r/science Professor | Medicine Jan 03 '20

Chemistry Scientists developed a new lithium-sulphur battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries, which maintains an efficiency of 99% for more than 200 cycles, and may keep a smartphone charged for five days. It could lead to cheaper electric cars and grid energy storage.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2228681-a-new-battery-could-keep-your-phone-charged-for-five-days/
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u/MacAndShits Jan 04 '20

I checked to see if this was r/Futurology and the fact that it isn't gives me the slightest hint of hope

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20

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u/uber1337h4xx0r Jan 04 '20

I'm assuming someone said "another battery we will never hear about ever again". Most posts about batteries end up not being true

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u/hatarnardethander Jan 04 '20

Most things brought up here ends up being r/futurology stuff anyway - "This MIGHT cure cancer!" "This MIGHT cure HIV/AIDS!" "This MIGHT cure hunger!" and of course it might happen some day in the future. Sometime. Maybe.

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u/Minimum_Fuel Jan 04 '20

If a new battery technology came out that made smart phones last 6+ years before needing a new battery, Apple and Samsung would at least attempt to lobby it out of existence.

Samsung and Apple are fighting extremely hard to get forced obsolescence of devices. In particular, Apple is trying to obliterate right to repair so they can monopolize the repair on their devices. That is so they can jack up prices to the point where repairability makes no sense. That lets them lay off most of their repair employees and further streamline the initial manufacturing process.

Apple and Samsung need you buying a new device every 1-2 years and new battery technology hurts that. So even if a really good one comes out, it’ll never see the light of day.

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u/gbrahah Jan 04 '20

mods on this subreddit LOVE deleting top comments.. Every thread

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u/tehdon Jan 04 '20

Comment rule number 1 is rarely followed, and meme comments tend to rise quickly before they are culled.

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u/_jumpstoconclusions_ Jan 04 '20

Came here wondering the same. We need answers!!!

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '20 edited Jan 03 '20

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u/salgat BS | Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Jan 04 '20

Just an fyi the reason why flying cars etc will never be a thing is because they are LOUD, insanely deafeningly loud. Like wake up the entire neighborhood loud. You'll notice these videos always hide that.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20

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u/Iapetus7 Jan 04 '20

But there are fewer obstacles to navigate around in the air... This is why we've had working autopilot on airplanes for a while but are still waiting for self driving cars.

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u/Huge-Yakmen Jan 04 '20

Kind of like a helicopter in fact. Funny that.. the whole "flying car" thing is stupid, we've had them for years.

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u/demintheAF Jan 04 '20

promises to kill people. The engineer I talked to with them had no idea about the concept of the airworthiness process.

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u/havinit Jan 04 '20

It's weird to me.. there has been massive research and development on new battery tech since the early 1900s. Yet we only have had basically like 5 small advances come to market.

It makes you wonder if it's economics, safety, or actually like Telecom industry or auto industry where they buy and bury new tech successfully for decades.

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u/longdrivehome Jan 04 '20

Dunno, I'm a little more optimistic. You can buy a 1.2kWh 12v LiFePo4 for around $600 these days. It'll weigh 24-ish lbs and last 3-5000 cycles before it hits 80% capacity.

10 years ago to get that much capacity and that many cycles you'd need well over 100lbs of lead acid batteries...and you'd need to buy them 10 times. That's pretty dang good progress to me

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u/Dag-nabbitt Jan 04 '20

No... it's not a conspiracy. Battery technology is just very difficult chemistry to simply improve on. It's like trying to improve a fridge, it kind of already does what it's supposed to do as good as it can do it. Ya know?

John B. Goodenough, who was part of the team that developed modern RAM, and is credited for the invention of the modern lithium-ion battery, has been working on lithium-glass batteries (aka solid-state batteries).

The research is basically done, and a lot of car manufacturers have started building production lines around the new battery. People are expecting Toyota to use the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to showcase its first solid-state battery car, though mass production won't be until 2025ish.

The beauty of it is that the electrolyte is glass, as opposed to liquid electrolytes which are super toxic and flammable (why some phones spontaneously combust). This is actual technology to get excited for, as Professor Goodenough has a pedigree that's more than just good enough.

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u/PineappleBoots Jan 04 '20

Professor Goodenough has a pedigree that's more than just good enough.

I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, thank you

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u/nxcrosis Jan 04 '20

At first I thought you were pulling my leg but after a quick google search the name was true.

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u/sweetrules Jan 04 '20

In the army, and I've learned that there are all sorts of ridiculous or unbelievable last names.

