Despite the fact that batteries were probably invented several thousand years ago, and have been used in cars since the late 19th century, they remain functionally primitive, messy devices. Compared to the absolutely amazing hydrocarbons that power today’s transportation, batteries are klunky, dirty, heavy, and slow to replenish, and, well, feel free to add any faults that I’ve missed, or make them up if you want. Mock the balky battery! It certainly deserves it.
It’s actually a shame though, because if only the battery would smarten up, and lighten up, and clean up, the green future of automobiles might loom nigh, peak oil could become another footnote in the history of technological advance, and four dollar gasoline could be a forgotten nightmare. Imagine your favorite clean electricity source replenishing the new magic batteries at your home, office, or Main Street charging station–quickly, quietly, and cleanly.
Now two MIT researchers have tweaked the technology just enough to hang a few rays of hope on. Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons professor of materials science and engineering reported an advance in the March 12 Nature that could result in charging lithium ion batteries being quicker than filling up your gas tank––one that could render Better Place battery swap-out stations obsolete.
The problem that Ceder was addressing is that while lithium rechargeables can store a lot of energy per unit weight, the charge and discharge rates are slow. Half a decade ago, Ceder et al. made the unexpected discovery (through computer calculations) that charge and discharge should move far more quickly. They then determined that the sleepy rate of charge transfer had to do with the fact that the ions were slow to find entry points into the surface of the battery. They developed a coating that in rough analogy gives the ions a highway into the entry points.
The technology could make it possible to charge your consumer electronics in seconds, and could give EVs charging times comparable to a fillerup. A123 Systems, the Watertown, Massachusetts, advanced battery company, has an option to license the technology.
The second new device from MIT, reported April 2 online in Science by Angela Belcher et al. (whose collaborators included Ceder), is perhaps first and foremost a green way to make the cathodes on lithium ion batteries. In earlier work, Belcher devised a similar way to make the anodes. (Click here and scroll down to “Fashioning Conductive Nanowires”). The challenge with cathodes is that the materials must be highly conducting, but most candidate materials are highly insulating.
While most batteries require very high temperatures in the fabrication process, along with noxious materials, Belcher’s cathodes are fabricated below room temperature by harmless viruses of a sort that normally infect bacteria, the name of which (M13) has nothing to do with British motorways.
The virus, long and wiry at 880nm x 6nm, is engineered to grab carbon nanotubes at one end, and to collect iron phosphate, a conductor, along its length, assembling them into cathode.
“We showed we had really good performance. If this could be scaled up, it could be used in your Prius,” says Belcher, who drives one, and who is the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering. “And maybe, maybe, it could be used for plug-in EV batteries,” says Belcher, promising nothing. Then we could all go back to worrying about health care reform.
This opens a whole other can of worms, if your car can charge in 8 hours on regular household current what will it take to charge it in the time it takes to run in for a latte?
Begs the question if this will overload the grid since it has excess power at night not at peak commuting times in afternoon.
But still if they keep chipping away at the battery problems we might have a city car that would perform similarly to a compact ICE car and have reasonable price <20K and real world range of 100+ miles. Now that would be a seller.
capacitors, not batteries, capacitors
that’s true, plugging lots of these into a household outlet would be a problem for the grid as it stands now, but there are multiple solutions that could be applied to this secondary problem. Maybe a smarter and sturdier power grid could help, or maybe a new type of gas station where instead of huge gas tanks there are huge capacitors (which would need some new technologies of their own) that can handle these quick charges and are fed off the power grid. These are just some off-the-hip guesses, my point is that this Li ion technology is a promising technology and I suspect the quick recharging does not have to be a fundamental flaw.
Off topic but: Ha, could you imagine the sound if one of those capacitors blew!
The electric grid could supply 180 million cars without major changes bases on a Department of Energy study.
That is however based on the cars being charged at night while other demand is at minimum.
