Thread for new battery breakthrough PR releases

xsynergist said:
Yet another new battery technology announced. Aluminum about 1/2 the voltage of lithium.
[youtube]ZKIcYk7E9lU[/youtube]

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Yeah as refering to the last 2 posts, I read same kind of article here.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion-battery-033115.html

I think one of the most interesting things to dig out of it is the estimated 7,500 life cycles!

Durability is another important factor. Aluminum batteries developed at other laboratories usually died after just 100 charge-discharge cycles. But the Stanford battery was able to withstand more than 7,500 cycles without any loss of capacity. "This was the first time an ultra-fast aluminum-ion battery was constructed with stability over thousands of cycles," the authors wrote.

By comparison, a typical lithium-ion battery lasts about 1,000 cycles.

Sounds like to me they don't really need to improve the battery that can do 7500 cycles to have a market to sell to. They probably could start cranking out cells and use the income to improve the cell performance over time, well thats the approach I could imagine most capitalists taking. You don't have to tell me thats not the ideal way of tackling it.
 
TheBeastie said:
Yeah as refering to the last 2 posts, I read same kind of article here.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion-battery-033115.html

I think one of the most interesting things to dig out of it is the estimated 7,500 life cycles!

Durability is another important factor. Aluminum batteries developed at other laboratories usually died after just 100 charge-discharge cycles. But the Stanford battery was able to withstand more than 7,500 cycles without any loss of capacity. "This was the first time an ultra-fast aluminum-ion battery was constructed with stability over thousands of cycles," the authors wrote.

By comparison, a typical lithium-ion battery lasts about 1,000 cycles.

Sounds like to me they don't really need to improve the battery that can do 7500 cycles to have a market to sell to. They probably could start cranking out cells and use the income to improve the cell performance over time, well thats the approach I could imagine most capitalists taking. You don't have to tell me thats not the ideal way of tackling it.
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what gets me is that they never mention the battery capacity... ever.
Im getting the impression its a tiny tiny battery capacity for its size.
 
MrDude_1 said:
what gets me is that they never mention the battery capacity... ever.
Im getting the impression its a tiny tiny battery capacity for its size.
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Yeah I guess its probably not that amazing but there is still a market for small mah stuff.
I went to order a replacement battery for my Mobius Action HD cam and was surprised to find there is an active market of sellers selling Mobius "Super Capacitor" replacement battery, so they can safely let their camera sit and bake on the dash board of their car and not worry about it starting a fire while also giving it just enough juice to finish up a recording session etc.
As the aluminium battery cell was showing that its very safe against fire this is a perfect cell replacement for dashboard cams etc. We can safely assume the aluminum cell was crush the super capacitor in total mAh storage.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=mobius+battery&_from=R40%7CR40%7CR40&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.A0.H0.TRS1&_nkw=mobius+Capacitor+&_sacat=0

http://www.banggood.com/Super-Capacitor-For-The-Mobius-Action-Sport-Camera-p-918122.html
 
MrDude_1 said:
what gets me is that they never mention the battery capacity... ever.
Im getting the impression its a tiny tiny battery capacity for its size.
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Is that because most cell development is done on a small scale (button cell ?) in order to make full charge/discharge cycle testing quicker and easier and cheaper ?
Or maybe even it's just a "cell" assembled in lab apparatus ( test tube cell) ?
I mean, you would not construct a 1000 Ahr cell as a first test unit , would you ? It just makes all test equipment unnecessarily huge !
...so you develop and test on a small scale , then when results justify it,..consider scaling up trials to commercial sizes.
 
Energy density appears to be around 150wh/kg from what I can see, compared to ~230wh/kg for Tesla 18650's for instance. Power density appears to be around 300% higher, so kinda similar to high C rate lipo.

Ballpark it's 30% lower energy density than lipo, comparable power density, however doesn't catch fire. Very high cycle life and probably cheap-ish to produce. Seems like a reasonable match for ebike requirements, certainly better than lifepo4.
 
