Battery Life Breakthrough Could Increase Li-Ion Capacity by 1000%
In what could potentially be a revolutionary breakthrough for everything from laptops to electric cars, a South Korean team of researchers have made a major discovery in Lithium-Ion battery technology. A team of researchers at South Korea’s Hanyung University, led by professor Cho Jaephil, has claimed a discovery that could extend lithium ion battery energy capacity by up to 1000% or more.
The key to Jaephil’s discovery was the application of a three-dimensional porous silicon graphite material which has the ability of holding up to ten times the number of lithium ions as conventional graphite cathodes. Patents have already been applied for. from the press release:
Lithium ion accumulator batteries produce current by moving lithium ions. The battery usually contains a cathode (positive electrode) made of a mixed metal oxide, such as lithium cobalt oxide, and an anode (negative electrode) made of graphite. While the battery is being charged, lithium ions migrate into the anode, where they are stored between the graphite layers. When the battery is being discharged, these ions migrate back to the cathode.
It would be nice to have an anodic material that could store more lithium ions than graphite. Silicon presents an interesting alternative. The problem: silicon expands a great deal while absorbing lithium ions (charging) and shrinks when giving them up (discharging). After several cycles the required thin silicon layers are pulverized and can no longer be charged.
Cho’s team has now developed a new method for the production of a porous silicon anode that can withstand this strain. They annealed silicon dioxide nanoparticles with silicon particles whose outermost silicon atoms have short hydrocarbon chains attached to them at 900 °C under an argon atmosphere. The silicon dioxide particles were removed from the resulting mass by etching. What remained were carbon-coated silicon crystals in a continuous, three-dimensional, highly porous structure.
If this is for real, it could have a huge impact on the electric vehicle industry. For example, the Tesla Roadster currently gets about 150-200 miles per charge. Imagine having an electric car that gets 1600 miles per charge, with a full charge costing you less than a regular tank of gas. You’re getting more miles for less money, with no fossil fuel use - especially if your electrity comes from a renewable source.
This Post Source: Eurekalert
Tags: battery, Featured, li-ion, lithium-ion, lithium-ion battery
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I distinctly remember another Korean professor who had supposedly produced personnalized stem cells. Fool me twice shame on me!
Could the shape of things to come if, the technology takes off……
Nothing will come of this, the patent will get bought up by an oil company and be buried. How many time have you seen a revoltionary discovey posted somewhere and it disappears.
More exciting than a 1600 mile range would be a battery battery with a 200 mile range that is 1/8th the size, weight, and cost of current lithium batteries.
Even if the oil companies buy the patent, China simply does not respect patent law! If they can get a copy, Asia will soon enjoy the benefits. Anyone should be able to duplicate the methodology and re-patent the item, or simply ignore patent law and suffer the consequences . . . slaps on the wrist by a broken, weakened American system. Soon, we will have better batteries and capacitive storage methods for electricity. Soon we will pass from the oil age to the electric age. I hope that big business and bureaucracy imped us and invite their own destruction. 18th century business practices have no place in the computer age. Obama is embarking on a clean up of these traditional hold backs and has started a trend towards clear orderly thinking in government that may bring a battery discovery like this to the forefront and to the service of society as a whole.
Imagine how long battery operated dildos will last now.
Imagine how long battery operated dildos will last now.
wow, woman should be able to have over 9000 orgasms in one session now
actually it’s fool me once shame on… shame on you? Fool meh can’t be fooled again.
I guess this inventor will die as soon as many others who make a potential threat to the oil industry…
Sounds good, but I wonder about the cost of producing these…
Call this my personal pet peeve. Why does every article about new batteries and the wonders of the 21st century electric economy have to make the outrageous claim that you could charge up your car without using any fossil fuels?
Sure, you’re not burning those fossil fuels directly in that Tesla Roadster. But for the vast majority of the world, and the vast majority of Americans, their electricity comes from burning natural gas or coal. Both heavily polluting, greenhouse-gas producing, non-renewable resources. So don’t say “especially if your electricity comes from a renewable source.” ONLY if your electricity comes from a renewable source. Otherwise you’re still contributing to the global warming problem, just in a different place.
Could this technology be applied there also?
