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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

#771

Post by tuatoru »

jeffbee wrote: post #658
wuming2 wrote: post #476

I do wonder sometimes if scraping the million plus of components, produced and assembled with great care into a ICE car and still relatively new, makes any sense. Re-powering seems no brainer to keep millions of new cars out of the scrapyard. And avoid the environmentally unsustainable production of slightly newer cars. Reusing them whole, engine included, is ideal. If battery re-powering, synthetic gasoline and hydr…

Mass-producing IC engines, even complicated state-of-the-art ones, is exceedingly simple and cheap. Assembling an EV battery is actually pretty damned hard and energy-intensive. This is all reflected in the price. If it were easy to make an EV battery, they would cost less. If it was hard to make an IC engine, there would be no $4500 motorcycles.

The equivalent of your $4500 motorcycle is the $4000 - $6000 mini EVs sold in second-tier chinese cities[1], the best-known of which is probably the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV[2]. There are many reviews of them on Youtube, some in English by native english speakers. These EVs have the same number of airbags as motorcycles, but more seatbelts.

Edit: apparently they now have more airbags than motorcycles, as well as more roll cages and other safety features.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_city_tier_system

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuling_Hongguang_Mini_EV

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

#772

Post by timbit42 »

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…

The Aptera gets 1000 miles on a 100 kWh battery.

Porsche Taycan: 2 miles per kWh

Tesla Model 3: 5 miles per kWh

Lightyear Zero: 7 miles per kWh

Aptera: 10 miles per kWh

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpiH-Y-HOvE

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

#773

Post by tuatoru »

mg wrote: post #64

Key numbers: They doubled Wh/kg from about 280 to about 500. I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reached when the charged battery consists of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, right? Then during discharge, the reaction between the two would turn the matter/antimatter into energy. How would that stack up against the 500Wh/kg stated here? Update: Did a bit of googl…

What's needed is direct matter to energy conversion. That avoids the mass penalty of the containment structures for that inconvenient antimatter.

Or, just tap into the zero point energy of empty space.

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

#774

Post by tuatoru »

fwungy wrote: post #611
chaorace wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW: lithium-ion was also expensive chemistry. If the promise matches the reality, supply chains will eventually realign to the point where consumer applications become feasible.

We are likely in the incremental phase of battery innovation. You've got to balance so many factors to commercially release a battery: safety, durability, reliability, weight, energy density, cost. You can build cheap batteries, they just have some terrible characteristics.

> cheap batteries

That was CATL's other announcement, two years ago: sodium-ion batteries. Now being incorporated into a model of car by Chery, one of the second tier Chinese EV manufacturers, and another by BYD, the biggest.

1. https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-electric-cars-with-BYD-a...

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

#775

Post by nixass »

loeg wrote: post #675
nixass wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It solves only one of multiple problems new generations of cars (EVs especially) are facing

It's the main problem, as far as I can tell. I guess charging / "pump" time is an issue for cross-country road trips, but my personal needs would be entirely met by home charging.

Home charging isn't a thing for vast majority of car owners

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

#776

Post by mlindner »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #129
elevaet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> battery with 500 Wh/kg Wow, that's amazing, creeping up towards the energy density of gasoline at around 1200 Wh/kg Of course you don't have to lug around the spent gasoline after you've used it, but that's really the problem too innit?

Various theoretical energy densities of batteries and gasoline: lead acid 123 Wh/kg lithium ion 250 Wh/kg zinc-oxygen 1,084 Wh/kg sodium-oxygen 1,605 Wh/kg lithium-sulfur 2,600 Wh/kg magnesium-oxygen 6,800 Wh/kg aluminium-oxygen 8,100 Wh/kg lithium-air 11,140 Wh/kg gasoline 12,700 Wh/kg from 2022, Asad A. Naqvi et. al., Aprotic lithium air batteries with oxygen-selective membranes , Table 1, https://link.springer.com…

Lithium ion is already over 250 Wh/kg so that calls into great suspect the rest of the numbers.

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

#777

Post by coderenegade »

Tade0 wrote: post #151
prox wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s like how analog photography shops were going, no not really. Perhaps you will get specialized shops for fuel and biofuels?

Or we'll just go full circle and gasoline will be available at pharmacies: https://radair.com/blog/2011/11/10/automotive-history-benz/

It's like people have forgotten that ICEVs started without any of that infrastructure in place. Even if we can't buy petrol from pharmacies, methanol and ethanol engines are a mature technology and the fuel is both cheap and easy to get. The practical reality is that lack of fuel stations is a pain in the ass, but the strength of ICEs is that they can be modified to run on different fuels. And fueling them is easy.

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

#778

Post by stenius »

crazygringo wrote: post #565
Swannie wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Qantas 16h 45m flight from Dallas to Sydney aims for Brisbane, and then turns to Sydney as the plane approaches Australia. (10th longest commercial route in the world). This allows the plane to land at Brisbane and refuel if the calculations are done wrong. Couldn't find stats on how many times it's had to land in BNE. Pre-COVID, it was apparently common to try and off-load passengers to single stopover flights t…

Knowing nothing about it, what causes fuel calculations to be done wrong? Is it math errors, or uncertainty about exact weight of cargo and passengers, or wind conditions different from predicted, or something else?

Wind is the main one.

You might also run into some weather you didn't have to plan for and that changes the prevailing winds at the altitude you were previously cruising at or causes you to divert to fly around it.

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

#779

Post by stenius »

krasin wrote: post #19
idontwantthis wrote: post #4

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…

A lot of people won't fully fuel up their 172 so they can bring more weight, either baggage or passengers. I don't think anyone would fly 6.5 hours in one either, but 2+ is normal for non-training flights.

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

#780

Post by coderenegade »

dalyons wrote: post #507
Moldoteck wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the problem is electric cars aren't cheap, even in SH market and public transport in some parts of europe and us just sucks. For example I can totally see banning selling ice cars in netherlands, sweeden, norway, israel and other regions with good transportation and richer people, but banning them in us, italy, greece, romania and other similar states (either because they're poor or public transport is bad) i…

They will become cheap though. As manufacturers move downmarket and the used Ev market grows. Maybe even cheaper than gas in the end - simpler, more reliable etc

If they become that cheap, there won't be any need to ban ICEVs.
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