Commentators thus far seem mainly interested in applications in cars, in the event this ever makes it out of the lab.
Frankly, cars are not the big deal here. Existing battery technology is good enough for most light vehicle applications, and continues to incrementally improve. A lithium-air battery car could be even better and would solve most of the edge cases (the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars).
However, this would be a transformative technology for electric aviation.
Delivery drones double or triple their useful range. Air taxis go from pushing the limits of structural engineering to being easily doable. Short-haul all-electric airliners become plausible.
Delivery drones: groan. The most compelling use of an advancement such as this should not be so that we can fill the air with constant noise pollution.
Drones are loud, noisy, intrusive things, and really should not be a delivery vector in most places.
This battery tech, with improvements, since the headline is aspiration and not factual, could well be used in commercial aircraft, vehicles, on boats including commercial vessels, or in plenty of other applications where the environmental benefits of having lighter, cleaner technology is important.
This is probably a stupid question, but assuming some noise pollution is inevitable, is it plausible that a motor could be tuned, or have its noise output "converted" in some way to emit a pitch higher than the frequency range audible to human ears? Or even a lower frequency that was more in line with the existing noise pollution we're accustomed to.
Edit: maybe we could RL a somewhat efficient ornithopter. A mechanical harpy eagle with owl-like noise dampening serrations on its wings would look way cooler flying through our cities and be much quieter.
Simple answer: drone noise is a combination of narrow band and broad band noise. The narrow band frequency comes from the RPM of the rotors spinning, but the broad band noise comes from the turbulence inherent to propeller lift production and the frequency cannot be contained to above/below human hearing.
The overall magnitude of the noise production can be reduced a bit by using lighter vehicles (less thrust needed) and more efficient propellers, but it's never going to be quiet unless we do away with propellers, which is very unlikely to happen.
Wing has already changed their drones to attempt to reduce the annoyance from the noise.
Better batteries may also assist to make drones quieter: if you have a bigger energy budget, you can afford to waste some of it using quieter but less efficient propulsion (like those toroidal rotors discussed here a little while ago).
Delivery trucks are quite annoying and accidentally drive over people sometimes... At some point drones will probably be better than that (not yet).
Every time I go to my city center with the train, from the train station I first have to cross a few busy streets with a lot of car and truck traffic before getting to the walkable parts. Only then it feels I'm actually in the city. Probably one could easily measure the stress level lowering.
Would drones make it better or worse? Maybe they could fly high and operate on rooftops, unnoticeable from street level?
NYC has had a handful of fatal helicopter crashes and largely banned helicopter pads in the city even though they such flights where never very common. The idea that say 10,000+ large drones can safely and continuously fly over a city is ludicrous. You could use even larger drones to cut down on flights but now they’re even more dangerous.
Rather than drones the obvious safe solution is to use small tunnels for underground delivery which various cities have used at small scales, but such dedicated infrastructure isn’t cost effective. And delivery drivers aren’t common enough to make a real difference by taking them off the road. However, several same day package delivery companies do make use of the subway.
Tunnels indeed would be good. But I understand there the problem is scale. It's not so easy to make a large amount of small tunnels for traffic? (They are possible for piping though for some reason). But easier to make one big tunnel.
For drones, it's the opposite, they are very well suited for very small point to point connection, there is basically no infrastructure needed between the points whatsoever?
Right. There’s no infrastructure needed, just already existing infrastructure like power lines, telephone poles, radio towers, buildings, gusts of wind, signs, etc.
Yes they don’t need infrastructure, but there is a cost to using the air. The risk that your drone fails and harms someone, someone’s property, or even just the drone itself.
Plus the additional risk that you get banned from using this airspace.
But we'd just be replacing loud and annoying delivery vans with loud and annoying delivery drones. If anything, flying delivery drones would be more annoying, given that they're buzzing around at greater heights, right outside the window of your mid-rise apartment building. You'd also see a lot more drones, since they're only carrying one package at a time and returning to their depot for each new one. By comparison, a single delivery truck carries up to a couple hundred, depending on their size.
If we ever get to the point where delivery drones might become common place, people are going to lose their freaking minds once they hear the noise. It'll make the normal NIMBYism that pops up every time someone wants to build something in a city to decry the inconvenience of it look positively benign.
A new Rivian-made Amazon Prime electric delivery van went down my street today. Whisper quiet except for the required low-speed noise-maker (like all EVs).
To be fair... a non-trivial percentage of the major breakthroughs in human science/engineering were developed to have some form of impact on an active warzone.
Honestly I think most aviation should just go away. There are legitimate reasons for people and high-value cargo and mail to use planes to get places in a hurry, but I'd rather people treat plane flights as a rare luxury rather than a routine thing. The energy costs are enormous, and civilization is kind of in a wile-e-coyote-ran-past-the-cliff-edge-but-hasn't-looked-down situation with respect to climate change.
Electric aviation might be a huge improvement over burning kerosene with respect to CO2 emissions, but also reducing how much we rely on planes would go a long way too. I don't see electric air taxis being a good thing in almost any situation -- they're tremendously inefficient and they make a lot of noise. Air taxis for emergency responders might be an acceptable tradeoff.
If someone can come up with a good way to run a large airliner off of batteries in a practical fashion, then by all means I think that's worth doing, but I feel kind of obligated to be a wet blanket on the idea of the aviation industry suddenly revitalizing itself and everyone flying everywhere just because they can.
I think it is interesting that per km travelled, it is actually more energy efficient to travel by plane, than by car. This is mostly because most people tend to drive solo, so they are moving around a lot of vehicle for just a single passenger.
Of course people tend to travel much further/faster by plane. So prehaps it is not plane travel that you would like to see as a thing of the past, but traveling long distances? Or perhaps you class car ownership/driving in the same class of things that should go away.
It would be nice if long-distance travel by train were much more practical than it currently is in the U.S.
