire.
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Don't be so cynical. I'm sure practical applications of this technology are only 10-15 years away! Just like fusion!
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This is not for BEVs. Volts & amps are a prob (Score:3)
In the fine article there is mention of using this technology for charging BEVs, but careful reading tells us this battery technology is not for the batteries in the BEVs. This is battery technology for the BEV chargers, not for inside the BEVs. This may solve the cost issue in batteries in stationary applications but not that of voltage and current needed to put energy into BEV batteries.
I recognized the name Sadoway in the summary. The name Sadoway comes up often in discussions of new battery chemistry because this man is obsessed with lowering the costs of batteries by using cheaper materials. This is admirable but do we need to print up new news articles every time this man offers a new combination of periodic elements as anode and cathode? This is another variation on a theme in his molten metal battery idea. He keeps trying different variations on his theme, and at some point he's going to run out of elements on the periodic table to try.
Because the batteries use molten metals they are not suited to use in vehicles. If the batteries get cracked open in a crash then this would create a hot burning mess that could vaporize human flesh on contact. We already have toxic flaming messes in vehicle crashes, and these batteries would be worse. If the alternative isn't safer and cheaper than what we already have then it's not going to sell well among the public, and won't get approval from the safety regulators. I know liquid hydrocarbons can make a toxic flaming mess in a crash, it's just that batteries containing molten metals are worse.
The batteries rely on layers of materials kept separate by gravity, the layers make up the battery float on top of each other. If put under vibrations like that seen in nearly every vehicle in motion then they won't maintain the layering needed for operation. Sadoway knows his batteries are not suited for use in vehicles, but the people writing the news articles need to make this sound like something useful for electric vehicles in some way or it's not going to get the needed advertising clicks.
The biggest problem with electric vehicles is not in the battery chemistry. If we solve that we'd still be left with the problem of the high voltage and current required to move energy anything close to that of pumping liquid hydrocarbons into a tank. Even if we account for electric motors being far more efficient than internal combustion engines there's still a big problem with the amount of power transferred by electrical conductors of a size we'd consider reasonable for charging electric vehicles. People need to just look up the math on this. Copper conductors in air would be quite large. If we use active cooling to make the conductors smaller then we'd have to consider the size and weight of the cooling systems.
Battery chemistry is a problem for electric vehicles. It's not the only problem. There's still energy needed to make up for rolling resistance, air resistance, and so on. Any resolution to these problems can be applied to vehicles with internal combustion engines. Any improvements in energy losses in getting vehicles to move widens the gap that BEVs need to cross to compete with ICEVs.
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People need to just look up the math on this. Copper conductors in air would be quite large. If we use active cooling to make the conductors smaller then we'd have to consider the size and weight of the cooling systems.
I've worked with some companies on this. Interestingly there are already designs floating around and being tested for watercooled charging cables. The size and weight isn't an issue as the majority of the weight is fixed within the charger. The biggest issues that are being run into are:
- Wear and tear on the cable (water and electricity are not a good combination).
- Connector heating up (change in connector so that water can circulate around the connection point is impractical)
- Wiring within the vehicle c
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Perhaps the charger can contain enough cryo to make superconductors work or use some other kind of coupling (inductive perhaps). After all, complexity and weight in the charger is less of a problem than in the car.
I'm surprised that the problem is getting electricity across the threshold between charger and car and not distributing it within the car.
Maybe it's time to put multiple charging connectors on the car
So? (Score:1)
That's Nice and All (Score:2)
But i want to know where my Flying Car is. I don't mind if it's electric. I just want it before I die.
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People are bad enough at driving in two dimensions. We don't need every Tom, Dick an Harriet distracted flying over cities and towns.
Yeah, just like thin film solar cells (Score:2)
I'll first plaster them thin film solar cells that I picked up for a bargain at eBay all over my house before playing with these new batteries.
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So, I've always thought to get a Generac, but solar panels and a good battery system are a path I had not seriously considered until now. It will be interesting to see what the market offers over the next 5 years or so.
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Considering the operating temperature, I don't think they're planning on using it right next to electronics. There are lots of uses where that wouldn't be a problem, but it sure doesn't sound like a "one size fits all" battery. Boiling hot isn't THAT hot, but it's too hot for many applications. You won't use that in your flashlight.
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In a flashlight not, but that is not a current problem.
And boiling water temperature is lower than a combustion car one so ... could be a very interesting alternative for transportation; anyway, we are using radiators to control temperature in our petrol based machines and this is seldom a problem for the most of the people.
What I think is that we are just grasping the surface for many other not so well studied options for future batteries. The future looks nice.
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"And boiling water temperature is lower than a combustion car "
"Near boiling water temperature"
It's 110 degree Celsius, not 'near' but way beyond the boiling point of water.
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It's not that bad 2 bars of pressure should be enough.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox... [engineeringtoolbox.com]
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It's not that it is bad, but 'near water-boiling temperature' suggests 97 degrees or so, not 110.
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To me these batteries would be great to use for balancing the electric grid over the day so that solar and wind could become a lot more stable and useful.
Excess heat can be harvested from stationary batteries and reclaimed either to drive turbines or to get hot water for heating and tap water.
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To me these batteries would be great to use for balancing the electric grid over the day so that solar and wind could become a lot more stable and useful.
If we get cheap electric grid storage then that's going to be bad for wind and solar power.
What is a big problem that makes steam power plants expensive to operate? The steam turbines cannot vary power output quickly. We can make up for this with batteries. Big steam power plants are built because they are far more efficient than reciprocating piston engines and gas turbines. (The "gas" in gas turbines refers to the fuel being vaporized or atomized into a gas, not because they run on natural gas, but th
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The new green deal is the solution to absolutely ALL our problems! Kudos to the current administration for that!
I'll have you know that Jill Stein of the Green Party was the candidate pushing the green new deal.
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Also, every senate democrat failed to vote for the GND, so it didn't pass. Not sure why that is on anyone's radar, as that was a while ago now, and no one has brought the legislation back.
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Not sure why that is on anyone's radar
Agreed. Hillary's emails are clearly a more consequential and urgent matter.
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I wouldn't say that, but I would say that the disparity between Hillary's treatment as she committed thousands of counts of 7 felonies and Trump, who committed an unknown number of 3 of the same felonies, should concern anyone. Hillary also destroyed evidence (of multiple crimes, and items under congressional subpeana), transmitted classified information, destroyed official records, and destroyed classified records, which Trump isn't even accused of.
Now, what does that have to do with the Green New Deal th
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How dumb are you?
It appears that the scientists pursuing this research are pretty frickin' smart. I'm not sure what you're on about; it's interesting new research.
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This same MIT professor has been trying to sell his idea on molten metal batteries for at least 10 years. Go do a web search on Donald Sadoway and molten metal batteries. He's been trying different metal combinations for a very long time and each time he thinks he has it figured out there's another news article about a professor from MIT with a new battery chemistry that will revolutionize the industry.
I caught on that he's not doing anything all that new. I would think that other people would catch on t
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