Most users would presumable be guided by price, a smart grid would charge a low price during the night higher if you needed the car charged during peak demand. With a smart power grid car batteries might also work both ways, providing power during brief peak demands and getting charged when there is extra energy
Even Ultra capacitors have 20 times worse energy density than typical Lithiums.
So a 400 pound Lithium pack would need to be replaced by 8000 pound ultra capacitor pack.
Maybe someday MIT Lees capacitor research will live up to its full potential and they will only be about twice as bad as todays typical lithiums.
Where they might make sense replacing a small non plugin hybrid battery in something like a Prius.
If everyone charged during the day at the local “power station” then the grid would overload. However, there are several ways to get people to prefer to charge at home overnight.
For starters there’s always the possibility of having cheaper electricity prices at night. California homes with solar roofs already have time metering so that homeowners can earn premium rates for home generation sold back to the grid during the day and use cheap electricity bought from the grid at night.
Charging at home could be as easy as pulling into the garage and having a robotic arm plug you in when you got close to the wall. That would save people the trip to the filling station, which alone would be enough to drastically reduce daytime load.
Although there are lots of people without garage parking, rolling out widespread use of electric cars could start first with people that do. There are still lots of people who do have garage parking.
Maybe those who don’t have garage parking could pull the battery out of their car every night to plug it in. They’ll get smaller eventually, if people keep working on them.
Regarding the electric load thing…
Just because a battery can charge in 2 seconds doesn’t mean it has to. It could be easily managed from the charging end, to say, draw power slowly, instead of dumping all of it into the battery at once. So it might take 30 seconds to 1 minute. Still not bad.
An Ultra capacitor can be run from completely full to completely empty unlike lithium so it is only 4000 pound which really makes a a big difference (or not).
Batteries and Ultra capacitors have different strong and weak points.
Batteries can store much more energy per kg and they loose it slower. Ultra caps. don’t have a memory effect and i assume that they are more efficient is storing and retrieving electricity.
It probably end up that cars will have both. batteries for storing power over longer periods of time while ultra caps are used to store power for a few minutes
I feel like a broken record on this but the real limiting factor here is how fast you can get current to you, not the fact that it takes time for the electrons to find a suitable home in the battery. Here’s a real quick and dirty back of the envelope calculation.
First let’s assume 100% efficiency everywhere (then later, I’ll fix that)
How much energy do we need to put in the battery. A small electric car should average about 15HP at 50MPH for 200 miles. I’m going to switch to metric now because that’s how I think. But 15HP for 4 hours is about 160MJ of energy.
So we need to get 160MJ into our battery. Let’s say we want to charge in 5 minutes (that’s still pretty slow when you think about it). That would require power delivery of 537MW over those 5 minutes.
At split phase household voltage (110V) that’s 4.8 kA of current.
At dual phase household voltage (220V) that’s 2.4 kA of current.
At typical Industrial 3 phase voltage (480V) that’s 1.1 kA of current.
The highest non-arcing voltage that would be “safe” for the populace to use would be about 5000V – that’s 100A of current.
For reference, the circuits in your house are 15A, special circuits for AC or your electric stove are usually 30A. Do you want to be messing with 100 times more current?
Or I guess more importantly, do you want to have to set up the grid to _safely_ supply that current? You’re going to need wires as thick as your arm (you know how heavy copper as thick as your arm weights) to be plugging your car into. And then if more than one car needs to charge at any given time, the wires going into the charging station are going to need to be the size of your leg (although, since those wires can be at a higher voltage you could get away with smaller ones).
Now all of these calculations assume 100% efficiency, that’s 100% efficiency from the charging station to your car, 100% efficiency to charge the battery, 100% efficiency getting the power back out of the battery, 100% efficiency of converting the electricity to motion in the motor.
Using numbers from other things that I know:
Charging station efficiency 90%
Efficiency of getting the electrons into the battery 70%
Efficiency of getting the electrons out of the battery 70%
Efficiency of converting that to motion 95%
That’s about 40% overall efficiency, so multiply all of my requirements by about 2.5!
