New battery chemistry

[meyersnole]

Pretty interesting article on new types of battery chemistry under development that can quadruple or lead to an order of magnitude improvement in energy storage density. 

 

Lithium-Sulfur Battery Looks Promising For Electrified Vehicles

 

[CombsAuthor]

Thanks for posting. It looks promising and you know a better battery will always be in our future. I wonder what the difference in weight is.

[Russael]

Very cool and exciting.  I don't think we'll see these mass market by the time we'll need new batteries for our cars though.  And would we also need to replace the battery charger to work with Li-S or would current standard Li-ion chargers be compatible?

 

It looks like this tech has already been around since 2001.  Lithium batteries were proposed back in 1970's according to wiki, and the first commercial lithium battery back in 1991.  Thing is, I don't remember widespread usage until cell phones came around and then they were everywhere.  I wonder how much longer we'll need to wait for these high capacity cells to come available?  Imagine taking our 20 - 30 mile range to 80 to 120 miles with the same physically sized pack.  Or, if they go Lithium Air, they're saying 10 times the capacity (200 mile EV range in a Fusion Energi?  Shut up and take my money!)

[meyersnole]

This is the first discussion I have seen on Lithium Sulfur or Air, I know that even with the same materials they keep tweaking the chemistry to gain energy density (Volt increased their range last year). The good news here is that this seems to be a viable form of transportation and there is investment in this space. There is also research in super capacitors (and probably other forms of energy storage) that would be even better if they could get over some technical hurdles. Obviously, if you could go to the fuel station and charge up ~10 mins to go 300ish miles you would really have something.

 

What was cool about this story was they they claim to have the science settled (it works), they just need to commercialize.

 

Increasing numbers of EVs, lower prices, and improving technology is great news.

[Russael]

The problem with that is I don't see an infrastructure being able to deliver that kind of energy to a car in 10 minutes.  The Tesla S has an available 85kw/h battery pack that they said could go 300 miles (epa reduced it to like 260).  Now, imagine the kind of energy that would be required on-demand to charge that pack in 10 minutes...  At 480 volts, it'd require 177 amps to charge that in an HOUR.  Accelerating that to 10 minutes means over 1,000 amps.  Cabling would be absolutely nuts to carry that amount of current.  Even if you took the voltage to 960 volts, that would still need 500 amps.  I just don't see that happening.  To give you an idea of how much energy that would be, a Michigan average home has 240v, 100A service for maximum capacity, or about 24kw of service.  The Tesla superchargers used to deliver 96kw (they increased it to 120 now).  So for that duration of 40 minutes, you're consuming as much energy as 5 homes if they maxed out their service.  If you did it in 10, then you'd eat as much as 20 homes to charge your car.  Plus there's also the fact of battery internal resistance and the amount of energy that would need to be expended to keep the battery temperature under control.  In warmer weather, I've heard of Tesla's backing off the charging rate while supercharging because the cooling system can't keep up with the heat generated by the battery.

 

Still, I'd be extremely happy with even a 100 mile PHEV.  Charging rate wouldn't matter as much since you aren't dead in the water if you run out of energy.  Still, even with the battery that's currently in the Fusion Energi... that fits my lifestyle perfectly.  I still haven't used a drop of gas in the 560 miles I've driven, so additional capacity wouldn't really benefit me per-se, but I know it would many others.

 

In all honesty, doing induction energy while on the road I think would be more feasible.  If they could find a way to deliver 5 - 15kw to the car while it's driving would be of far greater benefit... but would be crazy expensive to implement depending on how far away the power panel would need to be.  If they built it in to the road surface (maybe cutting a groove in the road and laying some kind of cable like they do with smart traffic lights), that would work, but if it had to be some kind of pad... nope.  Another possible solution would be to simply put some kind of high capacity antenna on power poles along roadways (but then the distance to the car becomes at least 20 feet, which greatly loses its effectiveness).  The cars would still need batteries to go through residential areas, etc, or through areas were the system might be down.

[jsamp]

Russael,

 

  You bring up some key points that are really the crux of the issue.  Delivering the amount of energy needed in a short amount of time is not possible with today's technology (delivery systems can't handle that current, neither can batteries at the moment).  That is a large part of the reasoning behind battery swapping.  The batteries can charge at their intended slower rate, and be swapped in <10 minutes.  That, of course brings up a whole new realm of issues like standardizing on battery sizes/types, how do you pay for the service, can it compete financially with a gasoline fillup, etc.  Time will tell which way it will go, but I don't see a 10 or even 30 minute charge giving you 300 miles any time soon.

[Russael]

The issue I see with battery swapping... do you pay for the initial pack and then you lose it once you swap it the first time, or do you just buy the vehicle 'shell' and then pay per the usage of the battery packs (the individual does not own them, but rather, they're rented)?  And what happens after a swap that you get a defective one that somehow got through the changing station's quality control?  The benefit of a 'rented' pack is that you can probably shave 30,000 dollars off of the cost of the car, but then how much do you pay to borrow that pack and then service fees for pack swapping?  And which company tracks how many miles were driven on that pack to figure out what to charge a person, and THEN who gets that money?  What if you wind up swapping packs at a different vendor (shell vs BP or Blink vs Chargepoint for example).  And then there's the fact that people will still charge at home and may only need to swap the pack on a yearly trip... do you charge the person some kind of 'pack depreciation fee' each month?  All things considered... unless it was one brand controlling all of it, I don't see how it would work.

 

Then of course there's the huge mess of getting all of the automakers to conform to a standard.  Presently, all vehicles are J1772 complaint, but the Tesla requires an adapter to make it work where everybody else fit the J1772 socket right on the car (or motorcycle) itself.  But what do you do when you have to conform the structure of a vehicle?  The Tesla's battery pack is the size of the whole car.  Can you get Ford, GM, or any other auto maker to build their car around that battery pack and still have a style all of their own?  I know Tesla is in the process of making the Model X and I assume that they're building that vehicle around the battery pack so at least that part is standard across their whole platform.

 

Presently, only Tesla has a swappable pack (that I know of).  The Focus Electric is permanently mounted.  I think the Leaf supports a pack swap too, after looking at a bunch of pictures.  But now a changing station would need to have x number of different packs available.  Can you have one service station have a variety of packs?  And how many different ones are there going to be?  Each one would need its own charging hardware if there were no standard.

 

In the future, they may be able to figure out some sort of standard, but the system is too much in its infancy.  I'm positive most of that is on the drawing board though and people are talking.  But I wouldn't expect to see anything like that for another 10 years.

 

Electric cars are definitely the future... but there's a ton of hurdles to work through.

 

*edit* and now I see I just made a really wordy paragraph which basically rehashes what you said (and for some reason, my brain didn't register... LOL)

Edited July 16, 2013 at 11:11 PM by Russael

[mmmhmmmm]

Sorry to resurrect the dead thread :drop: here; this is a very interesting discussion!

 

I wonder if a very large capacitor bank could be used to help deliver a charge to such an advanced battery very quickly. Obviously size and cost would be a concern (based on today's capacitor technology), but this technology might be feasible for commercial charging stations.

 

Here is a neat project I found sort of relevant

http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Forever-Rechargeable-VARIABLE-Super-Capacitor-/