This looks closer to an industrial product than many new battery technology announcements. The cathode chemistry isn't exotic. The efficiency is high and stable (supplementary table 3). The rate capability is good. The specific energy is quite good. The cycling stability is pretty good.
The trickiest part looks like the chemical vapor deposition of graphene onto SiO2 nanoparticles. CVD is a slow growth process that I normally see applied to creating precise, thin layers on flat substrates. I think it would be hard to scale this up to industrial (tonne per day) quantities of coated particles. Is it possible to replace that process with something like a fluidized bed reactor? I'm out of my depth here regarding paths to scale-up -- I have a chemistry background, but I'm not qualified to comment on most chemical engineering.
Wow, this might be one of those rare instances where new research is gonna proceed rapidly into industry. The paper[1] isn't shy about it either. This is great on all fronts: increases cycle life, charge speed, and even marginally increases capacity. They're very optimistic about integrating it into production lines and it seems cost-effective. Cheap, even. The inputs are methane and fumed silica into a 1000 C furnace- you can practically buy those at a hardware store and then it just gets mixed into the r2r slurry.
I think it's pretty likely that charge speeds are about to increase handily. Fig. 4 shows the battery with additives charging at 5 C compared to virgin chemistry at 1 C. That's about 5 minutes to charge the middle 50% of a battery- incredible. Still remains to be seen if this is compatible with standard additives and SEI conditioning, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work out fine.
I feel the same about the CVD but it looks like it was fast and easy from the paper (as much as I recall right now). Certainly way less exotic than most CVD.
I'm out of my depth here regarding paths to scale-up -- I have a chemistry background, but I'm not qualified to comment on most chemical engineering.
I applaud you, sir, on your awareness of self and awareness of scale. If only all programmers were as self aware and aware of the difference between a background in programming and software engineering at scale, I'd smile a little more.
CVD in general is slow and time consuming, but because graphene is just one atom thick growing graphene specifically might not be too bad. Also the process gas/chemistry requirements are relatively very simple.
For reference, I used to see ~4 hour cycle times for growing graphene on copper sheets. I think most of that was in the heat up and cool down, maybe order of 30min actual growth time. These numbers might be off by a factor of 2-5, it's been a few years since that job, and I was a equipment design engineer not a process guy as such.
>This looks closer to an industrial product than many new battery technology announcements.
Compared to other Battery tech advance from University Research and Startup which are trying to hype and gain new funding, Samsung doesn't need that. And my guess it is at least small scale production ready before they make such announcement. ( Or they knew a competitor which has a similar product announcement soon and step up ahead of them )
Hopefully we see this in shipping product by 2020.
Can you help parse the specific energy in terms of Wh/Kg? I feel like I’m doing something wrong since I keep arriving at numbers about an order of magnitude better than current lithium tech.
They claim a full size battery has a "possibility" to reach 800 Wh/L. I'll just use 800 for illustration. They don't report the specific gravity of a full battery, but for other lithium ion batteries a specific gravity of 2.5 - 3.0 might be reasonable.
800 / 2.5 would be 320 Wh/kg.
800 / 3.0 would be 267 Wh/kg.
Both numbers are quite good, as batteries go, but not an order of magnitude higher than what's available now.
An order of magnitude might be really hard and may be impossible to reach *1. Price, charging speed, and lifetime have more space. 5X charging speed is huge for EV.
pause the screen at 2:49- he's calculating the specific energy for a very specific chemistry, lithium cobalt oxide with a carbon anode. EVs don't even use that chemistry. It's more appropriate to use a more general formula.
Here's the most general possible one: only lithium. Each lithium atom gives up one electron, at some voltage. The standard electrode reference voltage of lithium is 3.04 volts. That works out to 26.8 amp-hours per mole, and 81.47 Wh/mole. A mole of lithium weighs 6.941 grams. The end result is 11.74 kWh/kg. That's the absolute, utter maximum energy density for a closed system battery (which is why li-air can exceed that figure).
I am continually surprised by how quickly capacity keeps increasing towards that. Battery capacity will easily double with tech quite similar to current, and 10x would not surprise me within my lifetime.
If even 10% of the battery 'breakthroughs' we've seen on these pages in the past 5 years had come to fruition, we'd have 20Kw batteries that charge in 10 minutes on our phones. Oh, and they'd be 100% recyclable but that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles.