Personal vehicles are a huge source of CO2 emissions, but I don't think it's realistic to just ban them all. I would rather we focus on phasing out internal combustion as quickly as possible, which is a lot easier to do if we had suitable infrastructure. (Not just more public charge stations, but it should be standard for new apartment construction, and we should be looking at electrification of highways so cars don't need huge batteries for cross-country trips. It's not realistic to expect every car to have 500-1000 pounds worth of batteries. That doesn't scale, at least not in the short-to-medium term.)
It would also be good if public policy didn't encourage large vehicles.
It's important to note that I'm just talking about an average situation. If a car is a massive gas guzzling thing, it's a much different equation from a micro-electric.
I hadn't thought about the differences in high altitude emmissions vs low. If you'd asked me before today if there would be a vig difference, i would have guessed that eventually it all just mixes evenly throughout the atmosphere, regardless of wjere it was emmitted. But after what you wrote, I learnt that this might not be the case (the science is still investigating):
It's niche but I'd love for the most logical option to be train for any trip under 1,000 miles (SF to LA, Berlin to Paris, etc.), and then something along the lines of https://ecoclipper.org/ with decent internet for longer trips. Though sailing ships are probably not going to replace transatlantic flights any time soon. Maybe airships can come back, if only we weren't squandering all the Helium...
That's just a very practical way to ensure aviation remains a polluting and oil guzzling industry for perpetuity.
Since the economic and political elites of the world (in the broad sense) are the clients of aviation, there is just about zero chance they will allow the field to be dismantled for environmental reasons, especially since they have come to relly on it in the global competion.
> I'd rather people treat plane flights as a rare luxury rather than a routine thing.
Trains would definitely be key here. However, for migrants living in another continent, it becomes impossible in several scenarios to go back to visit their beloved ones.
It is normal for a long range airliner to take off with more weight than it can safely land with, necessitating a fuel dump if for some reason it needs to return to the airport shortly after leaving.
Sure, but even these batteries won't allow long range which is why short haul was specified. It's unlikely that batteries will _ever_ get energy density anywhere near enough to make long haul all electric flights possible, even with big efficiency increases. You just can't compete with using 100% of your mass as storage.
Most situations where an airliner returns to the airport don't involve any sort of crash landing, and don't have a significantly higher risk than normal of igniting fuel in the tanks.
To use the 787 Dreamliner[0] as an example, the maximum landing weight is around 120,000 pounds less than the maximum take-off weight. Even a 737 [1] has to fly an hour or so to burn off enough fuel for landing (assuming it is fully loaded to begin with), or dump it into the air if it's urgent.
fun fact, the SR-71's tires could not handle the weight of the plane with a full fuel tank, so it could not takeoff or land filled up, which is why they always refueled them in midair.
I think it’s because the way the battery works involves oxidization of the lithium. So the weight comes from collecting oxygen from the surrounding air as a form of rust.
> the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars
Casually dismissing people who are likely using the road for commerce is not a great take. In particular, if you ever hope to legitimately electrify anything larger, you should probably consider this serving this segment as a useful precursor to more work.
It seems to be a consistent knee jerk reaction to the idea that the current generation of electric automobiles just aren't a good "drop-in" replacement for the current fleet. We should solve that problem, not demean people who experience it.
It was just a joke about the legions of boomers on FB complaining about these increasingly implausible reasons why an electric car won't work for them when they clearly would, and for those people who do have one of the rare legitimate reasons, they can just continue to use ICE vehicles..
A family member is constantly posting that nonsense, and whining about how he could never buy an EV since he hauls his boat. Nevermind that he hauls his 2,000lb pontoon boat 40 miles round-trip twice per year. The base model Hyundai EV could easily perform 100% of his towing requirements.
He doesn't have a problem to solve, he just likes to complain and virtue signal. No amount of battery range will convince him to buy an EV because it has nothing to do with his complaints.
I never heard of serious suggestions to ban hydrocarbons from in general. We're not dumping R&D money into synfuels for fun. It's just that synfuels make no economic sense for almost everyone. Why would you want to pay 5x more per mile in a car with 10x more moving parts?
For context, a gallon of gas carries about 33.4 Kwh, a Cessna 172 has a fuel capacity of 56 gallons. Topped up at take-off it's carrying the equivalent of 1.87 Mwh. That will take you about 1,200 km.
I expect short range electric commuters will come first - similar to cars.
The math is quite a bit better than those numbers would suggest. An aircraft piston engine is roughly 25% efficient, but an electric motor can be over 90%.
A gallon of gas weighs about 2.7 kg, so the gas is about 12.3 kWh/kg. If we adjust this type of battery to account for the difference in efficiency, it is about 4.3 (equivalent) kW/kg.
Ok, so that's still a factor of 3 worse. However, all the gas in the Cessna weighs about 336 lbs. The engine weighs about 250 lbs. A comparable electric motor is about 70 lbs. That gives you another 180 lbs, or over 50% more weight to fill with batteries.
Now we're at about 50% of the useful energy of the Cessna. You can also factor in a little bit of gain from "regenerative braking" since the electric airplane can charge the batteries while descending. This may not make a huge difference in range for just point to point flying, but it does add some extra for flight training with lots of landings, and also provides some extra reserve in the case of a missed approach for example.
All of that is to say that this doesn't bring the small electric airplane to parity with gasoline, but it's starting to much more credibly inch in on its turf.
50% is well within the engineering margin available too. Ultimately you can make 2 seaters that are a little bigger than existing ones but have the same range. Most Cessnas don't fly with full tanks all the time, people usually fill them to ~60% (tabs) for the vast majority of flying and training.
Also, hyper efficient aircraft like the LongEZ (2000mi range on 52usg) become more interesting. Most legacy piston singles are horribly inefficient aerodynamically, to the point where just comparing them by frontal cross section is a completely legitimate strategy. A large amount of thrust is wasted just cooling the engine and the wings on most Cessna's are not flush riveted, seams not covered, etc. People often wonder why multi engine aircraft don't have 2x the performance; they have over 2x the cross section. Composite aircraft have the potential to allow for extremely competitive designs.
