Lithium-oxygen battery can store 5 times more power

New breakthrough research published in the Nature science journal describes a prototype for a so-called “lithium-oxygen” battery, based on lithium superoxide (LiO2) that can store up to five times the energy of current lithium-ion batteries.
True win for smartphones.
http://bgr.com/2016/01/25/lithium-oxygen-battery-research/

 

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Very interesting.

A side effect that is often forgotten: Cells like these slowly reach the energy density of rocket fuels and low grade explosives. They become increasingly useful, but also potentially dangerous. Particularly due to their ability to deliver the stored energy in short time frames, much like the mentioned fuels.

I hope that companies will not try to push such cells before the safety problems are solved. There already have been cases of airplanes which had to land because a cell stack began to smoke (no open fire), and several laptops and smartphones went on fire due to battery problems.

But we urgently need better storage for electric energy, both in small as in large scales, so every advancement is very welcome.

 

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For large scale storage, the super flywheel is very attractive. Some work on it was done 35 years ago at APL/JHU where I worked by Dan Rabenhorst. Mainly testing various designs to destruction by over spinning them. One which did very well was basically a circular fiber brush. It does not completely fail all at once like a disk or hoop does, but various fibers snap and that absorbes energy even before they slam into the vacuum containment wall. Other fibers may hit the one leaving and that collision absorbs energy too. So soon after one fails you have a pile of hot dust inside the vaccuum chamber. A lot of the energy also goes into creation of square miles of new dust surface as well as the temperature rise.

They can run on non-disipative magnetic bearing and spin in a high vaccuum, and then have loss rates about the same as storage batteries now used for large scale storage of electrical energy. Dan's did not. They used bearings and their losses were constantly made up by energy fed to the common shaft generator/motor. His interest was in achievable energy density and how to contain one when it was failing.

They are much less costly to build than battery storage for power companies. Also they can deliver their stored energy much more quickly (higher peak power possible) than batteries which are limited to about 1/C, as I recall.

I am mystified as to why they are not in serious development now. (Perhaps they are and I just don't know of it?)

 

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Safety concerns. You cannot safely dissipate (for example) 20 kilowatt-hours in a few seconds as a flywheel comes apart.

 

Also, the gyroscope effect would make their use in moving objects problematic.

Higher efficiency lithium batteries aren't without their own safety risks, but they are potentially a game-changer if this is true (every pop-sci announcement needs that disclaimer). One of the biggest current knocks against electric cars is the massive and yet insufficient capacity battery packs.

 

And combined with this (another one of Plasmainferno's threads):

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/cheap-plastic-film-prevents-batteries-from-overheating.154850/

perhaps safer, too.

Prior to this, a MnO2 battery chemistry was combined with the Li-ion technology to reduce the likelihood of such batteries catching fire. You don't want that; Li-ion batteries reach temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees F when they burn out of control, sufficient heat to be lethal if your mobile device catches fire in your pocket.

It sounds like the new battery described in this thread may also have found a way to mitigate the tendency of such batteries to expand and burst in non-pressurized storage compartments at altitudes greater than 15,000 feet, once a major problem for the shipment of large quantities of Li-ion technology batteries.

I was briefly part of the battery engineering group that tested the Ultralife 9V Li-ion batteries that caught fire in the overhead compartment of a commercial flight. They disassembled the battery in an Argon glovebox and discovered the characteristic green colored cathode material that indicates the presence of metallic Lithium absorbed in the cathode metal. This would be normal only for a primary (non-rechargeable) battery type, but these are supposed to remain sealed. Coin type Li-ion primary batteries seldom if ever catch fire like the Ultralife 9V did, but a lot more metallic lithium is present in this particular battery as opposed to a coin type.

One easy way to render a rechargeable (or "secondary") type of Li-ion battery into a non-rechargeable (or "primary") battery like the one that caught fire in the aircraft is to charge them while that battery is stored at low temperature.

