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India Develops the World's First Iron-ion Battery
A research team from India's IIT (Institute of Technology) Madras has officially developed the world's first iron-ion battery, which promises a low-cost stable alternative to the existing mainstream lithium-ion battery.
[...] Compared to the traditional lithium ion batteries, the newly developed batteries from IIT are much more cost effective, and features slightly better storage capacity and stability. The iron-ion batteries are also much more safe to use, due to the inability of iron to produce dendrites, which prevents a short circuit from happening when the electricity is discharged, according to the research team's findings.
[...] Despite having some noticeable advantages over lithium ion batteries, the newly developed iron ion batteries will still need to undergo further optimization and testing, as the research team's findings have showed that it is only capable of 150 cycles of charging and discharging for the time being. At the present stage, the energy density of the battery is also only able to reach around 220 Wh/kilo, which is only around 55-60% of the 350 Wh/kilo of energy density for lithium-ion battery.
Still requires vanadium, a relatively rare element, but it's six times as common as lithium
Also at IIT and Popular Mechanics.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 27 2019, @01:07AM (5 children)
The advance of lithium is given by it's low atomic mass, which translates into higher ion mobility in the electrolyte, which means better power density (the voltage being fixed, a mobile ion means a higher current which means you can extract higher power).
Now, that's a thing I didn't see mentioned in TFA and does matter in practical applications, be it for EV (when you want a high power density coupled with a high gravimetric energy density - like in Wh/kg) or for grid storage (when you want a high volumetric density - Wh/litre - too, but you don't care about weight that much). Without a good enough power density, you will need more of them when the push come to shove..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday August 27 2019, @03:00AM (4 children)
Actually, is even volumetric density all that important for grid storage? I suspect that a battery that cost half as much per kWh of capacity would be far more attractive in almost all cases, even if it had twice the mass and volume.
If you're talking battery backups to protect against localized outages within a population center, it's obviously a bit different. But if you're simply trying to buffer production and demand my impression is that power is rarely generated in expensive neighborhoods. Buying up more land near the power station, or somewhere along the transmission lines, is unlikely to be anywhere near as expensive as filling that land with batteries.
Heck, if you wanted to buffer your solar farm to be able to sell power at peak-demand prices instead of peak-production, then you've already got lots of land where you're only really using the top few millimeters.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 27 2019, @03:39AM (1 child)
Well, is at least more important than the 'gravimetric density'.
I doubt it, but then that's just me.
Even in buffering use case, I doubt you'll be using only the top few mm (insufficient to support the weight).
On top of higher land footprint, it may mean higher structures (or digging deeper), maintenance is costlier (handling higher volumes/weights when a pile need to replacing), risk management may also cost more (i.e. the sensors fire/overload/whatnot** and countermeasures will need longer connections and more effort in periodic inspections, etc.).
** I know it's hard to set the water alight, but a shorted protection diode dumping some MWh from the nearby batteries into a single one will surely make some impressive display of what an explosive boiling of electrolyte can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @09:33AM
>>I suspect that a battery that cost half as much per kWh of capacity would be far more attractive in almost all cases, even if it had twice the mass and volume.
>I doubt it, but then that's just me.
Remember that doubling volume increases each linear dimension by the cube root of two, about 1.26. There would be lots of situations where a cheaper but larger battery would make sense.
Of course we see articles about breakthroughs in battery technology all the time and then never hear about them again.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:05PM
There could of course also be combinations of both. For example, on solar arrays, one might have a large capacity of cheaper Fe-Ion batteries to save energy for the night and extended bad weather periods, and a smaller capacity of more expensive, but power-dense Li-Ion batteries to handle power peaks.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:22PM
Given the idea behind Salt Water Batteries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_water_battery [wikipedia.org]
I don't thing that the grid cares about any energy density other than kWh/$.
Basically, the idea was to create a battery only from the most common of substances. This lead to low cost, as well as low toxicity (common substances aren't toxic, if they were we would die too much, go evolution). I think the creator actually ate some of each electrolyte to show that it was non-toxic (one was just a pressed carbon rod, it wasn't tasty).