from the pick-two:-better-faster-or-boiling-hot dept.
The big catch is that it has to be at roughly the boiling point of water to work:
There's a classic irony with new technology, that adopters are forced to limit themselves to two of the three things everyone wants: fast, cheap, and good. When the tech is batteries, adoption is even more challenging. Cheap and fast (charging) still matter, but "good" can mean different things, such as light weight, low volume, or long life span, depending on your needs. Still, the same sorts of trade-offs are involved. If you want really fast charging, you'll probably have to give up some capacity.
Those trade-offs keep research into alternate battery chemistries going despite the massive lead lithium has in terms of technology and manufacturing capabilities—there's still the hope that some other chemistry could provide a big drop in price or a big boost in some measure of performance.
[...] People have been pondering batteries based on aluminum for a while, drawn by their high theoretical capacity. While each aluminum atom is a bit heavier than lithium, aluminum atoms and ions are physically smaller, as the higher positive charge of the nucleus pulls in the electrons a bit. Plus, aluminum will readily give up as many as three electrons per atom, meaning you can shift lots of charge for each ion involved.
[...] At slow rates of discharge, the aluminum sulfur cells had a charge capacity per weight that was over three times that of lithium-ion batteries. That figure went down as the rate of charge/discharge went up, but performance remained excellent. If the cell was discharged over two hours and charged in just six minutes, it still had a charge capacity per weight that was 25 percent higher than lithium-ion batteries and retained roughly 80 percent of that capacity after 500 cycles—well beyond what you'd see with most lithium chemistries.
[...] There are some notable cautions here. One is that the battery needs to be at about 110° C for this sort of performance. With good insulation, this only requires a small heater to get things molten; after that, the heat generated during charge/discharge cycles should keep things working. And, while insulation may add a bit to the bulk of the battery, you can get away without the cooling hardware some lithium-ion applications require.
The bigger caution is that, with any water contamination of the materials, the battery will start producing hydrogen sulfide, which is both poisonous and highly flammable. So, while the battery can't catch fire like some lithium-ion options, if its contents come in contact with the environment, there's a window of time where fire risks are possible before the salt cools down and solidifies.
[...] None of this is to say that this technology can let us punch a one-way ticket to battery nirvana. While a company has already been formed to commercialize the tech, there's already a huge infrastructure dedicated to lithium-ion battery production, and the tech there is constantly improving, too. But if supplies of the raw materials for mainstream batteries ever become constrained, it could be very useful to have a tech based entirely on abundant chemicals waiting in the wings.
Journal Reference:
Pang, Q., Meng, J., Gupta, S. et al. Fast-charging aluminium–chalcogen batteries resistant to dendritic shorting. Nature 608, 704–711 (2022). 10.1038/s41586-022-04983-9
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 25 2022, @08:14PM (1 child)
Not for replacing your standard batteries. Could be great for off-grid solar/wind power, though.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2022, @10:41PM
It seems like there are many options for grid storage, including gravitational potential energy. It's the Li-ion used in everything from smartphones to robots that needs to be surpassed.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday August 25 2022, @08:46PM (3 children)
If you read the article you'll see these things release flammable gasses when ruptured. Which, combined with the high temps, is really bad if you're a passenger in a car with these batteries.
If you read the article you'll also see they are designed for charging stations, not cars. So the chances of one of them getting ruptured drops quite a bit. Especially if they install it underground where it's really really hard for clueless/drunk idiots to hit.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday August 25 2022, @09:16PM
These batteries sound perfect for putting in a vehicle, except for how dangerous they are in a collision. Therefore, vehicle manufacturers will start putting them in vehicles.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hartree on Thursday August 25 2022, @11:41PM
Depends on how much of it an accident releases. Your standard lead/sulfuric acid also releases H2S though in small amounts. It has the advantage of stinking to high heaven so it's easy to detect and you get the heck away. When you're behind a car and smell rotten eggs from an overcharging battery, that's what you smell.
The disadvantage is that if it's present in fatal concentrations, it knocks out your olfactory receptors so you don't smell it any more. It's a significant problem, though. H2S causes more industrial fatalities than any other poisonous gas IIRC.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Friday August 26 2022, @12:49PM
You mean, like the gas tank in your ICE car?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Thursday August 25 2022, @11:33PM (1 child)
This is interesting once you read the actual research article in Nature (DOI in the linked article at Ars. Full disclosure, I just skimmed through it and haven't done the in depth reading. That's slow as I'm not a full up chemist and it takes some time to decode and figure out what's really being said in the details).
It's Don Sadoway at MIT who is the principal investigator. That gives it a lot more credibility than some random research group. Sadoway has done a lot of work with molten ionic liquids and has been working on commercializing them for some time. They describe two chemistries in the research article, aluminum selenium and aluminum sulfur. Sulfur is the one that's cheap. There have been a number of sulfur battery chemistries. This is a lot lower temperature than the ones I know of.
This isn't ready for prime time, but it's certainly interesting and something I want to keep track of.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2022, @01:30AM
I've posted this link before, it's a recent lecture by Don Sadoway on the current situation re batteries for electric cars and other uses. He's an excellent lecturer, no waffling, straight to the point. I can't say that I followed all the electro chemistry, but the rest was very clear--there is a hard road ahead and very little long term funding to develop new candidates into useful cells and batteries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuVoSqj1OE [youtube.com]