It's the exact same thing with solar panel technologies. But then if you look at the long term, 10 or 20 years, you see that there really is an underlying current (...) of steady improvements that eventually make it to the market or that reduce cost. But the vast majority are hype.
It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth.
If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them.
Hypervolume grows exponentially.
One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually.
Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it.
What is the shape of that space?
You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.
There can also be a very long lag between initial research and industrialization. PERC cell technology for high efficiency solar has been growing rapidly to multiple gigawatts of manufacturing capacity over the past couple of years. It's expected to account for over half of all monocrystalline cell manufacturing within the next few years.
10 years ago PERC cells weren't available on an industrial scale, even though the technological basics were discovered, explored at the lab scale, and published in the 1980s. It took a lot of manufacturing advances and market evolution before PERC technology was both practical and profitable to manufacture for large scale use.
but that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles.
That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements.
"100% recyclable" is good for them (and "biodegradable" even better), because they can act "green" while continuously making products that don't last and have to be recycled, expending even more energy and creating profit in the process. "The best kind of planned obolescence is environmentally friendly planned obolescence."
>That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements.
That's ridiculous, tinfoil hat thinking. Longer cycle life = cheaper battery = higher profit + happier consumer.
In an ideal world with infinite competition and perfect knowledge about competing products, perhaps you'd be right. But in the real world where we live, it happens all the time.
I remember my first electric razor. It failed after a couple of years, so I took it apart to find out why. I discovered that the electrical contacts to the motor were just little pieces of graphite, and when they wore down to nothing the razor was finished. Definitely planned obsolescence in action!
Are you saying there are reasonably priced long-lasting equivalents to graphite brushes? I'm asking out of ignorance. Because that would be really good to know when buying any appliance that has a rotating part. My impression is that they all use graphite brushes.
Large appliances like washers and dryers use brushless motors, although the newer ones are likely to be inverter/VFD-based instead of the older induction type, where the control electronics will fail long before the motor itself wears out (bearings etc.)
(Search YouTube for "vintage induction motor" and you'll find plenty of century-old(!) examples still in good running condition. I don't think the same can be said of the brushless motors today.)
There must be, certainly there are no graphite brushes in your spinning hard disk. That might not have been a common motor design back when I had that razor though, but they certainly could have used a beefier piece of graphite.
I agree. You can charge more for products that never wear out and outsell your competitors. If you're cornering the market, you don't care if it shrinks a bit.
That’s probably true for smartphones, which would still have other significant improvements every year or so (like displays, performance, and networking) to incentivize owners to upgrade.
You mean if journalist’s versions of research come to fuition?
Those breakthroughs, when applied to scaled up battery manufacturing give us the 5%-10% compounding annual improvement we see. A doubling at least every 15 years is pretty good!
If the absence of vastly superior batteries were only due to patents, someone would be producing them right now and enjoy the exclusivity. While there are numerous promising approaches, usually announced with great fanfare, they tend to only work in the lab. The hard step is scaling them up to mass production such that the economics make sense.
Experts are right to be skeptical that it's possible with current gen tech. As usual, Musk is probably extrapolating charge speeds to when the truck will be finally delivered, which is in what, 2020?
No, the two have nothing to do with each other. The Tesla Semi charges slower than the model S does already- it takes roughly the same time to charge a battery regardless of how large it is. That Bloomberg article is not talking about the battery itself, its talking about the charger- the wires hooking up to the battery.
Before Tesla and Panasonic joined forces to mass produce the batteries, there were many many rumors that samsung was in negotiation with tesla to supply the batteries. I wonder of Tesla will look into working with samsung.
> Additionally, the battery can maintain a highly stable 60 degree Celsius temperature, with stable battery temperatures particularly key for electric vehicles.
Isn't this only necessary because Lithium-Ion batteries need it to maintain efficiency and longevity? Is this also an issue with graphene?
It seems to be very practical. The researchers made special effort to verify that, which is unusual. The silica nanoparticles are just fumed silica of a certain size, which costs <$1/lb. The final product can be added directly to the cathode slurry.
