It seems like I see headlines every few months that a lab somewhere has created a paper-thin battery made out of unicorn horn which charges instantaneously when exposed to the sun and will run for a thousand years without recharging, and then it turns out to only work at absolute zero or to become unstable when three of them exist in the same area code or to emit radiation that kills anything smaller than a muskrat on contact.
I'm glad we've got labs researching battery technology, since I think that's one of the most important areas of research we can develop today. But forgive me if I'm skeptical until I see something show up on the shelves.
Power Japan Plus executives have years of experience overseeing battery manufacturing and supply chain at industry powerhouses like Sumitomo Metal Mining.
The company owns a battery production facility in Okinawa, Japan, where it will begin bench production testing of 18650 Ryden cells later this year. This facility will allow Power Japan Plus to meet demand for specialty energy storage markets such as medical devices and satellites.
> It seems like I see headlines every few months that a lab somewhere has created
Mostly because it is very much needed for a whole lot of things from mobile phones to cars to making solar energy work 24-7, so if someone gets there first they will become immensely wealthy capitalising on a shift of our civilisation.
But yeah, proof of concept is not path to market, press releases are not profits and all that.
I am also sceptical of claims that a new battery is both safer and energy-denser. These two things are not natural allies.
The press release says that it has an energy-density comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries, which in PR speak means "a little bit less than the worst lithium-ion batteries" which means "less energy-dense".
Just like cancer or time travel or any kind of cool & urgent research projects, looking at it through the lens of pop science media on twitter is not ideal.
This article has a "path to market" section, which I appreciate. But that section raises its own questions, such as: if this technology is so amazing, why is it being deployed in satellites and medical devices but not cell phone batteries and laptops? Why would you put unproven technology into the most fault-intolerant sectors first? Maybe I'm too much of a skeptic, but that doesn't sound plausible.
Honestly, unlike you, I don't want to hear about it if it's going to turn into vaporware. Should it be published in a peer-reviewed journal? Absolutely. Do I want Apple and Tesla and Samsung looking into it? Definitely. Do I, personally, want to hear about it? Not particularly.
When ramping up production, you would start with markets that are small, price-insensitive, and performance-sensitive. If it costs 10x as much as a normal battery but performs 5% better, that could be a value proposition that captures them the entire satellite market, letting them expand production into cars and consumer goods.
(I know squat about the satellite battery market; this is generic market wisdom.)
>raises its own questions, such as: if this technology is so amazing, why is it being deployed in satellites and medical devices but not cell phone batteries and laptops? Why would you put unproven technology into the most fault-intolerant sectors first?
Don't know the specifics for this technology, but the answer is obvious in general.
Because new techologies are first put to use in expensive and demanding sectors, that can pay the top dollar needed for them (since they are not mass-market yet to have economies of scale).
That's why the army, NASA, industry etc had GPS, cellphones, etc before you had one, and the same for most other such technologies.
Using it first in satellites and medical devices indicates to me that reliability has been sufficiently demonstrated, but that cost is high. If it was cheap but unproven, you'd first see it in toy helicopters or something. I don't think it's unreasonable that a new technology could be demonstrated to be reliable but not yet be cheap.
Higher power density would be ideal for toy helicopters, as they typically have to use a different formulation of LiIon battery that compromises energy density and recharge cycle endurance in order to get a little bit more energy density.
Unfortunately the markets they're targeting are going to need very thorough testing and characterization. And they're probably way too expensive for the other uses that come immediately to mind. It'll be years before you see these in action.
This one looks a little more promising. It will probably still take at least 3 years to see it in niche products on the market, though. But if I were Elon Musk, I'd keep a very close eye on this one, and if their claims are real, and won't take too long to appear on the market, I'd even buy them, and try to put the technology faster on the market.
This is one of those daytime fantasies we all have while daydreaming. Except, even when I'm really fantasizing, I never actually dream of things as ludicrous as this press release talks about.
What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies? You don't see claims like this about CPUs, Monitors, Network Cards, etc... It's always batteries for some reason.
