[HN Gopher] Lithium battery ripe for disruption, inventor says
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Lithium battery ripe for disruption, inventor says
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-04-16 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| acyou wrote:
| Nowhere in the article does he say the industry is ripe for
| disruption. Can we please change the title to something more
| accurate, such as "Lithium ion technology is not going to be
| disrupted in at least the next 5-10 years, inventor says"?
| laurowyn wrote:
| Petition IEEE to change the title. Hacker news just parrots the
| original title. Them's the rules, always has been.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm always surprised when some dev comes up to me to delicately
| ask if we can rewrite or remodel something I did my first year at
| the company. Oh god yes, please.
|
| Some things you did long ago are just plain wrong, others are
| only eighty percent right. There's an expectation that something
| better will come along, even discounting fads. You just can't see
| it or have been sucked into worrying about ten other things.
| Someone should take that baton.
|
| As an inventor I suspect there comes a day where you open the
| trade journals expecting someone to have supplanted your old
| inventions. You were trying to improve the state of the art and
| having lived with it for years or at this point decades, you
| start wondering where the flying cars went. _Please_ supplant my
| work.
| slaw wrote:
| Is that dev asking why you need kubernetes for a simple CRUD
| application with few hundred users a day?
| Arbortheus wrote:
| If that is your org's existing, established, supported,
| observable, and familiar tool/deployment method for on-call
| individuals then it would be foolish to use anything else.
| IanCal wrote:
| The other kind of situation is a prototype you wrote before
| you understood the business and problem well enough, but it
| was more useful than nothing so is now an integral part of
| the sales pipeline.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The parent comment doesn't even remotely touch on anything
| like this, why do you need to bring a pointless strawman into
| this?
| hinkley wrote:
| > even discounting fads.
|
| I did touch on it, with a ten foot pole.
|
| That's a conversation that requires beers.
| philipov wrote:
| I tried disrupting my lithium battery, and it blew up.
| danans wrote:
| Disrupting Li-ion has to do with disrupting the high energy
| density + high power + high round trip efficiency use cases that
| it currently dominates. Much of these are existing use cases,
| like personal electronics and cars. The leading horse there is
| sodium ion last I checked.
|
| But there are many emerging energy storage use cases for which
| lithium ion was never a real contender.
|
| Trading off those constraints gets you options like cheap long
| term energy storage (metal air batteries, flow batteries, heat
| batteries), or batteries for lower performance vehicles or
| stationary storage (lithium iron phosphate).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Those are all important but degradation is very important as
| well and a limiting factor in many use cases, as well as low
| temperature performance and safety.
| sroussey wrote:
| You get 2-4x the energy density with aluminum over lithium. But
| the tech needs a decade and lithium will keep getting better.
| EntrePrescott wrote:
| Maybe the next big disruption is not about making better
| batteries based on Li (Lithium) but to ditch Li for most mass use
| purposes and go with a different material, e.g. Na (Natrium,
| vulgar name: Sodium)... which unlike lithium is extremely
| abundant. It would (at least in its early less optimized
| versions) have a slightly lower energy density at about 200 Wh/kg
| compared to the current best lithium-based state of the art
| batteries, but still be in a similar ballpark and easily enough
| for many applications, especially given the much cheaper price.
|
| Some manufacturers (e.g. CATL in China) are apparently already
| ramping up for Na battery mass production.
|
| https://archive.is/qJQPn
| canadiantim wrote:
| Lithium actually is super abundant
| EntrePrescott wrote:
| depends by what measure... if it's just about how much
| lithium is theoretically estimated to exist in the earth
| crust, then one could twist together an argument for lithium
| to be somewhat "abundant" (even though even by that measure
| Sodium is, depending on the source, 1000 to 2000 times more
| abundant).
|
| But if it's in terms of practicably available (mineable or
| otherwise practicably extractable at a sub-exorbitant price)
| lithium reserves, it's quite bleak actually, and we are
| currently forced to either rely on a small set of limited
| reserves, mostly concentrated in a few rather uncertain
| countries of origin... or to resort to extremely expensive
| low-yield extraction methods.
|
| In contrast: Na (Sodium) is trivially and cheaply extractable
| from salt, which is readily available everywhere in much
| larger quantities (be it as sea water or from salt mines
| which are enormously more common than lithium mining) for
| cheap.
| kube-system wrote:
| "Abundance" is kind of a tricky concept. 99.999%+ of earth's
| resources are not yet within human's ability to mine. Mostly
| either inaccessible or too sparsely concentrated or locked in
| compounds difficult to industrialize.