I've done estimates before suggesting we don't even need 50% of the performance, but rather somewhere around 30% to start to be competitive. 1.2kw/kg is well beyond viable.
What's the conversion efficiency with a Cessna 172's ancient engine though? Batteries don't have to get that much better for electrics to dominate the training GA market.
There's a Pipistril Velis Electro[1] that shares a hanger with my flight school. It can only fly for about 30 minutes + 30 mins reserve with 2 relatively light pilots. If it had a battery which allowed for 2 hours of flight you've now tripled your range - 1.5hours + 30 mins reserve. That would cover all ab-initio training.
A battery like the one in the article would expand the range further to cross country capability and/or higher useful load, with the complete reconstruction of a piston engine every 2000 hours gone from the equation. Can't wait.
Has anyone experimented with hydrogen or natural gas fuel cells? They're cumbersome for cars but for planes the reduced weight would make sense. Weight doesn't matter as much for land transport.
I know hybrids don't make as much sense for planes because the throttle range is typically 50-100% through a flight vs cars where you spend tons of time down at 10-15% throttle and need only bursts of power.
The problem with hydrogen is the volume, not the weight. It's 3x that of methane, which in turn is worse than aviation fuel. And that's in liquid form. Chilling hydrogen to near absolute zero to get it in liquid form requires some really heavy duty equipment. And keeping it there takes energy.
Most hydrogen trucks use compressed gas instead. At around 200 bars, the energy density by volume is about 18x that of diesel. So, you need a huge tank for the same amount of energy. And also 200 bar means it needs to be a really strong tank. Hydrogen trucks aren't really competitive with battery electric trucks for this reason.
You need a lot of infrastructure and you add a lot of weight and complexity to the trucks. The handful of hydrogen trucks driving around have in common that they are expensive, don't have a lot of range, and need to be supplied via an as of yet non existent distribution network for hydrogen. If you truck the stuff around, you need 18 trucks for every diesel truck to move the equivalent in energy.
All that volume is a show stopper on planes. We're talking about huge planes that are mostly hydrogen storage tanks with not a lot of room for useful load. Or alternatively really heavy tanks that can keep hydrogen at close to absolute zero. A more likely use for hydrogen in aviation is to use it to produce synthetic fuels that are more dense and easier to handle.
Huydrogen really sucks as a fuel. And it's not a particularly efficient battery either. Storing it is problematic. Transporting it is problematic. The vast majority of hydrogen today is produced and consumed in the same place for this reason. It's main role is as a raw material to produce other things (fertilizers, steel, etc.).
It might have its niche as season scale energy storage. It's pretty easy and cheap to store it in underground cavities, they are good enough for helium [1] which leaks even easier than hydrogen.
Universal Hydrogen is outfitting a Dash-8 with one hydrogen fuel cell engine for a test flight in March (leaving the other engine unchanged as a Jet-A powered turboprop). If all goes well they'll convert the other engine to hydrogen fuel cell as well, and they hope to be operating it in passenger service by 2025.
Seems promising because they don't have to fully design a new aircraft, they just have to get the new powertrain certified. Though the same end-customer airline (Air New Zealand) is also eyeing off some new-build battery-electric aircraft with 250nm range and 30 min recharge times.
Airbus is experimenting with fuel cells for airliners; I believe the idea is to use the fuel cells for cruising and use gas turbines when more power is required.[0]
Joby Aviation (the air taxi developer) also bought a company that's been working on a hydrogen fuel cell light aircraft. The power density of fuel cells density would make VTOL air taxis a whole lot more plausible (though you've still got a distinctly nontrivial hydrogen storage problem). [1] There's another startup called HyPoint working on fuel cells specifically for aircraft [2], though they haven't announced a whole lot recently.
This is a bit shallow a take. Current batteries may be wrangled to provide adequate range to cars, but it comes at a significant weight/volume knock-on costs.
A large heavy battery requires increased weights of shielding and frame structure, it's almost exponential. Tesla 3 battery weighs more than its max payload.
But still, electric cars work, and work well. I have an EV with over 400 miles of range. It may be heavy but that doesn't affect me much in my day-to-day.
But electric propulsion really doesn't work well for tons of air travel cases, and a battery like this really would be transformative for those uses - that's how I interpreted GP's comment.
Sure, it works, but their point is that the savings would be near exponential. Eg, a battery with similar characteristics but double the density might allow you to reduce the size of the battery by something like 70% while keeping the same amount of range. So the amount of resources required is greatly reduced. Considering it's only a matter of years before ICEs are flat out banned in most countries, figuring out more efficient ways to use resources for vehicles is pretty important.
With electric cars you're mostly looking at a cost curve at this point. The cars have proven they're competitive in a range of market segments and that advantage will be built out in the coming years, either from optimising the current battery tech or inventing new stuff. This is true for most overland transportation as we're also seeing batteries in trucks, trains, busses and trams.
This is not true for planes and helicopters yet. We're still not at the point where the planes carrying the bulk of passengers (100-200 seats, 1000-4000 km) can be electrified, even with no budget constraints. We're starting to see concepts for smaller planes and that's obviously a good start but there's still some ways to go – better batteries could make a big difference here as it might allow electrification of planes that wouldn't previously been possible. After that we obviously still need to get the costs down, but that generally comes with scaling.
Which one? What is your actual overall average Wh/mile vs. your car’s rated efficiency?
I own a Model S Plaid. Its rated range is nominally 396 miles, but that’s never gonna happen in real life. (No one buys a Plaid to drive in Chill mode…)
Sure, it’s a rocketship in a straight line, but there are reportedly lots of other cars (even electric ones) that are much more fun to drive on a twisty road.
Because its performance is unparalleled. Also, it’s tons of fun to drive on twisty roads.