And one of Carbon, Graphene, or Buckyballs always makes an appearance as well in these press releases. It would be nice to see a new material take the stage as the "10x faster to recharge, recyclable, energy dense, environmentally safe" battery technology that will solve all our problems.
My theory: if you want something bad enough, somebody will come along and sell you something. It won't work, but they'll still sell it to you.
Sometimes it's pure scam, of course, but I think that's rare. Mainly it's people who are clue-deficient in some important way. They think it works. Or they think they can get it to work. Or, like many marketing people, they're used to trusting somebody else that it works. It's the tech world's version of the magnetic healing bracelet or the ear candle.
The reason nobody is out selling 20 GHz processors is that nobody really wants them. It'd be nice, sure, but we're all pretty happy with what we have. Our desire for something better isn't strong enough to override our sense for what's realistic.
Good point! Altough bad example with the CPU: I do want a 20 GHz one and so do a lot of others. But I can see if it works as advertised very quickly whereas you cannot really absolutely with ultimate certainty prove that this bracelet doesn't work...
Interesting. You can test a battery's capacity, too, so I don't think that's exactly it. I also don't think the collective desire for faster CPUs is all that strong; look at how few people bother going to the lengths of, say, overclocking and watercooling, let alone more exotic approaches.
Maybe it's better expressed as a balance between desire and experience. We have a lot of experience with CPUs, and we've grown accustomed to their speed, so our collective desire is modest. But collective desire for better batteries is very strong, and our experience with them is modest. So it's much easier for somebody to say, "Miracle tech! Give me millions!" And somebody will.
This. We have electric engines pinned down. All that's missing from unlimited application of energy is better batteries and better power generation.
Look at it this way: Human endeavor consists of intelligent application of energy to mass. One of the three elements are close to being made trivial! It's very easy to get excited about batteries and renewable energy!
this is not that simple. the article claims that density is similar to lithium batteries, but it doesn't say what kind of density is it. the fact that it charges 20x as much may mean naught if it holds 1/20 energy per kg or per liter.
What do you mean "what kind of density"? "Similar to lithium batteries" means just that, if you have a lithium battery of a certain size, this will hold an amount of energy similar to that.
A 30% difference would still be classified as "similar", but this would still be a big deal since batteries are just borderline capable to provide electric cars with sufficient charge to be acceptable for most people. A battery that's 30% worse than the best current batteries would be unusable.
He's referring more to a car that could charge in 5 minutes and go 60 miles.
As I have an EV, that's closer to my current scenario of charging (once they put in a charger in the office parking lot) 4 hours and going 90 miles. The tradeoff of reduced distance for superior charge time is...irritating.
60 miles would be just short enough where I would need a gasoline car. That's why I've yet to get a Leaf. Can't afford a Tesla (nor do I want/need a car that big).
Energy density can be given in terms of mass or in terms of volume. In general, if a source of a new interesting battery technology does not describe which one they mean in a comparison, you can assume the worst, that is, that they are comparable to lithium-ion in joules/m^3 (at which lithium ion isn't actually that good).
Except that you also have to move the electricity into the car, which is actually the limiting factor in Teslas today, not the batteries. So this wouldn't really help at all.
From Tesla's website it looks like they take ~1 Hr to charge (1C rate). That would make me think they are limited by the maximum charge rate of the cells.
On the contrary, it is limited by the size of the cable going from the electricity distribution grid to the side of the car. With a typical (not a high performance) car engine capable of generating 75kW of mechanical power or so and a typical wall socket (in the UK at least) capable of transferring 3kW (and the average house having a 24kW total limit), there's going to be a problem that can only be solved by upgrading the cabling and using special high power sockets.
At some point the amount of copper needed to carry the current becomes heavier than the batteries themselves. 120kW is already outlandishly strong, at 120V it's 1000 amps!
If you had batteries which could accept that (Li-Ion's don't like going above 3C I think) and had the kind of energy density being claimed then it would be a relatively trivial matter to use a larger bank of them to provide the peak capability to charge a smaller bank of them.