|
| Titanium for instance is also very abundant. But it hasn't
| been until relatively recently that humans were able to mine
| and process it at industrial scale.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I am sure you're not the first person to not want dependency on
| foreign countries that have lithium deposits. Why is this not
| done already with sodium? Is it costly to manufacture with it?
| Durability?
| Lev1a wrote:
| My guess as a layman would be that AFAIK the reaction of
| alkali ("group 1") metals with water is more violent the
| further down it's situated in that column in the periodic
| table. Since Na is one down from Li it should react more
| violently to any water contact (even water vapor in the
| atmosphere) which would make it inherently more of a safety
| concern.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Sodium chemistries currently have intractable problems with
| dendrite growth, limiting the cycle life to a level not viable
| for use in commercial cells. It's an active field of research
| though, and probably the most promising lithium alternative if
| that problem can be solved.
| acyou wrote:
| That's correct about the specific energy, it's partly related
| to sodium's atomic mass of 23, vs lithium's atomic mass of 7.
| Tagbert wrote:
| There are frequent articles talking about various researchers
| that are investigating that vulgar Sodium as a new chemistry
| for batteries.
| EntrePrescott wrote:
| Different sodium based battery technologies have existed for
| quite a while (much longer than lithium based batteries
| actually), and research as well. And there were already a
| couple niches where some of them managed to establish some
| foothold, e.g. in the domain of high-temperature batteries.
|
| But most sodium based battery types either had a too low
| energy density to be competitive or they had other drawbacks
| that - while sometimes controllable in lab or industrial
| conditions, made them unsuitable for common mainstream mass
| uses where lithium batteries are established.
|
| Only quite recently have we reached a point where new Na
| battery types emerged that 1. simultaneously do not suffer of
| such problems, 2. have a sufficient energy density AND 3.
| have made it to a commercially viable alternative to the
| common Lithium-ion-batteries for mainstream uses. Let's hope
| this time is the right time for the Na battery revolution.
| We'll see.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I want to underline, it's not about any other chemistry
| overtaking lithium he is talking.
|
| Lithium will almost certainly remain the one, and only mainstream
| battery chemistry simply because of physics. Lithium ion has the
| lowest mass per unit of charge.
|
| It's about cathodes, and electrodes which may change, as well as
| their manufacturing technology.
| Torkel wrote:
| Disrupting lithium for batteries is like disrupting silicon for
| transistors - sure there are niches and areas where other things,
| like silicon carbide or gallium can be used! But to any one
| trying to pour money into something competing with the trillions
| of dollars invested into the existing techniques I say: good luck
| with that.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The article actually says that lithium batteries aren't going
| away any time soon. The "disruptions" the inventor calls for
| are more about _how_ lithium ion batteries are made, in
| particular:
|
| - Reducing energy inputs for manufacturing
|
| - Eliminating cobalt from cathodes (largely achieved already,
| depending on what performance characteristics the application
| can live with)
|
| - Using clean energy while mining for battery materials, and
| ensuring that there are regional supply chains around the world
|
| - Expanding battery recycling
|
| These sound more incremental than truly disruptive to me, but
| mining and heavy manufacturing change on a much slower cadence
| than microchips and software. So maybe these changes _would_ be
| disruptive in context.
| acyou wrote:
| Lithium is great, the low atomic mass of 4 is close to as good
| as you can get.
|
| They haven't invested trillions, the lithium ion technology is
| in a relatively young and poorly optimized state and is similar
| to the state of the art 40 years ago.
|
| You are right, disruption isn't the correct word. Investment,
| incremental improvement and niche applications are where we see
| most progress. Other chemistries are not seeming particularly
| promising for mobile, lightweight applications.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Battery tech is clearly a gargantuan problem.
|
| The amount of industry that desperately wants better density is
| stunning and the fact that despite the billions spent we are
| still stuck with basically the same tech is a testament to its
| stubborness
| Tagbert wrote:
| There has been steady progress over the last couple of decades
| in battery tech. Much of it has gone into better Lithium-based
| batteries. We haven't exactly stuck with the same tech.
|
| "Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under
| your nose" https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-
| five-years...
| oblio wrote:
| I think we've had, what? 3 major battery techs in 150 years?
| The first one, then lead acid, now lithium ion.
|
| It's a hard problem.
|
| 50% extra energy density with the same performance
| characteristics as lithium ion otherwise would probably level
| us up as a civilization.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Lithium-ion is 50% better than it used to be (in terms of
| energy/mass, it's done better than that for energy/volume).
|
| A problem is that lithium is more or less the best choice for
| materials, and we've been pouring resources into developing
| it.
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