[KaiserJeep]

Stanford scientists have invented a flexible, high-performance aluminum battery that charges in about 1 minute.
Credit: Mark Shwartz, Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-ultra-fast ... e.html#jCp

Advantages:

1) Safe, not flammable as are Lithium-based batteries.

2) Inexpensive, requires only aluminum, carbon nanocrystals, aluminum salts, and polymer envelope.

3) Durable: Could easily last for 10,000+ deep discharge cycles.

4) Ultra-fast recharge eliminates a major problem with existing mobile device and vehicle batteries.


Applications:

1) Electronic mobile devices that can recharge in one minute or less.

2) Electric Vehicles that can recharge in less time than it takes to do the other "pit stop" activities.

3) Whole-house electrical storage which would allow renewable energy from solar panels and wind to run your house for days.

4) Allow for baseload power plants capacity reduction by recharging at night, discharging during peak hours.


Comments:

1) I feel optimistic enough about this one to invest money in it.

2) Hopefully we can get it engineered for the various sizes and assorted applications before the crash.

3) Unfortunately, this is NOT a means of producing power. It is a cheap and safe and dense and rapidly rechargeable and durable energy storage medium.

4) This is an enabling technology for renewable energy.

[Pops]

I saw this. Sounds pretty cool, especially the long recharge life.

Voltage is low so far. I wonder about self-discharge, holding a charge is a big deal with Li

[KaiserJeep]

Lithium self-discharge is much improved nowadays. I treated myself to a set of DeWalt's "20v MAX" rechargeable Lithium-Ion tools. None of the batteries have been in the charger for 6+ months, but are still charged and the Impact Driver just sank about three dozen 3" deck screws yesterday using a single small 1.5aH battery pack.

I estimate that this aluminum battery tech could fully mature in less than a decade. I believe we have longer than that, except for a Joker in the deck called the "Islamic Nuclear Bomb". I simply do not trust the Ayatollahs in Iran not to use it. That idiot Obama believes he has "fixed" the problem in Iran and the other problems in the Middle East. Yeah, right. Carter was the first POTUS to declare victory in the ME, and every POTUS since then from both parties has also declared victory as part of their "Legacy".

[Timo]

Nice editorial on the aluminum ion battery there, KJ.

[Pops]

Lithium self-discharge is much improved nowadays. I treated myself to a set of DeWalt's "20v MAX" rechargeable Lithium-Ion tools. None of the batteries have been in the charger for 6+ months, but are still charged and the Impact Driver just sank about three dozen 3" deck screws yesterday using a single small 1.5aH battery pack.

Sorry, I meant that Li-ion batteries are much better at not self discharging.

I know for the same reason you know, LOL, the Dewalt 20s are supposed to have 2-3 times as many recharges as the old xrp batteries but I'm going to guess I needed recharged to the old ones at least as much from self-discharge as from actual work. In reality the 20s will last 4-5-6 times longer I think. I'm probably going to wear out the little charge indicator button—I always expect them to be dead and they never are.

[KaiserJeep]

The main drawback that I see is not low cell voltage, most rechargeable device designs use multiple series-connected cells until they reach the desired load voltage. So with Aluminum-ion, you simply use more cells than you would with Lithium-Ion. The tradeoffs are probably safety and longevity, you need to be careful not to compromise the strengths of Al-ion.

The main problem I see is the fast recharge - if you want to recharge a cellphone battery in 1 minute versus 30 minutes, then your charger must have 30X the current capacity of the 30-minute slow charger. Call it 30 amperes instead of 1 ampere for a 1-minute charge, or 6 amperes for a 5-minute charger design.

YES this is possible with 110vac powered chargers, but NOT with the cheap transformerless charger designs used today for Lithium-Ion slow charging. Transformerless chargers are current-limited today to about an ampere or less. The battery charger that could deliver 30 amps DC at the load voltage (plus a little to charge) will be rather large transformer unit, rather expensive for the copper it contains, and a significant power consumer (5-10 amperes AC) for the 1 minute or 5 minutes it is in use. The economical and safe design of such fast battery chargers is part of the decade of development I mentioned for this technology.