Battery safety can be a tricky business, and each design has unique characteristics that need to be taken into account to use them to best and safe advantage.

https://my.teslamotors.com/forum/fo...200-times-energy-density-lithiumion-batteries

Hydrogen fuel cells have about 200 times the energy density of current Li-ion batteries, but look what one did to Apollo 13.

 

That was what Dan Rabenhorst was exploring. Certainly the energy stored in any one unit will be limited. But he tested to destruction many designs. The best as I recall was fine radial wires (of high tensile strength material -glass or steel I forget). When they fail and slam into the inner wall of the vacuum chamber not only do they become red hot, but shatter into dust sized pieces. It is amazing how much energy is required to produce that new surface area. I don't recall how many KWH was in the spinning "circular brush" and am too lazy to try to calculate the surface energy in micron dust speck of steel or glass dust.

But Dan did demonstrate safe failure of units with higher energy density than the common lead acid battery. I don't think Li-ion batteries yet existed back then. Your comments prompted me to do a little Google search on: Dan+Rabenhorst+super+flywheel, which got too many hits to read all. Here is what seems to be the last significant US effort - Very promising, but dropped when its NASA funding was cut:

* With two units spinning in opposite direction there need not be any net angular momentum to bias satellite orientation.

Here is link to 20 studies: http://worldwidescience.org/topicpages/s/systems flywheel energy.html

Number 16 of the 20 is the most recent in Sweden dated 2008. I have not read it yet, but recall, that Sweden did more than a decade earlier have a flywheel power bus (at least one, probably several) but the early ones were just simple iron disk flywheels. For mobile use ALL the breaking energy can be very efficient recovered as energy can be put back into a flywheel at much higher rate (power level) than into an equal weight battery. I.e. With battery storage, most of a fast stop's breaking energy is just dissipated in heat.

I believe the Swedish bus route was basically level so only minor gymbaling was required and at some stops, the minor loss of energy was restored by contact with an overhead, recharge pole. That may have been only at the end of the line while driver took a coffee and bath room break. (With that efficient recovery of ALL breaking energy, there is very little net energy loss per 100KM)


Dan was my friend, much older than me at APL/JHU, and retired a few years after I joined APL, but we were part of a small group concerned with improving energy systems. I invented and worked on CASES*, Community Annual Energy Storage System. (Excess heat of summer returned in winter.) I think Google will still tell more about it and link to the paper I published on results of detailed study of a specific community. (The Norfolk Naval base, as they were paying our small group.)

*It got heat for winter from large ice machine - rotating circular drum, with the thin, just formed, ice scrapped off on each rotation - Very little Delta T across the thin ice, so high COP, coeficient of performance. That ice was stored in insulated quansit huts, and provided the cooling need in summer. In a well balanced community the COP could approach 10. Near ground temperature, uninsulated, cheap, plastic pipes with warm and cool water flowing in them extended into residential areas for the home's water source heat pumps to use as thermal source or sinks. - much more efficient than common air source ones, especially in winter.

Correction: there are 20 Flywheel systems on a page of above refference - but many pages for links to 500 systems / studies.

 

Many energy storage facilities have large destructive powers - finally they store a lot of potential energy. An artificial lake high up in a mountain valley, used as a source of water power can be catastrophic too, if the dam which holds the water, breaks.

All large scale energy capacitators of any make require safety measurements. Some more, some less.

 

Below is the abstract of paper less than a year old. No 26 of 500 at http://worldwidescience.org/topicpages/s/systems flywheel energy.html# I am slowly working my way thru the 500 to see if pioneer Dan Rabenhorst is given his do. Sweden continues to develope the supper flywheel, as it is cheaper, more KWH / KG and more efficient than battery systems, can deep discharge thousand of times without damage, and has several times longer useful life as well as not losing capacity in extreme cold weather as batteries do. As Dan Rabenhorst showed about four decades go, Billvon's post 4 concern about what happens when one fails is not of much significance with feasible systems.

Note the full article PDF [566 KB, uploaded 25 September 2015] is available for down load at the above mdpi.com site.