I don’t know of any other production car that offers comparable performance. Every other Tesla feels slow in comparison. I have driven the Lucid Air Grand Touring. Its performance isn’t remotely comparable, and the Lucid Sapphire is currently vaporware. As of mid-January, only three existed on the planet, and none of those were available to the public.
LFPs are intended to routinely charge to 100%, and that's where EV batteries are headed in the next few years. I'm not sure what fraction of EVs sold in the US today use LFP, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's relatively high, maybe 1/4, and it's going to go up.
LFP comes with a small weight penalty (for now) but the safety profile and longevity are superior.
Drones and general aviation are obvious markets. Batteries like this will initially be limited in supply and expensive. So targeting them at niche markets makes sense.
There are already a few certified planes flying and a few drones that are getting close to that. E.g. the Beta that flew in the New York area last week. And there will be a lot more in a few years. Current state of the art is a usable but not very long range for electrical planes. 200-250 miles seems to be the maximum range currently and some planes barely get to 100 miles.
Something that not everyone seems to grasp is that planes expend a lot of energy going up but then a lot less cruising from A to B and they can actually recover some energy going down. So, increasing the battery capacity without increasing the weight means you extend the cruise phase of the flight. The take off energy expense is kind of a constant that is mostly dependent on the weight.
Doubling the capacity might extend ranges to more than double what they are currently. A 1200 wh/kg aviation battery would more than quadruple current ranges. That's nice of course if you can get to 1000+ miles. But a more logical thing to do would be to cut the weight by e.g. half and still more than double the range. Also, current electrical planes sacrifice a lot of their maximum takeoff weight for batteries. Losing half that, increases their useful payload size and utility considerably. You can turn a four person plane into an eight person plane, for example. And still extend the range a little too.
I think Elon Musk called out 400wh/kg as the threshold that he considers as a minimum. This more than triples that. More than because of the outlined effects on cruise.
Trucking is still unsolved. This tech would probably start there. It’s entirely possible that a battery generation will cross industries due to process improvements.
Unsolved as in several products on the market that you can buy that are class 8 trucks? It's a solved problem. Batteries are heavy but a few tonnes of battery on a vehicle that is designed for 40 tonnes is not a problem.
Battery cost is a much bigger problem for trucks. A mwh of battery would deliver awesome range. But most commercial trucks come with something closer to a quarter of that. I think the Tesla semi actually comes close to a mwh. But it's an outlier. The reason for this is cost, not weight.
I think a much better solution is by electrifying highways, so the trucks don't have to carry too much battery (or can just use a much smaller amount of diesel) as they move. Usually the main limiting factor for truck range is the sheer weight of the batteries. The more weight you add, the less you can carry due to laws on maximum truck weights. Electrifying roads with overhead cables can be a more economical solution and does not rely on any non-existing technology.
If you spent the money to electrify roads, you might as well just build rails to lower friction. And perhaps chain multiple trucks together to reduce air resistance as save labor costs.
Also, while overhead lines tend to be the cheapest method, there have been some interesting tests in Sweden with rails embedded in slots in the road surface. (Sort of like those toy slot cars that used to be popular about 30-40 years ago or so.) It's more expensive, but the main advantages are that it can be used more easily by a wider range of vehicles (not just trucks or cars with comically tall pantographs), and you don't have to look at overhead cables, which some people find objectionable.
There are also some tests projects using induction charging, but that's super expensive and the amount of power you can usefully deliver is a lot lower than if you have a physical electrical connection. (I expect it to only be useful in a few limited cases. Maybe induction chargers installed at bus stops, for instance.)
Anyways, I would love if electrified highways were to be a real thing. The amount of diesel that gets wasted every day pushing trucks around is staggering, and it'd be great to be able to buy an electric vehicle with 100 miles of range or so and feel comfortable making long cross-country road trips without ever even having to bother to stop and charge.
Electrical trucks you can buy and drive right now. No reason to wait. Electrical highways (except for an expensive and impractical test range in Germany) don't exist and won't exist for many years to come.
There's nothing economical about installing lots of infrastructure on tens of thousands of kilometers of highways (what about other roads?).
A few hundred miles in a freight vehicle is bullshit. Someone said build me a thing and none of the engineers had the courage to laugh in their faces and say no.
The stores are full of bullshit products. Just because someone is selling it doesn’t mean it works. Some of these so called tractors only get 170 miles? Are you joking?
No. Still way too heavy for airplanes. “Short-haul” is still 1,000 miles or more, and energy density is still too low to do that practically. Also, metal-air batteries gain weight as they discharge.
This would wipe out the GA market though. Small planes, small business jets, drones, etc. Most of these have ranges well below 1000 miles.
Short haul is actually well below 1000 miles as well on average. Here in Germany, essentially all domestic flights are closer to 300-400 miles. Basically most 1-2 hour flights would be in scope for electrification. That's most of the aviation market.
Plenty of people would choose a fatter phone. Phones are thinner than wallets. I always assumed it was discharge heat surface. Phones are hotter than wallets.
Honestly I'd prefer a fatter phone. The dimensions of the early generation smartphones were in my opinion ideal, they fit in the hand well, it was easy to reach the whole screen with the thumb of the hand holding it, and there was enough meat for it to feel substantial without being heavy. In addition to packing more battery, a deeper phone would also allow better optics for the cameras and more freedom for antenna design. I don't really see the value of a larger screen which would justify giving this all up.
Plenty of people would choose a thicker phone with better battery life if given the choice but companies have long fought to use it as a marketing feature and don’t want to draw attention to the compromise.
The batteries themselves only dissipate heat relative to the charge/discharge rate/current but the total capacity would not change that.
When have you ever gone to get your phone replaced and have them ask you "do you want the model with the long battery life or the model that's thin?" The failure of niche competitors most people have never heard of is not consumers voting with their wallet, it is anti-competitive behavior entrenching established players.
If you want almost any smartphone to have a battery life of 5+ days, don't install any chat or social media apps, and turn off background email syncing. For that matter, turn off all background data transfers.
