Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thedriven.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 919 posts

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

#741

Post by 2h »

yc-kraln wrote: post #529

500 Wh/kg means Sulphur cathode, which also explains the solid electrolyte. Roughly speaking, it'll be 3x as energy dense but only a 1/2 as volumetrically efficient (so, a given capacity battery will weigh 1/3 less but take up twice as much space). There are other approaches to Li-S (and Al-S and Mn-S) which will be less expensive. Grats to CATL for bringing this to market, but the race for sure isn't over yet.

> 3x as energy dense but only a 1/2 as volumetrically efficient (so, a given capacity battery will weigh 1/3 less

It would weigh 1/3, not 1/3 less.

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

#742

Post by xienze »

theK wrote: post #731
xienze wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups. They'll be sabotaged by reality. Thinking ICE cars and gas stations will become a fading memory by 2035 is wishful thinking. Politicians get big headlines and praise for proposing ICE bans and such, but as the date draws closer the reality of "OK, maybe we're not quite there yet" sets in and the date will be pushed back again and ag…

How is this related to IP? We are talking about legislature being written to force us to be more Eco friendly. No politician ever wrote or proposed legislation for IP versions.

> How is this related to IP?

It’s an analogous situation demonstrating how hard it is to unseat an incumbent, ubiquitous technology with another, and how long it takes, even if that alternative is superior.

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

#743

Post by 05 »

walrus01 wrote: post #254
gibolt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current mass produced batteries, which tend to hover around 260-300 Wh/kg. Higher density (but still under 500) are available, but in far smaller quantities for a very high cost. The exciting part of this announcement is that if anyone can scale manufacturing, it is them.

What battery pack that I can buy right now is 300Wh/kg? Sincerely curious because that's 50Wh/kg above what people are using in some very expensive UAVs.

Nobody is using 50Wh/kg in UAVs; even 150C racing drone batteries are higher energy density (~135Wh/kg for Tattu R-line V5 1200mAh 6s, 195grams)

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

#744

Post by maherbeg »

ricardobeat wrote: post #669
fnordpiglet wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think F1 is going to save Saudi Aramco. People don’t generally need a super racing machine. Maxwells equations delivers a simpler machine that satisfies all needs of any user beyond the most exotic. The Rube Goldberg machine is the actual death of ICE - as a manufacturer, who have much more influence on cars, why do I want to build and design these incredibly complex machines when I could dramatically simplif…

F1 is like a test bed for new vehicle technology. It's not that you'll buy a race car, or a race car engine, but those discoveries will filter down into consumer products, like they have in the past: paddle shifters, KERS, hybrid engines, rear diffusers, traction control, drive by wire, the dual clutch, plus probably a ton of improvements in tires, fuel injection, safety, suspensions etc. So if a hybrid engine that s…

F1 has gotten further and further away from production deployment vehicles in favor of more entertainment for the crowds. Tires all degrade to enable more strategy, and the ground effect cars are now designed for closer racing which production vehicles don't care about. Le Mans has more production relevance than F1 now.

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

#746

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

philipkglass wrote: post #690
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere. How close/far would you say we are as a society on "having significant renewable generation"?

I don't know where you live, but in the United States renewables have recently surpassed nuclear and coal power as sources of electricity: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960 They're still pretty close to each other right now. Renewables are at 21%, coal 20%, nuclear 19%. However, nuclear is flat and coal is declining. Renewables are still growing rapidly and will widen their lead significantly in a…

I was curious, and Wikipedia lists 224 active coal plants in the USA. More amazing was that from 2010 to 2020, 240 coal plants were closed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_sta...

