BEST BATTERY EVER: All lithium, all the time, plus a dash of carbon nano-stuff Battery capacity remains a big issue in devices ranging from phones to electric vehicles – and one of the biggest constraints is the materials used to make electrodes. A paper published at Nature Nanotechnology (abstract here), offers a promising lead for improvements as boffins say they've hit on a way to replace today's …
or how about once a day for say 5 years or 10 ~ 3650 cycles before I have to replace the car/battery, assuming you plug it back in when you get home each day.
So with that electrical density number, can someone tell me how to work out the theoretical storage potential with a view to comparison with fuel cells, petrol etc. Assuming the tech improves would it be theoretically possible to have a car size battery with the capacity for say 600 to 1000km?
You need around 100KWh for s decent car motive battery
I cant quite make the numbers add up, but at 3.8Ah per gram., that's (at a cell voltage of 3.7v) around 10Wh per gram or 10kWh per kg.
That is so far from actual battery weights that I simply don't believe it.
Wiki suggest lithium is less than 0.5Wh per gram
they're not being deliberately misleading and are quoting the efficiency at 100 cycles because that's what they've tested (rather than because, say, it drops off a cliff at 101 cycles) I'd suspect that at 1000 cycles it's still pretty good. (99% efficiency is good for any technology - 99.9% is better.) But as always with these new battery technologies it's wait and see.
Analogies can sometimes be tricky, but your comment is a lot like saying "Carbon is relatively cheap. Lots of it around...so diamonds are cheap too" or perhaps more pertinent to the flavour of this article "Silica is relatively cheap. Lots of it around...so aerogel would be cheap to make too."
The trick to this new anode is in the construction of the lithium within the carbon nanoshperes. I suspect the final cost will probably relate more to the expense and complexity of the manufacturing process, rather than the cost of the base lithium itself.
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Anode surface = chemistry.
Anode center = conductor.
The anode structure should be made of something that is a good conductor and light (and might even be hollow if applicable), and then it should be plated with whatever the heck they want to make the chemistry work. It matters not if the plating 'weighs the Moon' per unit volume since it could be a thin layer.
The "plating" is not a catalyst. It is actually consumed by the reaction and replaced by charging. A very thin coating would be consumed almost instantly leaving you with a flat battery.
To use the lead anode of a lead acid battery as an example, the discharge reaction is:
Pb(s) + HSO4-(aq) → PbSO4(s) + H+(aq) + 2e−
In other words, the battery will only run until there's no more Pb (the anode/plating is gone).
I believe that the gist of the article is that the problem with lithium anodes is that recharging doesn't plate the Li onto the anode nicely but forms "hair" instead. The carbon structure acts like a hairnet.
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Are like the new River Thames crossing in East London, I will believe it once I see them building it.
Or in the case of the batteries; I will believe it the day I can buy them off the store.
On both of those things (The crossing and the batteries) news of a better improved one come every now and then.
But until then it will continue to be the classic battle of educating the wife to buy the original rabbit batteries instead of the cheap Chinese generic ones they sell at the super market.
Whatever the ultimate battery tech is, it's probably no single one of any of these stories, but a combination of bits of all of them. The power to weight ratio on this example is so amazing I'm not sure I believe it - I hope this isn't another "poke ordinary cells to make stem cells, honest!" type paper. And I'd like to know how easy it is to coat something with buckyballs - that sounds groundbreaking all by itself.
On the other hand there has been a lot of progress in battery tech - for example I recently purchased a jumpstarter that weighs less than a pound (the Jackco Zeta), replacing one I used to keep in my car that weighs 25 pounds. And the Zeta works better! I keep the old jumpstarter in my garage to inflate my bike tires (which it is quite good at, at least).
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"But until then it will continue to be the classic battle of educating the wife to buy the original rabbit batteries instead of the cheap Chinese generic ones they sell at the super market."
Does she go through a lot of batteries in her rabbit? Enquiring minds and all that.
They have heavy duty ones in the US that run off the mains or any handy 25 KVA generator. I am not sure whether this is a testament to US women or possibly US technology.
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