Battery Material Cycled 100,000+ Times (Research)
The lead researcher at UC-Irvine who coated a gold nanowire with a manganese dioxide shell reportedly was able to cycle a testing electrode about 200,000 times in 3 months without observing a loss of power.
“Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it. She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity. That was crazy because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most,” explained the chair of UCI’s chemistry department. Coating the fragile, tiny nanowires also help make them stronger, so they don’t break as easily. The study paper is here if you would like to read it.
Creating a material with a dramatically longer lifespan obviously would be a great boon for devices that use batteries, like laptops, smartphones, electric vehicles, and so forth. For electric vehicles, obviously, battery life has been an obstacle for greater adoption, but if it was possible for a battery to last thousands, tens of thousands of even 100,000 cycles longer, this kind of breakthrough could change the world in a number of ways.
The study lead is Mya Le Thai. She stated: “The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option. This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.” She is a doctoral student in chemistry at UC-Irvine.
Lab breakthroughs don’t always translate into commercially viable products, so it isn’t that clear at the moment what the next steps might be. Some universities work with their students via technology transfer staff who help them with things like patents, licensing, or even potential investors.
Image Credit: Thomas Mårtensson and Kristian Mølhave (Creative Commons 2.5)
We used to think that electronic gadgets didn’t live long. LED lights (20,000 hours maybe) and solar panels (30 years maybe) have taught us that ain’t necessarily so. A lot of effort is going into durability.
I seem to remember a solar panel system that 5 years ago had been running for 25 years
we’ve seen >30 years with almost no degradation.
Our oldest array of solar panels is now almost 40 years old. At the age of 35 they were taken down and tested in the lab before being reinstalled. Over the 35 years they had been in operation they lost 3.88% performance. Just over 0.1% per year.
http://www.presse.uni-oldenburg.de/einblicke/54/files/assets/downloads/page0009.pdf
Actually they may already be over 40 years old.
Anyone competent enough in German to search for a “40 year” reevaluation?
“A lot of effort is going into durability”
Hm?
Legal tender in it’s current form forces manufacturers (which usually need to serve interest and profit to investors/debtors) to optimize for churn, for repeated business.. exactly the opposite.
Nope. There’s actually an interesting phenomenon here. Repeat customers *are not necessary* right now.
There’s such a large market of ICE car customers who are going to switch to electric cars that electric carmakers do not need repeat business.
There’s such a large market of people switching from other sorts of lights to LED lights, and adding new lights, that LED light makers do not need repeat business.
There’s such a large market of people who don’t have solar panels yet than solar panel makers do not need repeat business.
They won’t start engaging in “planned obsolesence” until that changes: until all cars are electric, there are solar panels on eery roof, and all lights are LED. At that point, unfortunately, they *will* start going back to planned obsolescence.
Buy your panels while they’re still optimizing for durability.
Not all manufacturers will. Some will be white hats. If nothing else a new “Elon” will emerge or a group of people will form and produce lasting products.
With our ability to communicate today the planned obsolescence companies will fail.
The technology is changing so fast that the old ones will become obsolete before they die.
Osram, Phillips, GE.. same old wine in new belts.
They need repeat business for their shareholders and debtors.
The higher price of LEDs vs CFLs will help a bit now to get profits up but this won’t last forever.
If you don’t get a change in incentives (monopoly money optimizes for private profit that is not sustainable) the current lifetimes of LED bulbs won’t last.
It won’t actually be the LEDs that break.. but the alu capacitors or some other device in them.
Just open one up and see for yourself.
Compared to an incandescent lamp they have so much more in there now that can and will be designed for failure.. they have enough experience on that one from the CFL’s to be blunt.
As for PV panels.. I don’t trust the EPA foil on the back of them.
The next panels I get will be glass front/back.. those should really last forever.
This is the second time today i have heard about gold nanowire with a manganese dioxide shell so perhaps it has credence.
No doubt this will lead to further development, and further down the line we may see a very valuable battery.
Putting money into research gives far greater returns to society that anyone realizes.
Gold is costly.
They need try with another material.
The high cost of gold will be compensated with high lifetime and you end up with shipper overall battery especially in stationary usage. For EV there is doubts about energy density as gold is very very very heavy.
