New aluminum radical battery promises more sustainable power | Hacker News Reader

New aluminum radical battery promises more sustainable power

techxplore.com

32 pointswglb12 comments

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Hmm, what is it this week? Aluminum… ok, good good, see you next week. I think sodium is up again soon.

Molten salts, so hot right now.

This week is sponsored by the letter "S", as in "semi-solid":

https://www.electrive.com/2023/07/04/nio-has-started-integra...

You can't buy the battery though - it's only for rent.

Last revolutionary Aluminum battery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery) consumed Aluminum making it a non-rechargeable nothingburger.

Being non-rechargeable is not necessarily a problem. They could be recycled to recover the aluminum, although that did require a lot of electricity so recycling would probably require shipping the spent batteries to some place with cheap electricity. The batteries essentially turn the aluminum back to ore, and recycling consists of smelting that so probably would be done in the same areas where people put their aluminum smelting operations.

I remember that one of the companies working on those demoed an EV with one that had something like 1000 miles of range, with the idea that the battery was designed for fast swapping so that a battery swap would not take much longer than filling up the tank on an ICE.

For a lot of places where the grid isn't up to handling it if too many people get rechargeable EVs that could provide a viable way to get off of ICE.

Element Tf = unobtanium?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triflate

maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triflyl_group

Batteries are a mature technology that must work under the constraints of a)safety , b) cost, and c) energy density. With all the money and time put into battery research it is highly unlikely that a radical new battery technology that is cheap, safe, and energy dense will be discovered. Battery advancements are in the incremental phase.

The article isn't using the term 'radical' in such a sense:

"Stable radicals are a class of organic electroactive molecules that have been widely used in different organic battery systems. The first of this kind was commercialized by NEC in 2012."

This battery promises safety, but not energy density (it's only 130 Wh/kg, vs 250 Wh/kg for lithium-ion). As for cost, they don't claim anything, it's at the research stage. They claim many cycles (800) and quite low loss per cycle (0.028%).

You don't need to improve upon all metrics, depending upon the application.

For grid scale storage, for example, energy density can be very bad; even inherent safety can be compromised because it will be operated under narrow conditions, while costs should go down.

For airplanes, energy density needs to significantly increase, while keeping safety constant. Cost can be higher than existing batteries.

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