Hillhater said:
Is that because most cell development is done on a small scale (button cell ?) in order to make full charge/discharge cycle testing quicker and easier and cheaper ?
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Not really. That actually has nothing to do with capacity. its capacity in this context is its charge held compared to volume and weight. It can be as tiny as a pin, or as large as a truck, and that number doesnt change (within design constraints of course).
That said, there is a picture and video of the battery. its very thin but about the same size as a small cellphone.. actually I would say its the same size and shape as the event tickets next to me. lol. if it was lipo I would guess 1300mAh or so... at the 80% guess someone else posted, that would be about 1000mAh... exactly what I would aim for to test with anyway.

Hillhater said:
Or maybe even it's just a "cell" assembled in lab apparatus ( test tube cell) ?
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naa, its in a pouch. you can see it in the video, and they explain it in the text. making one in a tube would be difficult. :lol:


Hillhater said:
I mean, you would not construct a 1000 Ahr cell as a first test unit , would you ?
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I would LOVE a 1000Ah cell.. that sucker would be huge! did you mean milliamp-hour? because yes, 1000mAh would be perfect for testing.

Hillhater said:
It just makes all test equipment unnecessarily huge !
...so you develop and test on a small scale , then when results justify it,..consider scaling up trials to commercial sizes.
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test equipment never needs to get huge, you just take more time.. that also lets you log more data and learn... tiny batteries dont always show the same issues as larger cells.
and the problem is never what you make in small scale... the problems occur when you want to scale it commercially.. that takes more work than developing anything else.
 
Yes , I did mean 1000 Ahr (huge !) just to exaggerate why you wouldn't build a large cell for initial lab development testing.
And of course testing of large cells becomes an issue if you are interested in high discharge rates etc.
Imagine doing 10,000 life cycle tests @ 5C+ on that huge cell !......much easier and quicker on a 1 Ahr cell.
I have seen several of these lab videos for new cell technology, and most of them were very small scale cells ( likely <1000mAhr) being tested, I assumed because they are quicker and easier to construct and test in a lab situation, but it could also be because that is the intended market....miniature devices.
Lab development is to test and prove the electrochemical theory, before any larger commercial sized cells are produced and the issues associated with applying the new technology to real cells are addressed
 
Hi,

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/07...itude-potential-high-energy-li-ion-batteries/

Researchers Enhance Ionic Conductivity Of Solid Electrolyte By 3 Orders Of Magnitude — Potential For High-Energy Li-Ion Batteries

The ionic conductivity of polymer-based solid electrolyte has been enhanced by more than 3 full orders of magnitude by researchers at Stanford University, through the use of ceramic nanowire fillers, according to a recent press release from the university. The new ceramic-nanowire-filled composite polymer electrolyte also possesses a better (enlarged) electrochemical window of stability. (It might be obvious to some here, but just to be clear, an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude is a considerably greater one than when something is increased 3 times over — it’s actually an increase of ~1,000 times.)

This improvement opens the way toward the design of solid ion electrolytes with superior performance as compared against conventional electrolytes, according to the researchers involved.

A bit of background — solid-state electrolytes have many potential advantages (improved safety performance, better electrochemical stability, etc) as compared against conventional liquid electrolytes, but there are barriers in the way of their wider use. The low mobility of lithium ions in solid electrolytes is probably the primary limitation/barrier in that regard, which is exactly what the new work from the Stanford researchers addresses.

Here are some of the specifics of the work coming via the new research paper:
In contrast, dispersing ceramic particles in polymer matrix increases ionic conductivity effectively, meanwhile improving electrochemical stability and mechanical strength. The addition of these ceramic particle fillers is believed to hinder the polymer crystallization or to contribute highly conductive interface layers between polymer and ceramic.

