Posted on 08/16/2019 10:56:35 AM PDT by Red Badger
And after 50 cycles, it still had 54 percent capacity retention...
So, your car with a 300 mile range per charge, after 50 days, has a 150 mile range. How about after five years? 20 miles?
Someday they’ll get around to perfecting the nickel-iron battery, aka “Edison battery”. Yes, THAT Edison:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery
Duh … better than the first lithium batteryl
Di-lithium crystals for warp drive?
Yes, it underperforms now.
Btw, “cycles” isn’t days. Most people do not drive 300 miles a day. If you do you shouldn’t be driving EV anyway. A hybrid or just a fuel efficient high compression diesel would be better.
My own suspicion is that they may have been recharging the battery like they do a mature tech lithium batteries and that battery memory is a significant issue at this time if you don’t do something extra. It may sound like I’m insulting but really it isn’t uncommon for people to just overlook obvious things while they hunt down percentages.
I wonder what the effect of nano particles which greatly increase surface area without increasing size or weight on that type would be?
I think of a cycle as “drain and charge.” So, if you drive 50 miles a day and charge overnight, I see that as a “Cycle.”
Frankly, I think the future is in something more like a graphene capacitor.
This is the first time (this month) that a new promising battery technology has been announced!
Cannot wait for this breakthrough be a reality, just like the 50 or so other battery “breakthroughs” we’ve read about over the past few years! Oh wait, nothing came of those either...
Iron is so plentiful, that it might be an option for mass storage on the electric grid.
Bummer this is happening in India.
The cost to mine a ton of iron? $108.94 The cost to mine a ton of lithium? $2,180.00.
While these preliminary numbers suggest a low battery life for an iron battery, suppose after 30 cycles the iron batt retains 75% capacity. So a low-mileage user might swap out batteries at some sort of swap-station after 30 days or 45 days. An in-town driver might get 90 days out of a cycle.
Costs to replace a lithium batt are estimated to be from $1K to $6K, a range so wide so as to be ridiculous. I have no direct experience. Allegedly they last 2-3 years. But we know lithium is a problem on the supply front. Suppose a Li 30 month batt costs $3K, $100 a month. Lithium costs roughly $10 per kilo, iron is pennies. It’s not inconceivable that a rapid-and-cheap-replace iron battery pack that only lasts a month and costs $100 to swap out wouldn’t be the functional equivalent of a lithium batt.
I don’t know, there are a lot of interconnected factors, obviously. Just sayin’. We *do* have a history of replacing costly elements with cheaper ones; iron for lithium would be about as dramatic as imaginable. We went from platinum catalysts in cat converters to palladium, however those are both extremely rare metals. In the process, platinum went from $2000 to $850 and now sells for $600 less than gold, when it is 10x as rare a metal as gold in nature. (a nearly unfathomable anomaly) And palladium went from (depends where you measure from) $600-700 to $100 LESS than gold or about $1430. Yes, I recognize lithium is about 1/14th the weight of iron and that is sweet for vehicle use. But iron is so bloody cheap, there MUST be an economic argument in there somewhere.
Iron is heavier than lithium. So, wouldn’t the batteries be heavier.
“The cost to mine a ton of iron? $108.94 The cost to mine a ton of lithium? $2,180.00”
14x $109 = $1526.
Not so spectacularly different when you consider iron is about 14x as “weighty” as lithium.
Di-lithium crystals for warp drive?
~~~
Marianne Williamson crystals for a warped love
What weighs more? A ton of feathers or a ton of gold?
That would sure present an issue with memory.
But for those trying to advance the idea I would see them as focusing on their best options, they need to get funding ... then they can go for realism on how real consumers will recharge.
Sure, it's not ready for prime time. But, the possibility that batteries can be made of rust instead of lithium is worth investigating to see if it can be made a practical reality.
They weigh the same. But a ton of lithium occupies 14x as much space as a ton of iron and the number of times a steamshovel or excavator has to dig out a load of raw ore and load up a truck is probably at least 3x as many times as with iron, since the concentration of lithium in its ore is much less than with iron.
Iron concentration in taconite can be 15% - 50% though 30% is more common as an upper limit. Lithium in spodumene ranges from 1-6%, and the process for extracting the metal from ore are a lot more complex with Li than with Fe.
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