Did you get the part about nanowires? This means that the total volume of gold will be tiny. Gold is still very expensive, so even a small amount could have a significant cost. Catalytic exhaust converters in ICEVs use even more expensive platinum, which is recycled.
If you think the quantity of gold used will be small then then i will be happy
I don’t know where I read it, but didn’t they say they expect similar results with Nickel instead of Gold?
The kick seems to be PMMA gel encapsulating the coated nanowires, not so much the material they used for coating the nanowires.
How many ug would you need per kWh?
2.3 ugs per kWh is what I heard.
Tina talk about it in article on cleantechnica last days
As I understand it, this could have further benefits for EV use. Firstly, some of the capacity of lithium batteries are not available for use to prevent the cracking of the anode / cathode, and so extend the life of the battery. Without the need to do this, you immediately have a longer range EV from the same battery pack. Secondly, rapid / supercharging is slower than it could be – and not really useful beyond 80% – again to protect the life of the battery pack. So this opens up the possibility to charge at the fastest possible rate up to 100% – reducing the charging time and extending the use of the ev
Basically one could buy a battery pack. Use it for a lifetime, moving it from car to car. And leave it for use by your heirs. Many generations.
The Tesla S battery pack is thought to give about 1,000 cycles before dropping to 70% of new capacity. 200,000 miles. At 13,000 miles per year that’s 15 years.
200,000 cycles would mean a 2,600,000 mile battery. 3,000 years of service.
Correct me if I’m wrong but those 1,000 cycles, aren’t they measured from complete discharge (at least available discharge) to complete charge so just charging the battery in the midrange section to 50% of capacity might allow 2,000 cycles? So with a 90 kWh battery, you could drive about 150 miles per day with a total life of 300,000 miles. Just curious.
Ok to summarize:
A true capacitor stores its energy in an electric field (akin to a magnetic field for a magnet). A battery cell stores its energy by creating a chemical that would happily decompose into a more stable chemical.
— from a black box behavior – we find the relationship: Q=C.V
Capacitors are designed in such a way that C remains (very nearly) constant with changing Q (and hence, V is (very nearly) linearly dependent on Q); whereas rechargeable battery cells are designed in such a way that V remains (very nearly) constant with changing Q.
Capacitor in general have very long life. That is why if you open you a TV from the 50s or 60s you still have to watch out for the capacitor being charged.
This story is about a special type of capacitor, built only in labs, based on nano-wire. It is the use of nano-wire (that break) that resulted in short life cycles.
http://machinedesign.com/batteriespower-supplies/what-s-difference-between-batteries-and-capacitors
According to the article the gel coating prevents breakage.
Not a battery, it is just an anode. There is a huge difference between anode and whole battery.
I am another puzzled reader. I have seen this news on several sites…it seems very real, and important. But what is it? I have read the full report that UC Irvine published. It appears to be very relevant to lithium battery technology not merely a capacitor. It is basically an electrode which doesn’t have the issues that make lithium batteries anodes decay. Lithium batteries are theoretically almost infinite in cycles since they are just shunting back and forth but the various anode cathode chemistries are the problem, they “gunk” up. So this is what they are getting at. If so, it is dynamite.
One caveat. There are already lithium titanate batteries that cycle up to 30,000 times. The problem is price per kwh. For stationary batteries weight is not an issue and space is usually not a problem but merely having huge cycle life does not override the issue of cost. Batteries need to pay for themselves within 20 years tops.
Car batteries are another bag altogether. They need to be light, reasonable cost and compact. Cycle life doesn’t need to be more than 2000, since on a 300 mile battery they would last, at 50 cycles per year, for 40 years at 2000 cycles.
As pointed out, this may be only the anode. Not a complete battery.
But if we had a battery that offered 200,000 cycles with anything close to the manufactured cost of other batteries then the cost of storage would approach zero.
$160/kWh and 1,000 cycles = $0.16/cycle.
$160/kWh and 200,000 cycles = $0.0008/cycle.
Fascinating. I wouldn’t have guessed that Lixδ-MnO2’s low electrical conductivity would have affected the preparation of the nano-wires in any way. 😉