Just read up on any existing quick-charging technology. Tesla's superchargers are the world's highest-capacity quick charging at 130kW, 2x the nearest competitor (CHAdeMO). And this still requires ~one hour to give the battery a full charge. Let's say you want to be able to charge in six minutes. That would mean something on the order of 1.3MW of electric power. So let's say you have a small-ish refueling station like a contemporary gas station, with eight charging spots. To power these, you need to pull ten megawatts from somewhere. The current power grid isn't dimensioned for this kind of demand, especially since the demand is very transient.
Tesla is attempting to solve this by building a massive battery storage capacity into the chargers and then trickle charging these batteries when the charging bays are not in use, so this is by no means a problem that has been solved once and for all.
Distribution level voltage is anywhere from 4kv to 25 kv. Say it's 12. Typical partridge or linnet distribution conductor might do 200 A. P=sqrt(3)IV cos theta = 1.73 * 200 * 12000 * 0.9 = 3.7 mw.
So you are correct your average distribution feeder probably does not have capacity for a 10 mw service. I guess that's not much of a shock.
In the United States the normal distribution voltage, prior to being stepped down for consumer use, 7.6kv phase to ground, 13.2 phase to phase. So yes, you're pretty close, except the 13.2 kv would be 3-phase. For heavy industrial use, 4.4 kv is common for actual end user equipment, but above that would be some pretty serious equipment for an end user. Larger transmission lines operate anywhere from 60kv on up to 1.1 million volts, so lots of power is possible, as long as you don't mind the brownouts.
AFAIK it currently takes ~20 minutes to half-charge a Tesla. 20x would mean charging fully in ~2 minutes - nearly as fast as the automatic option for replacing depleted batteries with fully charged ones.
> Charge profile is not linear in existing batteries. A supercharger is 40mn to 80% and 75mn to 100%.
Many people have a mental model of battery charging like a tank of gas or another fluid, in which the first 10% and the last 10% take the same amount of time and effort.
It seems like a better mental model of battery charging would be a pressurized container of a compressible gas: the more you put in, the more it takes to put the next bit in.
I don't believe it's known yet. Battery longevity seems to involve a lot of trial and error, and there isn't much data.
As far as I've been able to gather (and I have no real special knowledge here and could be way off), the main problem with quick charging is that it heats the batteries a lot, since charging is not a 100% efficient process and any waste energy turns into heat. Heat is bad for batteries, so it could affect their life. However, Teslas have active temperature management for their batteries (both heating and cooling, as required) which should mitigate that.
However, back in the days of NiCad batteries, some formulations could cope with really fast charges - and in fact would behave better and last longer after a very fast charge than they would after a slow charge.
We're talking about shoving 20 amps into a C cell for five minutes here. You needed to carefully monitor the cell temperature - the charging process wouldn't generate much heat until the cell was nearly full, at which point nearly all the energy going in would convert to heat. 20 amps would heat a full C cell up very quickly indeed.
It's probably the fact that a huge leap in battery technology would make huge changes in both electric cars as well as being able to store solar power (and therefore allowing people to live off the grid). Faster computer hardware wouldn't have nearly the effect and I'm sure these companies want the biggest hype possible.
It is interesting to consider what could be done if somehow a battery were invented that could, say, store 1GWh of energy in a $1 rechargeable cell the size of a AA battery with 99.9% in/out efficiency and no danger of catastrophic failure.
Every car would be electric. Airplanes too. The idea of running a vehicle on gasoline would be as ludicrous as the idea of running them on steam is to us now.
The massive challenges of wind and solar energy would disappear. Transmission and varying supply/demand are trivially solved with storage.
In computing, the massive effort expended in the name of efficiency would become unnecessary. Multitask all the things all the time! You want your phone to spin the CPU 24/7 listening for swear words so it can record hilarious videos automatically? Go for it.