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

#747

Post by cyberax »

xxs wrote: post #343
2rsf wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DC is better then AC and both depends on how much the battery is already charged, temperature of the battery, the infrastructure (charging cables for example). The range is somewhere from low 80's for low amperage AC charging on cold weather using a low quality granny charger cable to high 90's for a warm battery on a dedicated high power DC charger. This of course doesn't include losses in transmission from the powe…

Charging goes like this: - AC converted to DC (with power factor correction, usually means AC stepped up 1st) - DC converted back to AC (but higher voltage) and MUCH higher frequency - AC transformed to lower AC voltage (still higher frequence) - AC rectified to DC (filtered and stabilized), DC voltage lower If there is DC, the very 1st part can be omitted.

That's not true. Tesla works like this: 1. You have a high-voltage DC bus that is basically connected to all battery modules. Modules have individual BMS modules and can connect/disconnect to that bus. 2. If you're doing fast charging, the charger connects to that bus directly (you can hear contactors closing), matches the voltage and pushes the current. 3. If you're doing AC slow charging, the charging module on the Tesla simply boosts the voltage to the bus level via a PWM-based power supply.

That's it. A pretty simple system.

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

#748

Post by cyberax »

littlestymaar wrote: post #287
msravi wrote: post #133

I just realized how much energy efficiency is being squeezed out of a Tesla. It's incredible. A normal diesel fueled sedan such as the Chevy Cruze diesel runs at about 31mpg, which is 13.2 km/l or 15.3 km/kg. Diesel has a mind-boggling 12700 Wh/kg energy density[1], which translates to an efficiency of ~827 Wh/km for the Chevy. By contrast, the Tesla Model S, has a ~540 kg battery[2]. At 272 Wh/kg (from the posted ar…

> which is ~27% of the energy required to run a normal car! This is because you're not comparing the same things: going from thermal energy to mechanical energy has a much lower efficiency than going from electricity to mechanical energy. But that electricity has to come from somewhere, and most of the losses happen at the electricity generation place instead of in the car. > It just wouldn't have been possible to ru…

Sorry, but this is BS. Modern electric engines in Tesla Model 3 use high-speed power transistors to precisely modulate the magnetic field. Back in 1920 all you could do was a collector plate with brushes.

The difference is like the difference between carburetor engines and direct fuel injection.

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

#749

Post by jpgvm »

cinntaile wrote: post #719
jpgvm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is.going to have the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world, all within a decade or two. We can bitch and moan all we want about their governance system but when it counts they are always the ones doing the right thing while Western governments hold their dicks and piss into the wind.

You seem to imply this is a sign of a failing of the west. I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion based on your data point, they produce everything for everyone and they have 1.5 billion inhabitants. It doesn't exactly come as a surprise that they require a lot of energy. China already has the largest coal, solar, wind, hydro energy production in the world.

It is a failing of the West.

We had a giant first mover advantage and didn't just squander it but fell behind the Chinese by a full generation.

We should be living in a post-scarcity era for energy. Instead we are contending with $80 crude prices and a future of trying to build a grid out of itermittent sources a lots of storage. None of that would have been necessary had we not dropped the ball.

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

#750

Post by diziet »

imiric wrote: post #244
oblio wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electric planes could recharge using solar or wind. As efficiency increases with these technologies, it would mean planes wouldn't require carrying the same watt-for-watt energy as fuel. Those are pipe dreams :-))) Solar recharging for electric cars is not realistic, let alone for electric planes. Wind charger... maybe there's something there, but the fact that nobody has tried it probably means it's not good enoug…

Planes have a much larger surface area to carry solar panels, and they fly above clouds, so have clearer access to sunlight than cars do. Wind charging is more of a pipe dream, but there's no reason a plane couldn't glide for a period of time to get some energy back, similar to regenerative breaking. There have been experiments in both areas, and while it's certainly unfeasible today for any large aircraft, the techn…

The concepts of potential energy and kinetic energy make the "wind charging" idea ... difficult.

The extra weight and structural challenges imposed by solar panels on aircraft don't seem worth it. The math on (174 sqft) * ideal theoretical power (250 W /m2) yields an optimistic ideal 4000 Watts. A conservative 75% power usage of a 172 engine is around 100kW. 4% under ideal circumstances.

Post reply on HN