Na-S Battery: Low-cost with four times the capacity of lithium

https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2022/12/07/low-cost-battery-built-with-four-times-the-capacity-of-lithium.html

by giuliomagnifico • 4 years ago

318 156 4 years ago

sydney.edu.au

MonkeyClub2• 4 years ago

Seems to be a legitimate advance in a long-disregarded battery tech, I’d be very happy if this ends up reducing lithium mining.

danuker• 4 years ago

Indeed, and it might also drive down prices. Sodium and sulphur are much more abundant than Lithium (1150x and 260x respectively).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

Does the 1150 take into account all the oceans full of NaCl? It sounds a little low.

ddulaney• 4 years ago

Sodium and sulphur are very cheap and easy to get, but not because of this.

Sulphur is a byproduct of lots of different industrial processes, usually oil refining.

Sodium is most commonly extracted from seawater.

Frequency of elements in Earth's crust is a pretty poor approximation for how easy they are to mine.

flavius296632• 4 years ago

This wiki page has a surprising graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

The "rare earths" are actually just as common as Si. It just shows we won't be running out of them anytime soon, it's just a matter of finding ways to extract them.

usrusr• 4 years ago

Is the material that ends up in the cell a significant part of the cost? If steel was free, ICE cars could be dozens of dollars cheaper than they are. I guess material costs are a much bigger factor in batteries, but in many other products is so low that "much bigger" could still be tiny.

hcarvalhoalves2• 4 years ago

Yes. The electrification movement isn’t any “green” if you take into account the impact of current battery technology.

PS: the impact of battery technology - I’m not only talking about mining but the entire cycle: usable life, reverse logistics, disposal and recycling, dealing w/ water and soil contamination.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

Ah yes.

Digging for coal or gas or oil, fracking, etc: just fine

Mining for (significant less amount of) lithium or other metals: "oh look they're ruining the environment"

As most discussions go, they're heavily biased towards the status quo

ZeroGravitas• 4 years ago

So its not fossil fuel funded climate change denial, it's actually about the ethics of lithium mining?

adrr• 4 years ago

Lithium on earth is in salt form. Most coming from dry salt beds in South America. Big US project is to extract it from the Salton sea. Fracking is much worse and contaminates water tables not to mention all the methane releases that cause global warming.

supportlocal4h• 4 years ago

Imagine a desalination process funded in part by producing battery-grade sodium.

All you practical people who wait until there is real world manufacturing promise are missing out on the pleasure of wild imagination.

jfengel• 4 years ago

Imagination is great, but there's a blurry line between "imagine a thing and make it happen" and "tell happy stories instead of working".

One belongs in science journals; the other belongs in Astounding Stories. Both have their place, and there's even some overlap, but it's no surprise that grumpiness occurs when the conversation crosses that blurry line too far (in either direction).

marcus_holmes2• 4 years ago

"we're all doomed"

"wait, there's a new battery tech that could solve some of the long-standing problems with moving to a clean-energy abundant civilisation, and yesterday they achieved fusion ignition for the first time"

"bah, these are all rubbish and will never make any difference, we're still all doomed"

benreesman2• 4 years ago

I’m a layman as concerns batteries, but I’m old enough, just like photovoltaics, for the prevailing view to be: this is at the asymptote, it’s not getting any better.

I’m glad some people decided not to listen to that bollocks.

Aardwolf2• 4 years ago

For solar panels I agree, there's a hard limit of how much energy per area the sun itself gives, and how much efficiency you can physically get out of that.

For batteries: biological creatures store more energy more densily, yet safely, so there's still headroom.

TheIronYuppie• 4 years ago

I think the general thinking is that cost is going to be the determining factor for PV. It it gets to be cheaper than paper, for ex, you could just put it everywhere.

But there are still lots of wins - we’re only in the low 20s for efficiency and mostly catching visible light. There’s also environmental, long life, etc ways to improve as well.

Gasp0de• 4 years ago

But afaik, solar panels currently convert only 20% of the energy to electricity, can you explain why this is close to the theoretically or practically possible maximum?

ilyt2• 4 years ago

For batteries: biological creatures store more energy more densily, yet safely, so there's still headroom.

