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Super-dense lithium-sulfur battery gives electric plane a 230-mile range:
British company Oxis says it's developed safe, high-density lithium-sulfur battery chemistry and will supply Texas Aircraft Manufacturing with a 90-kWh, next-gen battery pack to power the eColt, an electric aircraft with a two hour, 230-mile range.
[...] In practice, they have had issues – notably with the old chestnut of dendrite formation, in which ion deposits on the anode grow into long spikes of conductive material that short circuit the cell and cause it to catch fire. The lithium-metal anodes also tend to degrade in less dangerous ways that eventually just make the batteries die.
In a piece written for IEEE Spectrum, Oxis head of battery development Mark Crittenden details how his team is addressing these problems with a thin layer of ceramic material at the anode, and it's resulting in high-energy cells with significantly longer lifespans than previous Li-S designs.
"Typical lithium-ion designs can hold from 100 to 265 Wh/kg, depending on the other performance characteristics for which it has been optimized, such as peak power or long life," writes Crittenden. "Oxis recently developed a prototype lithium-sulfur pouch cell that proved capable of 470 Wh/kg, and we expect to reach 500 Wh/kg within a year. And because the technology is still new and has room for improvement, it's not unreasonable to anticipate 600 Wh/kg by 2025."
Still needs work on the limited number of number of charge cycles.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @09:06PM (7 children)
This is about as practical for aviation as fitting the aircraft with a really long power cord.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @09:27PM
Somehow, I was thinking of bombers.
When the batteries catch fire midflight, bombs away!
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday August 21 2020, @10:28PM
The not-so-practical prize might go, however, to The Aircraft Reactor Experiment [chemixlab.com]...
More at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @11:27PM (1 child)
yes but the weight of it will drag the plane down so you need to have the wire suspended up in the sky above the plane on balloons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2020, @02:14AM
But it would't be so heavy with out all the shielding. Would be perfect for bots, though.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2020, @12:06AM (1 child)
Which fool downmodded the parent?
Anyways, I see the wily coyote riding this plane to hunt the road runner, and the road runner standing over the cord with scissors.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 22 2020, @03:45AM
One of the rules is supposed to be that the road runner never leaves the road. Also that all the coyote's devices are made by ACME.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 22 2020, @02:36PM
Air Freight don't care as long as Amazon centers are less than 230 miles apart.
I suspect you'll see this for stuff like Amazon Fresh produce. Why would Amazon pay downtown Chicago warehouse food dealer middlemen prices for fresh blueberries when they can fly blueberries direct off the fields in Michigan for zero fuel cost?
Crappy logistics with tons of slow moving middlemen get me decent edible Florida oranges today. Who knows what'll happen when Amazon logistics meets cheap electric air freight. An obvious example is I'd be wary of online delivery of fresh seafood right now. But if Amazon could guarantee my seafood was in the ocean less than six hours before it landed on my porch ...
The 2020s look to be a bad time to be a middleman in general.