It keeps saying "some lithium-ion batteries".
>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?
>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?
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.
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.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.