Problem solved.
Because it isn't hardware that is at fault, it is software. Batteries have actually been getting bigger and bigger, the iPhone 6 everyone loves from 8 years ago had a battery that was under 2000mAh.
There are so many different metrics that are important in a battery. wh/kg is a key one, definitely, but the standard Lithium Ion battery meets a bunch of important ones.
What's the wh/volume? Maybe it's light but it's huge?
What's the charging rate? Maybe it holds power well, but takes 3 days to recharge?
What's the discharge rate? Maybe it hold power well, but can't release it quickly?
What's the cost per wh to produce? It's a research thing right now, so probably it's incredibly expensive- but that always is the case with new stuff.
This is the hard part with any new battery announcement. They always yell about how this new battery tech wins at one metric, while quietly not mentioning that there's a lot more where the Li-ion wins out overall.
I have access to the paper. First, the actual measured capacity is 685 Wh/kg, not 1200; the researchers stated they hope to reach the latter figure with further development. In order:
- Wh/L is 619, so the battery just barely floats. The absence of a dense metal oxide cathode probably makes it lighter than the usual lithium battery cell (which have s.g. ~2).
- Charging rate is given as 1 A/g for a 1 Ah/g electrode, so these numbers were measured with a 1-hour charge time. Data for higher charge rates is buried in the Supporting Information (which may be public?)
- Discharge rate is the same.
- Cost to produce is unclear. The electrolyte contains about 1-2% germanium (5 wt% of Li10GeP2S2), and the cathode contains molybdenum. It is difficult to give the Mo concentration with certainty because the specific area of the cathode is given as "250 g/m^2" but it should be as "m^2/g". Assuming a simple typo, the cathode contains 25 mg of Mo per cubic centimeter, which is sometimes written "2.5% w/v". These are rare elements, but the concentrations are rather low. The use of toxic sulfides (H2S risk) may increase production costs.
Coulombic efficiency, which you didn't ask for, starts at 93% and drops to 88% after 1000 cycles, so pretty good but a little lower than you expect from a typical lithium battery.
Wh/kg is an insufficient metric for air batteries. One needs Wh/kg at full charge and separately or full discharge, or kg/Wh charged and additional kg/Wh per unit Wh discharged, or something along those lines.
(kg/Ah discharged could be used to estimate electrons per oxygen atom absorbed, too.)
This is awesome. I hope people realize this came out of public funding and not made by a corp. Although eventually some corp will make a minor tweak to this and copyright the hell out of it. Really excited to see this in a car soon!
> Although eventually some corp will make a minor tweak to this and copyright the hell out of it
Patent rather than copyright, but you are most likely correct - in fact I fully expect at least one company already has a patent which might arguably be infringed by this work, regardless of whether that company has ever made an actual working battery, or really done any meaningful research whatsoever. Such is the insanity of the patent system.
If it’s a minor tweak it’s not patentable. And only the authors can patent it (assuming they do so before presenting it publicly which can set a clock). The authors of course can sell.
Public funding contributes basic research. Corporations contribute other things, like design for actual use and production, production tooling design, production tooling production, factory space and management, distribution management, warehousing, marketing (yes, you do need to spend money to market it in any economy). And by the way, all this results in paying wages and taxes which go back to the public.
Also, in many cases of publicly funded research, the resulting company is owned or partly owned by the researcher(s), which is one of the incentives for doing the research in the first place.
Utility patents cover that which is new and, in theory, non-obvious (although non-obvious is very poorly enforced based own personal experience). Those would include the "tweaks", which may not be as minor as you think, given the difference between the needs of a product that is to be mass produced, vs. a proof-of-concept laboratory device. Patents might also include the methods of production. Design patents cover the appearance and aesthetics, and are a different type of patent in the US.
If commercialized in similar stats, a million mile lifetime battery in a Tesla Model S:
250 kilowatt hour battery ~ 1000 mile range
battery would weight 208 pounds, although pack would probably be more than raw cell weight, let's say 250 pounds. Current Tesla model S is a 1100 pound pack.
Because you are chopping off almost 1000 pounds in pack weight, the car would go even further than current tesla effeciency because of the BEV "rocket equation".
The battery uses oxygen from the air, not purified oxygen unlike others. It is a solid battery design as well, so it should be compact. Materials are claimed to be common.
Of course it can be hard to tell the path to commercialization. Usually research cells are very small, a far cry from BEV / grid and other commercial scale cells.
The air intake could have filters, dehumidification, and drying via desiccant. I can’t imagine they would just run plain atmospheric air with all its pollutants through such a high efficiency, high energy battery.
The material resulting from discharge (Li2O) is very stable. Water (or LiOH) would break down before it on the charging process. There isn't a lot of stuff on the air that could contaminate it.
Enovix is already at 1,500 cycles w/ 88% capacity retention at *889 wh/L per core* (figure ignores packaging, like the Argonne figure) at 6C CCCV charge – 1C discharge.
And that is a commercially relevant sized cell that is being produced at Fab1 in Fremont.
The catch is that this is a tiny lab prototype, where the energy density is projected and I could not find it in the paper that the cycling was in fact tested for 1000 times and even though the starting materials are cheap the article is very light on details about mass manufacturing larger cells.
I don't want to take away from the research and think it's super cool and hope it scales well to mass production but it's usually a long road from lab prototype to Tesla level production facilities.
> I could not find it in the paper that the cycling was in fact tested for 1000 times
The team established that this shortcoming is not the case for their new battery design by building and operating a test cell for 1000 cycles, demonstrating its stability over repeated charge and discharge.
Most of these inventions don't live up to their initial hype, but some do find a niche (for example cell chemistry optimized for large temperature ranges, optimized for certain safety features, longevity over charge density etc.), and ideas from some of them find their way into mainstream batteries after a decade or two.