Well, I think there is a physics limit there, and gasoline happens to be VERY energy-dense (unfortunately for us trying to get away from depending on that property of it), but yes, that is fun to speculate on
It should be possible in theory to match the energy density of gasoline. You'd need to come up with a battery chemistry which takes in oxygen when it discharges and produces oxygen when it charges. Effectively, reversible combustion (or fuel cells). It's a tough problem but I don't think there's anything that fundamentally prevents it in theory.
Going much beyond it probably requires a nuclear process. You can store energy in certain isotopes by bombarding them with x-rays or gamma rays of a precise frequency. Stored energy can then be released with a similar process. In theory, it's possible to build a battery that uses this approach. In practice... to call it a difficult engineering problem would be a severe understatement.
There's always room for improvement, but it's starting to get within range of the fundamental limits.
Fundamentally, non-nuclear energy storage is limited by the strength of chemical bonds. For combustion, you're taking chemical bonds of high potential energy, breaking them apart, and rearranging the atoms into molecules with chemical bonds of lower potential energy. The energy difference is the heat produced by the combustion. The situation is similar in batteries, but in addition to rearranging atoms, free electrons are also liberated or consumed, with the bond energy difference going into that. For something like a mechanical spring, the winding force distorts the chemical bonds without breaking them, treating them like extremely tiny springs, with the same principle of operation as the big one. In all cases, the chemical bond strength determines how much potential energy can be crammed into the system.
For example, Wikipedia claims that flywheel energy storage (a "battery" where you just spin a disc faster to put energy in, and use it to drive something to get energy out) tops out at about 400Wh/kg. Lithium-ion batteries top out around 250Wh/kg, somewhat similar. Gasoline has a vastly better energy density at around 12,000Wh/kg... but gasoline needs to react with oxygen to release that energy! In fact it needs to react in an approximately 4:1 ratio, so the total mass going into the reaction is 5x the mass of the gasoline alone, making for an energy density of about 2400Wh/kg. Still much higher than batteries, but not outlandishly higher. I believe the difference would be because it's much easier to turn strong chemical bonds with a lot of potential energy into heat than it is to turn it into electrical potential.
You can see how reacting with the air gets you a huge advantage when it comes to how much stuff you need to carry around with you to store any given quantity of energy. And you can also sort of see how they all end up hitting the same basic limitations in the end. If you want to go further, you need take advantage of a stronger force with more potential energy, like the strong nuclear force.
(Gravity would be another possibility. If you could store energy by raising and lowering the orbit of a heavy object orbiting close to the Sun, you could get a pretty high energy density. Or if you want to go more exotic, store energy in the rotation of a neutron star or black hole. These approaches, however, pose even more difficulty for adaptation to automobile propulsion than the nuclear option.)
Thx for the basic theory of energy and chemistry. That clears up a lot of things in my head. So in terms of Chemistry and Physics goes, we are already reaching near the fundamental limits of energy storage?
Sort of, yes. You're not going to do much better than gasoline and air as long as you stick to the chemical realm.
However, there's still plenty of room for improvement within that limit. In particular:
1. The best batteries are still quite a bit below the energy density of gasoline+oxygen.
2. Creating batteries that can use stuff in the air the way gas engines do can let you "cheat" the energy density numbers.
3. There's a lot of room for improvements to how much batteries cost for any given capacity.
4. Similarly, there's a lot of room for improvements in battery longevity, in terms of how many charge cycles it can handle before it loses capacity.
5. Again similarly, there's a lot of room for improvement in charging speed.
I think 3-5 are key. Energy per mass or energy per volume is good enough for many applications now. It's not enough for airplanes yet, but as Tesla has shown, it's good enough for practical cars. The battery pack in a Model S is pretty heavy, but the fact that the rest of the drivetrain is so compact compensates a lot. The result is still heavier than a normal car, but not excessively so. The real limitations for electric cars are high cost (which is why the Tesla costs $70,000 and up, and cheaper electric cars have terrible range), battery replacement after some years of use (really just another dimension of cost), and slow charging speeds (meaning you have to wait 30 minutes or more for a charge, which is fine for normal city driving when you charge at home overnight, but troublesome for people who can't charge at home, or who are on a road trip).
