Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[x] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
Sulfur in mining tailings is huge problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage ). This one reason there is so much research in Li-S batteries. Plenty of material innovations have come from people looking at mine tailings and wondering if something useful could me made of it.
For 22 years I designed the electronics controls that ran Longwall Coal Mining Machines. I've been in many mines.
The problem with extracting things from tailings is that they are often contaminated with low levels of Thorium. Extracting the other things like Lithium, Sulfur etc, starts to build up the quantity of Thorium. Which sounds good if you want to build a molten salt Thorium reactor; I understand that China and India have prototype to come on line around 2027. Based on designs and experimental units that the US did in the ~1950s.
The tailing problem is that the company is how handling Nuclear Grade Material which causes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to show up at the mine site. No mine wants to deal with this paper work, and health ramifications, headache so the tailings are not used.
If the profit ratio to headaches would improve things might change.
It doesn't always come from mining. A huge problem with acid rock drainage (ARD) showed up when they built a freeway in Pennsylvania by merely exposing the rock.
The concept of making batteries out of drainage because both contain sulfur is like making socks out of cow manure because both contain carbon. There's so much of the latter that you could never use it all, but also the ingredient is dirt cheap in pure form.
I have a side project that could convert ARD into industrial strength sulfuric acid, which is unbelievably difficult to buy and transport, despite it being the most common industrial chemical in the world after water.
Once we stop using fossil fuels, maybe sulfur in mine tailings will become a valuable resource. Today, sulfur comes from desulfurization of fossil fuels.
"lithium-ion batteries .. degrade after just 1,000 cycles"
If you charge your car battery twice a week and complete a full cycle then we are still talking about like 9 years to reach 1000 cycles.
If you charge your phone every day, and do a full cycle, then we are close to 2.7 years. But you will probably not do a full cycle.
So, I guess lithium-ion batteries are not really that bad.
Don't forget calendar life. Lithium batteries degrade over time even if you do not cycle them. The life of the commonly used chemistries is only around 3 years.
There's also some research[1] suggesting that dynamic cycling extends lithium-ion battery life, compared to the fixed charge/discharge cycles typically done in a lab setting.
In this study, we systematically compared dynamic discharge profiles representative of electric vehicle driving to the well-accepted constant current profiles. Surprisingly, we found that dynamic discharge enhances lifetime substantially compared with constant current discharge.
Specifically, for the same average current and voltage window, varying the dynamic discharge profile led to an increase of up to 38% in equivalent full cycles at end of life.
We even lived to see lithium ion batteries redefine what battery powered devices can even do!
I remember my parents first Dell laptop with a whopping 2 hour battery life, if you weren’t doing anything processor intensive, otherwise it was basically a UPS.
But it could be very interesting for commercial or industrial use: commercial vehicles that are constantly driven and charged, power reserve batteries, tools...
And I guess that you could make devices with smaller batteries and fast charge, with less fear of wearing them early.
For grid-level solar energy, we will need batteries that cycle at least 200 times per year. A system that requires replacing batteries every 5 years can't really be described as "renewable energy".
As long as "replace" includes "take the old batteries and turn them into raw materials for making new batteries" it definitely can.
Typical issues with old batteries are things like dendrite growth. There's nothing wrong with the materials that went into making the battery, they've just reshaped themselves into an unfortunate spiky structure.
Note that LiFePO/LFP batteries used in cars and large installations are rated for 5,000+ cycles. They really are on another level compared to Li-Co phone batteries that top out at 1,000.
This is big news....if it can be refined into a scalable process enabling commercial production.
LI-S batteries have significantly more capacity than commercial Li-[x] batteries of the same weight, but the big weakness until now has been that they have terrible durability.
I'm kinda curios to know if they smell bad because of the sulfur. LiPo smells sweet, like bubblegum, when its electrolyte leaks. Would a Li-S electrolyte leak smell nice like fireworks, or weird like onion/garlic?
There is no doubt about lithium-sulfur batteries being excellent and better than existing lithium-based batteries for conditions 1, 2, 4 and 7.
Depending on their structure, there may be problems to be solved about their safety and the resistance to corrosion of their components, which may limit the lifetime to lower values than expected from the number of cycles supported by the electrodes.
Here the sulfur is contained in some kind of borophosphate glass, which should not be easily flammable, so safety or corrosion problems are unlikely.
An essential component of this new battery is iodine, which has an active redox role, together with lithium and sulfur, iodine being an intermediary in the passing of electrons between lithium and sulfur. Iodine is a rather rare element. Fortunately its extraction from sea water is very cheap, but nonetheless the total amount of available iodine is quite limited, so hopefully the battery needs much less iodine than lithium and sulfur.