Conversion losses are bigger tho

perlgeek• 4 years ago

Solar panels still have some dimensions along which they could improve, for example:

* efficiency in low-light situations

* efficiency when parts of the panel are covered

* cost

I guess the inverters could also be improved...

kennydude• 4 years ago

This would be great also if, during damage situations they are less harmful than Lithium Ion batteries (which cause very hot, self sustaining fires for hours and hours!)

galangalalgol2• 4 years ago

I would think any dry cell would have this as a problem? If you stuff a kWh into a box and get it back out without adding anything, there is a kWh in that box, and I think all these sorts of reactions proceed faster at higher temperatures, so wouldn't runaway always be a possibility?

ajross2• 4 years ago

This is all FUD, and I wish people would stop repeating it. Battery fires in vehicles (which I assume is what you're talking about) are objectively safer than gasoline fires. They just are.

It's true though that they have to be fought differently, because they can't be extinguished by flushing the fuel away as you can for liquid fires. So the "hours and hours" bit is sorta true, I guess. But having to keep people away from a battery fire for a while while you hose it down is an annoyance, not a safety concern.

In any case the battery under discussion is a molten electrolyte thing intended for grid storage, not vehicles.

ilyt2• 4 years ago

This is all FUD, and I wish people would stop repeating it. Battery fires in vehicles (which I assume is what you're talking about) are objectively safer than gasoline fires. They just are.

They just happen way more often, petrol tank is smaller tucked in usually somewhere in the back of the car, VS battery cell where just puncture can start a fire where gasoline can "just" leak without catching fire. Althought I imagine chance for that grows a lot with old cars, once they start to rot from corrosion

willnonya2• 4 years ago

While I welcome this advancement it still seems like a solution to the wrong solution for another problem.

SamBam• 4 years ago

Very unclear what you mean. Large-scale, cheap, safe, and environmental energy storage is a huge issue that is nowhere near solved yet, so more solutions are absolutely a good thing.

waynesonfire• 4 years ago

capacity is but one of many characteristics of a successfully battery technology. it's important to consider just about every possible factor,

capacity, power density, charge and discharge rate, lifespan / shelf life, safety, voltage range, temperature ranges while charging, discharging, cycle count.

And, also, the performance of these attributes under various temperature profiles.

This list is far from exhaustive, I'm not a battery expert but just something I came up with in a few minutes of thought. So, gtfo with your capacity claim. Every few months a battery break-through article comes out. I've become de-sensitize to this type of news.

simmerup• 4 years ago

What is your comment actually adding?

gumboza• 4 years ago

Time will tell. All new battery technologies solve one problem but create two more.

Edit: I'm not necessarily talking about technology problems. There are geopolitical and environmental problems too :)

qwertox• 4 years ago

https://www.energy-storage.news/basf-takes-sodium-sulfur-bat...

microjim• 4 years ago

Would love to hear from domain experts here. Reading the article one finds that they only created very small cathodes rather than anything close to a 'consumer sized' battery.

(The full text of the paper is available for free at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202206828)

jpm_sd• 4 years ago

It's just more science by press release. Wake me up when there's a real manufacturing process developed.

scythe2• 4 years ago

I'm not a battery expert, but I have looked into Na-S before. While it's a great rhetorical bludgeon in arguments about what batteries can do in theory — we'll never run out of sodium or sulfur — actual costs of Na-S installations are consistently much higher than lithium or other battery types. For example, this review cites a present system cost of over $400/kWh:

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/13/3307

A new scientific development can be cool, but it won't directly reduce costs, since it's not actually an industrial process. A lower operating temperature might simplify construction. But all that remains to be seen.

EDIT: if you read the original paper in TFA you will find that molybdenum, an extremely rare metal, is key to the cathode, though only at 1.2% by weight. Interpretation unclear.

app4soft• 4 years ago

Reading the article one finds that they only created very small cathodes rather than anything close to a 'consumer sized' battery

There are few articles on 'consumer sized' 18650 sodium-ion (Na-S, Na-ion) battery (aka NIB):

October 2019: Developing O3 type layered oxide cathode and its application in 18650 commercial type Na-ion batteries[0]

May 2022: First 18650-format Na-ion cells aging investigation: A degradation mechanism study[1]

August 2022: Remaining useful life prediction for 18650 sodium-ion batteries based on incremental capacity analysis[2]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336562138_Developin...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359078973_First_186...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362754837_Remaining...

jojobas3• 4 years ago

Li-S is already 2.5x the energy density of TNT.

