[HN Gopher] Lithium battery ripe for disruption, inventor says ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-16 23:00 UTC)