I'm not aware of any fundamental physical limitations at play in those areas yet, and at this point they're probably more important than raw energy density.
What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies?
This is a collaboration between an academic research department and a mining conglomerate, with the CTO being the guy who developed the nickel cobalt aluminum cathode for the lithium batteries they use in the Tesla and the Prius. I wouldn't call it nutty.
Getting 10 times more power density than lithium-ion isn't hard. It's also not very interesting, as we have enough power density already. Now we need more energy density.
"charges 20 times faster", which is also found in the title, is a statement about power density.
My post was a reply to the post that decried nutty battery companies. I just wanted to point out that 20x power density of lithium ion is something that's actually feasible and available today. It, however, isn't all that useful and if you have to sacrifice even a single percent of energy density for it you're better off with lithium-ion batteries.
Indeed. And if you don't have enough power density to (for instance) absorb energy from regenerative braking and then accelerate out of a corner, you just add a large capacitor with a massive power density (but a low energy density).
Assuming that it were orders of magnitude stronger, how could that possibly work, physically speaking? I see no way, unless the field was changing (rotating?) or the battery were moving to begin with.
Well, it is.. on geological timescales. And with sudden flips at that. The record is in the orientation of suitable partices at the divergent plate boundaries ('frozen' like that when the lava cooled), which also is an indicator for ocean floor spreading and plate tectonics. It's pretty awesome, actually. But as the sibling comment says, in addition to being slow it's far too weak as well.
lithium batteries are also special because of their light weight. This says it has an 'energy density' which is 'comparable' (density by mass or volume?). Vague enough for me to infer it can't compete on weight.
Yeah the energy density is the most important factor. If it's not competitive there will be some niche market for fast recharging, but lithium is good enough in many use cases.
If you assume a normal cell phone user charges his phone at night, and it will work the whole day, it means around 8 years of use.
If you calculate from lithium ion, based on my own experience with my phone and my macbook, a lithium ion battery crosses over into the less acceptable performance after 4-5 years.
If the degradation curves can be compared that would mean you could expect 12-15 years from these batteries. Pretty impressive!
Looks like it is actually carbon-lithium. Kudoz to danmaz74.
It does not stop to fancy me - why do we all need this stuff?
When Philips introduced thin Li-ion batteries, moldable to any shape 10 years ago, it took about a year or two for the industry to accept this innovation. Japanese inventors will probably license production to a larger producer. But if organic cotton only has its unique properties if grown on Okinawa, there will be no mass-production, I am afraid.
I'd love to see advancement in battery technology, I am surprised its never the established manufactures coming up with such innovations.
However this is still vaporware:
"Power Japan Plus will begin benchmark production of 18650 Ryden cells later this year at the company’s production facility in Okinawa, Japan"
Plenty of people have improved battery technologies, the issue has always been scaling up the process in a cheap enough way. If these batteries cost too much then its back to the drawing board.
People have adequately discussed why charging time isn't a particularly significant concern in batteries right now. My concern about these batteries is different: so far as I can tell, they're up to ten times heavier than lithium ion. That's a killer issue for cars. Literature in support of carbon lead claims that this is offset but the cooling and electronics needed for lithium, but I strongly doubt this.
Easy to do given the amount of battery stories at the moment, this one is pretty intriguing though.
"A new company called Power Japan Plus (PJP), working with researchers from Kyushu University, has developed a dual carbon battery (patent pending) that may solve many of the problems associated with Li-ion batteries. PJP’s chief technology officer is Dr. Kaname Takeya, who developed the batteries used in the Toyota Prius and the Tesla, so he knows a thing or two about the shortcomings of Li-ion technology."
The guy goes on to say eventually they'll make them just out of carbon but God knows how the physics will work then. You need some sort of chemical reaction to produce the electrical power along the lines of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Electrochem...
The carbon only bit sounds like management / marketing bs
I'm glad we've got labs researching battery technology, since I think that's one of the most important areas of research we can develop today. But forgive me if I'm skeptical until I see something show up on the shelves.