• Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz
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    2 hours ago

    TNT has 1162 Wh/kg ratio.

    These new lithium-ion batteries get to 300-400Wh/kg range.

    We are hitting the limit what is doable with energy density. Do you really want to carry 100g of TNT in your pocket or few tons of TNT in vehicle going 100km/h.

    Of course things are not directly comparable, but ball parks.

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      12 minutes ago

      Yeah but firewood is like 5 kwh/kg, or 4 times the energy density of TNT. We drive around with wood in our cars all the time.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 minutes ago

      TNT has 1162 Wh/kg ratio.

      How do you recharge TNT?

      We are hitting the limit what is doable with energy density.

      I mean, we’re definitely running into a problem of how you build a battery without also building a bomb. But the entire point of TNT is rapid thermal expansion. The point of a battery is very low voltage steady release of electrical charge.

      I might also note that C4 has around 6 Mwh/kg. A bit of applied chemistry can go a long way to improving energy efficiency. And that’s before you take advantage of geometry to focus pressure, via a shaped charge.

      Point being, there’s a lot of clever ways to juice a lemon. We’re a long way from the end of the road on battery improvement.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      Kinda, yes? Phones already do so much, why not one additional feature to deter theft.

      We’ve got a lot of that going around in the USA right now.

  • Reygle@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Every week with the “miracle battery!” headlines. This has been going on for ages and I’m sick of it.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    Sodium Ion already does 5000+ cycles. Adding Vanadium is not a scalable material. It is very expensive. 400 cycles steady is not useful information because it needs to do much more. They didn’t state a wh/kg density. This is probably not a viable research vector, but “big Vanadium” has proposed a rental model to make Vanadium more scarce for other applications. Flow batteries (a fuel cell with tanks of electrolytes) provides an ultra easy way of recycling/selling the vanadium for traditional uses. Battery rental that forces returning it could be viable.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Right up there with the batteries that would contain about 1 kg of silver in them. Even if they didn’t become insanely expensive you’d have tweakers foaming at the mouth to steal your batteries.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      Low capacity is my guess.
      Dunno if the article is the same I have read a few days ago but the, mentioned “everything” except the comparable capacity to sodium or lithium batteries.
      And I can’t imagine that the capacity for salty water with tofu remnants is much higher than a sodium battery which is atm serialized for mass production runs (isnt it even available in some capacity as a commercial product?)

  • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Man this title reminded me of an old animation involving iPhone and some Android phone, lemme go find…

    https://youtu.be/YWNQTpdcoC4

    The part about transforming into a jet and flying you to an island reminded me of the title.

  • iopq@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    Desalinating water might be the best part. Usually, solar power has the downside of needing storage and desalination has the downside of big energy requirements. If you can do both at the same time, it’s a big win for dry climates with lots of sun

    • FlyForABeeGuy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      14 hours ago

      There is also the issue with the salt by itself in desalinisation. If it’s removed with water, you have to deal with that stuff. Table salt is really cheap and there is plenty of offer, so you can’t really economically clean it enough and package it for human consumption or industrial use. So what usually happens is that they dump it back at one moment or another. And that is a hard pollution, and can lead to dead zones around the desalinisation plants if not managed well enough. Being able to add it in a high demand product such as batteries takes all those hurdles away

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      9 hours ago

      They are not going to get the sodium from desalination, they will mine it because it’s cheaper.

  • thericofactor@sh.itjust.works
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    20 hours ago

    Sodium ion batteries have less energy density as opposed to Lithium ion (100-150 WH per Kg instead of 150-250). I’m curious how much these “wet” batteries improve that. The article doesn’t say.

    Nonetheless, even if it’s not the new battery for your car, it could be useful as energy storage for the grid, storing green (solar) energy for the night, and desalinating seawater at the same time.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      My very uneducated understanding is that sodium batteries can be produced virtually anywhere.

      Not every battery application needs to maximize energy density, so sodium batteries are good where that is the case.