However, charger design is NOT any form of limitation for a residence-sized battery, which both charges and discharges over hours or days. The large stationary applications of Al-ion batteries may come first.

[dissident]

They have 2 V already. That nothing to sneeze at by any measure. Since all they did was hack a graphite cathode into their prototype there is plenty of room to boost the voltage.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 5309015304

The above is for lithium-ion batteries but it shows that there is indeed a vast realm for research in terms of the cathode material. I would say OP is quite right on the promise of this technology.

[GHung]

A 1000mAh cell phone battery is 1 Ah at 5 volts. 120 volts/5 volts = 24 so (minus efficiency and conversion losses) a 1 amp AC charger could charge the cell phone battery in 1/24th of an hour, assuming the battery could accept that rate of charge (24 amps DC at 5 volts). Full USB 2.0 charging is at 2.1 amps. Special connectors would be required since most current devices will reject a charge over that 2.1 amp rate (or likely get fried). Smart chargers could solve that ($$).

2 volts per cell is relatively high. My home's big 2200 Ah cells are 2 volt nominal. One wonders what the size limit is on these aluminum cells. One thing that makes current car batteries expensive is having so many small individual cells in series/parallel.

[ennui2]

Usually I am very skeptical about new batteries but this does look promising. Not necessarily revolutionary, but promising. I'd like to find out exactly how many cycles you can get out of a cell. If the density doesn't match lithium then it might not make a good car battery but would work great for storing renewables.

[kanon]

Here is a comment by "starpigeon" from the phys.org article

Actually it is only a new kind of supercapacitor, even though they claimed that it was an aluminum ion battery. It is the ionic liquid electrolyte (EMImAlCl4) that reacts with (AlCl4- anions intercalate into) graphite foil under moderate voltage, not Al3+ cations from Al electrode. If the Al electrode is replaced by other stable metal or graphite, the results should be the same. Compared with other real aluminum ion battery (Chem. Commun., 2011, 47, 12610–12612), its specific capacity is too low (60 vs 273 mAh/g). As a supercapacitor, its specific capacitance is only 4A/g*54s/(2.45-0.4V)=105.4 F/g. I can only smile on this "Nature" paper.

I thought capacitors dissipate the charge rather quickly and, unless i missed it, the time the experimental battery held its charge was not discussed in the article.

[Pops]

2 volts per cell is relatively high.

They have 2 V already. That nothing to sneeze at by any measure.

The main drawback that I see is not low cell voltage,

LOL, I mentioned voltage because the guy himself mentioned low voltage as a drawback:

"Millions of consumers use 1.5-volt AA and AAA batteries," he said. "Our rechargeable aluminum battery generates about two volts of electricity. That's higher than anyone has achieved with aluminum."
But more improvements will be needed to match the voltage of lithium-ion batteries, Dai added.
"Our battery produces about half the voltage of a typical lithium battery," he said

[dissident]

Here is a comment by "starpigeon" from the phys.org article

Actually it is only a new kind of supercapacitor, even though they claimed that it was an aluminum ion battery. It is the ionic liquid electrolyte (EMImAlCl4) that reacts with (AlCl4- anions intercalate into) graphite foil under moderate voltage, not Al3+ cations from Al electrode. If the Al electrode is replaced by other stable metal or graphite, the results should be the same. Compared with other real aluminum ion battery (Chem. Commun., 2011, 47, 12610–12612), its specific capacity is too low (60 vs 273 mAh/g). As a supercapacitor, its specific capacitance is only 4A/g*54s/(2.45-0.4V)=105.4 F/g. I can only smile on this "Nature" paper.

I thought capacitors dissipate the charge rather quickly and, unless i missed it, the time the experimental battery held its charge was not discussed in the article.

starpigeon apparently has the science knowledge level of a pigeon.

The difference between a battery and a supercapacitor:

http://berc.berkeley.edu/storage-wars-b ... apacitors/

In the supercapacitor, energy is stored electrostatically on the surface of the material, and does not involve chemical reactions.

