Batteries are everywhere in today’s hyper connected electrically propelled society.
I bet a battery is powering the device you’re watching this video on right now.
Do you have low battery status?.
What if you didn’t have to charge your phone again for another month?.
Today pretty much every electric vehicle utilizes lithium particle batteries. .
To add insult to injury, the energy density of decomposed organisms destructively drilled from the earth still achieve more than 100 times the energy density of the batteries used in most electric cars.
1 kilogram of gasoline contains about 48 megajoule’s of energy, and lithium ion battery packs only contain about .3 megajoules of energy per kilogram.
What’s more, lithium batteries degrade with each charging cycle, gradually losing capacity over the battery’s lifetime. Researchers often compare batteries by the number of full cycles until the battery has only 80% of its original energy capacity remaining.
As indicated by Elon Musk, battery modules are the primary restricting element in electric vehicle life.
In 2019 he said the Tesla Model 3 drive unit is evaluated for 1 million miles, however the battery just goes on for 300,000 - 500,000 miles or around 1,500 charge cycles.
While energy density and lifetime improvements to batteries appear to be the most crucial issues, there are environmental and geopolitical problems associated with current lithium ion batteries which are equally, if not more pressing to solve to reach the battery of tomorrow.
The mining industry of the world’s largest producer is often made up of competing rebel militias that use child labor.
Much is illegally exported and directly funds armed conflict in the region.
Additionally the camps often create conditions which drive deforestation and an array of human rights abuses.
To deal with the anticipated interest blast for electric vehicles throughout the next few decades, we’ll need to create better batteries that are cheaper, longer lasting, more durable, and more efficient.
We must also address the issues of political and environmental sustainability electric future.
Many questions were answered after Tesla’s long awaited battery day took place on September The Palo Alto automaker announced a larger The king sized cells make use of an improved design that eliminates the tabs normally found in Lithium Ion batteries that transfer the cell’s energy to an external source.
Laser powdered them, and enabled dozens of connections into the active material through this shingled spiral” This more efficient cell design alleviates thermal issues, and simplifies the manufacturing process.
Tesla also introduced high-nickel cathodes that eliminate the need for cobalt, and improved silicon battery chemistry in which they stabilize the surface with an elastic ion-conducting polymer coating that allows for a higher percentage of cheap commodified silicon to be used in cell manufacture.
All together these changes create an expected and the new 4680 cells expect to achieve a increase in range, and a 6 time increase in power.
Tesla hopes the improved cell design will allow them to achieve an eventual production target of 3 terawatt-hours per year by 2030, and help scale the world’s transition to ubiquitous long distance electric vehicles.
After Tesla’s recent battery day, the world’s attention is now more focused on batteries In the following video, we’e going to explore change everything.
Realistic battery packs would probably be closer to 1000 Wh/kg initially, but this is still three to five times higher than lithium ion batteries can achieve.
As usual, this technology is not without its drawbacks.
Current electrodes of lithium air batteries tend to clog with lithium salts after only a few tens of cycles – most researchers are using porous forms of carbon to transmit air to the liquid electrolytes.
Feeding pure oxygen to the batteries is one solution but is a potential safety hazard in the automotive environment.
Researchers at the University of Illinois found that they could prevent this clogging by using molybdenum disulphide nanoflakes to catalyze the formation of a thin coating of lithium peroxide (Li2O2) on the electrodes.
Their test battery ran for an equivalent with uncoated electrodes. While this isn’t enough lifetime for a car, it’s a promising hint of things to come.
More on nanotechnology later.
They believe that once their research cell is optimized, they should be looking at around high power requirements of takeoff.
But they too are struggling with low battery life.
For them, the solutions will boil down to improvements in the electrolyte.
Nanomaterials make use of particles and structures 1-100 nanometers The magic is that they behave in unusual ways because this small size bridges the gap between that which operates under the rules of quantum physics and those of our familiar macro world.
As we’ve seen, one of the challenges in battery design is the physical expansion of lithium electrodes as they charge.
Researchers at Purdue University made use of antimony ‘nanochain’ electrodes last year to enable this material to replace graphite or carbon-metal composite electrodes.
By structuring this metalloid element in this ‘nanochain’ net shape, extreme expansion can be accommodated within the electrode since it leaves a web of empty pores.
The battery appears to charge rapidly and showed no deterioration over the Carbon nanostructures also show great promise.
Graphene is one of the most exciting of these.
Graphene is made up of a single atomic thickness sheet