EV Range Breakthrough as New Aluminum-Ion Battery Charges 60 Times Faster to Lit
forbes.com
forbes.com
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.
[ ] 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.
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To Whom It May Concern: If human beings took advice like yours, we'd be living in caves. And no doubt the first person who proposed living in a cave heard the same. You are free to say what you like, of course, but try to stay out of the way of the people working. :)
How is something like this found on Hacker News, hosted by Y Combinator in SV?
Before i take a real look at a flat earth model it has to at least predict solar eclipses and explain seasons. Before i take a look at 'EV Breakthrough' it has to address everything on this list.
Alternatively, a title less grand then 'EV Breakthrough' is also fine.
1) 2x would take an electric car from 300 miles range to 600 miles range. That is a pretty radical improvement in energy density that possibly exceeds even hydrocarbons.
2) Automotive is a terribly unforgiving environment for batteries. Heat, cold, and vibration are all the worst. Oh, and don't do something silly like emit toxic fumes or explode when someone ruptures your containment with a 30mph crash.
They claim to be bringing this to market in under a year, though, so that is a deviation from the usual battery story we read. Whether or not it's true... shrug ask me in a year.
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
To over-explain the joke: we hear a lot of ideas but they never pan out, and here is a simple checklist for all the reasons that they might fail. Check those that apply.
(Ironically, email spam does seem to be a largely solved problem, though it has morphed into a lot of other things.)
My guess is that these 'breakthroughs' are basically directed towards current leaders in LiIon manufacturing and mostly serve as distraction from going all-in into liion while status quo can be maintained just a little longer.
Assuming that it doesn't fall foul of the last one "your claims are lies" it seems to be a step change in performance that's in early production and has a reasonable path to actual production.
You have a 60x EV Range breakthrough - and you are still a small company not snapped up by some monster. How in the HELL is that possible. 60x range is 20,000 miles for the tesla Model 3. How is this amount of energy even carried safely?
I've become jaded to these announcements. Glad someone is coming out with a checkbox for them.
Note that for EV's COST has become a key driver - 315 miles range is "good enough" if you get to leave your house every morning with a full charge. Hopefully the 60X improvement creating this "range breakthrough" translates into a 60x cost reduction given you can use a much smaller battery for the 315 miles.
Here's his video talking about Tesla's new silicon/lithium tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL6xp4fLdFw
The use of units and their notation is horrendous, almost as if the author doesn't know even the first thing about SI units and their use:
> 197 mAh g−1
> 10 gigaWatt to 50gW plants
I'm sorry, but nonsense like that detracts from the trustworthiness of the content.
The title is also a bit click-baity - so far they're working with coin cells and statements like
> It charges an iPhone coin cell in less than 10 seconds.
are highly misleading. What does that even mean? An iPhone doesn't contain coin cells.
Another irritating statements follows immediately after:
> The new battery cells are claimed to deliver far more energy density than current lithium-ion batteries, without the cooling, heating or rare-earth problems they face.
According to them, their cells achieve 160 Wh/kg. That doesn't add up at all. A mainstream APN 616-0809 Li-Ion battery pack (iPhone 6) has a capacity of 1810 mAh @ 3.8V and weighs ~45.5 g, e.g. ~150 Wh/kg.
So their current cells are no better than current Li-Ion batteries, but only just match them. I mean, heck, a Tesla Powerwall - a fully integrated, plug-and-play unit - comes in at 114 Wh/kg (13.5 kWh @ 114 kg) [0].
If they have a product with unique selling points (no rare earths required, much faster to charge, safer), why make claims that are demonstrably false? Little things like that make the whole announcement sound fishy and I can't tell whether it's the author or the researchers who messed up there.
I mean, seriously, the COTS Panasonic NCR18650B cell has an energy density of 252 Wh/kg [1] so even with cooling/heating elements a battery pack would have a higher energy density (by mass) than their product.
Something just doesn't add up in this piece.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/powerwall/Pow...
[1] https://www.batteryjunction.com/panasonic-ncr18650b-3400.htm...
