Tesla Acquires Canadian Battery Specialist, Hibar Systems
electricautonomy.ca
electricautonomy.ca
In particular: "The pumps are used by battery manufacturers from all over the world for filling batteries with electrolytes, and have set the global standard in the battery industry."
* There's a slight monopoly danger of having so many batteries manufactured from one source, although Tesla would be better than say, an oil company.
* Can we please get standard battery form factors, voltages and connectors: like AA, AAA, C, D, 9 volt, etc, but in a larger size similar to lantern batteries and car batteries?
* Can we please get batteries with built-in protection circuits? I want to wire them in series or parallel at any voltage and have them "just work" and never explode. Bonus: please do this with solar panels as well.
* Can we please get batteries with prepaid postage or a recycling refund (similar to aluminum cans) that can be taken to any post office, propane exchange or even gas station for recycling?
This exists already. 18650 is in widespread use and now 2170 is gaining traction. Each cell is already a standard voltage, 4.2V at the top end, 2.75V on the bottom end (or lower depending on whether you want to risk permanent damage).
> Can we please get batteries with built-in protection circuits? I want to wire them in series or parallel at any voltage and have them "just work" and never explode. Bonus: please do this with solar panels as well.
These also already exist. Tesla will never use them because the BMS handles that job, which is more effective and cheaper.
And connectors. There are multiple worldwide standards because companies keep pushing their own for attempt at proprietary advantage. J1772 is the worldwide standard for ac that everyone supports. It has a flaw of not going to high enough power. Tesla is the only company that supports upto 80 amps 220v. Most companies support much lower voltages, some barely 30 amps and 220 v. Current gen tesla support 220v and 45 amps (can't remember the exact number). There are multiple worldwide standards for high power dc. Chademo (Japanese standard, doesn't go to high enough power, only like 50kw), leafs support these in the us. ccs in europe is a successful cross company standard that everyone uses, including tesla model 3 and later. So good job there. The us stupidly has a different ccs plug. Not many cars support it.
Teslas own proprietary plug is better than all the standards, supports higher power. Only just now are there cars on the new euro high power ccs plugs that match and exceed tesla's powerful plug. My 2012 tesla model s car is basically better than all existing competitors in range, ability to charge, etc. The brand new cars from porsche (but you can't go out and buy one, coming soon maybe, the taycan has a higher theoretical charging speed, they need to build a charging network.
Tesla offered to share their plug tech to other companies if they agreed not to sue each other, but no companies took them up on it.
2) Model S can charge at up to 200kW. Porsche Taycan can charge up to 270kW and they have said a software update will push this to 400kW-500kW. We still aren't sure what Porsche's superior 800V architecture is capable of.
3) Porsche doesn't need to build a charging network. They can use the existing CCS ones provided by third parties many of which are starting to rollout 350kW charging.
No, it's not. It's mostly just used in North America and Japan. The IEC 62196 "Type 2" connector is the standard in Europe and most of the rest of the world. And outside of North America and Japan, Tesla use the standard Type 2 connector on their vehicles, not the proprietary Tesla connector.
North America certainly has a big problem with the lack of connector standardisation, but J1772 is a big part of that problem, not the solution.
Each protection circuit comes with a power cost. Consider the most basic protection: a resettable fuse (real protection circuitry is more complex).
If you put a resettable fuse on every battery in a pack that tiny voltage drop across a single battery will occur across each and every battery in your pack.
A small number of batteries and you wouldn't notice. But if you're looking at hundreds or thousands of cells it gets to be a major issue. Looking at string of batteries in series, if you draw a large current from the pack you'd find your pack voltage drops and you generate a lot of useless heat.
When building custom packs beyond hobbyist stuff it's often better to source (or design) your own battery management system than to rely on safety circuitry in each cell.
And that's not even mentioning the pack management and communications capabilities that custom pack- or string- based management circuitry would have.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and-Panason... [2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cover-Story/Sparks-fly-Ins... [3] hard to find a singular link that back this up, note the constant drumbeat of agreements/movement over the last year and contrast with 1 & 2: c.f. https://www.google.com/search?q=panasonic+toyota&rlz=1CAUWRX... [4] https://sciencebusiness.net/network-updates/commission-clear...
https://electrek.co/2019/06/26/tesla-cells-in-house-secret-b...
They're not?
While batteries store energy in a chemical reaction and capacitors store it in an electric field; physically their construction is very similar.
Super capacitors, like batteries, have plates and use an electrolyte. They are also packaged similarly.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=industrial+capacitor&t=fpas&iax=im...
I would imagine there is quite a bit of overlap in manufacturing and chemistry.
Recommend reading up on it, it's fascinating and quite widely covered online.
It's a win on many fronts for Tesla if they can make it work.