Before you say "petrol", petrol is typically not carried in the form petrol/oxygen fizz and its energy density is therefore zero.

foxhill• 4 years ago

likely because the logistics of handling and utilising an energy source that can materialise the entirety of its stored energy instantly has some safety concerns.

requiring air is not a limitation, it’s a feature.

jojobas3• 4 years ago

I'm saying I'd rather not be near a 100kW-h Na-S battery. Current Li-Po batteries require quite some shielding at tiny a fraction of the energy density if you don't want to burn.

gruturo• 4 years ago

TNT has actually pretty low energy density - lower than chocolate chip cookies if I remember correctly. It's only used because of its ability to deliver it all in one go - something cookies lack. Energy density alone is a fairly inadequate metric to decide how dangerous some material is, and what precautions to take handling and transporting it.

jojobas3• 4 years ago

Just as petrol, cookies have energy density of zero until mixed with oxygen. Just like TNT, or more like black powder, batteries have all components required to yield energy in one enclosure, which is why there are battery explosion videos and no cookie explosion videos.

cstross• 4 years ago

The key word that's almost submerged in the article is molten.

Like previous sodium-sulphur batteries this one relies on a molten salt electrolyte, meaning you won't see it in your phone or laptop any time soon!

However, as it's being developed with the idea of grid-scale smoothing/backup, that's much less of a problem. (The square-cube law means that as you increase the volume of your molten salt cell, the surface area grows more slowly -- and thermal losses scale with surface area, so really big cells are cheaper to maintain at operating temperature.)

koliber• 4 years ago

That also jumped out at me when I read it. However, later on they state that this reaction works at room temperature:

Using a simple pyrolysis process and carbon-based electrodes to improve the reactivity of sulphur and the reversibility of reactions between sulphur and sodium, the researchers’ battery has shaken off its formerly sluggish reputation, exhibiting super-high capacity and ultra-long life at room temperature.

This is confusing. Can someone make some sense of this?

dahfizz• 4 years ago

exhibiting super-high capacity and ultra-long life at room temperature.

Maybe this is just bad writing? The battery (at operating temp) has high capacity, and (at room temp) can be stored for a long time? The wikipedia page indicates that it is normal to store charged molten salt batteries at room temp when not being used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery

Valgrim• 4 years ago

Maybe they found a way to mix it into an eutectic mixture? The article doesnt say much on the specific chemistry of the liquid salt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic_system

red_trumpet• 4 years ago

The title of their article[1] is "Atomically Dispersed Dual-Site Cathode with a Record High Sulfur Mass Loading for High-Performance Room-Temperature Sodium–Sulfur Batteries".

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202206828?u...

cpfohl• 4 years ago

I (incorrectly it seems) assumed that “molten” was just part of the manufacturing process. This take makes more sense.

bluelightning2k• 4 years ago

Very important detail. Thanks for highlighting.

Not only does this limit practicality for phones, cars, but it limits practicality at all. Some of the larger utility scale solar-collector designs ended up failing because of the challenges of maintaining elements that involve molten salt.

Someone• 4 years ago

The paper’s title is “Atomically Dispersed Dual-Site Cathode with a Record High Sulfur Mass Loading for High-Performance Room-Temperature Sodium–Sulfur Batteries” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202206828?u...), so I guess you misread that.

deng5• 4 years ago

No, these are room-temperature NaS batteries. They use some special electrolyte, but I have no idea how this really works. Their main drawback so far was longevity, but this battery has a capacity fade of 0.05% per cycle, which is on par at least with a poor Li-Ion battery. LiFePo4 is still superior in that regard, but the much higher capacity and hopefully lower cost (if they can be manufactured efficiently) might make up for that, hard to tell.

ksec2• 4 years ago

but this battery has a capacity fade of 0.05% per cycle, which is on par at least with a poor Li-Ion battery.

