SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Focusing on the negative is good when it comes to batteries
Imagine not having to charge your phone or laptop for weeks. That is the dream of researchers looking into alternative batteries that go beyond the current lithium-ion versions popular today. Now, in a new study appearing in the journal Science, chemists at several institutions, including Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech for NASA, as well as the Honda Research Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have hit on a new way of making rechargeable batteries based on fluoride, the negatively charged form, or anion, of the element fluorine.
"Fluoride batteries can have a higher energy density, which means that they may last longer -- up to eight times longer than batteries in use today," says study co-author Robert Grubbs, Caltech's Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry and a winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. "But fluoride can be challenging to work with, in particular because it's so corrosive and reactive."
In the 1970s, researchers attempted to create rechargeable fluoride batteries using solid components, but solid-state batteries work only at high temperatures, making them impractical for everyday use. In the new study, the authors report at last figuring out how to make the fluoride batteries work using liquid components -- and liquid batteries easily work at room temperature. "We are still in the early stages of development, but this is the first rechargeable fluoride battery that works at room temperature," says Simon Jones, a chemist at JPL and corresponding author of the new study.
[...] The key to making the fluoride batteries work in a liquid rather than a solid state turned out to be an electrolyte liquid called bis(2,2,2-trifluoroethyl)ether, or BTFE. This solvent is what helps keep the fluoride ion stable so that it can shuttle electrons back and forth in the battery. Jones says his intern at the time, Victoria Davis, who now studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was the first to think of trying BTFE. While Jones did not have much hope it would succeed, the team decided to try it anyway and were surprised it worked so well.
Room Temperature Cycling of Metal Fluoride Electrodes: Liquid Electrolytes for High Energy Fluoride-Ion Cells (DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7070) (DX)
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday December 09 2018, @02:40PM (2 children)
I'm not entirely happy with the increasing use of perfluorinated organic chemicals, as they are extremely persistent in the environment, and it is not known what effect they might have on the ecosystem - experience of just one (perfluorooctanoic acid [wikipedia.org]) is not positive.
While I'm not afraid of teh kemikals as such, as I have a fairly extensive knowledge of chemistry, industrial uses of man-made/man-processed chemicals and materials doesn't have a wonderful history: absbestos; radium; tetra-ethyl lead; mercury, CFC refrigerants (vs Ozone layer), poly-chlorinated biphenyls are just a few.
I think a reasonable approach to chemical usage would be either to show a short half-life with respect to break-down into harmless products in the environment; or close supervision of their use so that long-term contaminants never leave their place of use and are properly disposed of by plasma incineration [wikipedia.org] (or similar), so that waste streams are entirely benign.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @04:08PM (1 child)
so when the inevitable accident happens and the battery contents are spilled all over the side of the road, how bad is that, compared to other bad chemicals?
assuming people will not simply spill used battery liquid into the sewers.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday December 10 2018, @04:27AM
Besides fluorinated drinking water and toothpaste, the only experience of industrial use of fluorine I have is in semiconductor manufacturing. In the poly furnaces (doped and undoped), ClF3 was used to etch the quartz and remove the byproducts. We could tell which zone in the furnace was being etched by the temperature sensors. The process was set to occur at 350C, but where the chemical reaction was occurring, it was at 375C and the temperature controller output for that zone would go down to 0%.
I've also read ClF3 works pretty well in liquid fueled rockets. When JPL needed an oxidizer that could oxidize fuel better than LOX, ClF3 tested very well. Though, it was noted that you had to be careful not to stare at the storage canisters funny.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base