Lithium-sulfur battery retains 80% charge capacity after 25,000 cycles
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[x] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The issue plagues moving forward with other energy solutions like hydrogen.
For storage and transport, I feel like the situations where is close to the best option are extremely limited, but I guess we'll see.
I work for a company that is keen on producing green hydrogen and exploring all uses of it, and the media and talking head narrative that constantly gets set is either "See Hindenburg, so too dangerous" or "Toyota Mirai was a laughing stock failure therefor all hydrogen is a laughing stock failure"
Politics and the media seems to be stuck in this loop of "one or the other.. there is never any shades of grey". the media does it i believe because it makes for easy narrative/story telling and selling. Politics do it because it simplifies their job.
People eat it up.
I get it, being skeptical all the time is exhausting. Having to see some of the opposing views as, in part at least, correct while not being railroaded into conceding ALL of your points is a Sisyphean task.
I despair for our futures because its getting worse.
Now would you kindly cite authoritative sources and references so we can verify your assertions.
The researchers suggest more work is required to improve the energy density.
So I'm deferring to what the researchers said about their research.
The problem with extracting things from tailings is that they are often contaminated with low levels of Thorium. Extracting the other things like Lithium, Sulfur etc, starts to build up the quantity of Thorium. Which sounds good if you want to build a molten salt Thorium reactor; I understand that China and India have prototype to come on line around 2027. Based on designs and experimental units that the US did in the ~1950s.
The tailing problem is that the company is how handling Nuclear Grade Material which causes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to show up at the mine site. No mine wants to deal with this paper work, and health ramifications, headache so the tailings are not used.
If the profit ratio to headaches would improve things might change.
The tailings do not become nuclear waste when we decide to use them for something.
If you want an actual bomb, you need that U233 without any thorium, because the thorium mostly just turns to U233 when it absorbs a thermal neutron (i.e. slowed down by a moderator like graphite). In a bomb you're relying on fast neutrons.
Read enough books/articles on thorium reactors and you'll come across a photo of the US thorium stockpile, which is a great big stack of pure thorium bricks.
It doesn't always come from mining. A huge problem with acid rock drainage (ARD) showed up when they built a freeway in Pennsylvania by merely exposing the rock.
The concept of making batteries out of drainage because both contain sulfur is like making socks out of cow manure because both contain carbon. There's so much of the latter that you could never use it all, but also the ingredient is dirt cheap in pure form.
I have a side project that could convert ARD into industrial strength sulfuric acid, which is unbelievably difficult to buy and transport, despite it being the most common industrial chemical in the world after water.
There's an enormous belt of pyrite in Spain that has caused a river, the Rio Tinto, to be one of the most acid rivers on the planet.
Think of it like the husk of a corn cob, or the cob of your corn. It's a byproduct of the very things we're looking for in mining.
The only other activity that could get hose minerals is indistinguishable from magic.
It might have something to do with the inferred activities of Rio Tinto, a transnational corporation that is one of the largest mining firms in the world.
But before the mining operations? Probably not very polluted. It's the mining doing the polluting, not the belt of pyrite simply existing.
From the wikipedia page:
"The discovery of multiple oxide terraces mediated by microorganisms at up to 60 metres above the current water level, and as far away as 20 kilometres from the current river's path, may suggest that the unusual ecosystem is a natural phenomenon since before human mining activities started in this region.[9]"
https://youtu.be/Lxfpgqn6NOo?feature=shared
One of the larger sinks for waste sulfur might be stratospheric injection for geoengineering, which is looking increasingly likely.
Almost everything humans do requires an extensive life cycle analysis.
but you know, lets just cut everything and pretend that'll improve our assessments of reality.
https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-p...
Not familiar with that term, what does it mean? Shared ride? A car for walking distances?
If the city was walkable, you would not need such a thing as neighborhood car, you could just use a bike, but apparently as a society at many places we have decided that the cars are the best mode of transportation ever.
Your 2nd sentence has issues with reality.
The statement "The life of the commonly used chemistries is only around 3 years" is completely misleading and probably inaccurate.
A lot of people report lithium batteries swelling up in their phones/tablets around 3-4 years of usage.
You would be wise to insist on an EV with LIFEPO4 batteries in the sense that calendar lifetimes are more likely to be on par with traditional engines.
