Argonne: Lithium-Air battery 1200 wh/kg, 1000 cycles
anl.gov
anl.gov
Frankly, cars are not the big deal here. Existing battery technology is good enough for most light vehicle applications, and continues to incrementally improve. A lithium-air battery car could be even better and would solve most of the edge cases (the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars).
However, this would be a transformative technology for electric aviation.
Delivery drones double or triple their useful range. Air taxis go from pushing the limits of structural engineering to being easily doable. Short-haul all-electric airliners become plausible.
I know hybrids don't make as much sense for planes because the throttle range is typically 50-100% through a flight vs cars where you spend tons of time down at 10-15% throttle and need only bursts of power.
https://hydrogen.aero/product/
Seems promising because they don't have to fully design a new aircraft, they just have to get the new powertrain certified. Though the same end-customer airline (Air New Zealand) is also eyeing off some new-build battery-electric aircraft with 250nm range and 30 min recharge times.
Joby Aviation (the air taxi developer) also bought a company that's been working on a hydrogen fuel cell light aircraft. The power density of fuel cells density would make VTOL air taxis a whole lot more plausible (though you've still got a distinctly nontrivial hydrogen storage problem). [1] There's another startup called HyPoint working on fuel cells specifically for aircraft [2], though they haven't announced a whole lot recently.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/airbus-fuel-cell-engi...
[1] https://evtolinsights.com/2022/07/hydrogen-fuel-cell-company...
Most hydrogen trucks use compressed gas instead. At around 200 bars, the energy density by volume is about 18x that of diesel. So, you need a huge tank for the same amount of energy. And also 200 bar means it needs to be a really strong tank. Hydrogen trucks aren't really competitive with battery electric trucks for this reason.
You need a lot of infrastructure and you add a lot of weight and complexity to the trucks. The handful of hydrogen trucks driving around have in common that they are expensive, don't have a lot of range, and need to be supplied via an as of yet non existent distribution network for hydrogen. If you truck the stuff around, you need 18 trucks for every diesel truck to move the equivalent in energy.
All that volume is a show stopper on planes. We're talking about huge planes that are mostly hydrogen storage tanks with not a lot of room for useful load. Or alternatively really heavy tanks that can keep hydrogen at close to absolute zero. A more likely use for hydrogen in aviation is to use it to produce synthetic fuels that are more dense and easier to handle.
Huydrogen really sucks as a fuel. And it's not a particularly efficient battery either. Storing it is problematic. Transporting it is problematic. The vast majority of hydrogen today is produced and consumed in the same place for this reason. It's main role is as a raw material to produce other things (fertilizers, steel, etc.).
I expect short range electric commuters will come first - similar to cars.
There's a Pipistril Velis Electro[1] that shares a hanger with my flight school. It can only fly for about 30 minutes + 30 mins reserve with 2 relatively light pilots. If it had a battery which allowed for 2 hours of flight you've now tripled your range - 1.5hours + 30 mins reserve. That would cover all ab-initio training.
A battery like the one in the article would expand the range further to cross country capability and/or higher useful load, with the complete reconstruction of a piston engine every 2000 hours gone from the equation. Can't wait.
1. https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/general-aviation...
A gallon of gas weighs about 2.7 kg, so the gas is about 12.3 kWh/kg. If we adjust this type of battery to account for the difference in efficiency, it is about 4.3 (equivalent) kW/kg.
Ok, so that's still a factor of 3 worse. However, all the gas in the Cessna weighs about 336 lbs. The engine weighs about 250 lbs. A comparable electric motor is about 70 lbs. That gives you another 180 lbs, or over 50% more weight to fill with batteries.
Now we're at about 50% of the useful energy of the Cessna. You can also factor in a little bit of gain from "regenerative braking" since the electric airplane can charge the batteries while descending. This may not make a huge difference in range for just point to point flying, but it does add some extra for flight training with lots of landings, and also provides some extra reserve in the case of a missed approach for example.
All of that is to say that this doesn't bring the small electric airplane to parity with gasoline, but it's starting to much more credibly inch in on its turf.
