Li-ion king Goodenough creates battery he says really is... good enough A team led by John Goodenough, the man who played a key role in creating the lithium-ion battery, thinks it has cracked a replacement. Goodenough, 94, and his merry band at the University of Texas have developed a solid-state battery that has three times the energy storage of a similarly sized li-ion power pack, can handle …
Finally, and most importantly for some purposes, the batteries won't catch fire.
Sodium is sodium. It does catch fire in contact with water. So it depends just how whet is the environment when you whack it.
Granted, it may be much more difficult for it to catch fire, but there will be circumstances when it will.
Indeed it does. However, as is implicit in your opening comment, you would have to subject the battery container to significant damage under wet conditions before you had a serious problem. Lithium based batteries of the current generation are inherently significantly more vulnerable. Furthermore sodium is available in gigantic amounts from seawater and would be much much cheaper than lithium. The degree of environmental damage that lithium extraction causes (blowing up mountainsides and so on) would also be drastically reduced. I sincerely hope that this actually turns out to be something that comes to market.
The sodium doesn't catch fire. It's the hydrogen generated in the reaction with water that catches fire, and then only if the conditions are right. The reaction with potassium is more violent and typically results in a flame, plus an explosion when a ball of hydroxide forms with some reacting metal inside still generating hydrogen.
However if the sodium is in the form of a thin layer you'd get a lot of hydrogen and heat very quickly on contact with water. Whether you'd get a flame is debatable, but even so it could ruin your day.
The article only said sodium *could* be substituted for lithium, so if this new tech pans out it might be a case of choosing cheap or high density as the situation demands.
BTW, Lithium extraction is done by removing salts from water, not blowing up mountainsides. It does have ecological impacts if done poorly, but can bring money to poor places such as Bolivia and, um, Cornwall.
"BTW, Lithium extraction is done by removing salts from water, not blowing up mountainsides. It does have ecological impacts if done poorly, but can bring money to poor places such as Bolivia"
I'm a bit hazy on my high-school geography, but I believe Bolivia doesn't have access to musch see water...
Lithium Ion batteries have a flammable electrolyte that bursts through the safety enclosure and sets everything on fire, then there's a hot sparking core to make sure the fire can't be put out. A glass electrolyte battery could safely hold much more power if it calmly fails as a blob of yellow-hot sparking goo. A bit of glass weave and sheet metal can hold that.
I assume that this technology is the standard 3 to ∞ years away from mass production.
Well, it is more modern than what was (10y ago or so...) my PhD supervisor's favourite program for typesetting: exp. That was always a major hassle to get this to run (on any "modern" machine and OS, more recent than Win95), also so that one could export his "slides" (etc.) to something in a more... eh... common format (yes, print to a file works in principle, but this DOS program was a bit bitchy when it came to printer drivers).
"Sodium is sodium. It does catch fire in contact with water."
In contact with water it also produces hydrogen as well as the heat and sparks. Mix the hydrogen with air in a confined space - light with reaction's spark - explosion.
In my school days two junior chemistry masters each managed to destroy a large glass pneumatic trough with a loud bang. The pea sized lump of fizzing sodium wasn't all consumed by that point.
The pea sized lump of fizzing sodium...
I recall a chemistry master trying to do exactly that. Unfortunately, while attempting to pare said pea-sized lump from a big stick of sodium, the stick slipped from his tongs and fell into said large glass trough.
We knew the loud bang was coming, the fact that his face went white and he hit the deck behind the bench while shouting "GET DOWN!" was a bit of a clue.
The trough was destroyed and the reinforced glass screen in a sturdy iron frame between us and it was pretty much buggered too.
"The trough was destroyed [...]"
Our troughs split neatly into three pieces: two semicircular sides and a bottom. In both cases the newly appointed junior masters had tried the experiment already - but had failed to show that the water then changed the colour of the litmus paper. So they tried a bigger lump. This time the little mesh "tea-strainer" tool started sparking - then kaboom.
When it happened the second time we were next door to the junior lab. We heard the bang - followed by a loud cheer - and deja vu told us what had happened.