According to the "funny" Nature paper, this aluminum ion battery uses the following redox reaction cycle:

We propose that simplified Al/graphite cell redox reactions during charging and discharging can be written as:

4 Al2Cl7- + 3 e- <=> Al + 7AlCl4- (1)
Cn + AlCl4- <=> Cn[AlCl4] + e- (2)

where n is the molar ratio of carbon atoms to intercalated anions in the graphite. The balanced AlCl4– and Al2Cl7– concentrations in the electrolyte allowed for an optimal charging capacity at the cathode, with abundant AlCl4– for charging/intercalation in graphite (equation (2)), and sufficient Al2Cl7– concentration for charging/electrodeposition at the anode (equation (1)).

[dissident]

the story was posted in phy.org.blah. It is the goto site for algae biofuel stories. Enough said.

I agree this or any other technology will not save humanity's sorry consumption pig a**.

[Peak_Yeast]

:-s Lets see.. There has been so many promising battery technologies - and none of them became anything.

This invention sounds a little too simple considering how many things that has been tried and discarded. I find it hard to believe that alu and graphite hasnt been tried before. So where is the cat buried?

[Keith_McClary]

:-s Lets see.. There has been so many promising battery technologies - and none of them became anything.

This invention sounds a little too simple considering how many things that has been tried and discarded. I find it hard to believe that alu and graphite hasnt been tried before. So where is the cat buried?

Has anyone seen a website keeping track of the progress of all these battery technologies?

[dolanbaker]

:-s Lets see.. There has been so many promising battery technologies - and none of them became anything.

This invention sounds a little too simple considering how many things that has been tried and discarded. I find it hard to believe that alu and graphite hasnt been tried before. So where is the cat buried?

I think that the big difference is that the graphite had been "built" using nanotechnology, I don't understand how it actually works, but recent developments in nanotechnology has produced some major leaps in materials technology.

[KaiserJeep]

:-s Lets see.. There has been so many promising battery technologies - and none of them became anything.

This invention sounds a little too simple considering how many things that has been tried and discarded. I find it hard to believe that alu and graphite hasnt been tried before. So where is the cat buried?

I think that the big difference is that the graphite had been "built" using nanotechnology, I don't understand how it actually works, but recent developments in nanotechnology has produced some major leaps in materials technology.

Essentially correct. Graphite electrodes were invented in the 1800s for the first zinc-carbon "dry cells". Nanotech constructed crystals are 21st century materials.

[dissident]

:-s Lets see.. There has been so many promising battery technologies - and none of them became anything.

This invention sounds a little too simple considering how many things that has been tried and discarded. I find it hard to believe that alu and graphite hasnt been tried before. So where is the cat buried?

This plausibility argument doesn't fly. Everything is trivial in hindsight. Going forward not so much.

Your statement is logically equivalent to the claim that all chemical and physical configurations in the Aluminum-Graphite battery field have been tested before or are all similar to each other to the extent that nothing of interest is to be found after doing a few simple attempts.

[Outcast_Searcher]

:-s Lets see.. There has been so many promising battery technologies - and none of them became anything.

This invention sounds a little too simple considering how many things that has been tried and discarded. I find it hard to believe that alu and graphite hasnt been tried before. So where is the cat buried?

This plausibility argument doesn't fly. Everything is trivial in hindsight. Going forward not so much.

Your statement is logically equivalent to the claim that all chemical and physical configurations in the Aluminum-Graphite battery field have been tested before or are all similar to each other to the extent that nothing of interest is to be found after doing a few simple attempts.

OTOH, using the history of "gee whiz new thing" posts on this site* to the ratio of such things that turn out to have merit worthy of notice is small enough that a healthy amount of skepticism for such claims is rational.

As for me, I'll be impressed when I can buy such batteries for a moderate price at Home Depot (whether I can also get the ECAT in the next bay or not). (If this thing is real, then there should be some batteries and tests producing significant results, and products to follow, even if it takes a decade.)

* (I notice such gee-whiz articles on MANY sites all over the internet. The general ratio of validity to apparent self-promotion is still very small -- IN MY EXPERIENCE).