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[truthofcraft-blog]

Darwinism is alive and kicking in the battery world

Darwinism is alive and kicking in the battery world (regardless of the threat the theory faces in other spheres). Let me elaborate. It is page after page of different chemistries that allow us to store cost. Some operate at high voltages others in low. Some are water-based others are non-aqueous. Some function at room temperature, others at higher (much higher) temperatures.

What is not listed in the publication are a lot of chemistries that might nevertheless be created to a battery but aren't worth listing because nobody is interested in utilizing them. Someone can (literally) go to the table, pick up two elements out of it, and make a battery out of these components. In all likelihood the resulting battery won't be that good, but you are certainly able to produce something (believe lemon battery). Of those quite a few combinations of anodes, cathodes, and electrolytes that make a battery, natural selection kicks in and we identify the ones that give us positive performance. From that Darwinian process we wind up with the batteries that we all know and love (although love might be too strong a term to describe our relationship with our power storage device!) . Likewise, we could play all we need using a Li metal anode but it took pairing an electron cathode using a graphite anode to make, what's come to be known as, a lithium ion battery to get this concept to get a successful rechargeable battery. Along the way, we've relegated a lot of batteries to market applications. Nobody has heard of a lithium-thionyl chloride battery because it is used in vague military programs involving missiles, nuclear bombs, remote launching, and a button in the White House ( so I am told. Who knows). And you thought lithium-ion was expensive!) . But natural selection does not happen overnight. There's a period of uncertainty in which it is not clear if a particular species (or plasma chemistry) will make it if it will left into the ash heap of history (being dodo-ed, so to speak). And like development, in battery chemistries, there's also such a thing as relegation into a marketplace (I will not offer you any examples in the animal kingdom due to the risk of offending someone). To survive you don't need to become the fittest, you merely have to get fit enough to get a market share, but little the share might be! But let us cease this history lesson and get the modern day where I think we're at the cusp of a single (or 2) such evolutionary change(s).

The class of batteries that we've come to forecast lithium ion batteries is similar to the previous battery chemistries that we've struck in that it does not signify one anode/cathode/electrolyte combination. Whenever someone clarifies a lead acid battery, they're talking about a battery which has a lead dioxide positive electrode and a direct negative electrode with sulfuric acid electrolyte. You could be using some carbon in the plate, or with a unique current collector grid, but fundamentally you haven't shifted the voltage or strength of the battery. Whenever somebody says they're employing a lithium battery which only lets you know that the type of battery at which the charge is completed by means of a lithium ion. The anode, cathode and (to a lesser extent) electrolyte are not specified. It might be a graphite/cobalt oxide battery that your cell phone uses or a graphite/lithium manganese oxide battery your powertool uses. Both are called lithium ion. In what I consider to be a public-relation disaster, the lithium ion battery community chose to club these chemistries to a term, lithium-ion. If, rather than calling the graphite/cobalt oxide battery that a lithium ion battery, they'd called it a, state, carbon-cobalt battery, today we would be talking about a carbon-manganese battery, a carbon-iron battery, a carbon-nickel battery, a titanate-nickel battery and so forth etc.. I should not blame myself because of this since I'd been only a teenager when this occurred) then it would seem like batteries are shifting all of the time. Rather, we get asked uncomfortable questions such as "Lithium batteries have been around for 20 decades. So... are you guys doing something new?" . Not that I am bitter or anything. But let us get back to the topic available. Its becoming increasing evident that lithium is going to be the choice for PHEVs in the near-term. What is not clear is which of these several chemistries will ultimately be the winner. May the low-cost, secure manganese system (the chemistry selected by LG Chem/CPI and Dow Kokam) triumph over the longer-life (presumably, but I have not seen such advice) secure iron phosphate system (A123)? Would the greater energy nickelate system (Johnson Control and Saft) function as alternative due to the high energy despite its security problems? Can the fast-charge capacity of this titanate anode (Enerdel and Altair nano) be of any use in a world where even slow charging could be an infrastructure nightmare?

Every chemistry has its own benefits and pitfalls. Nobody chemistry would be the magic bullet which satisfies these criteria. Each option results in a compromise. As of today, it appears hard to predict the winner.

Will we choose a car with much more back space and find out that we have to use the highest energy density battery we can get our hands on even if its just lasts 4-5 decades or would we prefer something which might be a bit cheaper but that might be a little car that's only helpful for a short commute? Or maybe we will end up saying that gas is fine and that all of this battery technology stuff is hype with no substance (now, that is a blog post that is well worth making!) . We're at a time once we cannot clearly determine which one (or perhaps three...or perhaps even none!) Of these can be our potential. GM and Nissan have chosen the manganese oxide system because of the Volt and the Leaf, respectively, but this does not indicate the race has been completed. Something similar is happening in the emerging market for grid-level electricity storage. It's evident that one battery will not function as solution for these programs. There are already many systems that are in many different phases of setup for grid software. And stream batteries are trying to make inroads. And like lithium ion batteries, stream batteries are a course and can signify anything from vanadium-based, halogen-based, or iron-based (I wonder if we are replicating our error together with the ion by calling anything a stream battery in contrast to, say, a hydrogen-halogen battery). Numerous those systems have been around for many decades, while others are being developed as we speak. And it's not only batteries which compete in this system. Over the next ten years, systems will probably be narrowed down and down-selected to people that make sense. Something similar happened in the 90's and in the early 2000's in the vehicle distance and technologies like electrochemical capacitors (or even supercaps or even pseudocaps) were gradually deemphasized. This is likely to happen in the grid space. 50 years from now, when we start the Handbook of Batteries (in some form we are studying at that time), all these chemistries will be in the publication. Question is, which chemistries will have the biggest chapters.