> Testing by peer-reviewed specialist publication Advanced Functional Materials publication concluded the cells had “outstanding high-rate performance (149 mAh g−1 at 5 A g−1), surpassing all previously reported AIB cathode materials”.
Advanced Functional Materials is just a journal. They do not do third-party testing (unless something really has changed in scientific publishing in that last few years). Just because your paper was accepted for publication doesn't mean you can go around claiming your device performance has been validated by outside investigators. The peer-reviewers for journals just look at the data/figures submitted and make a judgement call on if it looks legit/plausible or if it looks fake/wrong. They don't actually get devices from the authors and test them out in their own labs to verify things...
For third party verification you need to pay outside consultants (e.g. Exponent) to test your devices or need to get a national lab like NREL to test things.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14340 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.5b06809 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0014-y
What grinds my gears is copy-pasting without understanding the notation. mAh g-1 is not a unit. mA⋅h⋅g<sup>-1</sup> or mA⋅h/g is. I expect a technical article to at least use the correct notation for SI units. If your publishing system is so crappy that it doesn't support middle-dots and proper superscript, use division instead.
The mess seen in the article is the result of mindless copypasta.
Nonsense like "gigaWatts" shouldn't even be possible and causes red squiggly lines even while typing this in a browser; not to mention "gW" (grams times Watts?, Wattgrams?).
If you present technical information and include technical data, use the correct notation. Failing to do so demonstrates that there's no or a very poor editorial process and that the author has no clue what they're even writing about. This doesn't inspire confidence in the actual substance of the article, much like proper grammar and orthography are an essential part of a good essay.
Work to calculate the energy density comparison when that isn't even the point of the article. Everyone can look up the energey density and theoretical of a li-ion battery: 100-265 Wh/kg. There is absolutely no need to calculate anything.
Focus on the substance of the article. 60x faster charging rate as compared to Lithium-ion and make a comment regarding that. Otherwise your comments are as pointless as my reply to it.
Aluminum-ion technology has intrinsic advantages and disadvantages over the preeminent lithium-ion battery technology being used in almost every EV today.
What do calendar and cycle life in different conditions look like? How do weight/volume per unit power/energy compare with existing li-ion cells? And so on...
It seems like they found a way to improve the energy density of the al-ion cells mentioned in this Stanford news story.
https://news.stanford.edu/2015/04/06/aluminum-ion-battery-03...
But without more detailed specs, it's impossible to compare their cells to existing li-ion cells outside of the specific examples they are using.
If you have no issues with the units / expressions used in the article, could you please explain what is the power and energy density from this quote:
> Stanford’s natural graphite aluminum-ion technology delivers 68.7 Watt-hours per kilogram and 41.2 Watts per kilogram, while its graphite-foam bumps up to 3000Wh/kg.
> The GMG-UQ battery heaves that forward to between 150 and 160Wh/kg and 7000Wh/kg.
I have zero issues with using negative exponents, what I do take issue with is writing "g-1" in an online publication. You either use proper HTML to write an exponent as an exponent, or you use division.
"g-1" is not a a unit, it spells out "gram - 1", which makes no sense at all and there's zero excuse for not even using the commonly accepted crutch "g^-1".
ML2032, VL2032 and LIR2032 are similarly sized variants that can be recharged, but they're not the same, and you shouldn't attempt to recharge a CR2032.
Commercial battery cells used in vehicle sized applications, however, often do exceed this value.
So even at a 20% loss due to temperature control, an aluminium battery of the quoted power density still struggles to even just match Li-Ion batteries (i.e. Li-Ion batteries including cooling still have at least 26% higher energy density by mass; using a Panasonic cell as reference point).
Well, that's pleasantly surprising if true. I was expecting the standard caveat of it only being in research so far.
Over 90% of all the published breakthroughs are fantasy.
Seems like having a technology that crosses the "publish revolutionary battery tech in the press" hurdle is dramatically lower than the "actually make a battery at product scale for a profit" hurdle, and not all of the former will make the latter. Here's hoping these folks do what they say on their production part, because I'm pretty desensitized to the first part of their claim.
