Theion sulphur crystal batteries promise breakthrough in energy density
whichev.net
whichev.net
I always read these articles as having a subtext of "EVs are crap at the moment give 'em another decade" which I don't think resonates with me but is likely popular with certain segments and so gets clicks.
One key repeated talking point is "when our tech gets out the lab in a decade you can fill your EV just like your ICE". I don't want to do that. It was smelly, expensive and inconvenient then, it is even more so now I have a EV that's fully charged every morning when it doesn't even need to be. In 10 years time it'll be nostalgia like a fax machine or sending a telegram.
You should introduce that certain segment to the Briggs & Stratton stock price :)
We see no "breakthrough", just incremental optimisation (fine in itself). The biggest drop happened between 2000 and 2005, and for the past 15 years the progress have slowed (even after accounting for the logarithmic axis !). The conclusion is that battery technologies are incrementally harder to optimise, that progress is slowing and we shouldn't expect anything major unless an actual breakthrough is made.
In other words: if your project isn't viable with the current price point, you may hope for a small discount in few years, but don't expect anything major.
There's plenty of scenarios where a more expensive alternative could take over easily. A more energy dense alternative that cost 2x as much would be a massive win for vehicles and especially aircraft where weight is a huge penalty. Alternatively, a technology with a much lower price even with a much lower energy density could enable a lot of green energy storage projects that are currently uneconomical with current battery technology.
They are all currently lithium-ion. What they are varying is the ion.
The ion makes a big difference LiFePO4 is very different to LiMn and its mates (higher cycles and lifetime, lower energy density).
A LiS is a different ion yet again. It's not a 3 fold improvement in energy density like the article says, more like twice the density in both volume and weight. And like LiFePO4, no rare earth minerals. It's downfall has been durability (50 cycles or so), but there are now multiple teams announcing 1000 cycles or better in the lab, all using different approaches. It seems inevitable that someone will figure out how to manufacture one of those chemistries at scale in time. Then you will see a step change by a change in chemistry.
Without a change in chemistry all you see is improvements in manufacturing which is a gradual thing.
For lots of purposes EVs ARE crap.
For example my neighbor's job involves driving specialized supplies to a number of retail outlets every day. It's a very niche business that involves pickup truck and 8 or more hours of driving to do the deliveries.
If he was to try to use a EV it would result in unemployment.
The reason EVs haven't caught on more isn't because everybody but you is stupid.
Electic motor technology is fantastic. Battery technology is miserable.
And the reason we don't see "breakthroughs" every month, except those that involve press releases and nothing else, is because ideas and chemistry is cheap. It's easy to get patents. What is hard is actually manufacturing.
Taking an idea that works theoretically in a lab versus making it work in reality as a commercial product is similar to learning logging down the street the first time versus winning an olympic medal.
In terms of technology what we have now is really just a series of incremental improvements over technology released in the 1990's. The rare earth magnets, the computer control of motor phases, the lithium batteries are all stuff designed for portable Japanese consumer electronics. It's just been supersized and refined for EVs.
I would pin it on the groups that campaigned against efficient city design, efficient public transport, efficient private automobiles, efficient taxing of externalities like lead and CO2 and vehicle weight, efficient electrical production like wind and solar and told a whole lot of silly lies in the processs because they were getting a cut of fossil fuel profits.
But yeah, if you supported and voted for those people and accepted their wild lies without realising they were scamming you, then you are kinda dumb, so I'm not ruling out dumbness as a contributing factor, just that there was a lot of time, effort and money put into making people dumb on this particular topic and I'll save my ire for the smart people doing the scamming rather than the dumb people being scammed.
> 8 or more hours of driving to do the deliveries. If he was to try to use a EV it would result in unemployment.
The fact that the new truck the USPS commissioned comes in an electric version says you're wrong.
Some delivery trucks are moving 8 hours a day, but many are stopped or turned off a lot of that time. Some have much heavier loads (delivery trucks for distribution from bottling companies will likely go hybrid, rather than electric). It really depends how rural the route is, and that's a double whammy because not only is it more miles but there are fewer opportunities to charge. But we aren't that far from a point where urban deliveries can be done with vehicles that are more specialized to that purpose. We don't need one vehicle that is useful for all scenarios. If anything we've moved away from that over time.
I think the unspoken fear with shitting on someone else's parade is that if this catches on then eventually the supply and labor pool for your preferred way of doing things will shrink and you will lose your economy of scale. But honestly you should worry about that for your kids and grandkids, because that's going to be a good long time.