The growth process is the only remaining question, but it seems very tame. Methane is the carbon feedstock, and the furnace is only 1000 C. It doesnt have the pitfalls of normal graphene production because they arent concerned about monolayers etc- I would say their product has a lot more in common with expanded graphite than graphene. Because of that I expect its similar in cost to synthetic graphite, which is roughly equal to natural graphite.
So far there is no way to reliably mass produce graphene. There have been claims in the last year or so that we're getting closer, but nothing real yet.
Graphene coatings for anodes/cathodes is something
Robert Murray-Smith has been talking about on YouTube for years, many people called him a scam artist, even though he never tried to sell anything.
Observe the noticeable lack of any mention of how many cycles a cell will last at this charge rate. It is well known that ordinary li-ion cell can be charged extremely fast too, as long as you don't charge so fast it heats up rapidly and goes into explosive thermal runaway, but it shortens the lifetime considerably.
You probably missed it, but the nature.com article that some commenters have referenced [1] has more details, including information on the charge rate.
> A full-cell incorporating graphene balls increases the volumetric energy density by 27.6% compared to a control cell without graphene balls, showing the possibility of achieving 800 Wh L−1 in a commercial cell setting, along with a high cyclability of 78.6% capacity retention after 500 cycles at 5C and 60 °C.
In your other comment you write:
>the standard is 80% capacity after 500 cycles at the normally specified (1C) charge rate
> A full-cell incorporating graphene balls increases the volumetric energy density by 27.6% compared to a control cell without graphene balls, showing the possibility of achieving 800 Wh L−1 in a commercial cell setting, along with a high cyclability of 78.6% capacity retention after 500 cycles at 5C and 60 °C.
Does that mean 5C Charge rate and > 5C Discharge? Because in the EV Market 5C discharge would be borderline enough (I think Teslas 18650 discharge at a peak of 20A per ~3,5Ah Cell so 5C Discharge would be cutting it very close.)
If it's 5C Charge and getting to 500 cycles with higher discharge then...woah.
I wasn’t aware that faster charging shortens lifetimes. Does that mean that (using completely made-up numbers) that a battery will reduce to 80% its initial capacity after 10,000 slow charges, but after 10,000 fast charges its capacity would reduce to, say, 50%?
You have the right idea, but your completely made-up numbers are not even close --- the standard is 80% capacity after 500 cycles at the normally specified (1C) charge rate. If my vague recollection of the last time I read about this is correct, at 2C (twice as fast), after 500 cycles the capacity remaining may be more like 20%. It's definitely nonlinear.
So it seems that this cannot be immediately scaled. I wonder if Samsung/Apple will incorporate this in a super-luxe phone, which could perhaps bring it to scale.
I think the better application would be car batteries - you have huge incentive for a really fast charge. Imagine charging the battery in the same time it takes now to fill your gas tank!
It's not new battery material. It's just a better anode coating with a graphene layer, only a normal lithium-ion battery. Same strategy as most improvements there. Means time to market could be much faster.
Problem is that this graphene layer is extremely thin, one atom. Mass-production, what they claim to do, would be a killer app for much more than just batteries, but for batteries it's the easiest win.
Discharge rate appears similsrly improved (iirc), losses aren't really dofferent, temperature stability is increased, cycle life is increased vs. no additives, but they didnt test with additives.
Indeed, but you'll need to be able to supply the current. Tesla superchargers are the exception; other than them, 50kW is the max you'll get.
For cars, having twice the capacity with the same charge speed would be enough, since you can charge slowly when you sleep, what matters is that the car can handle the distance you can travel in a day.
Most people disagree. It's rare to drive >500 miles between charges, but most people will want to spend less than 20 minutes charging when they want to go long distances.
Anyone else clicked this hoping Samsung would announce "a battery that won't blow up your phone and will last more than your current battery" and then reading the comments felt every single one of those dreams and hopes being shattered, one by one?...
The trickiest part looks like the chemical vapor deposition of graphene onto SiO2 nanoparticles. CVD is a slow growth process that I normally see applied to creating precise, thin layers on flat substrates. I think it would be hard to scale this up to industrial (tonne per day) quantities of coated particles. Is it possible to replace that process with something like a fluidized bed reactor? I'm out of my depth here regarding paths to scale-up -- I have a chemistry background, but I'm not qualified to comment on most chemical engineering.