Also, hyper efficient aircraft like the LongEZ (2000mi range on 52usg) become more interesting. Most legacy piston singles are horribly inefficient aerodynamically, to the point where just comparing them by frontal cross section is a completely legitimate strategy. A large amount of thrust is wasted just cooling the engine and the wings on most Cessna's are not flush riveted, seams not covered, etc. People often wonder why multi engine aircraft don't have 2x the performance; they have over 2x the cross section. Composite aircraft have the potential to allow for extremely competitive designs.
I've done estimates before suggesting we don't even need 50% of the performance, but rather somewhere around 30% to start to be competitive. 1.2kw/kg is well beyond viable.
The batteries themselves only dissipate heat relative to the charge/discharge rate/current but the total capacity would not change that.
Some people want huge battery phones, but most don't, consumers have been voting their wallets for over a decade now.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/motorolas-2019-cheap... includes-a-5000mah-battery-option/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-2020-moto-g-goes...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/motorola-shovels-the...
Here is HTC trying to sell a phone with a large battery
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/htc-still-makes-smar...
Right now ASUS will happily sell you a phone with a very large battery
https://www.asus.com/mobile/phones/rog-phone/filter?Series=R...
Motorola will sell you a 2022 model with a 5000mAh battery
https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-gen-3/p...
But, want to know a secret?
If you want almost any smartphone to have a battery life of 5+ days, don't install any chat or social media apps, and turn off background email syncing. For that matter, turn off all background data transfers.
Problem solved.
Because it isn't hardware that is at fault, it is software. Batteries have actually been getting bigger and bigger, the iPhone 6 everyone loves from 8 years ago had a battery that was under 2000mAh.
Here is a graph of iPhone battery sizes:
https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/29/iphone-battery-mah-capacity-l...
Batteries have been getting bigger, as have screens, and the software demands put on devices.
It isn't some conspiracy or market failure.
A large heavy battery requires increased weights of shielding and frame structure, it's almost exponential. Tesla 3 battery weighs more than its max payload.
But even if that doesn't happen EVs are going to represent the majority of new cars sold in the quite near future.
But electric propulsion really doesn't work well for tons of air travel cases, and a battery like this really would be transformative for those uses - that's how I interpreted GP's comment.
This is not true for planes and helicopters yet. We're still not at the point where the planes carrying the bulk of passengers (100-200 seats, 1000-4000 km) can be electrified, even with no budget constraints. We're starting to see concepts for smaller planes and that's obviously a good start but there's still some ways to go – better batteries could make a big difference here as it might allow electrification of planes that wouldn't previously been possible. After that we obviously still need to get the costs down, but that generally comes with scaling.
Which one? What is your actual overall average Wh/mile vs. your car’s rated efficiency?
I own a Model S Plaid. Its rated range is nominally 396 miles, but that’s never gonna happen in real life. (No one buys a Plaid to drive in Chill mode…)
Sure, it’s a rocketship in a straight line, but there are reportedly lots of other cars (even electric ones) that are much more fun to drive on a twisty road.
I don’t know of any other production car that offers comparable performance. Every other Tesla feels slow in comparison. I have driven the Lucid Air Grand Touring. Its performance isn’t remotely comparable, and the Lucid Sapphire is currently vaporware. As of mid-January, only three existed on the planet, and none of those were available to the public.
(am a occasionally ga pilot and have been watching metal air batteries for a while)
Hey, I know a way we can save X lbs. of weight; this is going to sound a bit nutty but ...
The reality is probably that it was an obvious choice to everyone schooled in the art but from the outside it seems kind of genius.
To use the 787 Dreamliner[0] as an example, the maximum landing weight is around 120,000 pounds less than the maximum take-off weight. Even a 737 [1] has to fly an hour or so to burn off enough fuel for landing (assuming it is fully loaded to begin with), or dump it into the air if it's urgent.
[0] https://modernairliners.com/boeing-787-dreamliner/boeing-787...
[1] https://modernairliners.com/boeing-737/boeing-737-specificat...
You must have pretty strange takeoff technique, and perfect landing skills ;-)
Casually dismissing people who are likely using the road for commerce is not a great take. In particular, if you ever hope to legitimately electrify anything larger, you should probably consider this serving this segment as a useful precursor to more work.
It seems to be a consistent knee jerk reaction to the idea that the current generation of electric automobiles just aren't a good "drop-in" replacement for the current fleet. We should solve that problem, not demean people who experience it.