One of the drawbacks to li-s is that it had terrible cycle life. This is interesting/exciting because they've found a technique to overcome a major disadvantage to a chemistry that ticks a lot of the other checkboxs you've listed.
The question now is manufacturing, is this something you can use at scale to make batteries.
This is research. You should be focusing on "what's new, and is it interesting" not "is the thing they made a good product".
That said, Li-S typically looks good with respect to potential cost if mass produced (cheap materials), and density metrics. The papers abstract has absurdly good things to say about charge rates. All-solid batteries are typically going to be very safe. So at a glance this research is at least in a very commercializable direction.
>All-solid batteries are typically going to be very safe
Sulfur melts at 115 °C though, so when it overheats, it's not solid anymore. But then, it's apparently not just sulfur, but sulfur embedded in some other stuff, so who knows.
Last I heard of Li-S batteries about 10 years ago, they were fantastic at energy density and safety, looked like they could be pretty cheap to make, but they only lasted about 10 charge cycles, so this is pretty exciting.
Right. All battery articles, to be taken seriously, need a little table with those numbers. There are many battery technologies which look good on some of those numbers but are so bad on others that the technology is useless.
Exactly. For example the weight of a battery matters very little if used in a stationary application such as a BESS/UPS. But it's very important for transportation e.g. traction power
One shouldn't discount the cost of just mass. Feels to me eventually products costs are based on manufacturing complexity, material costs, and energy. Material costs themselves are often energy per unit mass.
Oh, and another reason why high cycle count may not even be relevant - the battery may become technologically obsolete and non-viable to operate long before it reaches anywhere near the projected cycle count.
So very high cycle counts (e.g. anything above 4000 cycles ~ 10 years of use) should be taken with a very large grain of salt and may be completely irrelevant for practical uses, unless the application calls for multiple daily discharges (if that's the case, why not use a supercapacitor?)
I hope the better batteries, when they genuinely are deemed to be better, are used in phones and stuff instead of using batteries that’ll go bad in a few years on purpose to drive up sales of new phones.
Even people who can deal with the slower speeds after a few years of owning a phone get driven crazy by having to charge it often, I’d say it’s a big driver if not the biggest to buy a new phone.
We already have longer lasting chemistries, lithium iron phosphate. They are also an order of magnitude less likely to go into thermal runaway. However, they are seldom used probably because they are somewhat less energy dense and consumers prioritize size and runtime over battery life and safety. I don't think it is a ploy to drive up sales.
You could also just exchange the battery instead of getting a new phone.
Of course producers made that more difficult over the years.
By 2027 mobile phones sold in the EU are mandated to have a replaceable battery.
In theory, a Li-S chemistry should be able to outperform Lithium Ion NCM chemistries by a factor of two or three.
Operating temperature range and cycle endurance were some primary barriers, and this seems promising, but ...
"The researchers suggest more work is required to improve the energy density and perhaps to find other materials to use for the mix to ensure a low-weight battery."
Note though that 'grid batteries' are a very important part for solar transition and they have very different requirement for weight and energy density than electric cars..
---------------------------------------------------------------- Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[x] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633670
there are uses for non-portable batteries
What other boxes does it check because otherwise it’s viable for home scale uses.
this is the stupid binary-ism that is holding us back. "its no good for X, so its immediately discounted for ANY solution".
The issue plagues moving forward with other energy solutions like hydrogen.
6 replies →
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...
Right, all your points may be correct or are perhaps possible.
Now would you kindly cite authoritative sources and references so we can verify your assertions.
Well, the article says;
The researchers suggest more work is required to improve the energy density.
So I'm deferring to what the researchers said about their research.
Sulfur in mining tailings is huge problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage ). This one reason there is so much research in Li-S batteries. Plenty of material innovations have come from people looking at mine tailings and wondering if something useful could me made of it.
For 22 years I designed the electronics controls that ran Longwall Coal Mining Machines. I've been in many mines.
The problem with extracting things from tailings is that they are often contaminated with low levels of Thorium. Extracting the other things like Lithium, Sulfur etc, starts to build up the quantity of Thorium. Which sounds good if you want to build a molten salt Thorium reactor; I understand that China and India have prototype to come on line around 2027. Based on designs and experimental units that the US did in the ~1950s.
The tailing problem is that the company is how handling Nuclear Grade Material which causes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to show up at the mine site. No mine wants to deal with this paper work, and health ramifications, headache so the tailings are not used.
If the profit ratio to headaches would improve things might change.
This seems backwards.
The tailings do not become nuclear waste when we decide to use them for something.