That is the entire reason for Popular Science magazine it did for decades. Amazing things that never were built some were yes but many were not. It's fun to read about it but I can see how it could be frustrating too.
Second, many times faster charging speed is nothing to ignore. It means you can charge on many more occasions and you don't have to stop the car.
Think you could stop your car by the side of the road and be on your way in matter of a minute.
Ability to charge cars fast is a huge problem because not only they need charge more frequently than feuling they need so much more time to do it. If you calculate, replacing all cars with EVs would require a lot of space to park cars and to guest the people that need to wait for the car to get charged.
I don't think 1000A is that huge of an issue.
These guys weld with 1000A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j61ezBX-EyA
Trucks use that kind of current to start and it doesn't seem to be an issue, though the starting sequence is rather short so it may be counting on the fact that some stuff will not have time to get heated up.
I don't want to say you can just put 1000A into existing cables, what I want to say that I can imagine this being manageable with some additional engineering (and especially safety) challenges to be solved.
350 kW CCS chargers are deployed all over the world. A few are 400 kW:
https://insideevs.com/news/375020/repsol-most-powerful-charg...
500 kW chargers are within the CCS specification (1,000 volts, 500 amps). Longer term I imagine companies will start deploying 500 kW CCS chargers.
Having a battery that can handle that and not get hot or loose capacity is really useful.
As for 500kw chargers, depending on the round trip efficiency and the discharge rate, using these batteries as a charging source would seem reasonable. It also would be useful for grid stabilization, having something that can instantly absorb a few megawatts would be really useful.
I think it is much easier to just swallow the pill an work with high current which at least is not going to immediately kill you if you manage to nick the cable or complete the circuit with your body in some other way.
Al/graphene in this form could be more cost effective and probably marginally lighter due to a lack of cooling/heating needed, safety equipment, and rare earth minerals needed.
That it charges faster and has more durability over recharge cycles would be a bonus.
Another open question is if you can produce this at industrial scale relatively cheaply, because having affordable gigawatt storage for renewables would be lovely.
This: https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/gmg-graphene-aluminiu...
may be a better article. Here is a clarifying quote:
> Dr Ashok Nanjundan, GMG’s Chief Scientific Officer, said, “This is a real game-changing technology which can offer a real alternative with an interchangeable battery technology for the existing lithium-ion batteries in almost every application with GMG’s Graphene and UQ’s patent-pending aluminium ion battery technology. The current nominal voltage of our batteries is 1.7 volts, and work is being carried out to increase the voltage to directly replace existing batteries and which lead to higher energy densities.”
> “The real differentiator about these batteries is their very high power density of up to 7000 watts/kg, which endows them with a very high charge rate. Furthermore, graphene aluminium-ion batteries provide major benefits in terms of longer battery life (over 2000 charge / discharge cycles testing so far with no deterioration in performance), battery safety (very low fire potential) and lower environmental impact (more recyclable),” said Dr Ashok Nanjundan.
The durability, operation at all temperature, and use of common, "easily" obtained ingredients are very relevant though.
A typical water tower holds about 4 million liters of water and is about 50m tall.
The Racoon Mountain Pumped Storage reservoir holds 410 BILLION liters of water (so 410 thousand times what a water tower holds) and has a head of 320m.
So you'd need about 1.6 million water towers with energy extraction capability to be equivalent to just that one pumped storage plant, ignoring the fact that you'd have to do /something/ with that water to extract the energy at the right time, when typically it's just drained out as people need it for faucets/showers/whatever.
On top of this, you'd be dropping a lot of the pressure from the water tower, which is like 99% of the reason that water towers exist, to provide adequate water pressure.
You might be right for other companies though, until Tesla proves extreme range has a market and they have to catch up again.
You can try various options easily here: https://abetterrouteplanner.com/
Non-tesla charging stations are even worse, and become buggy when trying to charge the mach E at the rate the vehicle attempts.
