Researchers Achieve 'Holy Grail' Of Battery Design: A Stable Lithium Anode

Well, they are flying with battery powered airplanes now.

We do seem to be making progress and that's a good thing.

I say go for it.

I'd like to know what's happening with those tiny lithium batteries that can charge in one second and have so much power that your phone could jump-start your dead car battery:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/alternative-power-sources/microbatteries-recharge-phones-instantly-130418.htm

We keep hearing about these breakthroughs, and then ...

you mean this?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3x_kYq3mHM

And they are leaving aside what's most impressive: you do that jump start thru the AWG40 tiny wires within your phone !!! I got to bow with awe !

Doggone Discovery...

LOL. Good point. I think what they actually said was that there was enough energy in a tiny battery to jump start your car. Maybe you actually have to take the battery out and clamp jumper cables to each side. Or maybe you can get special phones that have two quarter inch bolts sticking out to connect jumper cables to.

Hey, superconducting connectors have been also been in development for years. About time they did something with them. All you have to do is connect your phone to the car, dunk your new special phone in liquid nitrogen, and turn the key. That's cheaper than the liquid helium they used to need. That's progress.

There is another type of battery which claims to be 10 X the volumetric energy density of Lithium Ion - and even higher than gasoline! Shock horror! This is the vanadium boride (VB2)/air battery. So far it's only a primary cell - not rechargeable.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/07/researchers-d-2.html

I've struggled to understand the reaction, but it appears that both the vanadium and boron are oxidized during discharge and 11 electrons are produced by the VB2 anode. I think that the VB2 may be an interstitial compound, in which the V and B are present as the elements - not positive and negative ions, thus both may be oxidized, V to the +5 state and B to the +3 state, hence 11 electrons per "mole."

All sounds very "pie in the sky," but who knows?

From what I see the volumetric energy density of the VB2/air fuel cell (not a rechargable cell) would not be intrinsically higher than gasoline, but maybe so when gasoline is burned in a 27-30% efficient manner. Further, this requires Magnesium liquid metal for regenerating the VB2 anodes. Solar schemes exist for production of magnesium, but these rely on solar-pumped Nd:Cr:YAG laser crystals (these are by no means cheap on any scale, much less as large diameter active gain media). The system is known as Helios and certain Japanese companies and researchers have long range plans to build (one) here in the USA (probably in solar Arizona or Nevada). The Atacama desert would be another good candidate location. By the time the magnesium reaches final destination, I doubt the cost will be worth it. Would be better to produce solar electricity (and wind energy), then funnel that into large scale magnesium production, and use the chlorine produced for secondary energy release (probably a fuel cell where chlorine gets reduced back to chloride as hydrogen chloride).

Somewhere else I was reading a while back on the possibility of development of a sodium ion battery - supposedly with less problems that the lituim ion battery. Also, sodium is entirely abundant and available everywhere (geochemically speaking, that is).

Let me guess....

They will develop a battery that has 10x the power density of it's predecessor then put it in an EV but use one that is 10x smaller in size than the it's predecessor and still claim that battery tech is not advanced enough for commercial scale EV use.

no.... wait.. didn't they already to that when lithium based batteries came out and were used to replace the LA batteries that the old EV's ran on?

1970. EV tech sucks because LA battery systems are huge. We need something that packs 10x the power in the same size and mass.

2000. EV tech sucks because lithium battery tech sucks. (Granted we only us 1/10th of the batteries that the LA systems used but hey you know...)

2030 EV tech sucks because battery tech XYZ can't power a suv for 500 miles off of a 'D' cell sized battery. Sure we could put 1,000 of them in the vehicle without compromising space but well you know...

That's my take on this.