Battery made of aluminum, sulfur and salt proves fast, safe and low-cost
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
I mean, congrats on the great marketing department. But it's tiring to be disappointed over and over by the hype.
These are articles for taxpayers, not for you.
A scientist who is also an effective communicator can be 10-100x more effective than one who only publishes in journals, because it can build consensus to fund large projects and get champions and stakeholders.
Very frustrating that the article entirely fails to provide key information about its main topic - batteries. They even fail to provide even rough order-of magnitude values.
How much energy can it store, i.e., the energy density (watt-hours per kilogram or equivalent measure)?
How much power can it put out per unit mass (watts per kilogram or equivalent measure)?
What level of cost (e.g., dollars per kilogram) are we talking about?
Sure, they talk about some new feature, but without at least a rough order of magnitude on these key parameters, we cannot even guess at what will be the valid applications. For example, a battery with a very modest energy & power density but really cheap will be worthless for transport or airborne applications but may be great for fixed storage, and many other combinations.
But with only highlighting some new feature in isolation, the only possible audience is ignorant enthusiasts, who we hope are not making policy.
I used to be really enthusiastic about most new battery tech articles, but at this point, if they fail to even mention one of those three parameters, it looks to me just like clickbait or spam.
Are they? Taxpayers don't decide where their taxes go.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/new-aluminum-sulfur-...
https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/battery-characteristics/...
https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/battery-basics/electroch...
Update: I see it also depends on their concentration, so the voltage changes as the cell discharges, unless all the components are solids:
https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/battery-basics/nernst-eq...
I'm curious to know if this would also be suitable for grid-scale storage, it seems like an odd ommision in the article. The description certainly implies that this would be a good use but I wonder if there is an issue that I'm not seeing that would make them less useful for that?
Not being flamable sounds like a good thing for house and charging station level storage, although heat management might be an issue in smaller houses. I've always been a bit uncomfortable about the idea of a large li-ion battery pack in my house, given the difficulty of extinguishing fires that involve them, I'd be happier with something like this assuming the thermal management could be dealt with.
So am I, but I think we're not different from people who are afraid of using planes. Yes, it's really bad when it happens, it just doesn't happen all that often and when it does it ends up in the news. Just like cars are more dangerous than planes even when you have li-ion battery it probably has very low impact on total probability of your house burning down because of other potential sources.
Plus somehow people seem to be afraid of wall mounted battery while having no problem with EV car parked in the garage.
If fire hazard is what's stopping people I guess one could also build a fire-resistant brick cage around it (presumably just a shelf on top should be enough? so that it still can stay cool during normal operation)
The idea isn't to move it when it's on fire, but that if a recall is issued, then you can at least move it out of the structure in case it does ignite.
> Other types of batteries, such as a recent design using molten salt electrolyte and aluminum and nickel electrodes, could work better at grid scale.
Would still be interesting to see if this can be made to work well at grid scale, feels like we need as many different technologies so we minimise specific resource constraints.
Though it's still Li-Ion, LiFePo and plain old Lead Acid in practice.
LiFePO4 is a type of lithium-ion battery. There are also plenty of others. In 20 years cost has decreased to a tiny fraction and gravimetric density (kWh/kg) has increased 3-4x.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
So it does not have enough density and thus useless in BEVs and if amount of charge cycles is not counted in thousands, then it is kind of useless for renewable storage as well. But at least it is cheap.
If it's cheap enough, it might still be useful in a some sort of hybrid setting. Use this one after a more durable battery is almost exhausted. This way you'd get less cycles overall, but still have power when it's really needed.
Other way to look at it is if this one is 10 times cheaper per kWh, then you might prefer this over a more durable battery.
I think this was more of a 'we tried the thing' paper to justify whatever funding they had and now it'll all be hush hush until they think they have a product.
It's being commercialized by the same people that did ambri which looked like a very promising technology at the time with one hard materials problem then they went dark.
I feel like they're willing to hype anything. I'm sure this would be good for certain niche applications, but a standard operating temperature that high rules out a ton of uses and requires its own safety considerations.
I have no idea of the chemical reactions, but generally heat means wasted energy. I wonder what the efficiency is like for charge/discharge. And if they're used on a large scale how that heat dissipation would effect the local environment or climate change.
All I'm saying is that there are other concerns with this battery vs a lithium battery, and that I feel the concerns are much lower with lithium.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out over the next decade, if it becomes commercially available at all.
The tempature isn't a detriment to the battery, in fact it's required to operate efficiently. What it does limit is the suitable applications.
Yes please, today if you can deliver. A combination battery / heater / heat pump sounds amazing.
I doubt this would be a good candidate for vehicles due to the minimum operating temperature. Certainly vehicle design would have to change to accommodate the different pattern configuration with all the required insulation.
Houses make the most sense, but not for more than emergency power given the battery life is hundreds of cycles and not thousands. Come to think of it, the need to keep it at the minimum operating temperature makes it a poor choice for emergency power too.
(Sure, I don't really want lithium salts splashing on me either; but molten salt at 90C?)
Wake me up when you can buy them.
There's a hint here:
"The cells would cost just one sixth of the price of a similar-sized lithium-ion cell."
I'd assume that a well-tuned mass-production cycle would drastically reduce size over time, like it did with lithium batteries?
However, while there are also lithium-sulfur batteries in development, the current lithium-ion rechargeable batteries with Co/Ni/Mn/Fe electrodes have a much worse energy/mass ratio than a lithium-sulfur battery.
Moreover, in a lithium-ion battery, the mass of the electrode which stores the lithium is much greater than the mass of the stored lithium (which is intercalated in a porous structure), and the mass of the electrode is only a small fraction of the total mass of the battery.
The proposed aluminum-sulfur battery needs good thermal insulation, which will increase the volume in comparison with a lithium battery, but which should not increase much the mass.
In conclusion, it is likely that it should be possible to make such a battery at a similar energy per mass with the current Li-ion batteries, but at a worse energy per volume.
There is a chance to improve the energy per volume by making a very large battery, which would be possible because there is less risk of fires, but in a large battery the regrowth of the aluminum might be not uniform enough, resulting in a shorter number of charge-discharge cycles until degradation.
Sounds like thermal loss to me...