AB your an idiot, electric cars are 3 times as efficent at using primary energy to motion, put another way if a power plant burning coal at 40% charges an electric are it is still more efficent that the same car burning gasoline at 13%, I dont have time to give you a physics lesson but try looking up the facts on fueleconomy.gov
lets just use the GMvolt for example it uses 200 watt hours per mile while a similarly sized car burning gasoline would get 30mpg. there are 36.6 kilowatts in a gallon of gas so to go one mile the otto cycle car must use 1.23 kilowatt hours of primary energy. while the GMvolt only needs 0.2 kilowatt hours modern combines cycle plants are 50+% efficent some reach 70% with secondary heat recovery, no otto cycle car engine is ever going to touch thoes levels EVER. even given that AC highvoltage transmission losses are 6% over 500 kilometers a 50% naturalgas combines cycle plant still dilivers 44% to the GMvolt and 96% of that goes to forward motion. Again EV kill ICE cars in terms of CO2 and efficency.
AB: I believe that the excitement comes from the fact that combustion engines are only 29 to 30 percent efficient on their best days while electric motors are somewhere between 85 and 95 percent efficient….now multiply that by 100 million cars…that’s quite a bit of savings….I don’t care who you are!
It’s also pretty early stage. If it disappears from view it doesn’t need a conspiracy from oil companies to explain it.
Maybe it doesn’t work in hot conditions, maybe you only get 100 charges out of it, maybe it’s more fragile than current batteries and overheats if it takes a knock or two.
It’ll be great if it works out, but there’s a long way between the discovery and seeing it hit the market.
Yes electric motors are more energy efficient than internal combustion engines.
But the energy didn’t come from the battery!
If you are going to compare the overal efficiencies of ice engines (sorry for the redundancy) and electric motors, you have to come to terms with the fact that the battery was charged using electricity from a power plant (probably a burnable fuel source) meaning just one big combustion engine.
And so, nice as it would be that the fuel come from somewhere non-polluting, you’re comparing combustion engine = kinetic energy, to combustion engine = electric energy = kinetic energy.
Erebus your missing the point. The power plants are also more efficient than an IC engine. A power plant can be 40% efficient while a car is only about 13 % so you’re comparing a 13%efficient engine=kinetic energy to 40% efficient combustion engine=electric=kinetic. The electric is still much better. Then you factor in the fact that some people WILL be using a renewable source as their car charger. And you factor out the transportation costs of gasoline to gas stations. And then there is the fact that more and more plants will be built to provide clean energy due to recent gigantic advances in solar panel technology. Every little bit helps.
Alot of you fail to forget that if we also switch to “true” renewable resources (such as Wind, Solar, power harvesting, geothermal, hydropower, etc) along with this technology we would be cutting down on oil consumption on a mega scale. Supplemental power sources along-side the main power grid is another possibility.
Stop thinking that we will be using oil forever, it WILL run out. It’s better to develop and implement these technologies before that crisis starts (a true oil shortage). The only other problem is consumption of other elements in this switch.
Conspiracy worries aside, this is a great achievement.
If Lido Iaccoca was still in charge at Chrysler, the car that be a fit for this technology would already be in production.
My sole problem with this claim is how much mileage a single charge could produce. If you can get 1600 miles from the same charge that used to power you to 250 miles, would that not be a perfect battery for storage from alternative energies? Solar towers, Solar arrays, wind turbines etc….. a battery bank comprised of this new tech hooked to the most efficient collectors would make off grid living very possible.
The energy required to propel a Tesla Roadster for 1600 mile is quite a bit I am sure, I wounder how long that same amount of power could run a major appliance, like an AC?
Interesting times.
Be kind.
“Imagine having an electric car that gets 1600 miles per charge, with a full charge costing you less than a regular tank of gas. You’re getting more miles for less money”…
Certainly increasing range would be a major leap forward but to suggest that charging a battery pack with enough energy to travel 1600 miles won’t cost any more than charging it with enough energy for 160 is plain stupid.
As is assuming it will be done in the same timescale (ie overnight) - the waste heat generated pushing that amount of charge in overnight would likely be enough to vapourise the battery, car, and garage it was stored in.
What will happen (if ths report turns out to be true) is that smaller (so less massive) battery packs can be used and there will be the possibility of extended range plus better performance.
The auto solution is still a way out in the future if this lithium improvement is real.
A better application is in the IT and mobile device market.
Decreasing the charge cycle frequency is a big achievement for portable devices. While the energy load drawn per device is small (e.g. 4 hour full recharge on an Iphone), and the same with computers, there are billions and billions of these out there.