The ceramic fillers are generally divided into two categories: inactive fillers that are not involved in lithium ion conduction process (eg, Al2O3 SiO2) and active ones that participate in lithium ion transport (eg, Li3N and Li1.3Al0.3Ti1.7(PO4)3. Nanoscale ceramic fillers have large specific surface area and can enhance the ionic conductivity drastically. Most research has emphasized ceramic nanoparticles, whereas little attention has been given to one-dimensional ceramic fillers. Here we explore nanowire fillers and demonstrate significant improvement of ionic conductivity and electrochemical stability.
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To be specific here, the researchers fabricated Li0.33La0.557TiO3 (LLTO) nanowires and dispersed them into PAN-LiClO4 polymer without any additional additives — at concentrations of between 5−20 wt %.

Out of the various concentrations tested, the composite electrolyte with 15 wt % nanowires was shown to possess the peak recorded conductivity — of 2.4 × 10−4 S cm−1 at room temperature. This is roughly 3 orders of magnitude higher than that of PAN-LiClO4 without any fillers — a huge improvement, in other words.

According to the researchers, the improvements are the result of the ceramic nanowires — as you can probably guess — acting as a conductive network within the wider polymer matrix. More or less a highway system, to put an analogy on it.

The new findings were just detailed in a paper published in the ACS journal Nano Letters.
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Magnesium? Groovy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium
...the eighth most abundant element in the Earth's crust and the fourth most common element in the Earth (below iron, oxygen and silicon), making up 13% of the planet's mass and a large fraction of the planet's mantle. It is the third most abundant element dissolved in seawater, after sodium and chlorine.
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opperpanter said:
Mg-Ion batteries.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/uoia-btl041715.php
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OK battery gurus! Would this not be similar to Lead acid - Pb(s) + HSO−4(aq) → PbSO4(s) + H+(aq) + 2e−. If

not how's Mg different from lead. Wouldn't Mg have been thoroughly vetted before lead?
 
Most of the work on different battery elements seems to have been testing various recipes on the Cathode...I "think" the magnesium improvements are about doping the Anode?...
 
TheBeastie said:
Tesla's gigafactory could be obsolete before it even opens. Here's why.
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http://fortune.com/2015/04/27/gigafactory-obsolete/
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I love how that article starts out with "well this is dead because of this other thing coming out" and then spends the rest of the article telling about all the problems the other thing still needs to overcome, followed by a "well we want it bad, and are throwing money at it, so the problems should get solved"

meanwhile the first thing is vetted, mass produced already, and this is just a larger scale production facility of an existing product.
 
Fortune article - gigafactory could be obsolete said:
In January, Fuji Pigment Co. Ltd. (not affiliated with Fujifilm) announced that it had made a significant breakthrough in aluminum-air battery technology. Aluminium-air batteries have a theoretical capacity more than 40 times greater than the lithium-ion cells Tesla will soon mass-produce...
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Its Fortune magazine after all. I believe that Tesla's long-term partnership with Panasonic renders them safe. A solar powered net-zero high-capacity battery factory in Nevada, close to Tesla production facilities, in partnership with a leading battery R&D and production firm renders them relatively immune to technical obsolescence. They can always change the end product, and expect they will, to keep pace with advancements.
 
This is a age old story in manufacturing. The focus is key. W Edward Deming talked to us about it with the example of a friend of his that ran a most perfect carburetor factory. He, his friend did not understand the mission. It was not to make carburetors, it was to make fuel delivery systems. Same with the giga factory. If the focus is to make conventional batteries, it may also go the way of the carburetor factory. My bet is that Musk understands the mission, and will also be trying to obsolete the current best designs harder than anyone out there.
 
Hi,

Elon from the Q1 conference call:
http://www.thestreet.com/story/1314...eport-q1-2015-conference-call-transcript.html

We'd love it if somebody would do that. They just haven't. So there's all these things which are big on promise and short on delivery when it comes to battery chemistry.

It's just a real hard problem. Hardly a week goes by that there's not some alleged breakthrough in batteries. What they'll do is they'll cite the power but not the energy, or they'll forget to mention that it only lasts for 50 cycles, or uses an incredibly exotic raw materials.
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Swatch.. (yeah... them) is working on new battery tech:
http://jalopnik.com/swatch-yes-that-one-is-working-on-batteries-for-cars-1702898195
 
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