Extra salty sodium battery performs on par with lithium
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
>a comparable energy capacity and cycling ability to some lithium-ion batteries
Is that just covering their asses, or does this only perform as well as the worst-performing lithium-ion batteries?
I really hope something - anything - makes it out of the lab at a market-busting price point soon, it might actually give me a chance to restart some projects that have been collecting dust on the shelf for way too long.
I.e. it seems a bit bold to say
A battery that is just five times as cheap will never catch up to the learnings of li ion manufacturing.Sodium is number 6 on the list, while Lithium is way down in the middle (above lead, below cobalt). Also, you can literally scoop sodium out of the ocean, so extraction will never be a problem over any reasonable human timescale.
From this website https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/what-makes-ocean-salty-and-how...
A quick google says the mass of just the water on Earth is 0.02% of total mass and the mass of the moon is 1.2% of Earth’s.
Someone please point out my mistake.
For a related reason you need "big oh" notation for computing speeds. But in that case the magnitude difference over larger numbers is what you are interested in. The difference between O(n) and O(n^2) can grow to an arbitrary magnitude difference. If you want a difference of 1000, then take n = 1000, and you get O(n|n = 1000) = 1000 and O(n^2|n=1000) = 1 000 000. But if you take n = 1 000 000, the ratio is now 1 000 000 = 1 000 000 / 1 000 000 000 000. So, a badly written sort function can get pretty bad with large arrays.
Anyway, the latter is just tangential to show that indeed as you say, context is important (abundance and total need for a resource) and factors vs. growth-in-factors over large numbers are different. Resources scale linearly to use in product output, however, so the "big oh" (counter-)analogy is just for the sake of interest.
Either if would be slightly more expensive, the environmental and logistic consequences (not depending on a few places in a few countries to mine it, not needing to import the raw materials from another continent) would be also a noticeable factor.
> ... offering a comparable energy capacity and cycling ability to some lithium-ion batteries already on the market.
Having said that, it seems they do claim in the paper that the performance of their "battery" (really, they only tested a single cathode composition) is "competitive to the commercial LiFePO4-graphite" base on extrapolation of their lab results "to practical large format cells".
I feel funny about that sort of extrapolation in an engineering context, but I'm not an electrochemist and also not a chemical engineer, and I have only skimmed through the abstract, introductions, and conclusions of the paper; so take this comment with a grain of salt.
Edit: typo. Also, I'm not out to trash the work in case my comment comes across as being harsh—marketing aside (which is, sadly, pretty common in high-impact journals), it does seem like a step forward.
But I think there is at least one valid reason for using imprecise terms in scientific journalism: it makes the content more accessible.
The shortage of cobalt is a by far bigger problem. It's basically 80% about Congo, and what happens there.
50% to 80% of global supply can evaporate overnight if something is happening there.
The same argument could be made for nickel-iron batteries, though. They're heavy and bulky, but they last literally forever, and their source materials are ludicrously abundant. Why don't we see nickel-iron grid-scale storage? I'd love to know.
Their primary use is in applications where their long lifetimes outweigh all other considerations.
It they really work is a good leap in the right direction.
We must remember that some forms of NA will explode in a fire ball in contact with water.
It's valuable research, but still nowhere close to a superior end product.
https://www.ft.com/content/c6909812-9ce4-11e9-9c06-a4640c9fe...
I wonder how that estimate holds up today with the amount of places we now use Li-ion cells and the new lithium reserves we have found.
Whats more important than lithium is the cobalt they need, which is particularly hard to source. As others have mentioned, battery makers are trying hard to remove cobalt from their batteries.
Switch to LiFePO4 already, they're much safer and have more cycles in them. Yes, a bit less energy density, and have to switch BMS chips but still.
I remember one of my chemistry profs in the 1990s telling us how Sodium ion batteries could eclipse Lithium ion batteries once we figure out the practicality to make it work.
So it is very different - a li-ion battery anode is a tiny part of the battery. A lead-acid battery, its a much larger component.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/11/14/this...
This property is used to distinguish low mass stars and brown dwarfs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_burning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem#O...
There's a hint on the wikipedia page that someone may be trying it again, but I'm having trouble following the citations to figure out who.
[...]
"Experimenting with the design of sodium-ion batteries led the team to produce a version with a cathode made of
layered metal oxide
and a liquid electrolyte with a higher concentration of sodium ions.
In testing, the team found that this led to a much smoother interaction between the electrolyte and the cathode, enabling the continuous movement of the sodium ions and
avoiding the troublesome buildup of inactive crystals on the cathode surface.
The upshot of that was battery offering capacity similar to some lithium-ion batteries and with an uninterrupted generation of electricity, maintaining 80 percent of its charge after 1,000 cycles."
Junhua Song, Kuan Wang, Jianming Zheng, Mark H. Engelhard, Biwei Xiao, Enyuan Hu, Zihua Zhu, Chongmin Wang, Manling Sui, Yuehe Lin, David Reed, Vincent L. Sprenkle, Pengfei Yan, and Xiaolin Li
ACS Energy Lett. 2020, 5, XXX, 1718–1725 Publication Date:April 28, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.0c00700
"Abstract:
O3-layered metal oxides are promising cathode materials for high-energy Na-ion batteries (SIBs); however, they suffer from fast capacity fade.
Here, we develop a high-performance O3-NaNi0.68Mn0.22Co0.10O2 cathode for SIBs toward practical applications by suppressing the formation of a rock salt layer at the cathode surface with an advanced electrolyte.
The cathode can deliver a high specific capacity of ∼196 mAh g–1 and demonstrates >80% capacity retention over 1000 cycles. NaNi0.68Mn0.22Co0.10O2–hard carbon full-cells with practical loading (>2.5 mAh cm–2) and lean electrolyte (∼40 μL) demonstrate ∼82% capacity retention after 450 cycles.
A 60 mAh single-layer pouch cell has also been fabricated and demonstrated stable performance. This work represents a significant leap in SIB development and brings new insights to the development of advanced layered metal oxide cathodes for alkaline-ion batteries."
Besides those are lab tests. Show a thousand cycles of a hundred cells at various temperatures and vibration loads and there will be something to talk about.
Sorry, wrong thread.
For the average person using consumer products they are usually concerned with energy density and cost. Apart from electric cars most companies don't really care about no. of cycles, especially for phones.
(Not sure what you're getting at here.)