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Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

construction-physics.com

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Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#271

Post by floatrock »

raumgeist wrote: post #26
laxisOp wrote: post #6

We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.

I think, apart from finding better Batteries altoghether, we should build multi-tier batteries inspired by biology. Humans have bloodsugar, sugar in the Liver and then fat. All of them have their respective properties with availability and amount. This way, engineering tradeoffs could be allocated much more fine grained. For example, a while ago I read about a startup building an energy storage where they heat up lar…

CATL is kinda doing that for EVs. They're making battery packs that are a blend of sodium-ion and lithium-ion.

Sodium-ion isn't as energy dense as lithium-ion and it has a slightly smaller power efficiency, but it's a lot cheaper, has better cold resistance, and can deliver more power at low states of charge.

Use the two together and the thinking is you can get a sweet spot that performs better across a wider range of conditions your cars are likely to experience.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#272

Post by VaderAi »

It seems the solid state battery is the long awaited answer to ev development. Where we will see range of 1000km and super fast charging and reasonable battery replacement costs. Currently in the market with battery failures it is cheaper to buy another ev rather than replace the battery.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#273

Post by floatrock »

homeonthemtn wrote: post #270
floatrock wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is energy density required for all applications? Something that's not desirable for say a car doesn't mean something isn't good enough for say non-mobile applications.

Well, yes actually. If you're talking any kind of batteries above Duracell level, then it's important to understand how much power can be stored in a given "unit"

Of course you need to know the power per unit to some degree, but when you're building warehouse-sized stationary storage arrays, land is cheap and LCOS is more important than energy density. That's a very different tradeoff calculation than if you're building a car.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#274

Post by wongarsu »

inigyou wrote: post #266

YouTuber "NightHawkInLight" just made a flow battery from common materials. Why would I want a solid state battery when I could have a battery whose capacity expands just by duct taping plastic water barrels to it?

For storage at the level of a home or a grid-level battery, absolutely.

Li-Ion is dominating because of the amount of inertia and economies of scale it has. But if we assumed equal amounts of R&D and investment you'd expect a future of solid state batteries for mobile applications and flow batteries for stationary applications

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#275

Post by inigyou »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #232
moffkalast wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens somewhere, presumably.

Well technically those are zero point modules, not really batteries.

If you can extract some energy then by definition it is not zero-point energy.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#276

Post by inigyou »

jhallenworld wrote: post #203
qwery wrote: post #83

If you know a bit about electronics, you might be a bit surprised by the term 'solid-state battery'. It's a poor analogue to the more common usage of solid-state with semiconductors, integrated circuits, etc. -- a "solid-state" cell is still a chemical cell. It's not a paradigm shift on the level of, say, replacing a relay with a MOSFET.

I think "solid-state" is a marketing term which means you need to use Fermi-Dirac statistics to model your device, vs. vacuum tubes where you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. I think you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann at least for the ions in the electrolyte.. but maybe have to use for Fermi-Dirac for all conductors in a solid-state battery.

I thought it meant your database was singly responsible, open for extension but closed for modification, Liskov substitutable, interface segregated, and dependency inverted.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#277

Post by inigyou »

trollbridge wrote: post #14
laxisOp wrote: post #6

We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.

I can - it’s called a bomb. Some of the problems with batteries are heat dissipation (one of those problems that superconductors would mostly solve), fire safety, and end of life disposal. Higher energy density makes it even worse. A good place to start would be a BMS on individual cells that monitors them for general degradation, unexpected discharge, unexpected temperature changes, and can remove a failing cell fro…

LiFePO4 batteries are close to the dangerous lithium ion, but they're not even close to bombs. You can cut one in half or throw it in a fire (I think) and it doesn't explode.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#278

Post by floatrock »

mb7733 wrote: post #247
maxwwwt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theoretical efficiency maximum for burning gas in a home is 100%. Most systems won't hit that because they need to vent waste gases, which carry some heat away. Heat pumps are significantly more efficient than 100%. They can get to 500% efficiency. So no, it's definitely not more efficient to burn gas in a home. (To say nothing of the safety of running gas lines to every house.)

Completely separate conversation. I was responding to the statement "We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants".

You might be missing the point of heat pumps, and your statement was really about end-heat in homes.

You said

> Burning it for heat in the home is much more efficient than burning it in a plant, converting it to electricity, transferring that electricity, then turning that electricity into heat.

Burning it for heat in the home may be something like: 99% transport efficiency (gas distribution systems lose maybe 1%) * 80% combustion efficiency (a lot of heat energy still goes out your chimney as exhaust). Call it 79%. If you spent more for a high-efficiency burner with extra heat-recovery stages, you could get into the 90's.

Compare to: burning it in a plant (power plants can run efficient combined-cycle infrastructure, which is about 60% efficient turning it into electricity), transferring that electricity (plant-to-home transmission & distribution losses are 8-15%, so call it 85%), then turning that electricity into heat (and here is where heat pumps shine... heat pumps don't burn electricity, they use it to move heat, so they can have efficiencies above 100%).

So compare that 79%-90% "burn for heat in the home" efficiency to 60% * 85% * 300-500% = 150-255% efficiency for "burn it in a plant, convert to electricity, transfer that electricity, then turn that electricity into heat".

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#279

Post by TeMPOraL »

inigyou wrote: post #267
moffkalast wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regulatory approval for those is just too expensive in practice. I mean you blow up one star due to cost cutting and nobody trusts the tech ever again...

But that was a Joviet power plant with a severe design flaw. They had a foot of up-quark matter at the bottom of their control rods, which increased the reaction rate for a brief moment after the emergency ABSCOND button was pressed. Plus, they were running the reactor at dangerously low graviton flux levels, leading to a pion buildup, during a shift change. Everyone knows those Joviets can't do anything right. Our A…

The problem was that the science behind those fancy power plants of yours is so complicated, the rest of the galaxy found it easier to just oxidize biomass, and are now scouring every known sector for M-class planets they haven't yet strip-mined from all organic matter.

I say was, because the current problem is that those "environmentalists" you mentioned managed to scare remaining interstellar governments away from this technology, which made them double down on biomass extraction.

Re: Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

#280

Post by mb7733 »

floatrock wrote: post #278
mb7733 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely separate conversation. I was responding to the statement "We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants".

You might be missing the point of heat pumps, and your statement was really about end-heat in homes. You said > Burning it for heat in the home is much more efficient than burning it in a plant, converting it to electricity, transferring that electricity, then turning that electricity into heat. Burning it for heat in the home may be something like: 99% transport efficiency (gas distribution systems lose maybe 1%) *…

I completely understand your point. I know what a heat pump is and how it works. They are great. I am not anti heat pump. I am pro heat pump.

It's just not the point I was actually responding to. The OP was under the impression that you would be "extracting a lot more energy" from the gas in a plant vs the home.

Yes, converting gas to electricity allows you to use a heat pump, which in many cases uses much _less_ energy than a furnace to heat a home. (As long as it's not too cold.)

But that's just not what I was talking about. I was talking about the claim of extracting _more_ energy from the gas. Good day!

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