(Page 2 of 2)
Safety problems with lithium-metal batteries can arise when they're recharged. "When you charge and discharge, you have to electroplate and strip the metal over and over again," says Dahn, who is not a contributor to the IBM project. Over time, just as in a lithium-ion battery, the lithium-metal surface becomes rough, which can lead to thermal runaway, when the battery literally burns until all the reactants inside are used up. But Narayan says that lithium-air batteries are inherently safer than previously developed lithium-metal batteries as well as today's lithium-ion batteries because only one of the reactants is contained in the cell. "A lithium-air cell needs air from outside," says Narayan. "You will never get a runaway reaction because air is limited."
PolyPlus Battery has been working on lithium metal-air technology for about six years and has some dramatic evidence of the technology's viability: floating among clownfish in an aquarium tank at the company's headquarters, a lithium-metal battery pulls in oxygen from the salt water to power a green LED. The company has also developed a prototype battery that pulls oxygen from ambient air. But Steven Visco, founder and vice president of research at the company, says that lithium metal-air batteries are "still a young technology that's not ready to be commercialized."
IBM's Narayan points to two remaining major problems with lithium metal-air technology. First, the design of the cathode needs to be optimized so that the lithium oxide that forms when oxygen is pulled inside the battery won't block the oxygen intake channels. Second, better catalysts are needed to drive the reverse reaction that recharges the battery.
Narayan says that it won't be clear how much money and how much time the project will take until about a year and half from now, after research has begun. He estimates that the company will devote about five years to the project. IBM will probably not make the batteries but will license the technology to manufacturers.
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 >>>
.
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!
.
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.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
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?
Reply
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.
Reply