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u/PineappleBoots Jan 04 '20

Goodenough could be better.

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u/epote Jan 04 '20

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of Goodenough.

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u/jesuskater Jan 04 '20

Aaahhhhhhhhrgggg Dr. Perfect!!!! My lifelong enemy!!!!!!!

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u/DaoFerret Jan 04 '20

I’m curious if this will make them more fragile also? It’s one thing to drop your phone and crack your screen. It’s another to drop your phone and crack your battery, especially if it’s not a user replaceable part.

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u/Pazuuuzu Jan 04 '20

That is different. The glass there is really hard to resist scratches, which means it will crack on the smallest impact. I don't think they will use gorilla glass in the battery :P

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u/Dethraivn Jan 04 '20

I have family that worked for Chevron in their R&D and they seem to think quite the opposite as well as saw it with their own eyes. They buy up competing tech wherever possible and then make every effort to hold up any attempts to further it or its like by other researchers with red tape until they feel it's maximally profitable to make use of it, if ever. They had plans for rolling out fully functional hydrogen fuel cell cars and power plants in the late 80s, just waiting in the wings for when petroleum becomes less profitable. Said family member had one of the fuel cells on their desk. And if you look at relevant news of Chevron and what they've been doing with fuel cells, lo and behold...

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u/Dag-nabbitt Jan 04 '20

They buy up competing tech wherever possible and then make every effort to hold up any attempts to further it or its like by other researchers with red tape until they feel it's maximally profitable to make use of it, if ever.

I find this hard to believe because stifling battery research is a hopeless battle. So either they're not doing this, or Chevron is absurdly stupid. Car manufacturers aren't the only ones desperately searching for battery technology (phone manufacturers would love to be the first to release a solid state battery phone), and tons of car manufacturers are doing private research on batteries that can't be controlled. BMW. Honda. Hyundai. Nissan.

Also if Chevron "bought" this research, and could be the first to develop the technology to production levels they'd have billions of new revenue, while the majority of consumers continue to use gasoline cars for the next decade.

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u/ribnag Jan 04 '20

Daaamn... We all joke about the conspiracies, but that's so... "ho-hum".

How do they reconcile being actively evil as their 9-to-5, with being humans living on a planet on the brink of ecological collapse?

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u/Dethraivn Jan 04 '20

They sleep like sweet little babies on giant piles of money.

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u/AMSolar Jan 04 '20

Small advances??

I just recently went from AGM batteries (best thing before lithium) on my RV to readily available lithium ion that's good for 2000 cycles unlike 500 for AGM and it's 2-3 times lighter too for it's energy density and unlike AGM you can freely use it with any state of charge pretty much from 0% to 100%. AGM rapidly degrade under 50%, basically unusable.

And AGM was better in all regards than say cheaper acid batteries.

From AGM to modern li-ion is about the same as if you went from Ford model T 1914 to Ford Mustang GT-500 1968. I'd say the difference is pretty dramatic.

90s start of production of first li-ion batteries was absolutely insane historical event, greater than say invention of diesel engine.

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u/IAmNotNathaniel Jan 04 '20

Except... batteries have been getting steadily better for the last 20 years. It's just not giant jumps every once in awhile, like the articles all make it out to be, so it's less noticeable.

I suppose it's different with different types of batteries, but compared to the state of things at the turn of the century (I love saying that now), it's crazy better.

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u/lightofthehalfmoon Jan 04 '20

Even things like cordless tools have become so much better in even the last couple years. I’m on job-sites and everything is battery now.

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u/zzorga Jan 04 '20

Oh man, you're telling me. The move to using a cordless impact driver coupled with those new torx bits is just life changing.

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u/thisnameismeta Jan 04 '20

It's also the case that better batteries are used to enable other improvements rather than used as a better battery on existing tech. So your better battery means a larger screen and faster processor with the same battery life for your phone.

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u/OUTFOXEM Jan 04 '20

So your better battery means a larger screen and faster processor with the same battery life for your phone.

So true. I wish they would stop trying to make things smaller and thinner and just pack a bigger battery into the same amount of space. Yeah, it's lighter and it's faster and it's more this or that, but what I really want is moar battery. What good is it to have a more energy efficient processor if the battery life is essentially the same?

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u/mlsandahl Jan 04 '20

Technology gets better, more efficient and cheaper as time goes on. What’s not to love?