3 replies →
It's not sulfur so much as sulfate.
It doesn't always come from mining. A huge problem with acid rock drainage (ARD) showed up when they built a freeway in Pennsylvania by merely exposing the rock.
The concept of making batteries out of drainage because both contain sulfur is like making socks out of cow manure because both contain carbon. There's so much of the latter that you could never use it all, but also the ingredient is dirt cheap in pure form.
I have a side project that could convert ARD into industrial strength sulfuric acid, which is unbelievably difficult to buy and transport, despite it being the most common industrial chemical in the world after water.
Acid rock drainage is currently devastating Arctic streams with the melting of pockets of permafrost, which are in effect strip mines.
https://youtu.be/Lxfpgqn6NOo?feature=shared
One of the larger sinks for waste sulfur might be stratospheric injection for geoengineering, which is looking increasingly likely.
It's sulfides like pyrite that, when exposed to air, are oxidized by bacteria to sulfate.
There's an enormous belt of pyrite in Spain that has caused a river, the Rio Tinto, to be one of the most acid rivers on the planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Tinto_(river)
5 replies →
the largest pyramid on the planet.
https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-p...
Once we stop using fossil fuels, maybe sulfur in mine tailings will become a valuable resource. Today, sulfur comes from desulfurization of fossil fuels.
so long living batteries are a _good thing_.
Almost everything humans do requires an extensive life cycle analysis.
but you know, lets just cut everything and pretend that'll improve our assessments of reality.
"lithium-ion batteries .. degrade after just 1,000 cycles" If you charge your car battery twice a week and complete a full cycle then we are still talking about like 9 years to reach 1000 cycles. If you charge your phone every day, and do a full cycle, then we are close to 2.7 years. But you will probably not do a full cycle. So, I guess lithium-ion batteries are not really that bad.
Don't forget calendar life. Lithium batteries degrade over time even if you do not cycle them. The life of the commonly used chemistries is only around 3 years.
Explain my 7.5 year old EV with 95% battery health and 65k miles driven?
Your 2nd sentence has issues with reality.
7 replies →
Degrade to what extent? I have a 12 year old Nissan Leaf that's lost maybe 25% of its range. Still absolutely usable as a neighborhood car.
8 replies →
There's also some research[1] suggesting that dynamic cycling extends lithium-ion battery life, compared to the fixed charge/discharge cycles typically done in a lab setting.
In this study, we systematically compared dynamic discharge profiles representative of electric vehicle driving to the well-accepted constant current profiles. Surprisingly, we found that dynamic discharge enhances lifetime substantially compared with constant current discharge.
Specifically, for the same average current and voltage window, varying the dynamic discharge profile led to an increase of up to 38% in equivalent full cycles at end of life.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01675-8
We even lived to see lithium ion batteries redefine what battery powered devices can even do!
I remember my parents first Dell laptop with a whopping 2 hour battery life, if you weren’t doing anything processor intensive, otherwise it was basically a UPS.
But it could be very interesting for commercial or industrial use: commercial vehicles that are constantly driven and charged, power reserve batteries, tools...
And I guess that you could make devices with smaller batteries and fast charge, with less fear of wearing them early.
For grid-level solar energy, we will need batteries that cycle at least 200 times per year. A system that requires replacing batteries every 5 years can't really be described as "renewable energy".
As long as "replace" includes "take the old batteries and turn them into raw materials for making new batteries" it definitely can.
Typical issues with old batteries are things like dendrite growth. There's nothing wrong with the materials that went into making the battery, they've just reshaped themselves into an unfortunate spiky structure.
Note that LiFePO/LFP batteries used in cars and large installations are rated for 5,000+ cycles. They really are on another level compared to Li-Co phone batteries that top out at 1,000.
Most EV map displayed 0% to 100% to something like physical 5% to 95%, or even more extreme, to help.
This is big news....if it can be refined into a scalable process enabling commercial production.
LI-S batteries have significantly more capacity than commercial Li-[x] batteries of the same weight, but the big weakness until now has been that they have terrible durability.
I'm kinda curios to know if they smell bad because of the sulfur. LiPo smells sweet, like bubblegum, when its electrolyte leaks. Would a Li-S electrolyte leak smell nice like fireworks, or weird like onion/garlic?
When to comes to batteries, you have to look at multiple factors.
Focusing on just 1, e.g. cycles doesn't give you the whole picture.
1. What is the capacity per $?
2. What is the capacity per kg?
3. What is the capacity per unit of volume?
4. Ease of disposal and recycling
5. Charge and discharge rates.
6. Safety.
7. Viable to produce commercially en masse?
There are just off the top of my head, and not necessarily in that order. The priority will vary depending on your use case.