A family member is constantly posting that nonsense, and whining about how he could never buy an EV since he hauls his boat. Nevermind that he hauls his 2,000lb pontoon boat 40 miles round-trip twice per year. The base model Hyundai EV could easily perform 100% of his towing requirements.
He doesn't have a problem to solve, he just likes to complain and virtue signal. No amount of battery range will convince him to buy an EV because it has nothing to do with his complaints.
I think the problem is a certain noisy minority want to remove that option in defiance to reality.
Drones are loud, noisy, intrusive things, and really should not be a delivery vector in most places.
This battery tech, with improvements, since the headline is aspiration and not factual, could well be used in commercial aircraft, vehicles, on boats including commercial vessels, or in plenty of other applications where the environmental benefits of having lighter, cleaner technology is important.
Now imagine 4, 8 or bigger combo of flying vacuum cleaners in 3am. People are going to eat you alive.
If we ever get to the point where delivery drones might become common place, people are going to lose their freaking minds once they hear the noise. It'll make the normal NIMBYism that pops up every time someone wants to build something in a city to decry the inconvenience of it look positively benign.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-regulations-sounds/...
Every time I go to my city center with the train, from the train station I first have to cross a few busy streets with a lot of car and truck traffic before getting to the walkable parts. Only then it feels I'm actually in the city. Probably one could easily measure the stress level lowering.
Would drones make it better or worse? Maybe they could fly high and operate on rooftops, unnoticeable from street level?
Rather than drones the obvious safe solution is to use small tunnels for underground delivery which various cities have used at small scales, but such dedicated infrastructure isn’t cost effective. And delivery drivers aren’t common enough to make a real difference by taking them off the road. However, several same day package delivery companies do make use of the subway.
For drones, it's the opposite, they are very well suited for very small point to point connection, there is basically no infrastructure needed between the points whatsoever?
Plus the additional risk that you get banned from using this airspace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...
Edit: maybe we could RL a somewhat efficient ornithopter. A mechanical harpy eagle with owl-like noise dampening serrations on its wings would look way cooler flying through our cities and be much quieter.
Better batteries may also assist to make drones quieter: if you have a bigger energy budget, you can afford to waste some of it using quieter but less efficient propulsion (like those toroidal rotors discussed here a little while ago).
The overall magnitude of the noise production can be reduced a bit by using lighter vehicles (less thrust needed) and more efficient propellers, but it's never going to be quiet unless we do away with propellers, which is very unlikely to happen.
This is a recent new design.
“Toroidal propellers: A noise-killing game changer in air and water” https://newatlas.com/aircraft/toroidal-quiet-propellers/
Short haul is actually well below 1000 miles as well on average. Here in Germany, essentially all domestic flights are closer to 300-400 miles. Basically most 1-2 hour flights would be in scope for electrification. That's most of the aviation market.
Battery cost is a much bigger problem for trucks. A mwh of battery would deliver awesome range. But most commercial trucks come with something closer to a quarter of that. I think the Tesla semi actually comes close to a mwh. But it's an outlier. The reason for this is cost, not weight.
There's nothing economical about installing lots of infrastructure on tens of thousands of kilometers of highways (what about other roads?).
Also, while overhead lines tend to be the cheapest method, there have been some interesting tests in Sweden with rails embedded in slots in the road surface. (Sort of like those toy slot cars that used to be popular about 30-40 years ago or so.) It's more expensive, but the main advantages are that it can be used more easily by a wider range of vehicles (not just trucks or cars with comically tall pantographs), and you don't have to look at overhead cables, which some people find objectionable.
There are also some tests projects using induction charging, but that's super expensive and the amount of power you can usefully deliver is a lot lower than if you have a physical electrical connection. (I expect it to only be useful in a few limited cases. Maybe induction chargers installed at bus stops, for instance.)
Anyways, I would love if electrified highways were to be a real thing. The amount of diesel that gets wasted every day pushing trucks around is staggering, and it'd be great to be able to buy an electric vehicle with 100 miles of range or so and feel comfortable making long cross-country road trips without ever even having to bother to stop and charge.
The stores are full of bullshit products. Just because someone is selling it doesn’t mean it works. Some of these so called tractors only get 170 miles? Are you joking?
There are already a few certified planes flying and a few drones that are getting close to that. E.g. the Beta that flew in the New York area last week. And there will be a lot more in a few years. Current state of the art is a usable but not very long range for electrical planes. 200-250 miles seems to be the maximum range currently and some planes barely get to 100 miles.