 

More news on improved batteries.
Team from Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has come up with a possible solution to boost battery performance by putting silicone "sawdust" in a custom-fit cage made of graphene, a pure form of carbon that is the thinnest and strongest material known and a great conductor of electricity.
In a report published Jan. 25 in Nature Energy, they describe a simple, three-step method for building microscopic graphene cages of just the right size: roomy enough to let the silicon particle expand as the battery charges, yet tight enough to hold all the pieces together when the particle falls apart, so it can continue to function at high capacity. The strong, flexible cages also block destructive chemical reactions with the electrolyte.

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http://phys.org/news/2016-01-silicon-sawdust-graphene-cage-boosts.html

 

Agreed. However, "feasible systems" cannot (and are not intended to) replace batteries:

"Flywheels are seen to excel in high-power applications, placing them closer in functionality to supercapacitors than to batteries."

If they were to be scaled up to the level of BESS, then the failure modes become catastrophic.

 

Why not? Batteries can not recover all the kinetic energy when a car going 60mph makes a rapid stop, but flywheels can. Post 9 includes a quote mentioning that more than 30 centers in Sweden are working on flywheel units for cars, and other links of the 500 link list I gave* said more that 400 buses are now using them, many in England as well as Sweden. (City buses do a lot of stopping - only a flywheel can recover all that breaking energy if both weigh the same. Also batteries have limited life / number of deep charge and discharge cycles)**

The unit NASA was developing for the space station is 13 inches in diameter and 17 inches long. They planned to use two so there is no net angular momentum. That and your claim flywheels were not for cars, gave my inventive mind an idea:

Why not make them a little longer, so a pair has length just a little less than the space between the car's rear wheels? Also reduce the diameter some - say external vacuum case OD = 10 inches with the greater than NASA lengths keeping about same peak stored energy. Their vacuum case replaces the rear axle with in-wheel electric motor/generators for drive and recovery of all breaking energy. I. e. their strong cylindrical external vacuum wall does "double duty" as the rear axle.*** With 18 inch (or greater) diameter rear wheels there should be adequate road clearance. I. e. (18-1o)/ 2 = 4 inches of road clearance. (This is not the best design but easier to describe - see foot note ***.)

The flywheel rear axles are mainly used for full breaking energy recovery and battery of less peak discharge rate (or fuel cell) provides the desired "all electric range" I. e. the axial flywheel*** gives the higher power need for rapid acceleration and passing at high speed.

* BTW Dan Rabenhorst is link 112 or the 500 -it is the final report, with a lot of photos, of the work he started in 1977 of about three years duration. I have 300 more to skim.

** Lead acid battery for starting IC engine car has relatively thick plates - thinner ones could heat warp and short out. But lead acid batteries for powering a small fishing boats have thin plates and store much more energy. (I had one for fishing on a Baltimore water reservoir - gasoline out board motors were prohibited.) The total energy any battery can hold is approximately proportional to the total plate area. I would guess, the electric only car range could be doubled with same thin plate battery weight if the flywheel ALWAYS supplied any high current (high power) demands.

*** If you don't want tires bigger than normal, then mount two counter rotating flywheels side by side a few inches above the center line between the tires. Most of the axle weight can still be eliminated. I. e. from both ends of the twin vacuum cases, a “tab” hangs down. That tab is triangular in shape. The two rear wheel axles are each a few inches long and bolt into the triangle near the lower apex. The two top ones are part of the ends of the twin vacuum chambers. These short axles are much like the ones now used for the front wheels.

SUMMARY: Thin battery plates + a small zero net momentum flywheels for periods of peak current demand makes for a great advance in the hybrid electric car range.

 

Batteries can indeed do that. Test drive a Tesla for a real life example.

Flywheels, unfortunately, cannot store all the energy needed to drive a car a reasonable distance, since even the best flywheels have about half the energy density of batteries.

Sure, that would work. So would batteries. In a fuel cell vehicle, you could use LiFePO4 - much higher power but slightly lower energy than lithium ion.

