Scientists say new material can triple lithium-ion battery energy density

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/scientists-say-new-material-can-triple-lithium-ion-battery-energy-density/525772/

by Osiris30 • 8 years ago

124 83 8 years ago

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WheelsAtLarge• 8 years ago

I'm thinking the battery explosions will be more spectacular too.

the84722• 8 years ago

Consider the energy density of a cup of water when viewed as fuel for fusion reactions.

anonuser123456• 8 years ago

Zero? A cup of water doesn't typically contain tritium.

frankus• 8 years ago

I wonder what the effect is in specific energy. Weight is at least as much of a concern as volume for a lot of mobile applications.

philipkglass• 8 years ago

In the parlance of this space, energy density usually means specific energy. "Volumetric energy density" is the term normally used if research is highlighting a material that achieves high energy-per-liter storage from its high specific gravity.

stephengillie• 8 years ago

A conventional graphite cathode, in a process known as intercalation, can only transfer a single electron. But compounds like iron trifluoride can transfer multiple electrons.

Flourine is difficult to work with, so these batteries may cost more. Hopefully the energy density offsets the cost.

rini17• 8 years ago

This is not nastiness like pure fluorine or hydrofluoric acid, but a salt. It may be somewhat toxic, but it does not require extraordinary handling precautions.

greglindahl• 8 years ago

I wonder what happens when it catches fire?

08-15• 8 years ago

...and yet sodium fluoride is a component of common toothpaste. Manufacturers of sodium chloride (table salt) don't work with chlorine, either.

m3kw9• 8 years ago

Keep saying but let us know when a real world product can be achieved

theweb1• 8 years ago

How's that even possible ?

curiousgal• 8 years ago

  revolutionary_battery_tech_news++

bootlooped• 8 years ago

error: integer overflow

tzahola• 8 years ago

First law of battery tech headlines: it’s all vaporware unless it’s shipping in laptops.

Animats• 8 years ago

Actual paper [1].

They don't have a battery yet. Just a "half-cell".[2] They have the cathode side, but not the anode side, apparently.

This group has access to all the good toys. They're doing X-ray crystallography with a synchrotron beam line. They have a scanning tunneling microscope with a 3-axis nano-manipulator.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04476-2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-cell

plaidfuji2• 8 years ago

I believe in battery research a half cell is a perfectly acceptable test bed for quantifying cathode performance, given that the anode material is not the bottleneck in the device. Researchers shouldn't have to spend their time doing full-device optimization every time they want to demonstrate improvement in a material.

mrfusion• 8 years ago

I always found it confusing that the lithium solution is most of the mass of the battery but all of the energy is in the anode and cathode.

neltnerb3• 8 years ago

The lithium is also in the anode and cathode, the electricity is generated by lithium traveling from one to another through the electrolyte. The electrolyte is heavier and bulkier but is picked for the ability to let lithium get through without letting electrons get through. I guess you could call it a lithium solution since lithium passes through it to get between the anode and cathode.

The anode and cathode need to be electrically insulated from one another requiring a substantial gap, or else the battery will short out internally or self-discharge if the electrical resistance is too low. That's why it's so big. Of course, reducing that gap is a big area of research. Solid electrolytes in principle might be easier to do this with since they stay put, but stuff cracks when lithium concentrations go up and down. The materials literally swell with lithium at the nanometer scale and then break apart. It's pretty hard, you can't unfortunately just vapor deposit a thin film of a solid electrolyte on the cathode since the materials are a bit too fragile to maintain the electrical resistance required for it to work.

adrianmonk• 8 years ago

By adding cobalt and oxygen atoms to iron fluoride nanorods

Could someone who knows this area comment whether this sounds expensive to manufacture?

neltnerb3• 8 years ago

"Typically, FeF3∙3H2O and CoF3 were ball milled at a molar ratio of 9:1 for 30 min to reduce the particle size and get a homogeneous reactant mixture. Then, 170 mg of such mixture was dispersed in 1-propanol (75 ml) and stirred vigorously at room temperature for half an hour. The resulting suspension was transferred into a Teflon-lined 100 ml stainless-steel autoclave reactor, and subsequently sealed and heated at 210 °C for 24 h in an oven. For comparison, FeOF was also synthesized by the same procedure using pure FeF3∙3H2O as the starting material dispersed in butyl-alcohol. FeF3 was prepared by ball milling the as-purchased FeF3 for 6 h. The pre-lithiation of Fe0.9Co0.1OF is synthesized by ball milling Fe0.9Co0.1OF and LiH at a molar ratio of 1:2 for 10 h."