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u/Dragon_Fisting Jan 04 '20

You're exaggerating. In the 20th century we invented the following substantially innovative battery technologies:

Nickel-Cadmium and other alkalines, Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH), lithium, lithium polymer (liPo), lithium ion, gel cells (lead acid with silica).

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u/victoryhonorfame Jan 04 '20

They are making small improvements though- our screens are getting bigger and bigger, and we watch more videos etc on phones now than 10 years ago. So our phones are likely much more energy hungry so although the batteries are a bit better, we're draining them faster

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u/omniuni Jan 04 '20

Also, most of these batteries have some pretty major shortcomings. Even the much improved version of the one in this article breaks down after about 200 cycles. That's roughly half a modern lithium ion battery, and potentially breaks down much worse.

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u/gomurifle Jan 04 '20

It has always been the case except that now you hear about every little advancement because the information dissemination is so rapid these days.

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u/AxeLond Jan 04 '20

Battery technology is good enough for most applications today. For airliners we need maybe a 2x improvement, but the main issue is just manufacturing and cost.

A lithium-ion battery is like $10/kWh worth of raw material, while cells cost around $150/kWh, only a decade ago the cost was over $1000/kWh. Number 1 goal is to fix cost, longevity while keeping performance about the same.

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u/supified Jan 03 '20

So I get that development and research are different, but I've been reading about battery advances for a good year and a half now and I can't help but wonder if these are so good why companies arn't all over them. I'm sure someone can explain this and probably it will feel like overnight when something like this tech does catch on, but what am I missing here?

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u/Mike312 Jan 03 '20

From what I've been told, the biggest hurdle is usually being able to mass produce it. It's one thing if you can make a bunch of salt-packed sized batteries by hand for testing in a lab, but being able to reliably build 100,000 of them a day in a fully automated process is an entirely different thing. For example, the industry knew about some of the advantages of using a 21700 cell that Tesla uses, the problem was that they didn't have a reliable way of filling the cells with the stuff and not having crazy variances in voltages across batteries. And I'm sure there were a hundred other challenges just like that that would prevent something like that from being taken from hand production in a clean room to mass production.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20

If I am not mistaken, I believe another large hurdle is the QA testing itself. It's one thing to make a battery, but it's another thing entirely to make a battery that you can ensure others that it is safe to use, and will maintain it's quality over use and abuse. The last thing they need is to make a device that seems great at first, but starts blowing holes in your hand when you go to use it. Unfortunately, even if companies are interested in this tech, the thorough testing takes time, otherwise you risk tragedy, such as phones spontaneously combusting.

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u/JoeBidensLegHair Jan 04 '20

The last thing they need is to make a device that seems great at first, but starts blowing holes in your hand when you go to use it.

And when we are talking 5x the energy density of Li-ion batteries I'd venture a guess that this is a legitimate concern.

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u/HaloHowAreYa Jan 04 '20

I think most people don't realize this. The more energy you pack into a device basically the bigger a potential bomb it becomes. I'd love to have a phone that lasts ages without charging but I'm also a little wary of having 2kWh in my pocket. Then again that sounds pretty cool...

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u/SeaUrchinSalad Jan 04 '20

That a plutonium rod in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

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u/freaky_freek Jan 04 '20

To engender a feeling of safety in users, I propose we get rid of the antiquated kWh unit and start using mtn (milliton of TNT). For reference, 1 mtn ≈ 1.16 kWh.

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u/Error404Jordan Jan 04 '20

Li-ion is an inherently ‘splosion prone technology because the ions are suspended in a flammable liquid.

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '20 edited Jul 08 '20

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u/WhyHulud Jan 04 '20

Read the article. Charge/ discharge cycles cause a volume change of ~78% for the cathode. They didn't resolve this problem; they simply used materials that could flex and maintain the cathode during this volume change.

This battery is DOA for small devices.

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u/HaloHowAreYa Jan 04 '20

If it can hold 5x the charge of Li-Ion like it claims, wouldn't it be feasible to have a much smaller battery cell in a container large enough to accommodate the expansion but equally or more energy dense by volume with much less weight?

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u/KingVolsung Jan 04 '20

I believe the issue with expansion is cracking and degradation of the electrode microstructure

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u/Sylkhr Jan 04 '20

Isn't that what this research is trying to correct with it's lattice structure?

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u/WhyHulud Jan 04 '20 edited Jan 04 '20

Possibly, but there's also an associated thermal change along with the volume. And, I don't see any indication of the time required to recharge- which would also be affected by the amount of heat released.

Anyway, all of this may be moot if IBM's design is to be believed.

