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CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

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Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#12

Why does 500wh/kg make electric aircraft possible? 6x less than kerosene. Is that the break even on cost if you can source very cheap electricity? Seems like it would still annihilate the payload/range.

ICE engines only manage to turn ~15% of the stored energy in gasoline into actual work. A bit of googling suggests that jet engines are about 35% efficient. Stored electricity is much more efficiently turned into mechanical work... Electric engines have 75-90% efficiency. So, you get a lot more work or unit of stored energy.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#13
post #5

Cool! What didn’t occur to me until I learnt it was that you get a multiplicative benefit with energy density when weight is a major factor (air transport, especially) because you need to spend less energy accelerating mass used by the battery itself.

For a battery of arbitrary weight you need to spend the same amount of energy accelerating its mass, irrespective of how much energy that battery contains.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#14
post #13
post #5

Cool! What didn’t occur to me until I learnt it was that you get a multiplicative benefit with energy density when weight is a major factor (air transport, especially) because you need to spend less energy accelerating mass used by the battery itself.

For a battery of arbitrary weight you need to spend the same amount of energy accelerating its mass, irrespective of how much energy that battery contains.

Right, I believe GP's point is that for a given capacity, you now need fewer kilograms of batteries to store it, meaning the percentage of overall capacity used to accelerate the mass of the battery itself goes down.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#15

Why does 500wh/kg make electric aircraft possible? 6x less than kerosene. Is that the break even on cost if you can source very cheap electricity? Seems like it would still annihilate the payload/range.

> Why does 500wh/kg make electric aircraft possible? 6x less than kerosene

Where did you read that kerosene is at 3000Wh/kg? My googling says 12,000Wh/kg

The tweet thread from TFA and its replies just says that for aircraft, weight impact is important. See https://twitter.com/__bdimitrov__/status/1298753593638440960:

"260 to 400 Wh/kg should lengthen flight time by 90.8% --- assuming that 100% of the drone weight is from the battery."

But going from 400 to 500 Wh/kg adds another 39% on top of that, so 2.6x longer total

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#16
and then in Germany right wing/neoliberal politicians run around, make smug faces and tell people: ooooh, we need e-fuels because those combustion engines, they are sooooo good, the chinese are envious and will just copy (yes. for tanks...).

During their reign:

- solar industry: gone (in the 2000s germany had everything, domestically produced)

- wind energy: gone (well, Siemens did it themselves too)

- existing domestic electronics production: gone (Siemens had highly automated facilities producing state of the art mainboards...)

- in the pandemic masks were bought in China for billions. All the while the automation companies newly taken over by their Chinese joint venture partner were happy to show people how they built those in their chinese factories...

They call it responsible, I call it Seppuku...

Oh and of course they now want to build nuclear plants after they've shown for the last 30years that we have reached a state of more dysfunctional oligarchy than the Soviet Union ever was (they changed their system! Here the mantra is "There Is No Alternative"). I congratulate the chinese oligarchy for somehow keeping an interest in the physical world and fleecing two continents of 1200 million people for all they built and some more while their people are infighting on idiotic frontlines.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#17
post #13
post #5

Cool! What didn’t occur to me until I learnt it was that you get a multiplicative benefit with energy density when weight is a major factor (air transport, especially) because you need to spend less energy accelerating mass used by the battery itself.

For a battery of arbitrary weight you need to spend the same amount of energy accelerating its mass, irrespective of how much energy that battery contains.

The article mentions aircraft multiple times. Once a range is achieved through available energy, reducing weight is a goal. The energy is more useful the less weight you need to move as then you can shave off a bit more weight as less energy was needed.

Your car may not need this as much, an aircraft does.

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#19

Why does 500wh/kg make electric aircraft possible? 6x less than kerosene. Is that the break even on cost if you can source very cheap electricity? Seems like it would still annihilate the payload/range.

Let's consider Cessna-172S ([4]). Its characteristics:

- 130 kW engine, Lycoming_O-360 that weighs 117 kg. For comparison, an electric motor of this range would weigh 11-13 kg (at 10-12 kW/kg, [2]). That saves 100+ kg weight immediately and we can put 50+ kWh batteries instead.

- It carries up to 200 liters of kerosene ([3]), which weighs 164 kg. We can place 82 kWh of batteries instead.

- The engine consumes around 30 liters/hour ([1]), which gives us ~6.7 hours of flight time or the equivalent of 6.7*130=871 kWh for an electric-power plane.

- The fuel tank weighs about ~14 kg (source: an LLM, sorry) and gives us another 7 kWh.

So, we can put 50+82+7=139 kWh. By using modern materials, we can probably increase it to ~180 kWh, which will give us about 1.5 hours of flight time / 300 km range. This is much less than 6.7 hours, but quite practical for recreation and short flights. And it would be much cheaper to run too.

That said, still not practical for medium and long flights.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-360

2. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/03/25/groundbreaking-h3x-moto...

3. https://www.globalair.com/aircraft-for-sale/specifications?s...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_172

Re: CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg

#20

Why does 500wh/kg make electric aircraft possible? 6x less than kerosene. Is that the break even on cost if you can source very cheap electricity? Seems like it would still annihilate the payload/range.

Yep. Also... kerosene gets spent. Pilots can also dump fuel in emergency when it's too heavy to land. Battery powered planes can't dump electricity, so I'd imagine some trade offs that have to be made.
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