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Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby americandream » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 02:43:22

pstarr wrote:
StarvingLion wrote:This thread (along with almost every other one) is just another example of:

"The R&D will save us...The R&D will save us...The R&D will save us"

Its a mental illness, induced by FIAT easy money policies.
The Green Dream is alive.


Green infinite growth to be precise.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Simon_R » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 08:43:57

To Maintain the current level of car usage do we have the generating capacity to go electric
To Maintain the current level of car usage do we have the necessary lithium

If we went electric what would governments (EU) do to replace the missing fuel revenue ... tax leccy ... nope
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Newfie » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 08:55:19

Delivery aside Starving Lion has a point. We seem to be having difficulty accepting the limits of our culture.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 11:47:10

Energy costs are continuously rising. Anybody who has hung out around PO.com knows that they need a plan for WHEN (not IF but WHEN):

1) Gasoline and Diesel fuels pass $5/gallon and never come down. Should be within 12 months.
2) Gasoline and Diesel fuels pass $10/gallon and never come down. I'm guessing 24-48 months.
3) Gasoline and Diesel fuels pass $100/gallon and never come down. This one is harder. Will we make fuels from coal or not? Will there still be Middle Eastern imports or not? Will ? or ? or ? happen?
4) .....You could go on and on, but note that fuel cost is an exponential growth curve, there won't be much of anything in the way of a warning when it happens. The wild cards in the game are what and how the government reacts, and whether the current tiny trickle of a million or so illegal immigrant children per year turns into a flood of petty much everybody in South and Central America. Are we willing to call down drone strikes on refugees crossing the border or not? Will the USCG assist Cuban boat people or sink them and machine gun survivors?

Somewhere on the sure and certain path between $10/gallon fuel and $100/gallon fuel, our currency will experience hyperinflation. You won't ever BUY anything again, including monthly Internet access. You will never move your household again. You will rapidly find out whether life is possible without your prescription drugs. You will never barter for another vehicle aside from the bicycle that costs perhaps ten years of labor to acquire. ........

Speculation about the details is actually pointless. You cannot solve an equation where every term is a variable of unknown value. Simply enjoy the ride. Interesting times are upon us.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Pops » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 12:30:57

Starving lion then needs to start a thread about it and you all can go there and moon over impending destruction.

This thread, perhaps surprisingly if one doesn't read the title, is not about fiat money, hyperinflation or the stupidity of the masses.

It is about Li batteries.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 13:45:16

I think Lithium batteries are a good idea, for cellphones or other mobile devices. I will add a few larger cells in the garage for when the grid crashes, if the price per amp-hour is reasonable. They should not out-gas hydrogen as do lead-acid storage cells. Clearly an advantage if I don't need a ventilated battery house when I convert from grid-tied solar PV to off-the-grid, after the crash.

About the practicality of metallic Lithium cells in vehicle batteries I have doubts. The denser the power storage, the more dangerous the charged battery. Tesla may have gone over the top already in this regard with Lithium-Ion cells.

Remember that after the PO crisis, you can acquire only those things which you can make from materials that do not need copious amounts of energy to produce. It will no longer be possible to build anything like a Tesla vehicle using renewable energy. In fact, most people would have to labor for decades to acquire the low tech golf car NEV/LSV.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Pops » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 13:59:10

Surprisingly Newf didn't recommend this thread at Crusiers forum with almost 4,000 posts on LiFe batts in use for boat house power:
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f14 ... 65069.html

I never did find the Lithium batts for dummies link tho, LOL
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby steam_cannon » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 15:00:56

kublikhan wrote:StarvingLion - Based on your last few posts, I gather that you despise solar, nuclear, coal, (actually any steam/generators), batteries, Marxism, Capitalism, Steve Jobs, and people in general. All of that negative energy is unhealthy. Perhaps take a break from the forums and spend some time with something that makes you happy?
Or if we could channel that energy into the electric grid... :lol:
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby efarmer » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 17:27:30

Well we were kicking around lithium batteries and then all hell broke loose.
I don't wear rose colored glasses, I don't trivialize the multiple exponential slopes we are going to see go up towards vertical, and I refuse to ride shotgun with or post for the bloody Angel of Death. I will succumb of course, hopefully while busy and joyful and tinkering with something fun and/or necessary, and I hope to fart when I am in his jaws.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby americandream » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 17:33:46

Pops wrote:Starving lion then needs to start a thread about it and you all can go there and moon over impending destruction.