Add them up, apply the lithium improvement and you have lots of power plants with excess capacity. This surplus load is now available for plug in hybrids which are going to be a big factor in the next couple of years, assuming people can finance them in the current economic climate.
Unconventional energy conversion systems are under development in several countries and can be manufactured in many of the world’s electronic factories. They are likely to prove inherently cost-competitive with all existing energy systems. Not only can they be used to power homes and businesses of every variety, but also to make practical cars, trucks, buses, ships and eventually aircraft that need no engines, batteries, or any variety of conventional fuel or recharge.
Advanced designs will soon be capable of producing torque and/or electricity on a self-sustaining basis. Devices without moving parts are comparable to an inexhaustible electric battery. One Proof-of-Concept prototype was evaluated by Lee Felsenstein, EE. He concluded it to be analogous to the early work on the transistor, which eventually led to a Nobel Prize and the creation of Silicon Valley.
2,000 watts is the maximum amount of power that can be drawn from a 110 volt wall outlet to recharge the battery of a plug-in hybrid car. Generators we are developing are expected to generate this much power and demonstrate replacement of the plug needed by a plug-in hybrid car, within a year. This will be a harbinger of automobiles that need no conventional fuel. With normal progress, prototype new energy conversion systems are anticipated to replace an automobile engine within three years. These prototypes will open a path to mass production of entirely new varieties of automotive power plants. Vehicles powered by these technologies will never require conventional fuel of any kind.
Would you people stop perpetuating this silly myth that oil companies buy patents to these technologies? Why didn’t they patent the Li-Ion battery in the first place? Oh, because they can’t. 30 years ago you guys were claiming the oil companies bought the patents to electric cars and hydrogen engines. The truth was, the technology simply wasn’t there.
Why not just start looking into Methane Hydrate?
There’s 3000 times more of it than all of the Oil/Coal reserves combined, and as of now, we’ve screwed over the planet so bad with our emissions, that 2 quadrillion metric tons of it is melting as we debate these issues.
55 million years ago, the planet went through a period called the Paleo-eocene Thermal Maximum where global temperatures rose 26 degrees in 10,000 years. This wiped out 90% of the species. We’re seeing a much more dramatic increase present day.
Don’t let ‘em sell the patent to “Big Oil”
accompanied with a 1000% charge time increase as well?
shopped.
@Mindy Mindburger: Ahahahahha, that was a good one
AB & Erebus your views r due to your ignorance and lack of grasp of the basics.
JDinaustin & the rest r right. U can look at it from another way using the well to wheel analysis, which may be more comprehensible to a novice to such matters. It is used on the Tesla website for folks like yourselves who can’t grasp it yet.
Break it down sonny, the well (oil well for you) to (petrol) tank efficiency is a no brainer.
Think the much greater efficiency of huge stationary powerplants, which are geared to producing electricity cheaply for you to consume, as compared to the millions of small “powerplants” in each car which must power themselves thru stop starts.
The tank to wheel efficiency is even more astonishing for electric cars because electricity is a higher form of energy which converts to other forms (including motion) more easily, as compared to the heat energy of fossil fuels.
I won’t repeat what the others have already said but will add 2 things. Firstly, electricity is truly multiple source. Electricity from fossil fuels in one part of the world is mitigated by (increasingly) truly clean and renewable ones like wind and tidal power where its more suitable.
The other is regenerative braking. Only pure electric cars can recover 60-80% of the energy used to go up a mountain. Even hybrids & plug-ins can only recover a small portion of it before the tiny batteries max out.
The one thing that excites me most about the electric vehicle is that electricity cuts out the middle man of many other motor systems, and is more efficient than internal combustion systems. Without the loss of energy in transfer between electricity and, say, hydrogen (through electrolysis), and the inefficiencies of combustion engines, electric motors look like the best alternative fuel vehicle.
The best part about electricity, though is how it creates a form of a propulsion standard. With electricity, all energy comes from one source, power generating plants. Now, no matter what kind of plant you use, they all produce electricity. Whether a wind/solar farm or a nuclear plant produced it, the same electricity will run through every car.
The process of the Li-ion battery(extended life) reminds of using a Menger Sponge technique which a three dimensional object is used to incorporate surfaces for holding a greater capacity of electrical charge.