It basically never happens that a new cell chemistry becomes the market leader in all areas, but all in all, batteries to get better and cheaper at a remarkable rate.
> Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (abbreviated Li-NMC, LNMC, or NMC) are mixed metal oxides of lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt. They have the general formula LiNixMnyCozO2. ... NMCs are among the most important storage materials for lithium ions in lithium ion batteries. They are used on the positive side, which acts as the cathode during discharge.
But the catch is two-fold. First, are they weighing the battery before or after discharging? Oxidizing will change the weight significantly. The most honest result would be the average weight during the cycle.
The other catch with these air batteries is usually the purity requirements on the intake. I recall reading about earlier experiments that could not tolerate pollen, dust, and smog, and required an energy intensive purification step (maybe involving cryogenics) that was a nontrivial power draw.
Those caveats aside, a back of the envelope estimate for the energy density would be something like 600-700 Wh/kg.
The other issue is that metal-air batteries go by another name: fuel cells. You are power-gated by how much oxygen you can deliver to the battery. As a result, metal-air batteries/fuel cells are either very slow to discharge, or have big air pumps to have decent performance.
And of course, they will release oxygen if you try to charge them, which implies a way of rapidly expelling air when charging up quickly. Many past attempts avoid this problem by "mechanically" charge up the battery, meaning literally swapping out the spent chemicals with new ones. This of course require an auxiliary battery if you want regenerative braking or the ability to electrically charge.
And of course, the real catch is that we've already invented the metal-air battery in a practical way: hydrogen fuel cells. The big advantage with them is that mechanically recharging is very straightforward compared to other mechanisms. All other attempts are basically reinventing the wheel or have a very specific niche in mind.
A problem with fuel cells is that if they're acid, they need expensive platinum group element electrodes. If they're alkaline, they can use nickel, but then they need to have the CO2 scrubbed from the air or they clog up with carbonate.
As in this is roughly at least twice as good as current technology? Seems too good to be true. When can we expect to see it hit consumer cars? 5 years? 10 years?
Except tesla is expecting and has been achieving 10% density increases in the last few years. Do this for 8 years, and you get double, same as the new battery tech that's gonna take 10 years.
1st gen: 276 Wh/kg (2022)
2nd gen: 305 Wh/kg (2023)
3rd gen: 333 Wh/kg (2024)[1]
Here is a cool article on all the tech that is scheduled or went into these new 4680 batteries and getting the energy density up well past 300.
Your info is out of date. The 4680 actually ended up being 244Wh/kg[1], which is lower than the Panasonic 2170 at 269 Wh/kg that they were already using.
I assumed Tesla was at 300, which is pretty close. This might not be the tech for consumer cars though, but one thing I have seen is the enormous proliferation of applications for Li batteries as the costs have come down, and these will certainly find an application. That would be my bet.
Maybe one catch is that the weight of the discharged battery is much higher than the weight of the fully charged one. So, as you travel, the battery becomes heavier and heavier
> This new solid enables chemical reactions that produce lithium oxide (Li2O) on discharge.
Lithium has an atomic mass of 7 and Oxygen of 16. The reaction starts with only Lithium (2 atoms = 14 mass) and ends with Li2O, with a mass of 30.
Probably the same catch as any major battery news: going from lab to actual real-life production is a long journey, and it's as yet unclear if the manufacture can be scaled up and if it can work in real-life applications.
All these parameters do is help determine its best possible use-case for product and if it something to compete against incumbents or open up other market possibilities.
From the article: "The main new component in this lithium-air battery is a solid electrolyte instead of the usual liquid variety. Batteries with solid electrolytes are not subject to the safety issue with the liquid electrolytes used in lithium-ion and other battery types, which can overheat and catch fire."
Very long cars are going to make a comeback. Parking lots will never be the same again! Wonder how well the batteries tolerate deformation and if they could be molded into crumble zones.
Parking spaces in US cities can get smaller the closer you get to the central business district. Eventually they're marked as 'Compact' so hopefully only those in compact cars will attempt to use them. If Lithium-Air batteries enabled widespread adoption of EVs over ICE vehicles, but at the cost of requiring longer vehicles, would enlarging parking spaces be an acceptable cost?
For consumer electronics, absolutely. Not so much for cars. A Tesla battery pack is a big sheet just 3" thick. You could double that easily without significant effect on the layout or design of the body.
A friend of mine works at a major established car manufacturer and has been working on solid state electric batteries for awhile, and thinks it is the future (he recommends ignoring current EVs in favor of plug in hybrids until these batteries come out). He thinks when these batteries are ready to be put in cars they'll end up somewhere around 2-3x improvement in range, so slightly less than the 1200 miles but reasonably close.
1000 cycles is about three years of use. I personally charge my EV every night, it's better to form a habit of plugging it in every night than to forget to check it and not have enough energy in the morning.
no, 1000 cycles doesn't mean 1000 charging events will end it. 1000 cycles from 100 to 0% will end it, and if its like current batteries, you get more than say, 10X as many cycles when you only use 10% of the battery per cycle
Once charging/discharge times come down, trickery can be used to turn 1000 into 10,000 cycles easily. If you can charge fast, you can isolate cells alto charge/discharge them individually, only jumping to other cells once the first is full. Essentially, it's wear leveling of batteries as done with flash memory. At the moment individual cells cannot charge/discharge fast enough to fully enable this.
Just checked a relatively new iPhone that is 132 days old. I charge it nightly, even though it hardly goes below 50%. In fact, battery stats for last 10 says that it used on average 40% battery per day, and it is pretty typical usage for me. It has 111 charging cycles.
The Model Y battery is 771 kg. At 1200 Wh/kg, we're looking at 925 kWh. That's 12 times the current battery (76 kWh). So range would be ~500 km x 12 = 6,000 km.