No protective screen sin those days. One favourite demonstration was to fill a bottle with gas - then light it with a wood spill. The class were sent to line the sides of the lab - and the blinds drawn. The junior chemistry master then wrapped his lab coat round the bottle - aimed it down the room - lit it. The flame traversed the length of the room.
On another occasion he decided to show us the thermite reaction. For this we went onto the lawn outside the lab. The chemicals were made into volcano shaped pile and a strip of magnesium inserted at the top as an ignition fuse. However as it was a windy day the class was formed into protective circle while the master tried to light the fuse with a match. Each time a lit match was applied to the fuse - the boys skittered away in nervous anticipation and the wind blew the match out. Eventually the master persuaded us to stay in position until the magnesium ignited. A good show - although the caretaker was probably not too pleased with the bald patch on the lawn.
I can't remember if it was a chemmy lesson or physics but..
as we entered the lab the teacher had a large coffee tin (catering Nescafe size) with a hole in the lid from which a bright yellow flame about 8 or 9 cm high was burning.
He asked us all to gather round while expained the set up. The tin also had a hole in the bottom. It was sitting on a tripod (without a gauze mat) and under the tripd was a bunsen burner with its air-ring closed.
He said that the gas was going into the tin but it wouldn't burn until it came out of the top hole and mixed with the air. He went on to say that if he turned the gas tap off the flame would continue to burn in its lazy way as air came in through the hole in the bottom of the can to replace the gas going out of the top.
He had his spiel worked out so that as he said "mixes to form an explosive cond......" there was an almighty bang and the lid of the tin shot up and hit the ceiling about 7 metres above us (old school - very high ceilings).
It was one of those lessons you never forget.
Now was it the physics or chemmy lab?
Yep great fun, but it is Physics ;-)
I usually sell them some spiel about it not working sometimes (it takes a long time before it goes boom), after a few minutes I announce that it hasn't worked and we need to do some work. So I start dictating something for them to write in their books. Several mimutes later......BOOM (and no doubt several soiled pairs of underwear).
Always makes me laugh. Twice. Once at the time and once when I am marking their books and see the abrupt twitch in their writing.
"Yep great fun, but it is Physics"
Another simple physics demonstration was to heat an iron bar that was fixed at one end - while the other was secured by a pin through it. At a critical point of the bar's expansion the pin would shear with a small bang.
It was fun chasing mercury beads round the bench top when doing density experiments. We also saw that although it is a liquid it is not "wet" - as demonstrated by its convex meniscus.
"Though it is damn hard getting hold of the Nescafe tins that are great for this."
IIRC we used Golden Syrup cans.
One demonstration has stayed in my mind since the 1960s. A special piece of glassware shaped like a bottle with a glass pipe coming up through the bottom. The top outlet was also a pipe. Gas was fed into the bottle.
The idea was to light the gas coming out at the top o produce a flame - which was obvious. The telling point was also igniting air being introduced by the bottom pipe - showing that a flame of air could burn in gas too.
A one gallon rectangular can would be heated with a small amount of water in it until it steamed. Then the top was screwed on - and the heat removed. As the steam condensed the can buckled under atmospheric pressure. That was mind blowing when one previously thought of the presence of the atmosphere as nothing more than the effects of wind.
A beaker of ether had air bubbled through it so that the latent heat of evaporation would freeze the water in the dish in which it stood. The ether vapour just mixed with the air in the lab. It was only in A Level Organic Chemistry that we saw the accident of an invisible ether vapour trail on the desk top suddenly creating a flash flame between two people's experiments.
Those were the days when secondary school Physics and Chemistry both involved pupils doing practical experiments for much of the time.
My father told me the tale of a junior physics master who caused a degree of comment by shooting a 6th former in the leg.
It was all part of an experiment to use light beams as triggers for a timing device to establish the speed of an air-rifle pellet. The air-rifle was clamped in place, and lined up to shoot across the two light beams (one start, one stop) and then flatten itself harmlessly against a protective barrier. Normally the experiment was carried out by the head of physics, but he was away, so the "new boy" covering the lesson took his place.
