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

First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

pme.uchicago.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 135 posts

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#81

Post by ok_dad »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #74
jfengel wrote: post #4

I don't know much about electricity but surely an anode is necessary for electrons to flow? Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.

The other thing is how is that a benefit? Why should I be excited that "it creates its metal anode the first time it is charged"? I mean this question in ELI5-fashion not in a disparaging one.

cheaper to manufacture with less parts, since anodes are usually an expensive part made from expensive materials and are hard to manufacture

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#82

Post by ChuckMcM »

ec109685 wrote: post #72

Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong: “ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million. This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent…

Yes, and conflate "totals" with proven reserves while failing to mention that people aren't really actively looking for more reserve as aggressively. But this is a PR piece for the University for which the standard problem is to magnify both the problems it avoid as well as the impact it produces.

But at its core, an anode free battery has a lot of desirable properties which make this engineer feat notable. Perhaps the most important is that the materials are readily available in a number of countries which could source their own raw materials to produce batteries. They also do not fail exothermically[sp?] when cell integrity is breached, that makes them a better battery for cars than the current Lithium ones.

So the next bridge to cross (and one so many battery breakthroughs fall down on) is what is the cost to produce batteries at scale. If, as we read yesterday they can get them down to $1/kWh then you'll be seeing a whole lot of these.

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#83

Post by Workaccount2 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #65
Workaccount2 wrote: post #60

Can't wait for this to never go further than this single published paper.

Yeah don’t have your hopes up, but Shirley Meng is well known battery researcher, it’s not complete vaporware.

The thing is that researchers just have to come up with stuff that works, not stuff that is viable.

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#84

Post by zoigdev2 »

ec109685 wrote: post #72

Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong: “ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million. This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent…

[flagged]

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#85

Post by Covzire »

zoigdev2 wrote: post #84
ec109685 wrote: post #72

Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong: “ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million. This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent…

[flagged]

Does it permanently condemn the land as too toxic be used for anything? Or can that all be cleaned up?

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#86

Post by timerol »

jfengel wrote: post #4

I don't know much about electricity but surely an anode is necessary for electrons to flow? Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.

The anode is the part of the battery that ions flow to when charging the battery. To save weight as much as possible, you can imagine a case where the anode is only the ions that moved to the anode. This is what "anode-free" means. When the battery has charge, there will be some sodium metal as the anode. When the battery is fully discharged, there will be no anode, because the sodium has moved into the cathode.

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#87

Post by styfle »

philistine wrote: post #43
pfdietz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know Tesla Megapacks have declined in price by 44% over the past 14 months? Sometimes the changes become very visible.

Seriously for real? Why did the price of the cars not drop accordingly? Curious.

The price of their cars did drop.

For example, look at the price of the Model Y over that time period.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221129054722/https://www.tesla...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240701220914/https://www.tesla...

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#88

Post by timerol »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #74
jfengel wrote: post #4

I don't know much about electricity but surely an anode is necessary for electrons to flow? Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.

The other thing is how is that a benefit? Why should I be excited that "it creates its metal anode the first time it is charged"? I mean this question in ELI5-fashion not in a disparaging one.

Better energy density, since there is no permanent anode structure needed. See chart "b" from the article

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#89

Post by idiotsecant »

zoigdev2 wrote: post #84
ec109685 wrote: post #72

Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong: “ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million. This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent…

[flagged]

If you're the one making claims its on you to provide sources. If you're just saying things and putting question marks on the end people are going to treat it the same way they treat newspaper headlines, which is to say any headline ending in a question mark probably has an answer of no.

Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

#90

Post by Gibbon1 »

fbdab103 wrote: post #5
popol12 wrote: post #3

Na4MnCr(PO4)3 Chromium is 5 times more abundant than Lithium in earth crust (0.01% vs 0.002%). Better, but not that much ? "Regular" sodium-ion batteries with prussian blue has, it seems, the great advantage of not using any scarce elements. It would be nice to have a comparison between this solid state chemistry and the regular one.

Not sure it is a 1:1 equivalent, but this site[0] claims global chromium production is at 41 million metric tons while lithium is 180,000 metric tons. So, the supply chain already exists. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-o...

I went on a ride through the internet and saw some figures that lithium production would need to increase by 40X by 2040.

But that's still only 7.2 million tons/year.

I feel like the where are we going to get the lithium and but what about the environmental costs arguments to be kind of weak when you look at actual production numbers and compare the costs with other resources we consume.

Post reply on HN