Something that not everyone seems to grasp is that planes expend a lot of energy going up but then a lot less cruising from A to B and they can actually recover some energy going down. So, increasing the battery capacity without increasing the weight means you extend the cruise phase of the flight. The take off energy expense is kind of a constant that is mostly dependent on the weight.
Doubling the capacity might extend ranges to more than double what they are currently. A 1200 wh/kg aviation battery would more than quadruple current ranges. That's nice of course if you can get to 1000+ miles. But a more logical thing to do would be to cut the weight by e.g. half and still more than double the range. Also, current electrical planes sacrifice a lot of their maximum takeoff weight for batteries. Losing half that, increases their useful payload size and utility considerably. You can turn a four person plane into an eight person plane, for example. And still extend the range a little too.
I think Elon Musk called out 400wh/kg as the threshold that he considers as a minimum. This more than triples that. More than because of the outlined effects on cruise.
Electric aviation might be a huge improvement over burning kerosene with respect to CO2 emissions, but also reducing how much we rely on planes would go a long way too. I don't see electric air taxis being a good thing in almost any situation -- they're tremendously inefficient and they make a lot of noise. Air taxis for emergency responders might be an acceptable tradeoff.
If someone can come up with a good way to run a large airliner off of batteries in a practical fashion, then by all means I think that's worth doing, but I feel kind of obligated to be a wet blanket on the idea of the aviation industry suddenly revitalizing itself and everyone flying everywhere just because they can.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
Since the economic and political elites of the world (in the broad sense) are the clients of aviation, there is just about zero chance they will allow the field to be dismantled for environmental reasons, especially since they have come to relly on it in the global competion.
Of course people tend to travel much further/faster by plane. So prehaps it is not plane travel that you would like to see as a thing of the past, but traveling long distances? Or perhaps you class car ownership/driving in the same class of things that should go away.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transpo...
It's important to note that I'm just talking about an average situation. If a car is a massive gas guzzling thing, it's a much different equation from a micro-electric.
I hadn't thought about the differences in high altitude emmissions vs low. If you'd asked me before today if there would be a vig difference, i would have guessed that eventually it all just mixes evenly throughout the atmosphere, regardless of wjere it was emmitted. But after what you wrote, I learnt that this might not be the case (the science is still investigating):
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9818/why-do...
And there are a few other potential issues with other pollution aircraft emit at higher levels.
Personal vehicles are a huge source of CO2 emissions, but I don't think it's realistic to just ban them all. I would rather we focus on phasing out internal combustion as quickly as possible, which is a lot easier to do if we had suitable infrastructure. (Not just more public charge stations, but it should be standard for new apartment construction, and we should be looking at electrification of highways so cars don't need huge batteries for cross-country trips. It's not realistic to expect every car to have 500-1000 pounds worth of batteries. That doesn't scale, at least not in the short-to-medium term.)
It would also be good if public policy didn't encourage large vehicles.
Trains would definitely be key here. However, for migrants living in another continent, it becomes impossible in several scenarios to go back to visit their beloved ones.
What's the wh/volume? Maybe it's light but it's huge?
What's the charging rate? Maybe it holds power well, but takes 3 days to recharge?
What's the discharge rate? Maybe it hold power well, but can't release it quickly?
What's the cost per wh to produce? It's a research thing right now, so probably it's incredibly expensive- but that always is the case with new stuff.
This is the hard part with any new battery announcement. They always yell about how this new battery tech wins at one metric, while quietly not mentioning that there's a lot more where the Li-ion wins out overall.
- Wh/L is 619, so the battery just barely floats. The absence of a dense metal oxide cathode probably makes it lighter than the usual lithium battery cell (which have s.g. ~2).
- Charging rate is given as 1 A/g for a 1 Ah/g electrode, so these numbers were measured with a 1-hour charge time. Data for higher charge rates is buried in the Supporting Information (which may be public?)
- Discharge rate is the same.
- Cost to produce is unclear. The electrolyte contains about 1-2% germanium (5 wt% of Li10GeP2S2), and the cathode contains molybdenum. It is difficult to give the Mo concentration with certainty because the specific area of the cathode is given as "250 g/m^2" but it should be as "m^2/g". Assuming a simple typo, the cathode contains 25 mg of Mo per cubic centimeter, which is sometimes written "2.5% w/v". These are rare elements, but the concentrations are rather low. The use of toxic sulfides (H2S risk) may increase production costs.