He duly assembled all the equipment, including barrier, and started the lesson. At the appointed moment he pulled the string which actuated the air-rifle trigger, and the pellet exited the barrel, passed through the first beam (starting the timer), passed through the second beam (stopping the timer), passed through the sheet of stiff card (which the junior master had used instead of the "lab-stool on its side with 4" of newspaper wadded onto the seat" favoured by the head of physics), passed through the glass of the lab window, and finally came to rest in the leg of a passing student.
It says a lot for the values of the time that the reason Dad thought this worthy of comment was that by the time I attended the same school, said junior master was himself Head of Physics, rather than ruing the day he got drummed out of the teaching profession for shooting pupils.
(Other experiments which I was told about mostly so I *wouldn't* repeat them were:
Which wins - the convector heater or the fridge? and
Who operates at a higher pressure - the Gas board or the Water board? (Apparently the answer was the Water board, as established by one inquisitive pupil connecting the gas tap to the water tap with a length of rubber tube and opening both to Full. It cost quite a lot of money to have the gas system drained down, as well as a rather pointed letter to the Headmaster).)
"Apparently the answer was the Water board"
After a couple of such incidents, the gas feed into every lab at my school was piped through a (hefty) glass miniature gasometer in the corner of each lab - making it pretty obvious when things were running backwards and allowing a level-triggered shutoff circuit to be wired in parallel to the emergency shutoff solenoid system which was fitted at the same time.
It was cheaper than allowing it to happen a third time.
Actually, there's been a phenomenal amount of R&D going on for years now, initially driven by phone and tablet needs, not looking at cars and grid scale storage. Last year for which I saw data, the ten largest patentees of battery technology had pocketed over 40,000 patents between them. Obviously that doesn't mean the patents are worth anything, just an indicator of how much research is and has been underway.
Sadly, it's typically seven years from breakthrough in the lab to mass market product, because the lab breakthrough merely shows that something works there. At that point the technology doesn't have any supply chain, any manufacturing experience, or any products designed around them, and these take time to get in place (IP legal work, design work, contractual legals, safety testing & certifcation, manufacturing construction, battery manufacture and device manufacture and marketing). I anything, seven years is incredibly fast....
Even if that could be done in a third of the time, no sane person would risk a mass roll out of a product not proven at smaller scale - even if the battery is provably safe, there's huge commercial risks of real world durability, performance and economics. And sadly there's typically another seven to ten years to completely optimise a given chemistry or major tech break through. So at launch a new battery chemistry will typically be at around 40% of its theoretical potential (based on chemistry), but that can be steadily increased over time, and if you're lucky and invest enough in R&D, you might get that to 80% before something else comes along to replace it.
All of which assumes no technology or cost roadblocks are discovered on the journey to commercialisation, and that other more promising technologies don't appear that research funders choose to back instead.
No need to rush.
Oh there is.
We're reading here about the lab stuff. There's lots that is in between lab and product development, and could be in your hands in a couple of years. One example - lithium sulphur batteries are fairly well developed, have much better specific energy density than conventional lithium chemistries, and are being proven in high value applications as we speak - the main challenge is that for mainstream (=low value) applications they need to reduce the degradation rate. We have managed that with Li-ion, no reason to expect that other chemistries won't follow suit, although LiS looks like only a candidate for transport and static batteries, not for mobile devices.
Probably not. It's probably "glass" in the sense of a supercooled liquid with no long range structure, rather than the usual soda-lime you have sitting in most people's windows.
Sodium ions do move in glass, a fact used in "Anodic bonding" AKA The Mallory Process (invented at Mallory, the company behind Duracell batteries, in the late 60's)
However that needs c400c and 100s of volts to get the Sodium ions moving
The link was unhelpful. I guess for any one more interested they need to check Dr Braga's resume at the University of Porto in Portugal.
It has been said that advances in most sciences are by older people because of the large amount of base knowledge they have to acquire first. Mathematicians are apparently the exception.
However - being in a specific field for a long time can make one blinkered to other disruptive possibilities.
Yes. But don't forget Clarke's three laws:-
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It's also been said that much progress has only occurred because the older people at the top of the hierarchy who oppose new ideas have retired, allowing younger people with "crazy ideas that won't work" to take over.
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