This thread, perhaps surprisingly if one doesn't read the title, is not about fiat money, hyperinflation or the stupidity of the masses.

It is about Li batteries.


Agreed Pops and these developments are to be applauded. But the underling reality of what they are destined for should be mulled over.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby kublikhan » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 18:34:29

Ok lets forget above the angel of death and return to the subject of lithium batteries.

Pops wrote:So the question for all you scientists out there, is this really the Holy Grail of batteries?
upsides/downsides?
Not a scientist, but I'll chime in. From what I read from your 2 links plus a third article on the subject, the upside could be as much as a tripling of battery life. The downside is to get that, they had to restrict the current density to 1 mA/cm2. This is an order of magnitude too low for real lithium batteries. Also, they say the got the Coulombic efficiency to 99%. While this sounds good, for a useable battery you need to get it to at least 99.9%, or so I read. So is it the holy grail? I would say no. It sounds like a really promising lab development. But much work needs to be done before this sees the light of day in a commercial product. Not to mention that their method of depositing the carbon nanotube coating is uneconomical for a commercial battery. However they think they can beat that problem by using printing technology.

the researchers predict that commercial developments may eventually result in anything up to a tripling of battery life in the not-too-distant future. In the short term, however, some work remains to be done. For example, the team has managed to achieve a Coulombic efficiency (the efficacy with which an electron flow or charge is transferred in an electrochemical reaction) of approximately 99 percent after 150 cycles. For a battery to be useful and usable in the real world, it must have a Coulombic efficiency of 99.9 percent or better so, even though the new research shows great promise, it must reach the highest efficiency levels to be a success.
...
We show that lithium dendrites do not form up to a practical current density of 1 mA cm–2. The Coulombic efficiency improves to ∼99% for more than 150 cycles.
...
Jiguang Zhang, a lithium battery expert at the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, says: ‘I think the principle is very important.’ Nevertheless, he cautions that the present production method is not scalable to industry, and the power output is 10 times too low for real lithium batteries. ‘From a laboratory scale proof of concept to a real battery application, I think they have some work to do,’ he says. Cui suggests it may be possible to mass produce the coatings using printing technology, and says the team have now achieved stable operation at 2–3mA/cm2 and are currently working on increasing this....
Stable lithium anode may triple battery efficiency

Better batteries with pure lithium anodes

Interconnected hollow carbon nanospheres for stable lithium metal anodes
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby americandream » Thu 31 Jul 2014, 19:02:16

Its not so much the angel of death syndrome as a natural questioning of tech developments in the current context. But tech developments are to be expected and welcomed as they go hand in hand with quality of living and can of course have use were we ever to reason our way out of this mess.. However, paramount is that we develop a deep understanding of social relations and the material world as with enough of us, we can forge sustainable change (minus all the primitivistic nostalgia.)
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby efarmer » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 14:00:46

Well I have designed lead acid, nicad, NMH, and Li Ion battery chargers for embedded systems and instruments but see the innards as a black box where I need to know capacity, charge rate, allowable cell temp, and insure a peak current protection scheme for pack overload conditions. I do know the art is having an ion permeable membrane on the anode that keeps the electrolyte
away from the lithium to avoid premature EOL from pitting or catastrophic events like the lithium melting and rapidly reacting with electrolyte in an avalanche mode that can result in fire and exploding cells. So the nano carbon seems like a very nice ion sieve, but I too wonder if it has the protective credentials for the fail safe tasks during overload, overcharge, or failure modes.

Then there is new things in the wind free of batteries like Ion Flow Cells:
http://www.nanoflowcell.com/en#home
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Pops » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 14:28:44

Thanks. There are way too many things out there way over my head. When I hear about nano-anything I start thinking BuckyBalls and geodesic domes: interesting to people who are interested in such things but not all that practical in the real world.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 15:14:30

Pops wrote:Thanks. There are way too many things out there way over my head. When I hear about nano-anything I start thinking BuckyBalls and geodesic domes: interesting to people who are interested in such things but not all that practical in the real world.


Carbon-Carbon filaments are basically Buckyballs unwound into long sets of 6 Carbon rings joined together. The filaments are technically a nano-material because they are only a few atoms thick and enormously strong on a weight to strength ratio. When they use them for building aircraft like the F-117 or the B-2 or the Boeing 707 they spin the nano fibers together into string and then weave the strings into cloth. Eventually they bond the cloth layers together with epoxy like compounds to make the shaped pieces of the aircraft. I do not understand how they can make a single layer around the Anode, but I am not an engineer. As Pup55 used to say, I am just some person on the internet like the rest of you.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby PrestonSturges » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 16:23:49

I've been reading about anode nanotechnology for about 5 years and it is definitely a hot area of research and widely regarded as the next potential breakthrough.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby MD » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 16:39:11

If you set the benchmark at the energy density per volume and mass of gasoline, there is still a very long road ahead for batteries.