20% lost at 400 cycles. This isn't so bad if it really offers 4x the capacity. In terms of usage it will last 1600 cycles comparatively speaking. Which is still far better than Li-Ion.

analog312• 4 years ago

A somewhat shorter lifespan might be a decent trade if the materials are much more recyclable and if mining is produces less pollution.

davrosthedalek• 4 years ago

Is it 0.05% of the remaining capacity, or of the initial capacity?

marcosdumay2• 4 years ago

The paper, that red_trumpet posted down on the replies is about solid state NaS batteries.

walnutclosefarm• 4 years ago

The work describes a room temperature battery that uses an electrolyte of Na (sodium) in a propylene carbonate liquid carrier with electrodes made of graphene flakes with Mo and S embedded in the graphene framework. I don't know what the author of the article posted was trying to say when referring to molton Na-S, since it is not part of the battery described in the research, nor part of the manufacturing process. Probably the author did a search on Na-S for background, and not understanding how this differed, stuck it in.

passwordoops2• 4 years ago

Nope, the PR was poorly written (maybe the Department is experimenting with chatGPT ?).

Surprisingly the publication is freely available, and yes it's all room temp:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202206828

passwordoops2• 4 years ago

My supervisor's wife was working at a pharma company back in the 2000s. Her job was to reproduce promising publications related to any conditions they were involved in. The reproducibility rate was something like 25%, which is higher than some other estimates I've seen looking across many fields, but still....

Incentives matter and right now they're the wrong ones

midoridensha3• 4 years ago

Nope, the PR was poorly written (maybe the Department is experimenting with chatGPT ?).

ChatGPT probably would have done a much better job with access to the publication. Pretty soon, these lousy science journalists are all going to be out of a job when they can't even get basic facts correct, and the real scientists don't have time to write or review PR articles themselves, so an AI will fill that role instead.

uoaei• 4 years ago

That is not and never was the point -- sodium is in the same column as lithium on the periodic table, but it is significantly heavier than that, so mobile applications (cars, phones) are out of scope. Sodium is promising for stationary, community- or grid-level storage.

Tuna-Fish• 4 years ago

There are many good reasons to expect sodium batteries to beat li-ion batteries in specific energy. Yes, a sodium charge carrier is ~3.2 times heavier than a lithium ion, and yes, it holds a bit less charge, but none of this has to be relevant because in a normal li-ion battery less than 1% of the total mass is active charge carriers.

If you went by the simple properties of charge carriers alone, you'd expect lead-acid batteries to be at least 15 times worse than li-ion ones. However, the best lead-acid batteries are only ~8 times worse than the best li-ion batteries. Because even though the charge carriers are so much worse at doing their job, the chemistry is otherwise much more simple and easy to work with that it lets you pack a lot more charge carrier and lot less support infrastructure into the same battery.

Sodium is similar, in that if you have a viable electrolyte, you can expect to utilize a lot more than 1% of the mass of your battery for usable charge carriers. This is why it's absolutely possible for molten salt batteries to have specific energies much higher than the best lithium-ion ones. As far back as 2014 there was a lab-scale prototype that beat every li-ion battery then in existence. The big downside of course is the molten part -- these are stationary batteries not due to low specific energy, but the fact that they have to be heated above ~110C to operate, and it is much more economical to make such batteries as large as possible. And in that segment, the chase is not for the highest specific energy but the lowest cost per Wh.

tremon• 4 years ago

you won't see it in your phone or laptop any time soon

I know it's (probably) a compound and doesn't have the same properties as the individual constituents, but still I wouldn't feel entirely comfortable carrying around sodium and sulphur in my pocket all day. Maybe I'll let other people prove its safety over a few years first.

cantaloupe• 4 years ago

Is there any particular reason? Seems pretty naive to make any assumptions about the properties based on its elemental composition. Lithium is incredibly reactive and toxic in its pure form but you surely carry that around. Do you ever consume table salt, a compound of reactive sodium and toxic chlorine?

bunabhucan• 4 years ago

The Wikipedia article mentions two types, molten and room temperature, each with their own pros and cons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

The paper mentions making the battery at 300c (oven temperature) but the text talks about "room temperature" or "RT":

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202206828

"...thermally treated at 300 °C for 12 h. The Mo mass loading of S@MoS2-Mo1/SGF was ≈1.2 wt.%, measured by ICP-OES. The synthesis procedure of S@MoS2/SGF was the same as S@MoS2-Mo1/SGF but the thermal treatment was extended to 24 h. To prepare the S@SGF, pure SGF was used to replace Mo1/SGF. S@Mo1/SGF was prepared by pyrolyzing the mixture of Mo1/SGF and S at 155 °C for 12 h."

