Researchers have been testing a new type of lithium ion battery that uses single-crystal electrodes. Over several years, they’ve found that the technology could keep 80% of its capacity after 20,000 charge and discharge cycles. For reference, a conventional cell reaches 80% after about 2,400 cycles.
The researchers say that the number of cycles would be equivalent to driving about 8 million kilometers in an electric vehicle. This is within striking distance of having the battery last longer than the other parts of the vehicle. The researchers employed synchrotron x-ray diffraction to study the wear on the electrodes. One interesting result is that after use, the single-crystal electrode showed very little degradation. According to reports, the batteries are already in production and they expect to see them used more often in the near future.
The technology shows promise, too, for other demanding battery applications like grid storage. Of course, better batteries are always welcome, although it is hard to tell which new technologies will catch on and which will be forgotten.
There are many researchers working on making better batteries. Even AI is getting into the act.
I’m immune to positive news about batteries. Until it leaves the lab and becomes economically feasible to produce it’s not real. So far improvements have been small incremental changes, not large leaps.
Batteries are hard. You want high energy density, high power density(discharge current), fast charging (charge current), high roundtrip efficiency, low self discharge, long life (cycles), can survive temperature extremes, cheap, safe,… New technology gives us mostly new tradeoffs, but rarely overall improvements (those take a lot of time to invent and perfect).
Second that. “I don’t believe anything, if there is no video!”.
The battery issues are related to it’s name.
Since old times people were shouting: “Battery, fire!” and that kinds stuck. Also it kinda sucks, but we’re supposely working on it.
Better start thinking for a new, cool name.
To start this naming contest I’ll start easy: charge trap (“electron trap” would cull the ideas that might use holes as things stored). From this comes the following idea: what if we rip electrons from the inner orbitals also?
Cars have been having the same issue for a long time. Even ICE cars have become so reliable (with proper maintenance), and the car weak spots are always the gremlins in connectors and rust. Having a battery that can drive you 8 million km is not very useful when the car falls apart after 200k km.
I understand that it goes against the interest of car sales, but some more effort should be put into making the cars last longer.
It’s not good business to make something that lasts a long time so this will probably be one of those ideas that gets forgotten.
I’m not sure I agree with the interpretation of this paper. It’s not promoting a magical new battery construction (all the cells they were testing were commercially available units they purchased, including the single crystal one, and had been used in previous work over many years), they were doing the hard work of inspecting and characterising the kinds of degradation that cells experience after heavy use in order to build better models of how these cells work and fail at the microscopic level.
After all, you can’t improve your mousetrap if you don’t know what’s wrong with the previous one.
Meaningless graphs as illustration. What is DoD? No axis labels!