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IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

extremetech.com

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Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#51

Post by reneherse »

If the amount of oxygen exchanged between the battery and atmosphere is enough to make the battery "much lighter" in its charged/non-oxygenated state, wow, that's got to be a lot of oxygen!

I didn't see any numbers in the article, but a commenter (name, moishep) on the site posted the relative atomic masses of the elements and compounds involved:

Li ~7, O ~16, LiO2 ~39

If someone with a better understanding of the chemistry could answer, does this mean that a discharged battery would have over five times the mass of a charged one?

And if that much oxygen is being released in the charging process, that's quite a fire hazard that will need to be designed around.

Or am I missing part of the physics/chemistry involved?

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#52

Post by easp »

Groxx wrote: post #46

From the video: > If all continues to go well, we could see air-breathing batteries powering cars some time between 2020 and 2030 Ouch. Maybe laptops will come sooner?

Seems likely. Automotive engineers, and the companies that employ them, are (appropriately) conservative about things, give the $ involved, and the safety issues.

Toyota is only just starting to ship Lithium batteries in some of their hybrids, but they've been common in consumer electronics for years.

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#53

Post by sterna »

51Cards wrote: post #3

This is slightly off topic but simply stated I just love IBM these days. There aren't many corporations that dedicate as much focus on research and yet, for a large corp. they also keep their nose surprisingly clean (these days). While we watch the swirling tech scandals ebb and flow they just quietly sit off to the side and keep changing the world.

I am sorry, but from the press release they have only added two new industry partners to help develop this battery. There is still a long way to go before they have anything near a working product.

Press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37511.wss

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#54

Post by ta12121 »

oskarth wrote: post #36
ta12121 wrote: post #6

I think Paul Graham's goal to prevent Eternal September on Hacker News can be officially declared a failure.

Self-fulfilled prophecy? Please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html especially this bit: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. I…

First, it's not the comments I'm complaining about, it's the content, so no, my comment is not fulfilling any prophecy.

Second, the title is sensationalistic and misleading. To a casual reader the it implies that the battery is ready for use ("creates") and that it's unique to IBM. Neither are true. A more accurate title would be: IBM research department is trying to develop commercial lithium-air batteries, just like lots of other people.

The article is not in-depth, nor does it describe anything new or interesting in science. It is a brief, shallow overview of a line of research that has existed for decades. That is not news.

Battery research is slow and plodding, yet linkbait link this is often all over reddit and other technology blogs. Hacker News was supposed to be free, or at least low, on this kind of garbage, but the fact that this is the second time I see this very article (or an equivalent one) shows that the Hacker News userbase is no more discriminating than any other news site based on user voting.

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#55

Post by twoodfin »

Tooluka wrote: post #20
51Cards wrote: post #3

This is slightly off topic but simply stated I just love IBM these days. There aren't many corporations that dedicate as much focus on research and yet, for a large corp. they also keep their nose surprisingly clean (these days). While we watch the swirling tech scandals ebb and flow they just quietly sit off to the side and keep changing the world.

This is more because of secrecy (and ignorance). Any company of such scale is engaged in hundreds patent disputes every year at least, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands, it really hard even to estimate. And this continues for decades. Those ten-twenty disputes that made to journals and blogs are in such small amount that they can be counted as statistical deviation and more of PR or anti-PR moves. Real patent…

The way I've always heard the story told, IBM actually kept the patent peace in the industry for decades. They have thousands of patents going back to the foundational era of computing, and warehouses full of prior art. They also operated for a decade or so under harsh anti-trust scrutiny, which limited the viability of "offensive" patent use. Instead, if some upstart threatened to corner off key new technology, IBM was always ready to fire back with some "method for utilizing a spinning disk to store structured records" patent. Cross-licensing agreements among the big players were the norm, not patent fights (even the big Microsoft/Apple dustup over the GUI was over copyright, not patents).

I see evidence for this folklore in that the biggest technology patent wars we've seen in recent years have focused around wireless, which one might consider the first major new computing technology that IBM didn't take a big part in developing.

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#57

Post by ori_b »

experiment0 wrote: post #34
unwind wrote: post #13

So ... As the battery is used, bonds are formed between oxygen molecules in the air, and the lithium ions on the battery's electrodes. Weight is saved by "borrowing" those O2s from the air, as compared to carrying them around fixed in an oxide. Fine. Does that mean that as the battery charge is depleted (=it runs out of free lithium ions, I guess), it's mass increases due to all the newly bound oxygen being stored in…

Weight is also saved by using Oxygen instead of heavy metals to donate electrons. Using oxygen (Mr 16) over lead (Mr ~207) will be the main source of weight save.

I'd imagine that more weight is saved because all of the oxidant in the reaction is actively used, and you're not carrying plenty of it around hidden behind surfaces that prevent it from being part of the reaction.

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#58

Post by Tooluka »

MrJagil wrote: post #47
Tooluka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more because of secrecy (and ignorance). Any company of such scale is engaged in hundreds patent disputes every year at least, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands, it really hard even to estimate. And this continues for decades. Those ten-twenty disputes that made to journals and blogs are in such small amount that they can be counted as statistical deviation and more of PR or anti-PR moves. Real patent…

Got any sources?

I'm extrapolating on all industry actually, but I have a friend in a small (<100) company in ex-USSR that does exclusively patent reverse engineering for Freescale/Motorola. This one company (there are at least several others working for F/M in Czech and few other countries) does at least hundred patent researches per year for 10+ years at least, meaning buying devices by Apple, Samsung, TI, Microsoft etc. demolishing to bare crystal and then photographing layer by layer microscheme structure, restoring it on PC to reverse integral scheme and find patent infringing (and maybe a little more, some interesting tech things that wasn't known publicly, i.e. TI does very innovative tricks that are interesting for F/M). So returning to your question,no, I don't have sources, only second hand experience which I find very believable.

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#59

Post by jacquesm »

falling wrote: post #45
NickM wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a theoretical problem, but there are very sophisticated mechanisms in place to prevent this from actually happening in practice with current li-ion batteries. There was a big scare about it with Tesla vehicles a while back that turned out to mostly be one blogger spreading unsubstantiated claims. It's true that if you keep driving an electric car until the car stops running, and then leave it for weeks or m…

And if you drive any recent diesel engine until you run out of gas, you will cause damage.

Not to the engine, but to the (low pressure) fuel pump. And that's because that pump is cooled/lubricated by the fuel. A few seconds won't hurt but longer is definitely not good.

You'll likely also have to bleed the system because the injectors won't open on air pressure alone, but that's not really damage (it just makes it a lot harder to get it started again once it is out of fuel).

Re: IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

#60

Post by iwwr »

Retric wrote: post #24
unwind wrote: post #13

So ... As the battery is used, bonds are formed between oxygen molecules in the air, and the lithium ions on the battery's electrodes. Weight is saved by "borrowing" those O2s from the air, as compared to carrying them around fixed in an oxide. Fine. Does that mean that as the battery charge is depleted (=it runs out of free lithium ions, I guess), it's mass increases due to all the newly bound oxygen being stored in…

It reminds me of planting a tree in a pot, and then realizing in a few years the tree is a lot bigger and weighs a lot more than the pot when you started.

That's because the carbon mass of the tree comes entirely from the air (CO2). For 1kg of carbon mass your tree has to process 2000m^3 of air.
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