This is standard ceramic slurry processing, they mix the powders with some liquid and then heat the two ceramics together to do a solid state reaction. I am somewhat impressed that the reaction went suitably at 210C, but that's not particularly hot. I'd think that the raw material costs would dominate here.

EDIT: Ball milling is when you spin a jar on rollers with the ceramic powder and big teflon beads that crush it gradually over a long period of time. It can be done dry or wet, but it's not a fancy procedure.

bhnmmhmd• 8 years ago

It's was about time we moved on to the next energy-storage technology for mobile devices. I can't believe in 2018, battery is still the main issue of all flagships.

jdavis703• 8 years ago

Won't it always be an issue? I have a feeling they'll just put in more and better power-hungry hardware and software and we'll be back in the minimally acceptable battery life range.

function_seven2• 8 years ago

Right. And if they don’t do that, then the phone will just get thinner. We already have incredible energy density compared to a decade ago, but that budget is used up by shaving millimeters off the thickness.

BLanen• 8 years ago

A Jevon's paradox on battery life. Hmm, yea.

empath75• 8 years ago

Put the battery we have now into a Nokia flip phone from the 90s. It’ll probably run for weeks.

losteric• 8 years ago

I think the issue is still all the background activity. My phone (moto x pure) lasts multiple days in airplane+battery saver mode. It was 30% charged after using it for GPS/maps and occasional music on a 4-day backpacking (hiking) trip.

jwatte• 8 years ago

Isn't there a new cathode material promising manyfold improvement announced about every three weeks or so?

I'd like to see one of them actually deliver in new batteries. But instead, the 50% or so improvement we've seen over the last ten years have all been because of incremental refinement.

Color me skeptical until it's proven in production.

Gibbon12• 8 years ago

There has been an enormous amount work on battery technology for the last 30 years. Probably 99% of it leads to dead ends.

Standard rule of battery development, if everything goes right it takes ten years to market. And another ten to get market share. In the late 90's early 2000's there was paper after paper published on lithium iron phosphate batteries and dick all nothing for sale until ~2010. And ten years later market share is growing slowly.

ethbro• 8 years ago

Are there any main reasons for this?

I'd assume conservative and long-design time downstream users mean there isn't a volume market for new battery tech.

skookumchuck• 8 years ago

Edison tried for many, many years to improve batteries for electric cars. This has been going a lot longer than 30 years.

bdamm3• 8 years ago

Well, the power of a battery the size of a brick in the 80’s is now available in a AA form factor. I’d say the improvement has been profound, if not quite as profound as Moore’s law is for CPUs.

thermodynthrway2• 8 years ago

Sadly, it isn't remotely that good, closer to a change from C to AA. NiCad rechargeables have been around for over a century and LiPo only has a density about 3x higher. Overall we've only increased the energy density of the average rechargeable battery about 5x in a century, with most of the increase from introduction of NIMH then LiPo

Improvements in power efficiency have made battery advancements seem better than they are.

linsomniac• 8 years ago

If even half of these amazing battery technologies had come true, my car would be driven by a D cell battery.

But I'm ok that it hasn't, because I once heard a battery chemistry guy say that "the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb." I can't find the reference any more, but with all the Samsungs and Teslas catching fire, it rings true.

roryisok3• 8 years ago

with all the Samsungs and Teslas catching fire, it rings true.

Are there really a lot of Samsungs catching fire though, in the grand scheme of things?

abc_lisper• 8 years ago

More than the teslas I think ;)

Amygaz• 8 years ago

These have not much to do with attempt at increasing power density, but everything to do with particle contamination during the manufacturing process.

Tloewald2• 8 years ago

They have everything to do with increasing power density. By definition power density is potential energy and when you release that energy you get waste heat.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 years ago

"the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb."

You mean like gasoline?

Tloewald2• 8 years ago

Right but worse when batteries contain the “oxidizer”. If the battery uses atmospheric oxygen (e.g. as with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) then it’s exactly like gasoline.