Let's go metric with 2000 km. The 2021 Kona EV has a range of about 500 km. The level 2 charger at my house takes 9 hours to recharge from empty (i.e., overnight). That's 1.5 days to fully charge a battery offering a 2000 km range, in theory, which is half your estimate. A DC fast charger can recharge 400 km in 50 minutes (80% capacity), equivalent to 4 hours for 2000 km. Meaning those batteries will probably take closer to 5 hours to fully recharge when using the fastest chargers available today.
>With further development, we expect our new design for the lithium-air battery to also reach a record energy density of 1200 watt-hours per kilogram
"With further development". Somewhat misleading title. From the published paper:
>The results shown in fig. S9 indicate that this solid-state Li-air battery cell can work up to a capacity of ~10.4 mAh/cm2, resulting in a specific energy of ~685 Wh/kgcell.
Assuming a human can carry 20kg with relative ease (say, in a backpack or strapped to a bike), this new battery allows one to carry around 24kWh - enough to run a North American house for several hours. Or to drive an e-bike for 1,000 miles… Really stretches the imagination.
Kerosene contains 10 kWh of potential energy per liter (about 800g). So yes you’d need 3kg of kerosene to provide 24kWh of energy. But that is heat energy.
An efficient gasoline generator produces 1.7kWh per liter. So for 24kWh, you’d need to consume 14L of gasoline and also carry around the generator. I would personally prefer the battery option.
Perhaps convert an old lawnmower and power drill to power one’s desktop PC? Simple and perfectly safe/convenient with additional respirator and ear defenders.
Wow 11 years ago. i switched to an electric car recently and still frequently smell exhaust fumes from cars that are running rich or burning motor oil. I might be alive to see the end of internal combustion engines in cities which seems inevitable now.
Living in a urban area I can see the end of the ICE in the next 10-15 years. The game changer in my opinion is the ebike, if we can get just a slight shift in thinking, eg taking the ebike to the gym or store instead of driving an ICE car doesn't stand a chance in the city.
It's odd to think about the danger of such concentrated energy sources. Right now I'd treat a couple gallons of kerosene with way more respect than a battery. But if this battery tech was deployed, it could be more dangerous than liquid fuels in certain ways.
It largely depends on how easy it is to get the energy out all at once.
A stick of butter represents about 1kWh of chemical energy, and a 2000kg vehicle at 225 km/hr represents about 1kWh of kinetic energy. The latter is intuitively more dangerous because the energy could easily be transferred (to e.g. a person standing in its path) in an instant.
Heck the specific energy of any given piece of matter is c squared, but we don't (as of yet) know how to get it out except under a few very special circumstances :)
No need to give such examples out of left field. Just compare the danger of a gallon of gasoline vs a gallon of diesel. Or a stick of TNT vs a an eye dropper of plutonium.
> Right now I'd treat a couple gallons of kerosene with way more respect than a battery.
Lithium-ion batteries are far worse than kerosene as a hazard. New York City has a big and growing problem with people charging scooter-sized electric vehicles in apartments.[1]
Yes it's possible, but it's not something the average person can do for very long.
I can squat 1.5X my own weight, but I still get pretty tired carrying a mere 12kg backpack through a long airport walk. Sure you can build up to carrying 20kg all the time, but it's not normal for most people in the world. And it would not be accepted as reasonable by the people in the world who could afford it.
Soldiers are routinely expected to carry far more than this. They may be carrying it in a more effective pack and/or distributed over more of their body.
Quick google search indicates plenty of US Troops were hauling 90+ pounds of gear around in Iraq and Afghanistan due to need to carry a pack + body armor + weapons.
I'm no soldier but I have certainly hiked with a 50lb load in a good internal frame pack.
And in any case the eBike example was listed. 50lb is not a very heavy load on a bicycle at all. But a battery like this would be better used to make an eBike much lighter. Today they are comically heavy in ways that creates all kinds of extra problems.
If you make the battery 1/4 of the weight of a current eBike with a 100 mile range all of a sudden you don't have to supersize everything on the bike and make it heavy, hard to handle, and un-aerodynamic. It would make the whole bike's performance improve even more.
The key is a good pack like that used for hiking with a proper frame and a large padded belt, not a normal school type backpack that you carry just on your shoulders (often just slung over one shoulder). The proper pack setup loads your muscles more like squatting. The difference is pretty striking. I think 20kg is appropriate in that instance.
(Normal guideline is hike pack should not be more than a third your body weight to avoid injury, which for the average American male would be 60 pounds and the average American female would be 50 pounds… there’s enough margin so that even if you’re talking just those in a healthy BMI of like 23, there’s enough for a 44 pound pack for the average height American male and female.)
20 kg is heavy, but I've gone hiking for days with a 16 kg backpack and I'm not very big. Stronger people than me carry more, and those with better skills for ultralight packing carry less.
I think that you are right, it is serious effort, but you can carry 20 kg for a full day if you need to.
Anytime you see a "battery breakthrough" article, a way to save yourself some time is just to check if they've patented it. If they haven't, they have zero expectation that it has commercial potential.
They do, and in fact, the federal government even has a special exception for patents. They (think: the NSA) can file a patent, and if the public files a similar enough patent, then the older, government one is revealed.
Actual paper, paywalled: [1] (Why is this paywalled? It's work done by U.S. Government employees and thus cannot be copyrighted.)
This is a huge advance if it works. But we've heard this before. People have been fooling around with lithium-air batteries since the 1970s.
Previous breakthrough announced in 2022: [2]
Previous "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [3]
Another "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [4]
Not clear if this really runs on "air", or whether it needs a clean gas mixture. Water vapor has caused problems with previous lithium-air systems. That's not a killer problem, though; extracting clean oxygen from air is not that hard. Nor is removing water.
I don’t know about Argonne, but at NIST all our papers are supposed to have full text up on PubMed within I think a year. I try to post to arxiv when I submit to the journal. Ironically paywall journals are easier for us from a budget perspective because we don’t really have dedicated funds for article fees like academics get with NSF funding
Edit: I just saw that it’s “request full text”, which I found disappointing
Not directly related, but what are the odds that if I buy an electric car this year, I will be able to upgrade the battery chemistry in 10 years?