The only mentions of higher temperatures are for thermogravimetric analysis where they heat it to 800c and measure the amount of S as it varies with temperature.

megaman821• 4 years ago

These scientific advances in batteries are cool, but I don't take them as a specific indicator of what is coming. It is a numbers game, if there are 1000 scientific advances maybe 1 or 2 will survive the gauntlet and make it into manufacturing in the next 10 years.

It seems reasonable that there will be battery options that cost 50% as much and others that have 2x greater energy density in the near future. That seems great to me. Batteries will be viable and economical across most storage needs expect for aviation, shipping and seasonal grid storage.

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

Same. If you follow articles like this you’ll be constantly wondering what happened to “x”.

(“Graphene can do everything except get out of the lab”)

RGamma3• 4 years ago

Specifically for grid storage I'd like to see more attention given to gravity batteries [0], the compressed liquid type.

Recently saw a video (in German, [1]) in which there was back-of-the-envelope calculation that a gravity battery built by hydraulically raising a cylindrical landmass with 1km diameter by 500 meters stores about 2TWh (recent yearly gross electricity consumption of Germany is 560TWh).

It's such a simple concept! Also, they are looking for investors: https://heindl-energy.com/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=pnomwGCBNAE

AndrewDucker• 4 years ago

That is an obscenely large cylinder. And a large height to raise it!

amalcon• 4 years ago

Pumped-storage hydro (the cheapest and generally most practical gravity battery) is currently responsible for almost all grid-scale energy storage worldwide. I don't think it's fair to say it's not getting attention.

What's not getting attention is the use of solids for this. The main reasons are that you'd like to re-use most of the infrastructure of the hydroelectric dam you wanted anyway, and that liquids make for simpler engineering in these cases.

acc_297• 4 years ago

There are simpler technologies that already exist on this principle pumped hydro being the main one this proposal seems like overkill to have so much storage in a single location

mgsouth• 4 years ago

I'm assuming it's a cylinder 500 m tall, lifted by 500 m so it almost clears the hole (assuming basalt at 2.9 g/cm^3, that's only 1.6 TWh, but close enough.) Watching a 1 km-wide 150-story structure rise from a hole and then disappear would certainly be a majestic sight. However, a few issues:

- The Mir mine, 4th deepest open-pit mine in the world, has roughly these dimensions (1,200 m wide x 525 m deep) [1]. Of course, its approximately a cone, so its total volume would be about half the proposed cylinder. The mine took 40 years to excavate, albiet in very harsh conditions.

- Simply removing the rock from the hole, with 100% efficiency, would expend 1 TWh of energy (average lift 1/2 of total height). If diesel powered construction equipment is used, theoretical maximum efficiency of just the engines is 50%, realistic is more like 20%. I'd be surprised if you could get a total efficiency of over 1 or 2%.

- Of course, you'd also spend energy moving the overburden away from the hole. If the angle of repose was 1-in-5, then the pile would be roughly 150 m (45 stories) at the tallest point, and form a circle 4 km wide centered around the hole.

- You could be clever, and just dig out the circumference and bottom of the cylinder. At the bottom every square meter would have 500 meters of rock sitting on top of it. That's 1.5 million kg, or 14,000 kPa (2,000 PSI). That doesn't sound... impossible... but it would require a dense forest of supports. It would be the world's most expensive room-and-pillar mine [2], by several orders of magnitude. Integrity of the rock would be a problem, too. A fault wouldn't just risk a tunnel wall blow-out or cave in, it could litteraly drop a 500 meter mountain on your head.