There is no doubt about lithium-sulfur batteries being excellent and better than existing lithium-based batteries for conditions 1, 2, 4 and 7.
Depending on their structure, there may be problems to be solved about their safety and the resistance to corrosion of their components, which may limit the lifetime to lower values than expected from the number of cycles supported by the electrodes.
Here the sulfur is contained in some kind of borophosphate glass, which should not be easily flammable, so safety or corrosion problems are unlikely.
An essential component of this new battery is iodine, which has an active redox role, together with lithium and sulfur, iodine being an intermediary in the passing of electrons between lithium and sulfur. Iodine is a rather rare element. Fortunately its extraction from sea water is very cheap, but nonetheless the total amount of available iodine is quite limited, so hopefully the battery needs much less iodine than lithium and sulfur.
> Fortunately its extraction from sea water is very cheap, but nonetheless the total amount of available iodine is quite limited,
Huh? I don't know anything about this, but sea water is very plentiful so if that's where we get it how can the amount available be limited?
1 reply →
To add a few other factors:
1. Performance in hot/cold environment
2. Safety can be broken down to chemical toxicity, and thermal stability (likelihood to catch on fire)
3. Ability to hold a full charge for extended periods of time (self discharge rate)
One of the drawbacks to li-s is that it had terrible cycle life. This is interesting/exciting because they've found a technique to overcome a major disadvantage to a chemistry that ticks a lot of the other checkboxs you've listed.
The question now is manufacturing, is this something you can use at scale to make batteries.
This is research. You should be focusing on "what's new, and is it interesting" not "is the thing they made a good product".
That said, Li-S typically looks good with respect to potential cost if mass produced (cheap materials), and density metrics. The papers abstract has absurdly good things to say about charge rates. All-solid batteries are typically going to be very safe. So at a glance this research is at least in a very commercializable direction.
>All-solid batteries are typically going to be very safe
Sulfur melts at 115 °C though, so when it overheats, it's not solid anymore. But then, it's apparently not just sulfur, but sulfur embedded in some other stuff, so who knows.
1 reply →
Last I heard of Li-S batteries about 10 years ago, they were fantastic at energy density and safety, looked like they could be pretty cheap to make, but they only lasted about 10 charge cycles, so this is pretty exciting.
Right. All battery articles, to be taken seriously, need a little table with those numbers. There are many battery technologies which look good on some of those numbers but are so bad on others that the technology is useless.
this has a chart
https://www.batterypowertips.com/how-could-advances-in-solid...
and other variants are commonly used
Exactly. For example the weight of a battery matters very little if used in a stationary application such as a BESS/UPS. But it's very important for transportation e.g. traction power
One shouldn't discount the cost of just mass. Feels to me eventually products costs are based on manufacturing complexity, material costs, and energy. Material costs themselves are often energy per unit mass.
Oh, and another reason why high cycle count may not even be relevant - the battery may become technologically obsolete and non-viable to operate long before it reaches anywhere near the projected cycle count.
So very high cycle counts (e.g. anything above 4000 cycles ~ 10 years of use) should be taken with a very large grain of salt and may be completely irrelevant for practical uses, unless the application calls for multiple daily discharges (if that's the case, why not use a supercapacitor?)
I hope the better batteries, when they genuinely are deemed to be better, are used in phones and stuff instead of using batteries that’ll go bad in a few years on purpose to drive up sales of new phones.
Even people who can deal with the slower speeds after a few years of owning a phone get driven crazy by having to charge it often, I’d say it’s a big driver if not the biggest to buy a new phone.
We already have longer lasting chemistries, lithium iron phosphate. They are also an order of magnitude less likely to go into thermal runaway. However, they are seldom used probably because they are somewhat less energy dense and consumers prioritize size and runtime over battery life and safety. I don't think it is a ploy to drive up sales.
Consumers prefer larger tablets to phones, hence Apple abandoning the already large “mini” line after the iphone13
1 reply →
You could also just exchange the battery instead of getting a new phone. Of course producers made that more difficult over the years. By 2027 mobile phones sold in the EU are mandated to have a replaceable battery.
In theory, a Li-S chemistry should be able to outperform Lithium Ion NCM chemistries by a factor of two or three.
Operating temperature range and cycle endurance were some primary barriers, and this seems promising, but ...
"The researchers suggest more work is required to improve the energy density and perhaps to find other materials to use for the mix to ensure a low-weight battery."
ok, nevermind.
If it's written like this it must be quite low..
Note though that 'grid batteries' are a very important part for solar transition and they have very different requirement for weight and energy density than electric cars..