And I guess that you could make devices with smaller batteries and fast charge, with less fear of wearing them early.
Typical issues with old batteries are things like dendrite growth. There's nothing wrong with the materials that went into making the battery, they've just reshaped themselves into an unfortunate spiky structure.
In this study, we systematically compared dynamic discharge profiles representative of electric vehicle driving to the well-accepted constant current profiles. Surprisingly, we found that dynamic discharge enhances lifetime substantially compared with constant current discharge.
Specifically, for the same average current and voltage window, varying the dynamic discharge profile led to an increase of up to 38% in equivalent full cycles at end of life.
I remember my parents first Dell laptop with a whopping 2 hour battery life, if you weren’t doing anything processor intensive, otherwise it was basically a UPS.
Focusing on just 1, e.g. cycles doesn't give you the whole picture.
1. What is the capacity per $?
2. What is the capacity per kg?
3. What is the capacity per unit of volume?
4. Ease of disposal and recycling
5. Charge and discharge rates.
6. Safety.
7. Viable to produce commercially en masse?
There are just off the top of my head, and not necessarily in that order. The priority will vary depending on your use case.
That said, Li-S typically looks good with respect to potential cost if mass produced (cheap materials), and density metrics. The papers abstract has absurdly good things to say about charge rates. All-solid batteries are typically going to be very safe. So at a glance this research is at least in a very commercializable direction.
Sulfur melts at 115 °C though, so when it overheats, it's not solid anymore. But then, it's apparently not just sulfur, but sulfur embedded in some other stuff, so who knows.
1. Performance in hot/cold environment
2. Safety can be broken down to chemical toxicity, and thermal stability (likelihood to catch on fire)
3. Ability to hold a full charge for extended periods of time (self discharge rate)
The question now is manufacturing, is this something you can use at scale to make batteries.
https://www.batterypowertips.com/how-could-advances-in-solid...
and other variants are commonly used
So very high cycle counts (e.g. anything above 4000 cycles ~ 10 years of use) should be taken with a very large grain of salt and may be completely irrelevant for practical uses, unless the application calls for multiple daily discharges (if that's the case, why not use a supercapacitor?)
Depending on their structure, there may be problems to be solved about their safety and the resistance to corrosion of their components, which may limit the lifetime to lower values than expected from the number of cycles supported by the electrodes.
Here the sulfur is contained in some kind of borophosphate glass, which should not be easily flammable, so safety or corrosion problems are unlikely.
An essential component of this new battery is iodine, which has an active redox role, together with lithium and sulfur, iodine being an intermediary in the passing of electrons between lithium and sulfur. Iodine is a rather rare element. Fortunately its extraction from sea water is very cheap, but nonetheless the total amount of available iodine is quite limited, so hopefully the battery needs much less iodine than lithium and sulfur.
Huh? I don't know anything about this, but sea water is very plentiful so if that's where we get it how can the amount available be limited?
If the production of such batteries would require thousands of tons of iodine per year, that would require the processing of billions of tons of sea water per year, from which the iodine would be removed.
Moreover, I do not know the current prices, because in recent years the metal exchanges have become more and more secretive, but some years ago iodine was about 6 times more expensive than lithium, so if a large amount of it were required for such a battery it could raise its price.
Hopefully the amount of iodine used in such batteries would be low, because the amount of needed iodine is proportional with the power of the battery, but it should not depend on the amount of energy stored in the battery (because iodine is an intermediary in the electron flow, it determines the maximum current during charge and discharge, but it is not an endpoint for electrons, so it does not determine the amount of stored energy).
LI-S batteries have significantly more capacity than commercial Li-[x] batteries of the same weight, but the big weakness until now has been that they have terrible durability.
Even people who can deal with the slower speeds after a few years of owning a phone get driven crazy by having to charge it often, I’d say it’s a big driver if not the biggest to buy a new phone.
Operating temperature range and cycle endurance were some primary barriers, and this seems promising, but ...
"The researchers suggest more work is required to improve the energy density and perhaps to find other materials to use for the mix to ensure a low-weight battery."
ok, nevermind.
Note though that 'grid batteries' are a very important part for solar transition and they have very different requirement for weight and energy density than electric cars..