Coulombic efficiency, which you didn't ask for, starts at 93% and drops to 88% after 1000 cycles, so pretty good but a little lower than you expect from a typical lithium battery.
(kg/Ah discharged could be used to estimate electrons per oxygen atom absorbed, too.)
How does that compare to other batteries?
Current batteries charge in as little as 18 minutes so by this metric it's about a quarter to a third as good.
But this has 3x the energy density so it's about on par (same weight battery accepts similar amount of energy in similar time).
Patent rather than copyright, but you are most likely correct - in fact I fully expect at least one company already has a patent which might arguably be infringed by this work, regardless of whether that company has ever made an actual working battery, or really done any meaningful research whatsoever. Such is the insanity of the patent system.
Also, in many cases of publicly funded research, the resulting company is owned or partly owned by the researcher(s), which is one of the incentives for doing the research in the first place.
Utility patents cover that which is new and, in theory, non-obvious (although non-obvious is very poorly enforced based own personal experience). Those would include the "tweaks", which may not be as minor as you think, given the difference between the needs of a product that is to be mass produced, vs. a proof-of-concept laboratory device. Patents might also include the methods of production. Design patents cover the appearance and aesthetics, and are a different type of patent in the US.
250 kilowatt hour battery ~ 1000 mile range battery would weight 208 pounds, although pack would probably be more than raw cell weight, let's say 250 pounds. Current Tesla model S is a 1100 pound pack.
Because you are chopping off almost 1000 pounds in pack weight, the car would go even further than current tesla effeciency because of the BEV "rocket equation".
The battery uses oxygen from the air, not purified oxygen unlike others. It is a solid battery design as well, so it should be compact. Materials are claimed to be common.
Of course it can be hard to tell the path to commercialization. Usually research cells are very small, a far cry from BEV / grid and other commercial scale cells.
Five years ago they were at 750 cycles (https://today.uic.edu/new-design-produces-true-lithium-air-b...), unreported density.
And that is a commercially relevant sized cell that is being produced at Fab1 in Fremont.
https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/667425e2-44ef-4ab0-978b-9...
Putting the same weight of this into a Tesla Model Y would easily give over 1200 miles of range
Not in Europe, a lot of US cars already wouldn't fit in EU parking spots (most are 5mx2.3m)
But how long? Longer than 300 miles?
But sometimes they do.
> Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (abbreviated Li-NMC, LNMC, or NMC) are mixed metal oxides of lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt. They have the general formula LiNixMnyCozO2. ... NMCs are among the most important storage materials for lithium ions in lithium ion batteries. They are used on the positive side, which acts as the cathode during discharge.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Powerhouse-America-China-Great-Batter...
99 out of every 100 ideas they come up with are complete rubbish, but the 100th tends to be an absolute humdinger.
Frame it wisely and wittily enough for fast food. Feed it back to those smart people.
That's Terry.
Shit on them. Imply there was nothing impressive about what they did and it wasn't worth doing.
That's HN.
As opposed to the miracle of selection elsewhere. /S
It basically never happens that a new cell chemistry becomes the market leader in all areas, but all in all, batteries to get better and cheaper at a remarkable rate.
The team established that this shortcoming is not the case for their new battery design by building and operating a test cell for 1000 cycles, demonstrating its stability over repeated charge and discharge.
1. how fast can you charge it
2. how much power can it output?
3. how long does it last time wise, not just cycle wise
4. how much does it cost
5. how much space does it take up
6. what temperature ranges can it handle?
7. can it handle vibrations
just a few
All these parameters do is help determine its best possible use-case for product and if it something to compete against incumbents or open up other market possibilities.
From the article: "The main new component in this lithium-air battery is a solid electrolyte instead of the usual liquid variety. Batteries with solid electrolytes are not subject to the safety issue with the liquid electrolytes used in lithium-ion and other battery types, which can overheat and catch fire."
> This new solid enables chemical reactions that produce lithium oxide (Li2O) on discharge.
Lithium has an atomic mass of 7 and Oxygen of 16. The reaction starts with only Lithium (2 atoms = 14 mass) and ends with Li2O, with a mass of 30.
that would be fine!
