Free of Heavy Metals, New Battery Design Could Alleviate Environmental Concerns | Hacker News Reader

Free of Heavy Metals, New Battery Design Could Alleviate Environmental Concerns

ibm.com

37 pointsGys15 comments

A totally worthless article with almost zero information.

They say the electrolyte suppresses lithium dendrites, so my guess is the anode is lithium metal, rather than carbon, silicon, or sulfur to absorb the lithium.

But the don't actually say the anode is lithium metal. There's also some nonsense about extracting materials from sea water, so it could be a sodium ion battery.

Altogether a waste of time announcement.

For anyone but IBM to announce this, yes.

However... IBM is mostly about IP at this point, they are one of the few companies in the world that still has a cutting edge research division in house. They're responsible for a lot of the tech in present computer chips, like silicon on insulator or copper chip interconnects.

Possible this is just fluff, but with IBM it's not guaranteed.

Have their armies of outsourcing services tanked that badly?

sounds to me like they are just re-announcing existing announcements for sodium batteries with glass electrolytes?

IBM was 'ready' to develop li-air batteries back in 2009 (link below). This should be viewed as a research project until proven otherwise.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131201231910/https://www.ibm.c...

They didn't include recharge cycles in the properties they think they can beat lithium....

Why aren’t they saying what’s in it?

It's also free of details, apparently. But this sentence seems key: "three new and different proprietary materials, which have never before been recorded as being combined in a battery" - that has "we're waiting for patents to be granted" written all over it.

From the sound of it, this is a lithium anode battery with some new materials tech in it, which might be a significant improvement in some areas over present chemistries, kind of like how Lithium Ion Phosphate and Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide have different characteristics and are used for different purposes.

"New battery design could outperform lithium-ion across several sustainable technologies"

That is some weird marketese...

It uses lithium from my reading of the article.

Lithium

> The materials for this battery are able to be extracted from seawater, laying the groundwork for less invasive sourcing techniques than current material mining methods.

marine life might find it "invasive"

Every goddamn time an alternative to mining the goalposts get mounted on monorails and the new's sins exaggerated to atomic testing in a rain forrest level.

The only marine life impacted would be microscopic in the sea water removed and maybe the waste brine returned.

> marine life impacted would be microscopic

that would be disastrous as all marine life depends on those organisms.

it's not about shifting goalposts, it's about looking at the bigger picture. the problems we are now facing is because of past myopia

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