We can talk about batteries and smart grid technology all we want. But the real limit is not that. The real limit is the laws of physics, and we can’t break those!
12:23 into this video. I think it sums up electric cars perfectly. (You have to let it buffer to get to fast forward it to that point.)
Simpsons – Special Edna
Compared to the absolutely amazing hydrocarbons that power today’s transportation, batteries are klunky, dirty, heavy, and slow to replenish
drilling for oil, transporting oil to every corner of the globe, refining oil, shipping the refined oil aka gasoline and diesel, dispensing said refined oil, and then burning the hydrocarbons is klunky, dirty, heavy, and will never, ever, be replenished. In the process our air, water, soil, and lives are filled with pollution.
Batteries have no emissions, are easily recycled, and can be powered from electricity which can be produced by anything from dirty hydrocarbons to nuclear plants, to millions of hamsters running on wheels.
/flame on
A couple of points that I feel are missed in the discussion here.
Most people wouldn’t need to recharge during the day. Even available EVs have ranges far in excess of the average US driving distance per day per vehicle. (Multiples, actually). These vehicles would be charged when rates are low, and capacity is high – at night.
The big argument against EVs is what to do when you’re out driving, and you need to top up. Waiting for hours kills the appeal of the technology. A Better Place wants us to swap batteries at their stations, which means that car manufacturers would have to agree on a battery standard. Right.
This could be a solution – if it wasn’t for the size capacitors required.
BMW spent a fortune investigating capacitors for automotion, and stopped the project. (May be on again, for all I know). As I heard it, they became most wary of capacitors, due to the string of challenges attached. Maybe someone else here knows more about their program?
No worries on battery recharging time if Cedar and MIT are correct in their recent announcement. MIT may have the breakthrough technology for rapid battery re-chagring and a quantum leap forward in battery technology. You can google “MIT Battery technology” or link to this Boston Globe story
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/03/12/mit_scientists_charged_up/
What we really have to figure out is how we can use wind power to produce and store hydrogen, a very electrically intense operation. Then fuel cells can move us forward into the future with no one holding a gun to our heads.
In the interim, the grid will need to “smartened” up, we’ll need to reverse car battery power to the grid when called upon, and parking structures may be need to be outfitted as “hot blocks” similar to the Canadian system of plugging in your car when you park to the keep the oil and fluids from reaching gelatinous states. Brain alert! Keep thinking.
The only problem with hydrogen is that you can’t get enough energy back out of it to make up for the energy it costs to get it from water.
The amazing thing about hydrocarbons is that there have been so many of them trapped under the earth for modern times to exploit!
@ John Horner
If “modern” means “now” then, yes.
But there’s nothing modern about how we’re using hydrocarbons – the technology and the burn rate is strictly troglodyte.
miked is right. I probably don’t know the physics quite as well as he does, but even if you had a battery that could be charged in a fraction of a second, big deal. You still have to get all that power in there. If you halve the amount of time needed to charge the battery, then you’ve just doubled the rate of power transfer.
In metric, power is measured in Watts. Volts x Amps = Watts, so in 5 mins you’d be looking at colossal voltage, or amperage, or both. High voltage is efficient, but also dangerous. High amperage is inefficient, generates a lot of heat, and would require a huge cable, as miked said.
If anything above is wrong, feel free to correct it.
Now it’s my turn to sound like a broken record on quick recharging times:
1) Obsessed with a <5 min charge? Battery swap is probably the better way to go. A huge, relatively safe transfer of power into your vehicle…in a couple of minutes. No cable required, nor a massive surge of power from the utility.