I'm still thinking super capacitors will win the race over chemical batteries, eventually. No basis for the opinion other than WAG and wishful thinking.

Am wondering about the .9% efficiency gap that's listed as an issue. I suppose that means a heat problem?

The volume issue maybe not a huge deal for certain applications. I used to carry around a bag phone. It wasn't so bad. :-D
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby PrestonSturges » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 17:23:52

The silicone anode degrades because it swells and shrinks while acquiring and releasing lithium ions. Over time, the batteries efficiency degrades. This is the kind of thing that would get a consumer very very pissed. And manufacturers don't want to eat the expense of warrantied replacement of $10,000 battery packs either.
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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby Pops » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 17:27:56

h/t PO.com news feed
It comes top of almost all ‘most wanted’ polls, but manufacturers rarely listen. Battery life has become the great unloved element of the modern smartphone and it has built an entire industry of spares, charge cases, mini power cables and much more as a consequence. But that could all change after scientists announced they have achieved the ‘holy grail’ of battery design .

In a paper published in scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers at Stanford University report they have designed a pure lithium anode with the potential to increase the capacity of existing battery technology 400%.

“Of all the materials that one might use in an anode, lithium has the greatest potential,” said Yi Cui, professor of Material Science and Engineering and leader of the Stanford research team. “Some call it the Holy Grail. It is very lightweight and it has the highest energy density. You get more power per volume and weight, leading to lighter, smaller batteries with more power.”

The Science
To understand why requires some light science. The vast majority of all today’s batteries are so-called ‘Lithium Ion’ batteries. They have three core parts: an electrolyte which provides electrons (the essential part of electricity), an anode which discharges these electrons into a device giving it power and a cathode which receives the electrons back into the battery after they have been passed through the device’s circuit.

Where the problem lies today is the lithium in ‘lithium ion’ batteries is contained in the electrolyte but not in the anode (which is typically graphite or silicon) so the electrons cannot be harvested very efficiently before they are sent out to the device. Produce a pure lithium anode, however, and efficiency – and therefore performance – skyrockets. The quest to do so has been going on for decades.

The Challenge
The issue in making a pure lithium anode is that lithium ions expand in hair-like structures when a battery is charged. This expansion can be so strong that it can warp and crack the battery casing and, even if it could be contained, the anode is so chemically reactive that it consumes the electrolyte and the battery’s ability to recharge declines rapidly.

How rapidly? Previous scientific research produced a pure lithium anode battery that was 96 per cent efficient but that still meant its ability to charge fell to almost 50 per cent after just 100 charge cycles. Nowhere near good enough for the average lifespan of a smartphone, laptop or something bigger like an electric car.

Image

The Breakthrough
What the Stanford researchers claim to have achieved is a pure lithium anode battery which doesn’t expand and has dramatically improved charge efficiency. The result is a stable battery which retains 99% charge efficiency after 150 cycles.

The researchers achieved this by building ‘nanospheres’ – protective layers of interconnected carbon domes on top of the pure lithium anode. Each layer has a honeycomb structure which is flexible, uniform and non-reactive which both stops the lithium ions expanding too much and the anode reacting with the electrode. Remarkably the nanosphere in each battery is just 20 nanometers thick – 1/5,000th the width of a human hair.

Furthermore because the battery retains the same core operation as a standard battery it could theoretically be fitted into our existing electronic devices without any modification. Devices with removable batteries could even swap out their lithium ion batteries for a pure lithium battery and enjoy up to 3x the battery life.

In future it would also allow batteries to become smaller (for example, half the size of a current battery but with twice the capacity) allowing for ever thinner, but longer lasting devices.

“In practical terms if we can improve the capacity of batteries to, say, four times today’s, that would be exciting. You might be able to have a cell phone with double or triple the battery life or an electric car with a range of 300 miles that cost only $25,000 - competitive with an internal combustion engine getting 40 mpg,” explains Steven Chu, the former US Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate who is part of the research team.

iPhone_4_battery

The Challenge Still To Come
But we are not quite there yet. To be commercially viable batteries need to be 99.9% efficient, which places the team’s 99% efficiency rating a fraction short.

