Australian battery tech company Li-S Energy has a major improvement in the performance of its lithium-sulfur battery technology, with its latest battery achieving an energy density close to 500 Wh/kg. It is semi solid state battery.
They are manufactured full-size 10 Ah semi-solid-state cells that deliver an energy density of 498 Wh/kg on first discharge and 456 Wh/kg after formation cycling, with the cells continuing to cycle in ongoing testing.
They have a commercial approach to testing. They testing full-size 10 Ah and 20 Ah pouch cells produced on their automated production line and reporting performance after formation cycling. Other companies use smaller coin cells and use the first cell discharge performance.
They are working with Queensland-based drone developer V-TOL Aerospace and New South Wales solar cell maker Halocell Energy to develop drones using its lithium-sulfur batteries.
Li-S Energy will enhance cell reliability, production accuracy and throughput at its 2 MWh production facility in Victoria.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Hmmm… taking the whole informercial as what it is, using a scalpel to trim out the obvious pro-futurist unaffiliated points (e.g. the hover-car bits), then going on to read these comments and counterpoints, I am left with a “gee, that’s cool” and a “doesn’t really seem revolutionary though” reaction.
0.5 kWh/kg is pretty darn good, for the lil’ cells. Lil’ cells though are not a car’s (or hovercraft’s) battery-pack-installed-and-certified, are they? No. Lil’ cells are … well, one can paint this many ways … are somewhere from 80% down to less than 50% of the mass of manufacturable, environmentally-and-physically protected, fault-tolerant self-protected battery packs, aren’t they?
The issue there is that 80% of 0.5 kWh/kg is 0.4 kWh per kilogram. And 50% is 0.25 kilowatt hour per kilogram. Awe… darn.
STILL, not to be a Cynical Old Goat, the half kilowatt-hour per kilogram is attractive. IF the company can also show (without all the silly tech-lingo-speak) that they can achieve a reliable 1,000 near-full charge-discharge cycles, at a end-of-life point offering at least 75% of original spec capacity, and with significant progress to packing these things tightly together without causing an INFERNO situation, well that’d be astounding and wonderful.
Meanwhile. Not yet a real answer for flying cars. Hovercraft by any other name. Pretty metallic green hoverbugs require prodigious power to go NOwhere. And only modestly more to go zipping off in any direction the joystick operator deems good. It’s gonna take some big damm kilowatt-hours to make practical, short-to-medium-range e-fliers a commercial option. (Or a tiny propane-turbine generator in a well muffled compartment for true hybrid-power operation.)
Just Sayin….
State-of-art batteries are already good enough for land vehicles, only the price needs to be — an will be — somewhat lowered. Further improvement is needed in first place for aircraft. The 500 Wh/kg is the minimal requirement. For cars the cost is much more important, especially in view of improving infrastructure.
Let’s compare
High density battery
Energy density: 500 W*hr/kg
Average motor efficiency: 75%
Effective energy density: 375 W*hr/kg
Gasoline:
Energy density: 12,700 W*hr/kg
Average motor density: ~25%
Effective energy density: 3,175 W*hr/kg
So the ratio of the density of energy used to do actual work is 8.4 to 1.
I’m impressed. I thought it would be way worse. Now, I only need 310 lbs of batteries to replace my 13-gallon gas tank on my Chevy HHR.
Later you check real cars and see that the difference is not as big as it seems.
For multiple reasons.
At first, range is only a problem when it’s not enough. The impact between a thousand mile range and a million mile range is minimal, as a thousand range is more than enough for anyone to use it.
That’s the reason about the “small” tank of most ICE. It’s… enough. You can add a bigger tank and have more weight. Not too impactful on efficiency, as hydrocarbon is very energetic dense, but… you just don’t need more, and you will probably prefer the efficiency and the extra space.
On other side, ICE drivetrain weight a lot more and occupy more space than electric train (without battery). So that extra space and weight is used on the battery itself.
Still there are margin of choice between big or smaller batteries. as a smaller battery means less consumption and cheaper ownership while bigger batteries bring you more range.
In the end, you will check that it’s not true that common ICE has ten times the range of a EV one. Not because it can, but because it’s not desirable. If range argument were absolute, we would use nuclear cars, not fuel based. Of course the problems of nuclear energy for cars are so numerous that almost nobody takes that idea seriously.
That makes your argument useless in the context of real cars. It’s true in the physical sense (while engine efficiency can change between context) but overall for real cars, it’s not a useful way to compare between them.
So the real comparison here is EV vs EV, as we reach a range and price that fulfill most people needs, so it becomes a minor issue to add even more battery for a non-used range.
People is gonna compare if time to refuel/recharge is similar, price comparison both ownership and refuel, and other things.
Density of the fuel? A useless anecdote per se.
Well i drive a plugin hybrid and its cheaper for me to tide on elec. Than gas. Now for the ?same price? In the future i could get a twice as big battery, twice as much range, thats me stopping only twice a year at the gas station, as in for a big trip or to get he gasoline refreshed… ever drove one? Harshest comments are always from the people who not drove an ev.. there really much difference in this capacity, capacity will expand further not to forget… the ev is unstoppable. Aside from that id be happy not be in the pesky diesel fumes anymore.
EV motors are more like 85% to 90% efficient.
Now compare the total powertrain weight. Lucid’s drive unit is 74kg which includes inverter, transmission, differential, and motor, and it gets 430 horsepower. And it doesn’t need near as much cooling as the ICE engine, which is converting 75% of its energy to waste heat. So that’s less weight in radiator, coolant, and coolant pipes, plus there’s no exhaust pipe or catalytic converter. Also no starter motor.
These water batteries from China have more than twice the power density!
https://www.batterytechonline.com/design-manufacturing/aqueous-battery-s-energy-storage-capacity-blows-li-ion-cells-out-of-the-water
1200 Wh/L, but nothing about Wh/kg, so real comparison is hardly possible. If they are so modest about the later indicator, than arises doubt that gravitational energy density is less then stellar.
If I had a buck for every battery breakthrough article I’ve seen in the last decade …
Every ‘breakthrough’ is a modest increase in energy density or some other important performance factor, such as number of recharges, over the previous best battery.
So over a few decades it adds up to major performance improvements.
I still want to see a practical lithium-air battery. That would actually be close to the energy density of a petroleum fuel.
That would be an “incremental -through” and not a breakthrough.
Breakthroughs have been seamlessly incorporated into every product around you since forever, including batteries. We call it innovation and the march of progress.
We make battery systems for drones.
We use the world’s best cells. We have cells in stock of 550 wh/kg and many suppliers that are above 400 wh/kg.
We’re talking to companies that have 600 wh/kg in the lab. That will be the next frontier.
but what cycle life at higher than 1c discharge?
You don’t think that’s part of the equation of a successful product? They’re just going to build a battery good for THREE charge cycles? Get real.
most high capacity (>350Wh/kg) batteries I’ve looked into have cycle life to 80% of less than 100 cycles. LiS chemistry is particularly bad for this.
For most daily-charging products you need more like 1000 cycles, and for some like air-taxis ideally charging up to several times per hour you really want many thousands of cycles.
And they will. No one is going to build a TV that only turns on/off a dozen times. No one is going to sell a blender that only makes five margaritas and then self destructs. Same for batteries. No one is going release a product unless it fills the requirements of the application.
Li-S Energy says they’ve fixed the short cycle life. They’re using boron-nitride nanotubes, which they’ve figured out how to mass produce.