No, the fastest charging cars on the road today are CCS cars and so far none of them can make full use of a 350 kW CCS charging station.
The Porsche Taycan and the Audi e-tron GT have peak charging speeds of 270 kW. The Lucid Air is supposed to have a peak charge rate above 300 kW. The Audi e-tron charges at 150 kW but its charging curve is flat to 80% so it ends up being one of the fastest charging EVs. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 peak at around 225 kW and stay above 130 kW to reach 80% state of charge in 18 minutes.
> GMG is an Australian-based clean-tech disruptive company listed on the TSXV (TSXV:GMG) that produces graphene and hydrogen by cracking methane (natural gas) instead of mining graphite
I wonder about the long term environmental impact of a technology that - at present - depends on continued fossil fuel extraction.
https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/gmg-graphene-aluminiu...
Creating graphene from gas instead of mining does seem cleaner, as methane can and probably will use green sources in the future.
For NG -> graphene conversion, I don't see a problem, unless you're using it to smelt aluminum. OTOH, if batteries displace fossil fuel use, that seems like a huge positive, even with moderate amounts of aluminum smelting.
You need a lot of gas to make a bit of solid.
But maybe the process is better than direct combustion if you’re still able to use the process heat for something like district heating.
Better to get the carbon sequestered in graphite instead of CO2.
> The new battery cells are claimed to deliver far more energy density than current lithium-ion batteries, without the cooling, heating or rare-earth problems they face.
> “So far there are no temperature problems. Twenty percent of a lithium-ion battery pack (in a vehicle) is to do with cooling them. There is a very high chance that we won’t need that cooling or heating at all,” Nicol claimed.
Am I off base by saying, this is potentially world changing if true?
Would you accept half the battery life/range if it means you can recharge in 5 minutes instead of an hour? In phones, probably not. In cars and trucks, maybe, depending on the specific application. In stationary storage? Quite possibly!
This kind of hybrid may be impractical because it still requires cooling equipment (and its added weight) for the Li-ion, I'm just spitballing here.
1) Lifetime - Historically aluminum ion batteries struggle with cycle life. The aluminum ions are bigger than lithium ions so the batteries endure more strain during charge/discharge cycles. For grid-scale storage, you need to be able to last >10,000 cycles so they need to address this.
2) Scaling up the size of the batteries. Eventually they will need to move on from coin cells and start making larger battery cells. Many technologies struggle to keep their fast charge/discharge characteristics when they scale up in size. We'll see how they do with this.
The fastest chargers seem to be in the 250kW range. That's a lot (on par with a loaded tractor-trailer moving at highway speed), requiring sophisticated cooling of the chargers themselves, and complaints that the cables are too heavy for some people.
If we could charge 60x faster, would it be feasible to hook up a 10 megawatt cable to it? That's literally the power output of a small country.
I suspect that alcohol fuel produced by carbon-neutral methods makes more sense for (hybrid electric motor) vehicles than batteries when you factor in the environmental costs of production and disposal.
If feels like only production ready tech with that will really change the dynamics of the market should make their way through - almost none of them are ever going to make it to market and I don't feel like I am any better for knowing about all of them.
Are iPhone batteries considered coin cells? Isn't a coin cell like the ones shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_cell which are much smaller in capacity? If he is indeed referring to a 2000-4000mAh battery size then that is amazing.
It even contradicts their own numbers, which calculated the charge time for an average phone to 1 - 5 minutes [0].
IMO this article is just a hot mess cobbled together by someone who doesn't have the faintest idea about what he's even writing about.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gmg-graphene-aluminium-ion-ba...
In comparison a package battery like in an EV is made up of many individual cells to provide higher voltages. An iPhone can run on 3 or 4 volts, but a Tesla cannot.
https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/gmg-graphene-aluminiu...
That said, nearly everything else sounds very promising... just like all the other extremely promising battery R&D press releases. Let's hope this one's for real.
The good news, though? EVs will be at least twice as good in 2030 as they are today.