“While we’re not quite to that 99.9 percent threshold, where we need to be, we’re close and this is a significant improvement over any previous design,” said Cui. “With some additional engineering and new electrolytes, we believe we can realize a practical and stable lithium metal anode that could power the next generation of rechargeable batteries.”

What’s that sound you hear? It’s Tesla and Apple beating down their door.

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Re: Pure Lithium Anode Battery

Unread postby kublikhan » Fri 01 Aug 2014, 18:00:23

MD wrote:If you set the benchmark at the energy density per volume and mass of gasoline, there is still a very long road ahead for batteries.

I'm still thinking super capacitors will win the race over chemical batteries, eventually. No basis for the opinion other than WAG and wishful thinking.
If you use that as your goal, you just set yourself an unachievable goal. The maximum theoretical limit of lithium batteries is about 6% of oil's. Super capacitors don't have it any better when compared to oil. That's not to say that vast improvements cannot be made over existing batteries or that we will never see EVs replace combustion engines. Just that chemical batteries have theoretical limits on their energy storage that are much lower than fossil fuels.

Indeed, 1 kilogram of crude oil contains nearly 50 mega-joules of chemical potential energy, which is enough to lift 1 metric ton to a height of around 5,000 meters. Furthermore, crude oil happens to be liquid at Earth's surface conditions, making it easy to store, transport, and convert. The energy densities of natural gas and coal, around 55 mega-joules per kilogram and 20-35 mega-joules per kilogram respectively, are similar to those of crude oil. Fossil carbon is packed with chemical energy.

Many companies and scientists are diligently trying to improve energy storage technologies, and we're confident that substantial progress will be made. We can, however, use thermodynamics to calculate the upper limits of what's possible for a variety of technologies. And when we do this, we find that many technologies will never compete with fossil carbon on energy density.

Let's start with batteries. Today's lead acid batteries can store about 0.1 mega-joules per kilogram, or about 500 times less than crude oil. Those batteries, of course, could be improved, but any battery based on the standard lead-oxide/sulfuric acid chemistry is limited by foundational thermodynamics to less than 0.7 mega-joules per kilogram.

Due to the theoretical limits of lead-acid batteries, there has been serious work on other approaches such as lithium-ion batteries, which usually involve the oxidation and reduction of carbon and a transition metal such as cobalt. These batteries have already improved upon the energy density of lead-acid batteries by a factor of about 6 to around 0.5 mega-joules per kilogram--a great improvement. But as currently designed, they have a theoretical energy density limit of about 2 mega-joules per kilogram. And if research regarding the substitution of silicon for carbon in the anodes is realized in a practical way, then the theoretical limit on lithium-ion batteries might break 3 mega-joules per kilogram. Therefore, the maximum theoretical potential of advanced lithium-ion batteries that haven't been demonstrated to work yet is still only about 6 percent of crude oil!

But what about some ultra-advanced lithium battery that uses lighter elements than cobalt and carbon? Without considering the practicality of building such a battery, we can look at the periodic table and pick out the lightest elements with multiple oxidations states that do form compounds. This thought experiment turns up compounds of hydrogen-scandium. Assuming that we could actually make such a battery, its theoretical limit would be around 5 mega-joules per kilogram.

So the best batteries are currently getting 10 percent of a physical upper bound and 25 percent of a demonstrated bound. And given other required materials such as electrolytes, separators, current collectors, and packaging, we're unlikely to improve the energy density by more than about a factor of 2 within about 20 years. This means hydrocarbons--including both fossil carbon and biofuels--are still a factor of 10 better than the physical upper bound, and they're likely to be 25 times better than lithium batteries will ever be.

What about storing energy in electric fields (i.e., capacitors) or magnetic fields (i.e., superconductors)? While the best capacitors today store 20 times less energy than an equal mass of lithium-ion batteries, one company, EEstor, claims a new capacitor capable of 1 mega-joule per kilogram. Whether or not this claim proves valid, it's within about a factor of 2 of the physical limit based on the bandgap of the dielectric material. Electromagnets of high-temperature superconductors could in theory reach about 4 mega-joules per liter similar to our theoretical batteries given a reasonable density; existing magnetic energy storage systems top out around 0.01 mega-joules per kilogram, about equal to existing capacitors. Here again, both the realized technology and its ultimate physical potential are far behind the energy density of common hydrocarbon fuels.
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