New Aluminum-Air Battery Powered Car Travels 1,800 Kilometers Without a Recharge | Hacker News Reader

New Aluminum-Air Battery Powered Car Travels 1,800 Kilometers Without a Recharge

21stcentech.com

69 pointsnkurz34 comments

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847829

This is not a very green technology. It is not the same as recycling aluminum. The aluminum is turned back into alumina by the reaction. "Recharging" this "battery" (it's more of a fuel cell) means shipping a 220lb module back to a far-away aluminum smelter and reforging it anew.

Forging aluminum is a hugely energy intensive process that produces significant greenhouse gases. It's a cheat to say the smelters use hydropower -- if this were to scale up to power the automotive industry it would require more dams which have major ecological impact. Plus there's still the greenhouse gas emission and transport problem.

This still has the potential to be quite green, despite CO2 in the manufacturing process. When combined with a Li-ion pack for regular journeys, the average driver isn't going to be using the Al-O2 battery very much.

Our current solutions to range issues are packaging a shit-ton of li-ion capacity (model s), or including a separate engine (volt). These both add enormous weight and manufacturing costs to the car. The much higher energy density of this solution means that you carry a lot less weight with you during most of your journeys.

Let's say that these guys' estimates hold up, and the average driver does < 2000 miles in long distance journeys out of a total of, say, 12000 miles per year. How much difference in total energy consumption will shaving 200kg (lose 300kg for 2/3rds of the tesla's battery pack, gain 100kg for the new al-o2 pack) off the weight of the car make?

edit: I realise this is rather hand-wavy, considering the 1800 mile range for this system is based off a smaller car than the model s, but I still think it's worth considering the difference in overall energy consumption that the higher energy density of this pack provides.

> a smaller car

For reference, this is a Citroën C1 or Peugeot 107 (same car as Toyota Aygo, albeit with a slightly different design)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_C1

> 1800 mile range for this system

It is 1800KM, which is closer to 1000 than 2000 miles. At 12000 miles a year that is about a battery a month rather than a battery every other month.

They're claiming that it has a max range of 1860 miles for a 100kg battery system:

> The Phinergy aluminum-air battery at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) weight contained enough on board energy to allow the vehicle to travel up to 3,000 kilometers (over 1,860 miles)

The article does seem slightly unclear on that point, though.

Again, if you have normal driving patterns this Al-O2 system is a backup battery. You'd be using a smaller li-ion battery for the day-to-day drives. That means a normal user wouldn't need a new Al-O2 battery every month, because they'd only rarely be using it.

> It is not the same as recycling aluminum. The aluminum is turned back into alumina by the reaction.

I agree. Recycling an aluminum can use much less energy than converting the aluminum oxide to metallic aluminum (perhaps only a 10%). To convert the aluminum salts of one of these used batteries to a new battery you need to reduce again the aluminum to the metallic state, so you need almost all the original energy (perhaps only the 90% because you may skip a few purifying steps).

> It's a cheat to say the smelters use hydropower [...]

I disagree here. To move any car you need energy. The energy can come form gasoline, gas, a battery, ... In all the electric cars the battery have to be recharged. In a normal electric car (for example a Tesla) you charge the battery every night at home. This aluminum battery is “recharged” in the smelters only a few times in a year. In both cases the energy from the recharge comes from oil, gas, solar, wind turbines, nuclear, hydroelectric or whatever is cheaper there. If both model have the same efficiency, then doing a lot of small recharges is as green as doing one big “recharge”.

In Québec (where those batteries would be recharged), if we need more dams we build more dams. The only limiting factor is the demand and the amount of legal nightmare we are ready to unleash by flooding the first nation land. In both case, money is usually the answer. A single river can support tens of dams as long as the flow is correctly regulated. Moving that power to the states (2000km) is wasting 70% of the power in losses. Better build more smelters in the north and ship the energy as battery instead.

It's true that smelting aluminium is a hugely energy intensive process, but it can use energy wherever and whenever it's available.

That's actually a much bigger deal than it sounds like, because the biggest hassle with solar and wind - the best forms of renewable energy we have, if nuclear is politically impossible - is bridging the gap in time and space between availability of the energy and people wanting to use it. If we start being able to store energy in the form of aluminum, that would be great. Put the aluminum plant in the desert next to however many hectares of solar panels, let it spend all day soaking up solar energy, no need for power grid upgrades.

Phinergy claims an energy density of 8kWh/kg here:

http://www.phinergy.com/default.asp?catid={00658B18-2755-468...

The following ComputerWorld article is related, but it's worse than the linked article that nkurz submitted.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248966/Electric_car_...

EDIT: The two Alcoa press releases are below, but they don't add much:

http://www.alcoa.com/canada/en/news/releases/2014_phinergy.a...

http://www.alcoa.com/car_truck/en/news/releases/2014_02_05_A...

8kWh is around 28 MJ which places it several orders of magnitude above the currently available battery technology according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

As I understand it, these types of batteries are not rechargeable. They would need to be taken back to a factory and be recycled.

I'd like to know how energy efficient the recycling stage would be. I've not seen that information anywhere so far.

Tesla has automated battery pack replacement down to 90 seconds, so the yearly replacement doesn't seem like a big deal. The Aluminum-air batteries do wear out eventually as they turn the aluminum into aluminum hydroxide, but they can be recycled. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything official on recycling efficiency, and I spent some time digging.

Note that these batteries wouod have to be replaced every time they are empty not 'once a year .

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248966/Electric_car_...

