The article sounds very promising (3+ times the current energy density, much faster charging, more charge cycles, better operating temp range etc) - was hoping that someone who knows his stuff could look and tell me if this is real or pie-in-the-sky…
If this is realizable (and doesn’t cost way more than current tech), that would make all-electric cars a much better proposition.
This looks like a legit advance, but it’s all still in the lab. Scaling it up for production is where we see if the rubber meets the road. Here’s a balanced take that says it would be 15 years before this gets used in EVs if it can be successfully scaled up for production.
Seems real enough, but keep in mind this is just research and hasn’t been placed into a practical battery for consumer use yet. When it all comes out in the real world, the energy density might not be quite as good or there may be some other practical drawbacks, or it may cost more than they think it will in large scale production.
A lot of recent battery advances have come from tinkering with the basic Lithium Ion formula, and that’s what they’ve done here. So it’s definitely in the right ballpark of where I’d expect an improvement in battery technology to be.
Given what they claim to have done, I wouldn’t expect the improvement in energy density to be quite as large as they state, but who knows. We will have to wait and see how it performs when it’s actually put into production, assuming that it ever gets that far.
It looks promising at this point though, I will say that.
Here’s the Slashdot blurb with links to some skepticism.
I’m definitely skeptical about tripling the energy density. Battery tech is mature enough that you’re much more likely to see something like a 5% or 10% increase.
Wag: you want it in less than 15 years, then license it to Elon Musk. If he’s not interested, no one will be. If he is and it is doable, he will have it out the door in 5 years.
But he’ll promise it in 3.
It’s good to be skeptical, but the stated skepticism in that article doesn’t necessarily make sense:
The objection as summarised in the text I graped above, is bollocks. You could say the same thing about lead-acid batteries - which have lead plates on both electrodes - the difference is produced by the action of charging the thing.
There might be more to it underneath, but as a summary, the above (esp ‘the known rules of physics…’) is a desperately stupid objection.
To be fair, the positive plate in a lead-acid battery is coated in lead dioxide, which is essential to the electrochemical storage reaction.
I don’t understand the objection. This is bog standard lithium sulfur chemistry. You can get some plating on the cathode but that’s because the sulfur cathode isn’t fully oxidized so there’s still some cell potential.
FWIW, Dr. Goodenough is the fellow who devised the lithium ion battery in the first place, so it’s not like he’s some random researcher making wild claims.
He’s also an outstanding and respected physicist in his own right outside of his battery work.
I think that’s a manufacturing and performance optimisation. IIRC, you can get there by dunking two bits of pure lead in acid, then applying current to create an initial charge.