And speaking of kids, the American Dream doesn't include cruising in a car anymore. Many kids today even in smaller towns are now delaying learning to drive. When you are against something you use the worst aspects of that thing as part of your rationale. If anything, refusing to reduce the consequences of cars will just galvanize this generation and their children against cars in general. Modest ICE vehicles benefit from both the introduction of EVs and outright banning of the worst ICE vehicles, in ways that were perhaps not true even a generation ago.
I'm not sure that this follows - I would be amazed if many USPS local delivery vehicles were driven 8 hours a day. A daily range of even 50 miles is probably way more than many routes need.
This is what we realized when we got our BMW i3 a few years ago. Sure, cars with longer range will come soon, but we live in the city and very seldom drive more than 100 miles per day. Unless we move, that's not going to change and the i3 is good enough.
These short trips would be much better in an EV.
This isn't really the right take. Production at scale isn't happening. Cars won't be the first applications because of huge safety concerns. Much easier to stop a battery fire when it's a cellphone.
>I must wait for my car almost a year. Volkswagen group delivers car in almost 2 years when I order today. Even if the new batteries will come out, my Kia EV6 will be absolutely fine for my weekly 300 miles.
Oh ya, it is a matter of time for new battery tech. I believe Tesla will be using a new battery tech in the cyber truck. Then again, where's that at? It's going to be at a premium for sure.
Your EV6, ID4, or even BZX4 type vehicles will be the current battery tech for many years. You're going to love your EV6.
I believe they're going to be building the Cybertruck at the new Austin plant. The plant is still under construction but looks pretty far along from the highway. It's kinda cool how they built the factory with large glass windows on the outside so you can see in from the road.
I expect you're right. When I read "higher energy density" I think "closer to being an actual bomb", ha ha.
https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Hammond's_Rimac_Crash_(TGT)
That Rimac caught fire and they couldn't stop the fire for days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thegrandtour/comments/7in8bc/commen...
With higher energy density, for the most part the application will be that we provide a smaller battery for the same range and lower cost. that fire will still be a thing, it's just so much energy.
Here's the flipside. Did you know like 1/4 of firemen calls are for gasoline vehicles catching fire? I had a rust bucket that if you braked hard enough gasoline came out of the tank. We are dealing with explosive flammable fluid.
EV cars are tremendously safer and even if we invented a battery that only needed recharging twice a year and held immense power. It wouldn't be a bomb. It would just be a crazy fire.
Anyway, wake me up when we are talking about something with an energy density any close to gasoline.
It's already enough.
My nominal range is 215 miles. That's enough to drive around town all week - this car's typical usage pattern - before I have to recharge, and of course I can do that more often if I need to. It's enough to get from here to the ski club we're members of, which we'll probably never even do unless my wife's car breaks down. And that's the key: this is a second car. It doesn't need more range.
Maybe in a few more years, if/when battery technology has improved even more, we'll be able to replace my wife's car with one that will get to the club and back without recharging. Maybe when chargers are more ubiquitous, it'll be reasonable to go all the way from eastern Massachusetts to the middle of New York (where my daughter is likely to attend college) in an electric car. Maybe even all the way to Michigan, where I have family.
But that's all in the future. In the here-and-now, all of my trips are already emissions free and much cheaper than if I were using gas. Good enough. It's a lot like buying a computer; anything you buy today will be worse than what you could buy in a year, but you can still make better or worse purchases based on technology and price cycles. No reason to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
I suppose these guys have never bought and will never buy a computer?
Compared to what ? Very annoying when articles do that, it shows a lack of rigor that does not inspire confidence in the rest of the article.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/11/lithium-sulfur-batterie...
[1] https://www.lis.energy/site/li-s-energy-applications/lithium...
Right now any replaceable battery is the domain of robotics, because there is no human-rated pack that would provide a compelling increase in range. Another factor of 2 and hauling a few 15kg cylinders or cubes out at a 'gas station' might get you to grandma's house or safely past a "no gas for 200 miles" sign.
Gasoline does not spontaneously combust when exposed to air, unlike the components in some batteries.
Neither do lithium or sulfur.
Gravimetric energy density ≥ 1’000 Wh/kg (Gen 4) Volumetric energy density ≥ 1’500 Wh/l Power capability ≈ 12.000 W/kg Cycle life ≥ 1’000 at 1 C
More details here in in their blogs: https://www.theion.de/
Do these articles do anything to help spur research or draw interest? What's the point?
Most true progress comes out of hundreds if not thousands small improvements and innovations.