2) Who cares? If batteries eventually get up to the point where you can reliably get 300-400 miles per charge, and you can fill up in just a few hours (usually overnight, while you’re sleeping) then each night you just plug in and top off the battery. Right out of the garage you’re good for hundreds of miles every time. It’d be like living in a world without gas stations, but you have a gas pump right there in your garage. 5 seconds to plug in, 5 seconds to pull it out again. For 98% of all your trips, you’d be good to go. And for those few cross-country trips, keep an old ICE or hybrid around. Or rent one. Or borrow from a friend.
The battery uses very low voltage internal so it may not make sense to use high voltage.
If you want <5min charge than you will need a gas station type operation. Could be high Watts charging or battery swap.
But there’s nothing modern about how we’re using hydrocarbons – the technology and the burn rate is strictly troglodyte.
Ah yes, and burning coal through a cord – on a power grid that borders on collapse every time people turn on their air conditioners – is so much more intelligent.
So many smart people, so little common sense…
@don1967
You’re projecting, Don. I did not compare EVs with ICE.
My comment concerns the fact that we could have pulled a lot of efficiency out of ICE and autos, by thinking smarter long before we had a knife at our throats. We have 1920s fuel efficiency – and that’s troglodyte.
One forgets that any increase in the charge rate of a chemical cell will result in an immediate efficiency gain because more of the energy from regenerative braking (high power density charging) can be stored in the battery. (This would apply mainly to “city” driving).
The “supercapacitors” (as mentioned before) could be stored underground at commercial “energy stations”, recharged at night, and be there during the day to rapidly charge cars taken on highway trips.
SunnyvaleCA:
“Charging at home could be as easy as pulling into the garage and having a robotic arm plug you in when you got close to the wall.”
Cool – Good Idea.
One of the difficulties with battery swap is that you’d have to have a standard size and shape of battery for all EVs. Another: you have to keep enough of them at the swap-out station to deal with peak demand (think holidays). And how much storage space are you going to need for all the batteries? You need (and this may not be insurmountable but it sounds like a pain) a system for sticking the empty batteries in one end of some sort of conveyer, and pulling them out charged at the other end. All of that means that while it might be easy enough to have swapout stations on the New Jersey Turnpike, it would probably be a pain to have them in NYC, where I might find myself running out of juice on the way from Boston down to DC.
“Batteries have no emissions, are easily recycled, and can be powered from electricity which can be produced by anything from dirty hydrocarbons to nuclear plants, to millions of hamsters running on wheels.”
Where does the lithium or nickel come from?
Batteries are not “easily” recycled.
This is a very important development in making EV’s more practical. Perhaps the most important one recently.
@miked – The issue here is NOT home overnight charging. Who cares if that takes four or eight hours? It’s all about being able to recharge quickly on a long trip. That was the biggest bugaboo about EV’s so far. High voltage quick recharging stations are now feasible, and the battery-swap idea of Better Place is history, already. The complexities of battery swapping are not inconsiderable; a quick charge much less so.
@davey49 – the lithium in batteries will be recycled, just like the current NiMh batteries in Priuses are all recycled. The components will be in demand, and no one will even consider throwing these batteries away. All current car lead-acid batteries are recycled. We’re not talking about AA cells here.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/new-coated-lithium-battery-charges-in-minutes/#more-279901
This is all fascinating stuff…. Yet another example of technology stretching the design envelope.
Just as challenging is ‘commercializing’ the technology.
Just like powercells as long as the item in question is being hand assembled by guys with PhD’s it’s just one notch better then being a lab experiment (I’m talking to you Ballard Power Systems).
Just as challenging – but less appreciated – is figuring out how to move into mass production.
“Batteries have no emissions, are easily recycled, and can be powered from electricity which can be produced by anything from dirty hydrocarbons to nuclear plants, to millions of hamsters running on wheels.”
A study done a few years ago found that EV’s using lead-acid batteries actually emitted more lead than an ICE using leaded gasoline. And don’t forget the hydrogen given off by a charging battery.