If I bought a car today, I'd like to drive it until I can't anymore. If electric batteries are x times better in 10 years than now, it would suck to only be able to replace it with today's lithium ion.
Imagine upgrading your car in 10 years to take it from 200 miles to 10000.
Those odds are entirely contingent on the software/firmware being rooted and reverse engineered or else completely replaced by an open alternative (eg ECU swap).
Car manufacturers would have no motive to develop let alone release retrofits for older cars.
Furthermore they have an incentive to lobby for legislation to forbid aftermarket hardware/software, likely in the name of "public safety", but really just sales figures. Electric cars generally have fewer parts that wear over time, so car makers really have to up the planned obsolescence game if, after a major battery breakthrough that allows for more range/lifespan than you need, they still want to be selling the same amount of cars year over year.
Can't wait for someone to come up with a full aftermarket car firmware that would let you run everything on it, circumvent restrictions, and disable telemetry.
It's a bit disheartening that some part of science were created by a few hundred dudes in the course of a few decades (say, quantum theory in the early 1900s), and we know the name of those persons, and they changed the world for ever while also getting famous pretty fast.
But nowadays, it takes hundreds of teams of unknown researchers to _not quite actually_ make the changes that we desperately need.
Maybe there are some problems that you can only solve "Mannathan Project"-style, as opposed to the normal, slow and steady course of research ?
Must take some courage to realize the urge, and still go the way of the tortoise without loosing your mind.
These are lithium-air batteries, meaning you cannot construct them into normal, cylindrical batteries as they need air intake (and exhaust when charging).
Since this is being developed at a National Lab, do the findings automatically enter the public domain for commercialization, or can the government license the tech and reap the rewards for citizens?
National Labs usually patent tech like this. Sometimes they open-source, usually at the discretion of the researcher and funding entity. If patented, they either:
1. Commercially license to one or more corporate entities
> Licenses to practice inventions covered by patents and pending patent applications owned by the U.S. Government as represented by this Department will generally be royalty free, revocable and nonexclusive. They will normally be issued to all applicants and will generally contain no limitations or standards relating to the quality or testing of the products to be manufactured, sold, or distributed thereunder.
But...
> Where it appears however that the public interest will be served under the circumstances of the particular case by licenses which impose conditions, such as those relating to quality or testing of products, requirement of payment of royalties to the Government, etc., or by the issuance of limited exclusive licenses by the Secretary after notice and opportunity for hearing thereon, such licenses may be issued.
In other words, if it would be in the public interest to impose royalties, exclusivity, or conditions of use, the Government can do so. In this case since it's a high energy density battery, I suppose an argument could easily be made that it would be in the public interest for the government to impose conditions related to quality and testing.
EDIT: With all of that said, it appears that patents related to this project, such as [1], have UChicago Argonne LLC as the applicant and not a US government agency, so the above might not even be applicable in this case. But, again, IANAL.
Those kind of rules infuriate me... Some politicians friend will manage to argue that it's in the public interest to grant an exclusive license in return for commercializing the tech. They would argue that without being granted exclusivity, nobody will commercialize it. Then one company gets to reap all the profits of government work.
I'm a little late in responding, but I want to correct my previous comment. It appears that I linked and quoted a section from a title specific to the Department of Education. Instead, [1] applies to all federal agencies. It appears that it's up to individual agencies to determine when it's appropriate to grant exclusivity, so the rules may vary between Departments and their agencies.
With that said, any exclusive license, including prospective exclusive licenses, must be published in the Federal Register. So, any exclusive licensing should be available to the public. Additionally, the agency has to give first preference to small business applicants. However, this only applies if the small business capable and have "equal or greater likelihood as those from other applicants to bring the invention to practical application within a reasonable time", both of which are at the federal agency's discretion.
I think your concern is still valid, as I share it. I just wanted to correct the misinformation I presented previously. It still appears that the "default" licensing of Government-owned patents is to be royalty-free and non-exclusive, but what I didn't previously consider is that is only the default if they choose to license it. They could just as easily not license it at all.
This is hazily remembering a presentation when I worked at ANL 5 years ago, but commercializable products are owned 1/3 by the govt 1/3 by ANL and 1/3 by the team that worked on it.
So I'd guess they will patent this and that's who will get the money when they do something commercial (make or license).
> “The chemical reaction for lithium superoxide or peroxide only involves one or two electrons stored per oxygen molecule, whereas that for lithium oxide involves four electrons,” said Argonne chemist Rachid Amine. More electrons stored means higher energy density.
I find it odd and surprising that the limiting factor is electrons per oxygen, not electrons per lithium. Oxygen is freely floating in the air, while lithium is in a fixed amount in the battery. Possibly something about the electrode makes it store a limited quantity of oxygen.
Please can someone explain the chemistry better? The article seems to say it takes O2 from air and makes Li2O as output? Won't that somehow expend the battery over time .. or is the O2 released back on recharge?
The O2 content of air varies seasonally in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and is decreasing from year to year. Also Oxygen is more disperse at higher altitudes. Interesting how it affects such batteries.
rechargeable batteries, which want to use air as the second electrode, have the problem of CO2 in the air which causes dendrites in the (liquid) electrolyte, a solid electrolyte does not have this problem, obviously, but there seems to be still some problems as they achieved only 1000 cycles
1000 cycles is bullshit. 3 years of lifetime.
And they forgot to say what those cycles are (how much discharge, from which capacity, at which temperature).
Frankly, cars are not the big deal here. Existing battery technology is good enough for most light vehicle applications, and continues to incrementally improve. A lithium-air battery car could be even better and would solve most of the edge cases (the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars).
However, this would be a transformative technology for electric aviation.
Delivery drones double or triple their useful range. Air taxis go from pushing the limits of structural engineering to being easily doable. Short-haul all-electric airliners become plausible.