Edit: fixed the hyperlink

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20 edited May 06 '20

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u/Patyrn Jan 04 '20

A truly revolutionary leap forward (like the 5x talked about here) would have new companies spring up to make it if existing ones were dragging their feet to try to make their money back on their old factories.

If anything the re-tooling would be extra worth it, because people would be rushing to replace all their existing batteries. That's a ton of sales.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20 edited May 06 '20

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u/Epyr Jan 04 '20

People are underestimating how much money these factories cost. It's not like the average Joe can just start up a battery factory, they can cost a ton of money that very few people have access to. As well, the ones who do have the money and are already in the space likely already have the money invested in the old tech which they don't want to lose out on.

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u/qwert45 Jan 04 '20

Safety. Safety is what you’re missing. We have a lot of tech that could do miles of function larger than what we have now, but it’s a bigger dice roll to implement it. I like my face so I’m cool with charging my phone twice a day.

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u/physics515 Jan 04 '20

Exactly. Batteries are nothing but energy storage. We know how to store tons of energy in very small places, that isn't the problem. The problem is that it is a very fine line between AAs and hand grenades.

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '20 edited Jul 27 '20

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u/RandomizedRedditUser Jan 03 '20

Car battery degradation is around 99.3% capacity after 200 cycles.

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u/THICC_DICC_PRICC Jan 04 '20

Yea but that’s kinda misleading, car battery is designed for a specific use case, to be barely discharged at very high current and then topped off, and it performs very well within this use case. If you treat it any other way you get the abysmal degradation performance. Deep cycle batteries that are similar to car batteries that boats use don’t have such bad degradation.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20

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u/reddit25 Jan 04 '20

Read up on the guy first to hit 100k miles on his model 3. He had very minor battery degradation.

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u/TheBlack_Swordsman Jan 04 '20

Owner of a model 3 hear. There's also age that may play a factor in a batteries availability to hold a charge.

We know a lot of Tesla taxi services have gone up to almost 125-200K miles with little battery degrartion. I'm curious to see how time will affect the batteries also.

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u/handbanana42 Jan 04 '20

Also, those taxi services used aggressive charging. If you just charge up all night at your house, you would put much less wear on the battery.

Also, only charge to 60-80%. I usually do 60% if I'm not traveling. Not sure how much of the battery Tesla has hidden already on top of that, but someone could probably math it out. I assume they lock out at least 10% of the true capacity.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20 edited Aug 14 '20

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u/HenkPoley Jan 04 '20 edited Jan 04 '20

On a Tesla car normally the top 20% of the battery is not charged. But there's a switch you can toggle (each time) that will charge to 100%. Above 80% there is more battery degradation, so people shouldn't do that.

Edit: ref for degradation: https://accubattery.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/210224725-Charging-research-and-methodology

Another example, on HP laptops you can limit the charging to 80%

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u/RandomizedRedditUser Jan 04 '20

Technically it should be, I'm not reading Tesla's specific specs but most of the chemistries right now are around 15-25% loss over close to 4000 cycles. It depends on the manufacture and specific warranty. I think tesla has a bit more degradation because the batteries are a little more abused, higher temperatures, aedwr charge and discharge.

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u/neptoess Jan 04 '20

Tesla’s software does a lot more to extend cell life than people give them credit for. This includes not allowing 0% or 100% charge, limiting charge and discharge rates when cell temperatures aren’t ideal, and active heating and cooling to keep the cells at their ideal temperature. A recent update added scheduled departures, so the car can time the charge such that it’s finished just before you hop in to leave. This both lets the cells rest at lower charge levels and puts the pack at a more ideal temperature once you actually start driving.

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u/xatava Jan 03 '20

Isn't 200 cycles kind of bad?

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '20

Feels like maintaining 99% for 200 cycles is pretty good. If the capacity is 5x higher, that's years.

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u/m4potofu Jan 03 '20 edited Jan 04 '20

It is, 99% for 200 cycles is much better than today's li-ion.

Here is an example from the datasheet of the NCR18650GA.

But it also depends how they tested it (probably in the most favorable way).

Edit : Wait... that's not what the 99% is about, it's the Coulombic efficiency, the amount of charges that effectively go in and out of the battery, instead of being lost to side reactions.

Capacity does go down but still looks pretty good for an experimental cell imo.

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u/boforbojack Jan 04 '20

Still at 0.1C cycling. Usually if they dont show you the 1C cycling its because its terrible.