I don’t know if Li-ion batteries have any emissions in normal use (besides those at the power plant or manufacturing plant), but I wouldn’t automatically assume they’re zero.
Permit me to ask a stupid question—why are we screwing with charging stations and hybrids and such nonsence when all we need to do is do is slap a couple of differential gears on each wheel, pipe the energy to a turbine/generator over each wheel and pump that energy directly to the batteries?!!
You don’t need gasoline or a gasoline engine. Wheels spin around to make the car locate—right? A wind turbine is nothing but a wheel spinning around by air, Right? How come no one is thinking—harness the energy of the spinning wheel and feed it back to the batteries to CHARGE THEM?!!! This ain’t rocket science, folks—the technology exists OFF THE SHELF today!!!
Me? Give me the engine off the Tesla, give me a shit load of 3V CR123 LI-on rechargeable bateries, hook four small kinetic generators, over each wheel and pump that new made juice back into the batteries AS YOU DRIVE!!! So how come I ain’t a multi-millionare car builder yet? Damn Li-ions are good for about 1K charges before you have to pitch the batteries. Figure a full charge a day x 365.25 charges a year—you’d have to toss out your batteries every three years or so.
This is great, but they’re still a ways away from making a nanotube based anode to complement their new cathode
We have 1920s fuel efficiency – and that’s troglodyte.
A modern-day Ford sedan burns half the fuel of a 1920s Model T, despite being three times heavier, ten times more powerful, and producing 99% fewer emissions. This is hardly “troglodyte”. How much progress were you expecting during the span of one human lifetime?
Sorry if I was projecting your views, but this is the direction most of the world is taking and it’s out of control IMO. Everyone is suddenly in a big hurry to abandon a winning technology in favour of half-baked golf carts, simply because of a temporary fuel price bubble and a book by a former Vice-President. This is not progress; it is panic.
There will be a time and a place for cars that run on electricity, hydrogen, or banana peels, but we simply aren’t there yet. While our best and brightest work on it, I will continue to take pride in today’s Troglodyte technology.
The only thing preventing the rapid advance in electric vehicle technology is institutionalized ignorance and entrenched interests.
The tech is happening now, and competition will drive rapid innovation, if given a fertile environment.
The “V8 growl” will be simulated by aftermarket speakers housed in bolt-on “mufflers” if you like, and requisite tire smoke is just a “sport” button away.
And yes, coal will power these first cars, but that will change as well.
As can be seen by cars like the Teslas and Fiskers, not all EV’s will be dour boxes on wheels (and much cheaper ‘sporty’ versions will be available in time).
A nice “offshoot” business would be renting V8 musclecars for those who need a ‘fix’.
CPTG: I can’t tell if you’re serious or not. The reason nobody has invented such a thing is because you are talking about a perpetual motion device! Regenerative braking is exactly what you are talking about, but it only works when you are trying to slow the vehicle because you are exchanging kinetic energy for electrical energy. At any other time your idea would generate, at best, the same amount of energy that you would need to expend to overcome the braking load your generators would place on the vehicle.
So as great as it sounds, it ain’t gonna happen.
@shaker
Just a quibble here–only half of US electricity is powered by coal at present. The rest, in descending order, is natural gas, nuclear, and renewables.
I can tell you though, as someone who loves the feel and sound of internal combustion, artificial ICE noises ain’t gonna cut it. a very rough analogy is looking at pictures of the opposite sex instead of actually having sex.
Or here’s maybe a better analogy: you love cars, but you have to take the train. So you bring your driving simulator and play with it as you ride on the train.
So the way I see it, battery swapping has two reasons to exist. One is the difficulty with fast charging, but nano batteries may negate this reason. The second reason for swapping is so you dont have to own your incredibly expensive battery and pay 20k to buy a car instead of 40k. I havn’t read anything hear to show that this reason is invalid.
Also, if swapping and fast charge stations were both around, then why couldn’t Better Place use the fast charge batteries allowing you to use either station?