I'd much rather have batteries fail in a predicable way than trust failure from abusive usage can be prevented (and then fail unpredictably).
If it had to be anyone though, glad it’s one of Musks moonshot companies. Uh, not his literal moonshot, figure of speech!
Starship and its fins it uses for re-entry will need top of the line battery tech. The prototype Starship uses Tesla batteries[1], wouldn't surprise me if that continued to be the case
Is there a theoretical limit on how much energy a rechargeable battery of, say, 1 kg mass can hold?
Can a rechargeable battery be discharged and recharged and afterwards be in the same state it was before the cycle? Or is degradation inevitable? Again, I am asking for the theoretical possibility. Not real life challenges to implement it.
For the spinning matter battery, the limit might be when the whole matter of 1 kg spins at the speed of light. I wonder if it matters how big the radius is with which it spins around the center?
For a non-rechargeable battery, I guess the limit is 1kg * c^2. As Einstein postulated that e=mc^2. And that guy was right more often then not. Is that also the upper limit for rechargeable batteries?
How long could a Tesla drive on 1kg * c^2?
Supposing a Tesla averages 200Wh/km, then it would drive ~ 10¹¹ km (4 light-days, or around 600 times the earth-sun distance... which is a lot)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E11km+%2F+earth+ci...
Shows the potential of batteries. Charge your one kilo batttery to drive around the planet two million times.
That's still enough to go 20.000 times around the globe and longer than any car is known to have lasted so far[2]
[1] https://www.phys.ksu.edu/personal/wysin/astro/review9/p4.htm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity
Assuming it is antimatter-based you can double that capacity by consuming air. But that just turns it into a fuel tank for an internal annihilation engine and hardly qualifies as battery anymore.
Why not? There are plenty of battery technologies that use air as an oxidizer.
> battery: a container consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is converted into electricity and used as a source of power.
> cell: a device containing electrodes immersed in an electrolyte, used for current-generation or electrolysis.
An antimatter reactor would not be a battery because it would not contain any cells. Additionally, because it converts nuclear energy into useful power, not chemical energy.
The answer is really, really good. Fast charging, long rang, 1 million mile lifespans.
Add on top of that the ability to connect into a smart grid and earn money by buying energy off-peak and selling on-peak, and the ability to double as an emergency generator for your home.
Of course, it's theoretically impossible for the matter to spin at the speed of light, and any actual material will tear itself apart at speeds far below c.
A chunk of uranium-238 contains a lot of energy but it is only fissionable but not fissile, so you need an external fast neutron source to extract that energy. Comparatively it is a fairly safe energy source for its density. Similarly there are some metastable nuclear isomers that can theoretically be stimulated to release their energy with high energy photons with a precise frequency and would otherwise release their energy relatively slowly through their natural decay modes.
And I think the difficulty of turning a hypothetical portable fusion power plant into an explosive device should be evident from the difficulties of keeping current experiments running for even a few minutes.
Any nuclear scientists here?
As for weaponizing batteries, pretty sure bad actors have been able to cook dangerous bombs at home for decades that can inflict magnitudes more damage than a battery could ever do. So battery based bombs won't be a thing for the near future.
That's a nonsense question then. Theoretical limits on power density will revolve around unobtanium and matter-anti-matter explosions; it's off topic as far as I'm concerned in a thread about Tesla acquiring a Canadian Battery Specialist, a company that is engineering batteries in the real world where practical limitations of materials science and chemistry are the ingredients, not your fantasy of what amount of energy one could theoretically store in a given volume if all of natures laws would be lifted. For reference, just the kinetic energy of a couple of liters of Neutron star alone should also figure into such discussions as well as a whole bunch of other nonsense.
That would have a mass _substantially_ higher than 1kg...
Approximately same goes for stuff we already know how to build, vehicle applications of nuclear batteries and reactors. Although IIRC for practical reasons nuclear refueling is done ever 10 years or so in terrestial applications.
I'm not sure how far we have studied the miniaturization of reactors. There were some designs for airplanes and cruise missiles in the 50s. And there's the current Russian missile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik). A paper at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1358022 claims that 60-80 kg reactors might be possible.
rechargable Li/CuCl2 could offer 1166.4 Wh/kg[1], while recyclable, non-rechargeable aluminum-air could offer 5200Wh/Kg[1].
Some batteries may have 200K recharge cycles[3].
Innolith is talking about a battery with 50K recharge cycles[4], but for the grid.
They also talk abuot building a 1000Wh/Kg battery for cars.
But who knows , they're a startup, so we'll need to wait and see.
And phinergy, another startup working on recyclable aluminum-air battery - is planning to open a factory in India in 2020.
[1]https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/4328/whats-t...
[2]https://phys.org/news/2018-10-catalyst-high-energy-aluminum-...
[3]https://www.pcmag.com/news/343967/researchers-stumble-on-a-2...