That would add an interesting dynamic during a race!
Something doesn't add up.
But the catch is two-fold. First, are they weighing the battery before or after discharging? Oxidizing will change the weight significantly. The most honest result would be the average weight during the cycle.
The other catch with these air batteries is usually the purity requirements on the intake. I recall reading about earlier experiments that could not tolerate pollen, dust, and smog, and required an energy intensive purification step (maybe involving cryogenics) that was a nontrivial power draw.
Those caveats aside, a back of the envelope estimate for the energy density would be something like 600-700 Wh/kg.
https://www.google.com/search?q=current+tesla+battery+energy... says Tesla batteries are currently in the range of 270-290Wh/kg
Is that accurate to you?
As in this is roughly at least twice as good as current technology? Seems too good to be true. When can we expect to see it hit consumer cars? 5 years? 10 years?
1st gen: 276 Wh/kg (2022)
2nd gen: 305 Wh/kg (2023)
3rd gen: 333 Wh/kg (2024)[1]
Here is a cool article on all the tech that is scheduled or went into these new 4680 batteries and getting the energy density up well past 300.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/22/everything-you-need-to-...
[1]https://insideevs.com/news/598656/tesla-4680-battery-cell-sp...
https://insideevs.com/news/600297/tesla-model-y-4680-is-just...
And of course, they will release oxygen if you try to charge them, which implies a way of rapidly expelling air when charging up quickly. Many past attempts avoid this problem by "mechanically" charge up the battery, meaning literally swapping out the spent chemicals with new ones. This of course require an auxiliary battery if you want regenerative braking or the ability to electrically charge.
And of course, the real catch is that we've already invented the metal-air battery in a practical way: hydrogen fuel cells. The big advantage with them is that mechanically recharging is very straightforward compared to other mechanisms. All other attempts are basically reinventing the wheel or have a very specific niche in mind.
"With further development". Somewhat misleading title. From the published paper:
>The results shown in fig. S9 indicate that this solid-state Li-air battery cell can work up to a capacity of ~10.4 mAh/cm2, resulting in a specific energy of ~685 Wh/kgcell.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1347
Still impressive, but not 1200 Wh/kg!
20 pounds maybe... but 20kg (44lb) would be a serious effort for most people.
I can squat 1.5X my own weight, but I still get pretty tired carrying a mere 12kg backpack through a long airport walk. Sure you can build up to carrying 20kg all the time, but it's not normal for most people in the world. And it would not be accepted as reasonable by the people in the world who could afford it.
(Normal guideline is hike pack should not be more than a third your body weight to avoid injury, which for the average American male would be 60 pounds and the average American female would be 50 pounds… there’s enough margin so that even if you’re talking just those in a healthy BMI of like 23, there’s enough for a 44 pound pack for the average height American male and female.)
Quick google search indicates plenty of US Troops were hauling 90+ pounds of gear around in Iraq and Afghanistan due to need to carry a pack + body armor + weapons.
I'm no soldier but I have certainly hiked with a 50lb load in a good internal frame pack.
And in any case the eBike example was listed. 50lb is not a very heavy load on a bicycle at all. But a battery like this would be better used to make an eBike much lighter. Today they are comically heavy in ways that creates all kinds of extra problems.
If you make the battery 1/4 of the weight of a current eBike with a 100 mile range all of a sudden you don't have to supersize everything on the bike and make it heavy, hard to handle, and un-aerodynamic. It would make the whole bike's performance improve even more.
I think that you are right, it is serious effort, but you can carry 20 kg for a full day if you need to.
An efficient gasoline generator produces 1.7kWh per liter. So for 24kWh, you’d need to consume 14L of gasoline and also carry around the generator. I would personally prefer the battery option.
And how much does it weigh?
A stick of butter represents about 1kWh of chemical energy, and a 2000kg vehicle at 225 km/hr represents about 1kWh of kinetic energy. The latter is intuitively more dangerous because the energy could easily be transferred (to e.g. a person standing in its path) in an instant.
Heck the specific energy of any given piece of matter is c squared, but we don't (as of yet) know how to get it out except under a few very special circumstances :)
Lithium-ion batteries are far worse than kerosene as a hazard. New York City has a big and growing problem with people charging scooter-sized electric vehicles in apartments.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/nyregion/lithium-ion-batt...
