Waterproof power: This protective casing envelops a functioning lithium-metal battery electrode, excluding water but letting lithium ions pass. It’s part of a prototype battery made by PolyPlus Battery of Berkeley, CA.
PolyPlus
The company hopes to develop powerful, lightweight lithium-air batteries.
IBM Research is beginning an ambitious project that it hopes will lead to the commercialization of batteries that store 10 times as much energy as today's within the next five years. The company will partner with U.S. national labs to develop a promising but controversial technology that uses energy-dense but highly flammable lithium metal to react with oxygen in the air. The payoff, says the company, will be a lightweight, powerful, and rechargeable battery for the electrical grid and the electrification of transportation.
Lithium metal-air batteries can store a tremendous amount of energy--in theory, more than 5,000 watt-hours per kilogram. That's more than ten-times as much as today's high-performance lithium-ion batteries, and more than another class of energy-storage devices: fuel cells. Instead of containing a second reactant inside the cell, these batteries react with oxygen in the air that's pulled in as needed, making them lightweight and compact.
IBM is pursuing the risky technology instead of lithium-ion batteries because it has the potential to reach high enough energy densities to change the transportation system, says Chandrasekhar Narayan, manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, CA. "With all foreseeable developments, lithium-ion batteries are only going to get about two times better than they are today," he says. "To really make an impact on transportation and on the grid, you need higher energy density than that." One of the project's goals, says Narayan, is a lightweight 500-mile battery for a family car. The Chevy Volt can go 40 miles before using the gas tank, and Tesla Motors' Model S line can travel up to 300 miles without a recharge.
One of the main challenges in making lithium metal-air batteries is that "air isn't just oxygen," says Jeff Dahn, a professor of materials science at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia. Where there's air there's moisture, and "humidity is the death of lithium," says Dahn. When lithium metal meets water, an explosive reaction ensues. These batteries will require protective membranes that exclude water but let in oxygen, and are stable over time.
IBM does not currently have battery research programs in place. However, Narayan says that IBM has the expertise needed to tackle the science problems. In addition to Oak Ridge, IBM will partner with Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, and Pacific Northwest national labs. The company and its collaborators are currently working on a proposal for funding from the U.S. Department of Energy under the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
Research on lithium-metal batteries stalled about 20 years ago. In 1989, Canadian company Moli Energy recalled its rechargeable lithium-metal batteries, which used not air but a more traditional cathode, after one caught fire; the incident led to legal action, and the company declared bankruptcy. Soon after, Sony brought to market the first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which were safer, and research on lithium-metal electrodes slowed nearly to a halt. (After restructuring, Moli Energy refocused its research efforts and is now selling lithium-ion batteries under the name Molicel.) Only a handful of labs around the world, including those at PolyPlus Battery, in Berkeley, CA, Japan's AIST, and St. Andrews University, in Scotland, are currently working on lithium-air batteries.
Researchers at IBM now know how long a single atom can "remember" its state.
Battery breakthroughs could lower costs and improve performance for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage--but commercializing these new technologies will be challenging.
Development is a step toward making such batteries practical for electric vehicles.
Your penultimate paragraph indicates that IBM et al. want the taxpayers to do the investing.
Instead of using a molecular sieve to filter the oxygen. Provide the O2 from a pressure vessel?
I need this energy density today!
Then it will not be lightweight and compact anymore. It'll be heavy and bulky.
I hope the IBM researchers are not missing the market place requirements. Nearly all bulk energy storage applications, including electric vehicles are driven by cost and recharge time not kilowatt-hours per kilogram. The product I am working on has the highest peak energy density, the longest life >30 years, lowest cost per kilowatt-hour and greatest cycle efficiency >95%. Grid storage requires large volumes of inexpensive storage. The IBM product will be best suited for portable electronics rather than bulk energy storage unless they can demonstrate <$100 per kilowatt-hour in cost. The company I work for is at www-.1-ltl.com Always good to see what others are researching.
>>> it's a GREAT NEWS for the electric cars >>>
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despite the new Lithium metal-air batteries are THE DEATH of MY idea of a swappable battery "cellphoneCAR" [ http://ow.ly/dOIK ] I'm VERY HAPPY to read about it (and the IBM interest in this research) since they will help the electric cars to (finally!) become (soon!) a COMMERCIAL REALITY allowing the cars industry to produce millions electric cars with half sized and half priced battery packs but 500-1000 miles of autonomy!
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Re: >>> it's a GREAT NEWS for the electric cars >>>
Some major car companies have been working on this for some time. One of the french brands actually presented this at the 2009 IAA in Frankfurt. Can't remember which one it was but the system was quite interesting.
Comparing batteries to fuel cells doesn't make sense as fuel cells are not energy storage devices.
Batteries and capacitors store energy and release it.
Fuel cells convert fuel (hydrogen, methanol, etc) to electricity by combining air or O2 plus the chemical and outputing either water if H2 reacted with O2, water plus a few trace nitrogen compounds if H2 is reacted with air instead of pure O2, or carbon dioxide plus water if a carbon chemical like methanol is involved.
they can be indefinitely refueled till the membrane wears out at the speed of pouring liquid reactants (methanol for example), just like filling your tank with gasoline or diesel.
You don't 'store' anything in a fuel cell. You turn them on, heat them to operating temperature and they process fuel just like an internal combustion engine, except twice as efficient as they turn the chemical energy directly into electricity instead of into hot gas then into motion or then motion into magnetic fields to electricity
perhaps in a simplified form for trivial applications the combination of micro-fuel cell plus methanol cartridge for fueling a laptop or cellphone could be thought of like a battery, but again is not recharged, the methanol cannister is replaced with a new one.
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dwwhouse
1 Comment
Limited Resources?
Not to demean any technology for its advancements and potential contributions, but to try to keep things in perspective, how much can any one technology contribute to our energy problem?
The question for lithium batteries is applicable for any other energy technology. Even assuming a technology is ready for deployment and is operating at its fullest potential, there are questions of strategic availability, accessibility, manufacturing/refining capacity, distribution, environmental impact and commercial viability of the necessary raw materials and finished product.
In lithium's case, what are the estimated lithium reserves, where are they located and what is the projected demand? There are certainly reserve limits and accessibility issues. Even with efficient recycling efforts, the auto industry alone would require huge quantities of lithium to power every car world wide, replacing the gasoline engine. How far can this be taken?
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SJA
1 Comment
Re: Limited Resources?
There does seem to be an assumption that we are looking for a single technology and a single resource to replace those that we have (for a short while longer) - or at least as few as possible. Is that necessary, or would it make more sense to develop as diverse a group as possible, and use whichever was locally most appropriate?
In any case, I agree that a sentence or two about reserves for the main resources, and their accessibility, would improve any article about a new technology.
Reply
MakeSense
99 Comments
Re: Limited Resources?
Your comments about Lithium are valid concerns. Maybe advancements in metal-air batteries can eventually be applied to aluminum-air batteries. Research has been directed there in the past. Maybe the abundance of aluminum or some other suitable metal will become a trade-off for the lower performance of aluminum versus lithium. It could well be that an aluminum-air battery would store three times the energy and still be light-weight, inexpensive and meet consumers' expectations.
Reply
DeepOcean
8 Comments
Re: Limited Resources?
There are plenty of lithium in the ocean. Right now just a little bit hard to extract, as we have enough cheap resources on land. But if one we short of lithium, for sure someone will pull them from seawater. maybe Korean,maybe Japanese.
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