Bluestrike2• 8 years ago

Or even a flywheel. Any energy storage device is going to be energetic when things go wrong. One of the many challenges is in assessing and managing the risk of such an outcome.

overcast• 8 years ago

Gasoline only explodes under very specific environmental conditions, otherwise it just burns.

taneq2• 8 years ago

the higher capacity a battery is the more it resembles a bomb

A battery is a package containing the reagents necessary for a highly energetic reaction. A bomb is a package containing the reagents necessary for a highly energetic reaction. A high-capacity battery is effectively a bomb, pretty much by definition.

mianos• 8 years ago

Actually a bomb is something that is programmed to detonate intentionally under certain conditions. There are plenty of other similarly energetic chemicals around the house, like gas in cylinders. The problem with some batteries is, unlike a bomb, the detonation conditions are hard to control. Luckily battery ignition, as enegetic as it is, is low velocity.

zimablue• 8 years ago

This sounds reasonable but I think it's actually pretty silly. In physics everything is at some high energy level rolling doesn't to some lower state. Your body has tons of energy. If we threw you into the right sort of fusion reactor or dropped you down a giant well you'd release massive amounts of energy.

It's not about "high energy" "low energy" or even "by definition an explosive" it's about how likely and favorable the pathway to releasing that energy in a bad way is. Just because you can release it slowly doesn't mean you can release it quickly. Some radioactive materials have lots of energy and a long Half-Life, try making a bomb out of them. It is not a simple question it's a lot of chemistry physics and engineering to answer.

AngryData• 8 years ago

The problem is even though we have gotten miraculously stable lithium batteries, they still aren't 'bulletproof' enough that explosion and fire risks are negligible. Add 3x more energy to it and it starts becoming a really big problem. This is what has kept 99.9% of these miraculous battery technologies we always hear about, too dangerous to use in consumer devices.

If it is as stable, or preferably more stable, than current tech, great! If it is anything less, you will never see it except in maybe industrial applications.

Roritharr• 8 years ago

Industrial Applications, as Tesla has shown in Australia & Puerto Rico, are still a magnificent boon to society, so I hope they roll-out the more dangerous iterations sooner than later.

roryisok3• 8 years ago

Petrol is fairly flammable and explosive too, but we still drive around with big tanks of it under the back seat

phyller• 8 years ago

Gasoline is not explosive, it requires oxygen to burn. We wouldn't allow normal passenger vehicles to drive around with big tanks of explosives.

solarkraft• 8 years ago

Please don't let this become news until there's a production ready design.

There are lots of these battery innovations promising multiple x of improvement, yet never delivering anything. Maybe it's actually interesting to battery chemistry enthusiasts, but you can't give them headlines like this either.

Bring the down votes.

mavdi• 8 years ago

Totally with you. Battery research headlines are as reliable as apocalypse predictions these days.

amelius• 8 years ago

Agree, but I would be interested to know whenever they have a working prototype, rather than wait for a production ready design.

cutler• 8 years ago

Is it just me or have we been fed stories about potential improvements in battery life for over a decade now with no real improvements? There seems to be a vortex out in space where all these promises about CPU and battery improvements somehow get swallowed up. Take graphene, for example. Discovered in 2004, it was touted as something which was going to change the world and replace silicon in CPU production. Yet a recent article (https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/what-is-graphene-and...) concluded: "Unfortunately, this is all theoretical. Current graphene cells are not yet up to par with silicon cells".

princekolt• 8 years ago

Another thing to keep in mind: It makes no difference if battery capacity grows but power consumption goes up as well. When you have hungry apps (say, Chrome) hogging resources with no regard to the user's device, there is little to be gained from having denser batteries.

mathw• 8 years ago

There is if those resources are being used to do more stuff... or you put the battery in a car.

mastax2• 8 years ago

Lithium-ion batteries have been slowly improving over the last 30 years. Every year they get a little cheaper, a little higher capacity, a little more reliable, a little higher discharge, over a few more charge cycles.

In 1994, the cost to manufacture Li-ion in the 18650 cylindrical cell was over US$10 and the capacity was 1,100mAh. In 2001, the price dropped to below $3 while the capacity rose to 1,900mAh. Today, high energy-dense 18650 cells deliver over 3,000mAh and the costs are dropping.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_based_bat...

It's not the revolution we may want, but it is the successful application of battery research.

sitkack• 8 years ago

And there have been amazing incremental battery advances over the last decade.

plaidfuji2• 8 years ago

I see the Silicon Valley mentality of "it's not news until the product ships" is pretty prevalent here. News flash: this is how R&D works on physical products. Most advancements are incremental. Some are larger than others, but are always built on years of other incremental advancements. This one appears to be larger than usual, so it's news. Your phone battery will continue to grow incrementally in energy density in order to run the increasingly bloated software shipped by the "true innovators". Life goes on.

Scientists say new material can triple lithium-ion battery energy density

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