It seems that the Al smelter generates lots of CO2, so greenhouse effects might just be moved closer to hydropower plants... :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting

Edit: It would be interesting to see how much Al (not total weight of the system) is used/km. According to wikipedia there should be about 1.5 mol CO2/CO per mol Al created (depends on how the process is tuned). Car ads declare how much CO2/km they release, right? Anyone know their car engines? (I live in a city center and only drive on vacation.)

Edit 2: This Al energy source is cool, but what everyone here really want is some hard data comparing it to a normal hybrid energy in costs, how easy it is to use and (maybe also) greenhouse effects. That the articles doesn't discuss that is probably a good answer.

Recycling is not desirable unless the battery casing is valuable. The alumina is nearly worthless, especially in small chunks (and to an aluminum plant 200kg is tiny).

Instead I'd like to see some continuous process, granulated aluminum perhaps, and the alumina simply ejected as granules. Its present everywhere already, so not an un-green thing to do.

You mean the alumina ejection will be a manual procedure performed by the car's owner or mechanic, right? When I first read this I pictured a spray of dust out the tailpipe. I'm sure there would be complaints...

Yes I meant exactly that. Its one of the least objectionable things a car could spray (dribble?) out the tailpipe.

There are two big questions here:

1) What's the cost per mile (over the car's lifetime, including battery replacement costs) compared to petrol and standard electric cars?

2) What's the CO2 per mile (over the car's lifetime, including battery re-smelting) compared to petrol and standard electric cars?

Without knowing either of these figures it's impossible to make a decent comparison.

Just thinking of different use case here, this would make great alternate for home inverter (India) for me if the size is like small fridge. Please note currently i use small UPS for home computer and battery fan to cope up with 3 to 4 times a day power cut and it work fine. But once month if get 10 to 12 times power cut then there is no time for UPS to catch up. I will wait for it to make to developing countries. I hope the safety requirements are similar to current UPS/Inverter batteries

>>For the air-battery operator it will mean swapping out the old battery for a new one every few months

I don't know how much the author of this article drives, but 1800km range would mean that I would have to swap the battery every month. And I imagine that the range depends heavily on how you drive, so I would like to see real-world usage test.

It seems you're confusing the range of the vehicle at full charge with eventual need to replace the battery. The article is not particularly clear on that, but the ComputerWorld article I linked to gives a few more details.

From what I understand,the battery is non-rechargeable, so you can only drive 1800km until you have to replace it completely,no?

The Aluminum-Air batteries are rechargeable, but they wear out faster than lithium-ion batteries. Eventually, both Aluminum-Air and Lithium-Ion batteries will wear out and need to be replaced, but the Aluminum-Air batteries need to be replaced more often since they wear out faster.

From the ComputerWorld article:

> "The recharge of the aluminum-air [battery] is user-friendly and consists of refilling water and replacing aluminum when depleted," a spokesperson for Alcoa said in an email response to Computerworld. "The water refill is an easy task that can be performed by using tap water on average every one or two months according to mileage driven." The battery's aluminum replacement is also a "quick operation" that will be performed at periodic maintenance checks at a local service station on average once a year according to mileage driven, the spokesperson added.

Uh, Aluminium/air batteries are one time use (not "rechargeable", rather replaceable) or there is major new chemistry. See my other comment re Al smelting and energy/CO2.

Edit: This is discussed in the previous thread, abalone posted a link to it.

According to http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248966/Electric_car_..., recharging the battery is "just" replacing the aluminum plates and topping up the water.

And note that there's a classical Li-Ion battery, so the usage scenario seems to be mostly urban users with short commutes (on the Li-Ion, possibly slightly longer on the metal-air battery) with the occasional long trip eating into the metal-air battery.

I think the general idea is that you have a lithium battery for the typically shorter day to day journeys (say 60 miles?), and the air battery is there for occasional long-range journeys. This amounts to a different solution for the problem that the Volt solves - with substantially lower weight/cost/maintenance overhead.

"The recharge of the aluminum-air [battery] is user-friendly and consists of refilling water and replacing aluminum when depleted," a spokesperson for Alcoa said in an email response to Computerworld. "The water refill is an easy task that can be performed by using tap water on average every one or two months according to mileage driven.

The battery's aluminum replacement is also a "quick operation" that will be performed at periodic maintenance checks at a local service station on average once a year according to mileage driven, the spokesperson added"[1]

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248966/Electric_car_...

You can’t just dispose the old water into the sewer because it has a lot of aluminum salts. You must store it and send it back for recycling. Probably this task should be done in a gas station or a car repair shop and not at your home, so they have the tanks for the old liquids.

The use case here seems to be for city cars. If you only rarely need to go more than 20-40 miles in a day, the aluminum batter will last a very long time (as it'll almost never be used).

Agreed, for commuters this wouldn't be a good answer to the "range anxiety" question.

I'd definitely be curious in general to see what the total environmental impact of 1,000 miles of range produced with a gas motor is compared to the 1,000 miles of range with this battery. As in, from mining to fuel exhaustion.

While overall benefits of using them in EVs are speculative, it might be a good idea to use them in robotics applications. If a 100kg battery can power a EV through 1000 miles it might power a simple robot for years - like a powercell in terminator movies :)

One problem is that these battery swap stations need to be almost as ubiquitous as gas stations (at least along highway routes) to be convenient, otherwise it'll take very careful planning on road trips. But because swap-outs are the rare exception rather than the norm, they don't benefit from scale, so it's unlikely they'll be ubiquitous unless there's a cheap way to automate it.

Haters Gonna Hate: this is developed in Israel.

ok, Aluminum industry has come up with new aluminum battery. Of course, they couldn't invent any other battery type, even if the alluminum one is an environmental disaster, non-rechargeable, troublesome to use and replace, because they _are_ alluminum industry and they aren't interested in anything that's not alluminum.

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