      I also did not read about sodium ion batteries characteristics versus lithium ion, so there might also be other use cases where sodium ion batteries are better.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 hours ago

        No thermal runaway if I remember correct as those are not prone to exploding (unlike li-ion/li-po)

    • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 hours ago

      There is a branch of battery research that is only focused on grid storage. It’s the last piece to make solar and to a less extent wind unbeatably affordable.

      In a home solar setup, batteries are the other half of the cost and have not fallen as fast as the cost of the panels themselves, the other half of the cost. For fully off grid setups, they quickly become the main cost.

    • blackbeans@lemmy.zip
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      11 hours ago

      Exactly this, there’s a huge market for energy storage, where cost, power and cycle life matter way more than size and weight. And Na-ion can be produced in countries that do not have access to lithium mines, making transport less of an issue and countries more self-sustaining.

      • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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        9 hours ago

        Hilarious…all of these batteries are coming out of one country because only one country is doing serious R&D.

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 hours ago

          If the data is available for mass production, you just need to copy paste the factory and establish the trading partners for supply chains.
          Not the same issue as, for example, ASML and China.

    • fartographer@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      And instead of charging them, you can drink them! Unlike Lithium Ion batteries, which you have to chew.

    • apftwb@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      the strategy of retaining crystal interlayer water yielded a specific capacity of 280 mA h g−1 at 10 mA g−1, one of the highest capacities reported for SIB cathodes in literature.

      All I could find. This isn’t a statement about capacity(?) Units are wrong(?)

      Its worth noting how preliminary this research is. Currently these “batteries” are just jars with chemicals.

      https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2025/TA/D5TA05128B

      https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d5/ta/d5ta05128b/d5ta05128b2.mp4

      • finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        17 hours ago

        mAh/g (milliamp-hours per gram) is essentially still a measurement of capacity, but in terms of current instead of power.

        We can do a little dimensional analysis here to translate between them. Power = Current x Voltage, so you’d multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).

        Phone batteries are often specified in units of Current*Time (e.g. milliamp-hours), but I’m not completely sure why. I think it has to do with voltages being standardized for certain types of cells, so the only real variable in the battery capacity is the current.

        Edit: rearranged some ideas to make more sense

        • apftwb@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).

          This is the part that annoys me. The nominal voltage could vary between different batteries. 200Ah/g means different capacity for a 6v battery verses a 48v battery. I’m guessing battery scientists are using standardized nominal voltages for these tests or are seeing the same Ah/g capacity at different voltages (that I may have simply missed in the paper because I skimmed it and I don’t claim any deeper knowledge on battery research)

        • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          I’m not completely sure why

          I think it’s marketing

          5000 mAh is much a bigger number than 19 Wh and marketing loves huge numbers

          Kinda like BMW did with the i3.

          In 2013 Tesla was selling a model with a 60 kWh battery so BMW had the genius idea to install a 20 kWh battery BUT refer to it as “60 Ah” battery.

          Tesla introduced the 90 kWh battery? BMW responds with a 94 Ah battery (28 kWh)

          Newest Tesla has 100 kWh battery now? BMW has 120 Ah battery (38 kWh)

          “See? Higher number!”, says the marketing

          And in order to have a comparable range number they had to implement heavy weight reduction techniques like using carbon fiber for the body, negating any cost saving from the smaller battery AND giving the owner a total loss after small collisions as it shatters instead of bending

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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    18 hours ago

    Finally a new one!

    It was too quiet during the whole last year. But before, we had about 2 revolutionary new battery technologies every week.

      • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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        9 hours ago

        Would you prefer

        Not at all!

        I like serious publications very much, and I was also well humored by all these shoutings about revolutions…

      • Ace@feddit.uk
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        12 hours ago

        No but I’d prefer if journalists didn’t take the results of one experiment in the lab and write headlines about how cars will now have a 10,000 mile range and charge in 4.2 seconds and last for 75 million cycles

        I don’t think any of the mistrust from other comments in this thread is directed at researchers - it’s directed at the usually-sensationalised reporting. The “I’ll believe it when I see it” comments are because journalists have cried wolf too many times so now the headlines are just background noise.