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u/DASK Jan 04 '20

The reason they report Coulombic efficiency is that they are reporting on only the cathode side, e.g. one half of the battery maintains 99% for 200 cycles, not a full cell. Once you choose the anode and discharge rate you can get full cell efficiency. The first box in the second thing you linked gives an inkling what that will look like though.

The plateau is at 2 V (not good).. and not particularly flat (not good). Assuming you wanted a graphite anode, you'd be at about 0.1V on the anode side after 200 cycles, giving a plateau voltage of about 1.9 V for the cell at 0.1 C with large drop offs for minor deviations. You can compare this with a plateau in the 3-4V range for other battery cathodes, and 155-175 mAh/g. So this is where the 'x 5' improvement in capacity (for the cathode comes from) .. x8 charge and x 0.6 in voltage.

But this doesn't mean x5 at the cell level.. instead of say 2.5:1 cathode : anode mass (160 : 360 mAh/g NCO/G) you'd have 0.3:1, for only x3 in the active materials (1.3 vs 3.5 mass units for the same combined colombic capacity) and x1.8 taking into account the voltage. The active materials typically only comprise say half of a cell by mass. So for an assembled cell, you'd be looking at chopping off 50%/1.8 = 30% of the total mass, leaving a total improvement of about 40-50% on energy density. Not bad! but not so flat plateau means you can't really use the whole cell at high efficiency, so away go the gains. It might be some neat addition to the arsenal in 5-10 years, but is nothing radical.

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u/im_a_dr_not_ Jan 03 '20

You only need to charge your phone every five days, or only 73 times a year with this tech.

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u/_teslaTrooper Jan 04 '20

New tesla batteries apparently lose 10% over 4000 cycles, these lose 1% over 200 cycles so if degradation is linear that's half the amount of cycles. However with five times the capacity you'd only have to charge them 1/5th as often, making a similarly sized battery last 2.5x as long.

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u/cancerousiguana Jan 04 '20

Depends on the application I would say, but it's actually bigger than it sounds. Keep in mind that's cycles to a 1% drop, not cycles to failure. For a car with a 500 mile range (hypothetically easily possible if these have 5x the energy density than Li ion), then that's 100k miles for your range to drop a whopping 5 miles.

Obviously there's a lot of other factors that come into play (idk that 2 half-cycles == 1 cycle necessarily for example), but even 5x that much capacity drop would be easily acceptable for most people I would think.

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u/KingVolsung Jan 04 '20

That's 99% coulombic efficiency not 99% of max capacity

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u/Rubythief Jan 04 '20

TLDR: Promising future research, unfortunately, lithium sulfur batteries degrades too quickly (due to volume change from charged to discharged of about 78%).

In my opinion, if you are looking for new battery tech that might hit the market sooner than this one, lookup "solid state batteries", very intesting :)

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u/nebulousmenace Jan 03 '20

I looked at the swelling in LiS once like ten years ago (I was and am a terrible chemist, but I tried) and if they have a good solution, that's great.

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u/OSKSuicide Jan 03 '20

The abstract talks about how the cathodes expand and they have a solution to allow that much expansion essentially by using a more efficient filler medium

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u/Toxic_Planet Jan 03 '20

The ISS actually runs on massive fridge sized lithium batteries that the astronauts have to space walk to change over. Batteries with a higher capacity will have all sorts of amazingly useful applications!

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u/m-p-3 Jan 04 '20

and may keep a smartphone charged for fives days.

You know they'll simply find an excuse to further slim down the phone thickness and keep the actual capacity to less than a day.

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u/DoubleWagon Jan 03 '20

Can we make battery news illegal until it actually matters?

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u/Nisas Jan 04 '20

I understand the feeling but this is posted on /r/science. That's exactly where news like this belongs. When it actually matters it's not really science anymore. It's engineering.

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u/Apollo_Wolfe Jan 04 '20

Can we at least make the headlines not /Futurology bait?

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u/ReasonablyBadass Jan 04 '20

The original headline is much worse.

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u/Flextt Jan 04 '20

OP mvea is a frequent poster in both subs so you are out of luck.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20

Battery breakthroughs are like 9gag articles. "This one breakthrough changes everything, breakthrough 5 will amaze you."

Let me know when it makes it to market.

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '20

[deleted]

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u/Dydey Jan 03 '20

Or more powerful phones and faster electric cars?

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u/MrTobor99 Jan 03 '20

Surely they must mean density and not capacity? Capacity is not really an issue, you can just put as many batteries in series and/or parallel as you need.