 

Yes if you have a lot of them to divide the peak current among. I was speaking of a car where the battery is small part of the cost, a few percent, yet showing how its "all electric range" could be about doubled with a thin plate battery and flywheel hybrid.

 

A closed metal air battery sort of defeats the purposed of a metal air battery.

 

This link in danshawen's post 6: https://my.teslamotors.com/forum/fo...200-times-energy-density-lithiumion-batteries

begins with: " How will Tesla who has rejected that hydrogen storage is a viable option, deal with this issue.
Compressed hydrogen has an energy density of 142 MJ/kg.
Lithium ion batteries have an energy density of 0.6 MJ/kg. "

That is quite a distortion: It does not include the weight of the high pressure steel tank confining the H2. It does not include the weight of the fuel cell that converts H2 into electrical energy, which is the Li-ion battery's output, instead of high pressure gas, which must be down pressure regulated to avoid exploding the fuel cell. Nor does it recognize that H2 is not and energy source, but a carrier of the electric energy that was used in the electrolysis that produced the H2.

Tesla is fully correct to ignore H2 and Big Oil is wise to promote it as it is not a practical threat to their billions of profit, like sugar cane based alcohol is. - Renewable fuel, CO2 net negative release, Greater HP in the same IC engine, and many other benefits, the most important of which is the creation of many thousands of low skill jobs for currently unemployed in tropical lands, making them into consumers of first world's products like medicine and electronics, etc. Big Oil has gotten US Congress to make importation of this alcohol illegal and from their POV that was millions well spent.

 

I'm intrigued by the gyroscopic issue if flywheels were to be used in mobile applications. I presume you would have to mount them with a vertical spin axis, to avoid gyro effects when turning left or right. But would you not still get unwanted effects, such as diving forward if a wheel fell into a pothole, or something?

 

I simply do not believe in this Big Oil conspiracy theory of yours. The US is not the world. If it were viable, why do we not see making more progress in other places, especially those with the right climate for sugar cane? What limits its use in Brazil for example? Or Cuba? Not "Big Oil", I think.

 

In Brazil, near “saturation” as only 100% of cars can use alcohol and some wealthy people drive imported cars, which need gasoline. Not sure about Cuba, but lack of distillation centers I would guess. Cuba certainly could grow cane but food and tobacco for cigars to export makes more money per acre. I bet they will be growing sugar cane and building distillation plant soon when the embargo is lifted for the same reason Brazil started*.

Why would big oil not use a tiny fraction of its income to protect sales, via lobbying? Why did Congress make importation of sugar cane alcohol illegal? Why does big oil tell lies like that switching to sugar cane alcohol would destroy the rain forests, etc.

* Under military rule, the generals wanted to conserve foreign exchange for imported weapons and crowd control water cannons, etc., and they had the power to mandate all gasoline stations sell alcohol too. In Cuba that central power exists too, and now that Venezuela is on the verge of collapse it will be used to avoid importing refined oil (gasoline). Currently Cuba supplies doctors, medicines and medical centers to Venezuela and gets paid in crude oil. Cuba does have refineries for that heavy oil.

In fact that is why US and Cuban relations collapsed. Initially US supported Castro. Helped him over throw Batiste, but Big Oil wanted him to buy its oil. That was not very feasible to process in Cuban refineries designed for heavy crude, so Castro refused. It was all down hill from there, which shows how much influence Big Oil has over most government, especially those where bribes are widely accepted and expected. Big Oil has an essentially unlimited supply of money for bribes, but of course in the US they are called “campaign contributions.”

* This might give you a hint as to why Democrats are concerned with global warming, but with few exceptions, (men of principle), Republicans are not and most deny it is man made if it is real.

It is much worse now than in 2006 when that was written. See the bar chart here: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=E01 which will not post. but here is the data for 2015:
Total for Oil & Gas: $128,645,515
Total Number of Clients Reported: 188
Total Number of Lobbyists Reported: 780

 

No. As I have noted and NASA planned, you use a pair spining in opposite directions so there is no net angular momentum. Read post 12 to see two different mounting positions for use in cars. (The *** footnote mounting is best.)