On the other hand, all the claims are theoretically possible, sulfur could indeed replace the much more expensive cobalt or nickel oxides, if a cathode structure allowing good reversibility has been found.
If the claims of the company are true and their batteries will start qualification tests during this year and mass production next year, it would be a very important development, by allowing in a few years much cheaper batteries, produced in much larger quantities.
Of course, until further information, the claims could also be over-optimistic and the new batteries might have some undisclosed problems that will not be solved in time to permit the announced schedule.
One possible problem is that the batteries have a solid electrolyte, which is presumably necessary to avoid a degradation of the cathode after too few recharge cycles. A solid electrolyte might limit the density of current, which would lead to a low maximum power per volume. In that case the new batteries might be disadvantaged in high-power applications, like power tools or electric cars.
There is absolutely no information about how many charge-discharge cycles they have achieved with their completely new cathode structure. This is usually a major problem with most new promising cathodes. Their new battery might be twice cheaper than the current batteries, but it might have a lifetime of only a third of the lifetime of the current batteries.
Edit: according to https://newatlas.com/energy/rare-form-sulfur-lithium-ion-bat... it is possible to address the degradation problem. So maybe this is not vaporware.
They have used a slightly different cathode structure, with carbon nanofibers instead of nanotubes, and with a different electrolyte.
So, as shown by other posters, during the last couple of months there have been at least 3 announcements, from 2 commercial startups and from an university, all claiming to have solved the reversibility problem of the cathode in lithium-sulfur batteries, using either carbon nanofibers, carbon nanotubes or boron-nitride nanotubes, and the 2 startups claim that in a year or so such batteries may become commercially available.
Having 3 such announcements instead of 1, makes it much more believable that at least 1 of them is not overly optimistic, so indeed the lithium-sulfur batteries might replace soon the lithium-cobalt and lithium-nickel batteries, making the batteries much more affordable.
I’d expect there to be more and more interest and investment in this space over the coming years, given the latest developments around energy security.
(Interestingly, the Back Bay Battery Company simulation maintained by Harvard is commonly used as a case study in MBA programs.)
[1] https://www.lis.energy/site/PDF/0f90f952-4a18-45ea-bce9-3c52...
So presumably the patents of these 2 companies are non-overlapping.
In any case, having 2 companies with products based on very similar ideas, but still different, both claiming that are about a year away of starting production, is a good sign that this is something that might be real.
but this one was set "in administration" on 19 May 2021...
Also, these sound great for ultralight planes. Even though the electric motor weight is much lower than the gas engine options, battery weight makes electric almost impossible without significantly sacrificing flight duration.
("sulfur" is the preferred spelling instead of the pseudo-Greek spelling "sulphur", which is used in the article; in Old Latin the name of the element was "sulpur", and later it became "sulfur").
The element has traditionally been spelled sulphur in the United Kingdom, most of the Commonwealth including India, Malaysia, South Africa and Hong Kong, along with the rest of the Caribbean and Ireland, but sulfur in the United States, while both spellings are used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada
While some fancier British spellings at least correspond with spellings which were correct for English some time in the past, there are also many examples of pseudo-Greek spellings of Latin words, which insert the Greek sounds "y", "ph", "th" or "ch" in Latin words where they do not belong, as no such sounds have existed in Latin.
There is no justification for the pseudo-Greek words, so they must be avoided when possible, by using the correct Latin spelling. That is not always possible, because for many words the tradition of pseudo-Greek spelling is entrenched on both sides of the Atlantic, e.g. the words "stylus" and "style".
(brit here, cares little if it's spelt ph of f)
Turns out there's a whole article on this in Nature Chemistry :
Best line in the article.
"Stile Antico" from the Italian (?) for a form of music, but I think it was also used during a time spelling was more fluid.
the NGRAM page doesn't really help but it is interesting. Probably the changes in animal husbandry, and land enclosure account for some of this and have nothing to do with spelling
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=stile%2C+style...
Not because its lucrative, but because its the only place you can meaningfully compete before you have the economy of scale that lithium-ion has.
If you drop the floor out of the that market, the other industries will come calling you.
Grid storage is all about the price per kWh. Sodium-ion batteries ([1]) might become a good fit, while they are absolutely useless for electric airplanes / drones.
Sulfur is an industrial byproduct – no harmful mining required. This drives material cost down to 0.20 EUR/kg (compared to state of the art cathode material NMC811 at 20.00 EUR/kg).
No NMC needed.
It's not like lithium-ion owns aerospace, economy of scale doesn't give it the required energy density for an electric 747. Though I'm unclear on if this development opens up that possibility either.