It seems there are a few ...
In related news, Michael Thackeray also now is a fellow of the Royal Society: https://www.anl.gov/article/michael-thackeray-named-fellow-o...
This is a huge advance if it works. But we've heard this before. People have been fooling around with lithium-air batteries since the 1970s.
Previous breakthrough announced in 2022: [2]
Previous "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [3]
Another "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [4]
Not clear if this really runs on "air", or whether it needs a clean gas mixture. Water vapor has caused problems with previous lithium-air systems. That's not a killer problem, though; extracting clean oxygen from air is not that hard. Nor is removing water.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1347
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/02/01/how-thi...
[3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210506104801.h...
[4] https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/breakthrough-design-offe...
I don’t know about Argonne, but at NIST all our papers are supposed to have full text up on PubMed within I think a year. I try to post to arxiv when I submit to the journal. Ironically paywall journals are easier for us from a budget perspective because we don’t really have dedicated funds for article fees like academics get with NSF funding
Edit: I just saw that it’s “request full text”, which I found disappointing
It's really annoying for papers which could be world changing if true. This is either a huge advance or there's some reason it won't work in practice.
If I bought a car today, I'd like to drive it until I can't anymore. If electric batteries are x times better in 10 years than now, it would suck to only be able to replace it with today's lithium ion.
Imagine upgrading your car in 10 years to take it from 200 miles to 10000.
Car manufacturers would have no motive to develop let alone release retrofits for older cars.
Can't wait for someone to come up with a full aftermarket car firmware that would let you run everything on it, circumvent restrictions, and disable telemetry.
But nowadays, it takes hundreds of teams of unknown researchers to _not quite actually_ make the changes that we desperately need.
Maybe there are some problems that you can only solve "Mannathan Project"-style, as opposed to the normal, slow and steady course of research ?
Must take some courage to realize the urge, and still go the way of the tortoise without loosing your mind.
> Licenses to practice inventions covered by patents and pending patent applications owned by the U.S. Government as represented by this Department will generally be royalty free, revocable and nonexclusive. They will normally be issued to all applicants and will generally contain no limitations or standards relating to the quality or testing of the products to be manufactured, sold, or distributed thereunder.
But...
> Where it appears however that the public interest will be served under the circumstances of the particular case by licenses which impose conditions, such as those relating to quality or testing of products, requirement of payment of royalties to the Government, etc., or by the issuance of limited exclusive licenses by the Secretary after notice and opportunity for hearing thereon, such licenses may be issued.
In other words, if it would be in the public interest to impose royalties, exclusivity, or conditions of use, the Government can do so. In this case since it's a high energy density battery, I suppose an argument could easily be made that it would be in the public interest for the government to impose conditions related to quality and testing.
Source: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-A/part-6/sect...
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EDIT: With all of that said, it appears that patents related to this project, such as [1], have UChicago Argonne LLC as the applicant and not a US government agency, so the above might not even be applicable in this case. But, again, IANAL.
1: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
With that said, any exclusive license, including prospective exclusive licenses, must be published in the Federal Register. So, any exclusive licensing should be available to the public. Additionally, the agency has to give first preference to small business applicants. However, this only applies if the small business capable and have "equal or greater likelihood as those from other applicants to bring the invention to practical application within a reasonable time", both of which are at the federal agency's discretion.
I think your concern is still valid, as I share it. I just wanted to correct the misinformation I presented previously. It still appears that the "default" licensing of Government-owned patents is to be royalty-free and non-exclusive, but what I didn't previously consider is that is only the default if they choose to license it. They could just as easily not license it at all.
1: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-IV/part-404
So I'd guess they will patent this and that's who will get the money when they do something commercial (make or license).
1. Commercially license to one or more corporate entities
2. Spin up a start up and license it themselves
I find it odd and surprising that the limiting factor is electrons per oxygen, not electrons per lithium. Oxygen is freely floating in the air, while lithium is in a fixed amount in the battery. Possibly something about the electrode makes it store a limited quantity of oxygen.
Any downsides to this air battery that wasn't mentioned in the article?
These are the downsides. These are promises. Not actual performances.
If only we could have EV batteries instead make use of CO2 in the air...
This promises a jump of an order of magnitude (base 10)...