- Speaking of pressure... how do you perfectly maintain the integrity of a 3 km circumference piston ring? The water is going to really, really want to slip past the rock piston. Anywhere it does it will have very serious erosion. How do you fix a problem? Picture one of those submarine movies with water spraying everywhere, but unable to shut it off.

- Speaking of pressure, again... how do you maintain the integrity of the rock? You'd have to girdle it in a 3 km x 500 m tall wall.

- You still need a very large water reservoir.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_mine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_and_pillar_mining

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

They don’t mention the actual specific energy of the completed cells in Wh/kg. Also, “four times of WHAT?” They need to compare like-to-like, which would mean comparing to an equivalent Li-S cells.

Li-S cells usually have much higher specific energy than regular lithium ion. I doubt these cells are better, considering sodium is heavier than lithium.

The highest lithium ion cells you can get now are Amperium cells at 390Wh/kg, plus the metal anode Licerion cells at over 400Wh/kg. That’s not counting lithium sulfur which can get to 650Wh/kg (but are still stuck in the lab).

deng5• 4 years ago

They say the charge capacity is 1017 mAh/g. That is about four times the value of a typical (good!) Li-Ion battery.

bjarneh2• 4 years ago

Isn't that quite close to the magic number which makes electric planes a viable option? 1 kW = 1 kg; Musk said something about that in a podcast I think...

danw1979• 4 years ago

... assuming the cell voltage is the same ?

A quick google suggests Na-S cells at high temperatures are ~2.1V nominal (as opposed to 3.2V for LFP), but I lack the physics chops to parse the paper in the article to validate this. Anyway this sounds like a tiny experimental cell and for real world applications you'd want to see the Wh/kg for a fully packaged product.

dev_tty01• 4 years ago

Not useful without the cell voltage. Need both to figure out the energy storage. Anyone?

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

Is that for a complete cell or just an electrode? If it's not specified, you can bet it's just for the electrode. Complete cell is what matters (or to be strictly true, a full battery... but that's another story).

Plus the voltage difference... IIRC, Na-S is 2.1V compared to 3.7V nominal for Lithium-ion, high voltage versions sometimes up to 4.35V max voltage. Perhaps a factor of 2 difference in voltage, plus it's only counting a portion of the cell mass.

mikeyouse2• 4 years ago

They tested the drawdown at 1V with cells over 1,000 mah/gram so >1,000wh/kg if that voltage is their operating voltage.

sylware2• 4 years ago

How do you process them once they run out of reasonably efficient cycles?

Reconditioning facilities? wastes? etc?

Tagbert2• 4 years ago

Considering the main ingredients are sodium and sulfur, recycling should not be a major problem. Those are commonly used elements and not particularly toxic.

This question is always asked about EV batteries. Their recycling is something that is being developed but is still in prototype phase. Actual production scale recycling is not feasible yet because the number of retired EV batteries is too small to be efficiently recycled. That will eventually change but since EV batteries are generally lasting for a decade or more, it will take several years before we start seeing significant numbers needing to be recycled. I would expect that the same story would apply to these batteries if they are deployed.

sylware2• 4 years ago

"recycling should not be a major problem", well, this is where more details would be more than welcome.

m3kw9• 4 years ago

With batteries is that there are way more factors than just capacity. You need thermal run way, cold/hot weather perf, heat generated, charge time, numb cycles before capacity is 80%, weight power ratio, scalability and cost

thehappypm• 4 years ago

Some applications are easier than others. Grid storage, for example, can be in climate controlled warehouses, do optimal charging cycles to maximize longevity, don’t care about weight, etc.

ncann• 4 years ago

Sorry, I can't resist the urge to repost this classic comment on a thread about new battery technology:

Dear battery technology claimant,

Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:

[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.

[ ] it will be too expensive for users.

[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.

[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.

[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.

[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.

[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.

[ ] its charge rate is too slow.

[ ] its materials are too toxic.

[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.

[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.

[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.

[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.

[ ] your claims are lies.

Tade02• 4 years ago

I have a very simple criterion: Do they have a production process designed for this new technology? That's the final step to commercialization and is often the barrier that prevents new chemistries from entering the market.

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

From a young age I've combed the shelves at public libraries and found handbooks on battery technology.

Often 1/3 of the book is devoted to ordinary batteries and the other 2/3 are devoted to "reserve batteries" which are able to deliver a high power density for a short time to power a missile or something like that. There was a huge amount of research on those and I think it's easier to make a battery work if it doesn't have to last very long.

NiMH batteries seemed to come out of nowhere. I remember Sony licensing the technology for "InfoLithium" batteries that eventually took over the world.

The market for batteries is bigger than it ever was. Grid scale batteries relax many constraints: molten salt batteries might be practical there. The South Africans thought this kind of battery might be relevant for cars in the late 1970's and 1980's

https://www.afrik21.africa/en/south-africa-the-zebra-salt-ba...

and it might be again with electric cars legitmized and if oil is out of reach.

DebtDeflation• 4 years ago

NiMH batteries seemed to come out of nowhere.

My initial thought when I saw your post was "weren't these just a relatively contemporaneous improvement on NiCad batteries?"

Checked Wikipedia and nope:

NiCad - Invented in 1899 and commercialized in 1910.

NiMH - Invented in 1967 and commercialized in 1989.

I had no idea there was such a long gap between the two.

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

I think sodium ion will dominate the next 10 years of grid storage unless a sulfur battery like this can commercialize fast enough.

The sulfur chemistries might leave all the solid state stuff in the dust.

ahartmetz• 4 years ago

I thought of it as well, with the same result: this one looks like it could actually work for a change...?

ReptileMan• 4 years ago

True ... but we need new order or two of battery performance improvements, so the breakthrough must come from somewhere.

ksec2• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with reposting it. As a matter of fact I think this should be posted every time there is a new battery announcement so we can all do the tick boxes.

[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.

These are the only three I see as problematic or unknown. Which is not that bad.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 4 years ago

I find it tiresome empty snark.

Better batteries are a really big deal. Is every promising technology gonna work out? Of course not. But there's valid reasons to be interested and excited. I like that these stories appear on HN so I can keep a rough understanding of how research is progressing. And usually there's some comments here from people who know the field a lot better. But to find those gems I have to scroll past a whole crowd of people posting this self congratulatory snark.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

I have to scroll past a whole crowd of people posting this self congratulatory snark.

Has this comment ever been posted more than once in a thread?

edit: and I honestly can't understand what is self-congratulatory about a list of issues created by somebody who is obviously interested in batteries, and has seen a lot of press releases with the same flaws. It gives laymen a sensible list to check the newest claim against.

dreamcompiler• 4 years ago

Sodium-sulfur batteries are already in use for grid storage [0] [1]. They're large and they have to be kept hot, so they won't work for mobile applications. This article seems to be describing one that works at room temperature.

[0] https://www.energy-storage.news/uae-integrates-648mwh-of-sod...

[1] https://www.bestmag.co.uk/worlds-largest-sodium-sulphur-ess-...

Tade02• 4 years ago

I wonder how does it stack up against non-flow zinc-bromide batteries, which apparently are already being produced and are aiming for the stationary storage market:

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/09/30/gelion-unve...

The 2MWh/yr plant is very small, but reportedly it's a repurposed lead-acid facility because the production process is similar enough.

mikeytown22• 4 years ago

Let me know when I can buy 30kwh worth of energy storage so I can compare it to Lifepo4 costs [1]

[1] $10,500 https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-lithium-batteries-kit-48v-...

aidenn0• 4 years ago

LiFePO4 batteries are really magical; mostly made of easy-to-find materials, good density, long lifetime, hard to make explode.

mikeytown22• 4 years ago

LiFeYPO4 Have a wide temperature range of -45° to 85° C. Uses Yttriumbut cost more

driverdan• 4 years ago

Those are the more expensive packs with LCDs. The cheaper, simpler packs are only $9000 and just as good.

alex_young• 4 years ago

4 x the energy density, but 8 x the mass. These will be heavy batteries. Kinda defeats the point.

inamberclad• 4 years ago

Good for plenty of applications, such as power plants and renewables.

wankle• 4 years ago

I was never good with chemistry, the battery sounded icky to make. I'd bet on the Iron Edison battery or the iron rust battery instead.

Na-S Battery: Low-cost with four times the capacity of lithium

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