[4]https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/10/10/innolith-launches-inf...
However it does appear to be highly recyclable, at a fraction of the energy cost.
That’s kind of the point. If you can produce aluminum efficiently (i.e. reduce Al2O3 to aluminum metal without using much more energy than the theoretical minimum) and then oxidize it back to Al2O3 efficiently in a car, you have a battery that stores a huge amount of energy.
There is a rather spectacular non-battery use for this energy: thermite.
There's a production/re-use cycle in Europe wherein Aluminium is processed and smelted in Iceland, turned into ingots which are sent to mainland Europe to be manufactured-with, and then resultant used product sent back to Iceland for melting down and processing back into ingots.
The point being: Iceland uses geothermal energy to work Aluminium, so the entire process is one grand re/charge cycle of a significantly-used and energy-dense process.
Next step - small, modular fission power sources for the likely-hydrocarbon based and heavily-polluting ships transporting it all back and forth.
Currently electric car batteries weigh far more than a gasoline engine - and the range is still worse. Saying the gasoline engine is heavy is weird when you're talking about replacing it with something significantly heavier.
For an AWD ICE car, that includes fuel, tank, engine, transmission, differentials, and drive shaft. For an AWD EV, that's two motors, batteries, and the rest of the cabling and infrastructure required for the batteries and motors.
Even so, this is all trumped by the fact that the battery pack by itself weighs about 1,000 pounds more than the motor.
Are you saying a 300lb engine can't compete with a Model 3 in terms of driving performance? Here's a 5+ year old engine that weighs 290 pounds, makes just under 300 hp and lb-ft of torque in a stock vehicle.
https://media.vw.com/en-us/releases/96
With a mild tune (software upgrade, about $1000) you can turn a Golf R into a 11 second 1/4 mile car (you can do the same with a GTI, but it's a lot more work because it's FWD). It will literally run laps around a Tesla at a racetrack because the Tesla will overheat.
https://jalopnik.com/here-s-what-happened-with-the-tesla-mod...
Anyway, back to my original point - OP made a comment that seemed to me like the weight of gasoline engines was really important in comparing efficiencies - it's not. Right now gasoline vehicles are lighter, have longer range, and for many people are more convenient. I look forward to the day electric vehicles have improved enough that they are lighter, have longer range, and for many people are more convenient. But right now battery storage density is a real limiting factor in making that a reality, and the weight of the gasoline engine is nothing more than a second order effect.
If you feel I am wrong, please provide numbers/calculations in your rebuttal - it will make for a much more data-driven discussion.
Wow dude you're the king of misinformation. Why not link to a 2019 article reviewing Tesla Model 3's Track mode? https://www.motortrend.com/cars/tesla/model-3/2019/tesla-mod...
The Model 3 has a dramatically different thermal management architecture and does not overheat like the Model S did.
So far nobody has posted an impressive time for any Tesla on the Nurburgring - the track considered the gold standard for performance lap times for decades - and that seems to be because nobody can make it a single lap without the car overheating. I am aware that in the past month Tesla has been making a significant effort to post a good time, and they still haven't done so even with a custom vehicle.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/tesla-model-s-nrburgring-...
If you can show me a video or article of a Tesla racing 10+ laps in a row at any track without issue, or even doing 2+ fast laps in a row of the Nurburgring let me know. I just googled and couldn't find anything, other than anecdata of Teslas overheating and going into limp mode.
Since that article is about "track mode", you should be aware that is has been shipping to the public since late 2018.
In terms of real world preference, EV’s and plug in hybrids low speed handling characteristics are vastly more useful than top speed. So the 200hp Honda Engine is arguably undersized even in a lighter car.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/23/tesla-model-3-average-s...
Apart from that, the EA888 engine I mentioned is used in the VW Golf, the 7th best selling car in the world.
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/global/2018-full-year-inte...
The engine is considered highly fuel efficient, rated well above 30mpg for most variants and many people report >40mpg in real world usage (obviously this data will be biased towards higher numbers).
The emissions, however, are supposedly great but I don't trust VW at all on this front so I'll just assume they're doing something shady. They are being legally sold in California though, which is really the highest emissions bar there is, so I'm not sure what you'd expect from them (again, assuming they aren't doing shady shit).
And unusually for VW, this is considered a reliable engine. It's been around and iterated upon for much longer than any Tesla.
There is no apples-to-apples comparison between electric and gasoline vehicles, but claiming one of the most highly awarded engines in recent history is lacking in performance is like claiming Teslas are worthless in cold climates - it's more rumor than fact.
Back to that IC engine “With a mild tune” is an issue. You can get reasonable performance on a tiny hatchback with the stock 149 bhp EA888 but that’s not going to cut it on a midsized sedan. Want more performance from the same basic hardware and you will make some real sacrifices, weight, fuel economy, engine life, etc one or more things need to give.
Pretending otherwise is to suggest vast numbers of automotive designers are idiots.
https://www.goapr.com/products/ecu_upgrade_20tsi_gen3_mqb_r....
I'm sorry, but at this point I'm just going to say you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to IC engines and exit this thread.
The base golf gets 25 city / 34 highway a Golf R gets 22 city / 29 highway. With a mid tune that golf R gets even worse mileage. These numbers drop further when you talk about a larger car with more wind resistance or weight. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...
Meanwhile the larger Honda Accord is getting 30 city, and 38 highway. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...
Taking a 25+% cut to fuel economy to use a lighter engine is a really bad tradeoff for most people. Especially when the point of this discussion was talking about fuel density comparisons.
On top of this IC’s also need a much larger and more complex transmission among other things which should be included in the weight comparison.
A table you may be interested in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_energy...
I doubt very much they are going to actually store even 1kWh of total energy, because mass storage isn’t their strong suit.
Me too. Does anybody know a technology site/community, focusing on the theoretical limits of what various technologies could do, and how do they work , instead of the day to day news?
Essentially, all practical energy storage can be thought of as putting some sort of strain on chemical bonds. That is, you're taking things away from a low-energy configuration to a high-energy configuration and back to store and retrieve the energy.
The insightful part is that all energy storage systems (aside from Nuclear) are fundamentally this! They're all made of matter, and they all "strain" chemical bonds of one type or another.
People think of "batteries" as something special, but they're fundamentally the same as explosives, compressed gas cylinder, superconducting magnetic storage, flywheels, or whatever.
All of them are limited by chemical bond strengths and start going BOOM if you push them too far.
Explosives... explode if the stored chemical potential energy is too great. A lot of research goes into finding novel compounds that approach such limits as close as possible without actually going bang.
Compressed gas cylinders can store energy, but explode when the pressure ruptures the walls -- which have a tensile strength dependent on the chemical bonds of the material used to make them.
Magnetic storage is an exotic approach, but used in MRIs and some power stations. The ultimate storage limit is that strong magnetic fields produce significant forces that can rip even steel apart.
Flyweels are typically made of materials with high tensile strengths to allow them to be spun up to higher RPMs. Again, the tensile strength depends on the internal chemical bonds of the material.
In all cases, the upper limit is ultimately bounded by the available chemical bond strengths of the known elements, one way or another.
There are only very few ways past this limit. Anti-matter storage is probably the most "practical" energy storage method currently known that significantly exceeds chemical bond strength limits.
In practice, separating chemicals helps a lot. Liquid fuels can store much more energy than explosives. People think a stick of TNT has a lot of energy, but a candle the same size releases vastly more when it burns. There are grid-scale battery systems that rely on this approach, using tanks of chemicals to keep things apart.
Still though, the maximum energy you can recover from a fuel and an oxidizer is limited by the difference in chemical bond strengths between the reagents and the end product. I'm not quite sure what the maximum possible energy release is, but chances are that it's whatever the Caesium-Fluorine reaction produces, or close to it.
PS: This is why I chuckle when people are shocked to hear about exploding phone batteries. Well... duh. That's literally what a "high capacity battery is", it's a chemical system that's packed full of energy. Literally ready to explode, held back from the brink only through careful arrangement of its constituent parts.
Thank you for the insightful comment.
As with most things, you can find some fairly irrelevant theoretical maximum. It's fairly irrelevant because real life implementations will invariably involve compromises. It can be nice to know the limit, but it's not terribly useful for making an actual device.
For rechargeable batteries, it's not just about how much energy the battery can store, but how fast can you charge and discharge, what's the recharge efficiency like, does it degrade when recharged, can it be deep cycled without adverse effects, how sensitive it is to physical and electrical disturbances, does it have high or low self-discharge and so on.
Different applications have different demands and so there's usually not a single optimal battery technology.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...
I believe.. this is true, but not 100% sure. However the limit is higher with air batteries... as stated in another answer. The energy density of gasoline is high because it uses air intake for oxidation.
Also... part of why rockets are so big is because they also don't use oxygen from the atmosphere, they carry their oxidizer in the rocket.
At one point the only improvement beyond the physical barrier will be to throw electrons into a void sphere and call that a battery.
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-tiny-silicon-particles-power-l...
"Silicon shows promise for building much higher-capacity batteries because it's abundant and can absorb much more lithium than the graphite used in current lithium ion batteries. The problem is that silicon is prone to fracturing and breaking after numerous charge-and-discharge cycles, because it expands and contracts as it absorbs and releases lithium ions."
A sufficiently high energy density will collapse into a black hole, so a theoretical limit on ordinary energy storage definitely exists. But it might still be possible to use black holes since they radiate energy as Hawking radiation: