# Just Add Water



## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Phynergy is testing a car with an 1,100 mile range using a replaceable Aluminum-Air battery. Battery requires a few top-offs with tap water during the full use, then is swapped out for another. The battery materials are then recycled and turned into another battery.


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## dragonsgate (May 19, 2012)

All these new break throughs are like setting a glass of cool water just out of the reach of a man dying of thirst. I doubt if I will live to see any of them or at least still be young enough to do anything about it if they do come to the market in my time. When I did my car in 1999 lead was the only thing there was for the average person. Over the years lithium has become a little more affordable. I had been saving for almost three years to get a pack of lithium's and was just about there when I decided to use the money to help my son wipe out the last of his student loan. I am saving again and he is giving me a little each month to build the coffers back up so it might be a little less time to get there. It is going to be a real pisser if one of these new batteries comes on the market right after I make the big purchase. I figure 18 to 24 months I will have the cash again. I sure hope one of these outfits gets off the pot soon.


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## Duncan (Dec 8, 2008)

I hate to say it but 18 - 24 months is almost certainly too short a period,
These new technologies always seem to be 5 to 10 years away


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## dragonsgate (May 19, 2012)

Duncan said:


> I hate to say it but 18 - 24 months is almost certainly too short a period,
> These new technologies always seem to be 5 to 10 years away


 The 18 to 24 months for me to get the money saved up again will be to long but the battery marketing situation is to long. I usually skip over the new battery break through articles anymore because they all end up saying still in the research phase.


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## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

dragonsgate said:


> All these new break throughs are like setting a glass of cool water just out of the reach of a man dying of thirst. I doubt if I will live to see any of them or at least still be young enough to do anything about it if they do come to the market in my time.


You are thinking linearly, not exponentially.

Plot this for yourself to understand the difference.

Plot the price / performance of batteries for the past 50 years adjusted for inflation. You will get a line that curves, which intuitively "feels" like a slight increase in the rate of improvement.

Now plot the line on a logarithmic (or log scale - see Excel Help). What you will find is very nearly a straight line - meaning that over some period of time the performance routinely doubles for the same price.

Here is a better example - research "The Human Genome Project." It was originally announced with a 15 year time-line to map human DNA (just what it looked like, not what it meant). A bit over 7 years in they were less than 1% done, and the press had a party declaring it an utter failure and waste of taxpayer dollars (I might agree with the latter in principle, but even I would agree that understanding how to cure human disease is worth some tax dollars). Yet, the program finished early and under budget. Why? Because the knowledge of HOW to approach the problem was continually improving throughout the life of the project, as were the tools, techniques, and methods of cross-communication and cross-discipline consultation.



> When I did my car in 1999 lead was the only thing there was for the average person. Over the years lithium has become a little more affordable. I had been saving for almost three years to get a pack of lithium's and was just about there when I decided to use the money to help my son wipe out the last of his student loan. I am saving again and he is giving me a little each month to build the coffers back up so it might be a little less time to get there. It is going to be a real pisser if one of these new batteries comes on the market right after I make the big purchase. I figure 18 to 24 months I will have the cash again. I sure hope one of these outfits gets off the pot soon.


Buy used -that is always the best value. Get used Leaf modules while waiting for something better.

It's just like graphics cards for your gaming computer for the past 20 years. About every 18 months something comes out with about double the best performance of the last generation, and the last generation is then available for about 1/3 the price you could originally buy it for. There is no magic point in time in the near future; but there may be bumps where a new technology suddenly comes out at a lower price.

Speaking of video cards, the next generation architecture will about blow us away. A new type of memory has come to market. AMD has showcased it in their newest offering, but it is a poor taste as it is too slow and not enough of it to take the performance crown. However, next year both AMD and GE Force will adopt this new architecture, and we will get the biggest performance boost in many years.


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## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

dragonsgate said:


> The 18 to 24 months for me to get the money saved up again will be to long but the battery marketing situation is to long. I usually skip over the new battery break through articles anymore because they all end up saying still in the research phase.


That is true; I only keep posting them because many here believe that technology is mysteriously coming to a halt. It is not - and the trend of 50 years is not about to stop either.

It seems slow because everyone here wants cheap EVs. But, just in the time I've been on this forum we have seen dramatic reductions in the price / performance of the un-subsidized cost of building an EV - and it won't be too much longer before they are mainstream.

Personally, if I were betting I'd pick 24M as the tipping point. They approached it from a manufacturing perspective, and it looks like their process can ramp up quickly to the point where costs are only about 20-25% of current batteries with better / longer lifetime and a bit more energy density. It is "enough" to make the package financially attractive to mainstream buyers.


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## GoElectric (Nov 15, 2015)

Yes, I tend to agree - they are at the point of building a manufacturing plant, with the goal of producing batteries in 2017. 

I emailed them to see what the terms are for a distributorship.

Jim


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## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

Phantom: there are always limits. In some cases we've been very clever at removing the limits as we've gone, and in other cases we've talked a lot about it but it has never happened- hydrogen is a great example. Many people have made the mistake of extrapolating Moore's Law to fields to which it absolutely does not and cannot apply. In fact, even Moore's law has been falling upon hard times since about 2013 from what I've read. Growth is still exponential, but the rate is falling.

Take for example the efficiency of heat engines. I've seen idiots plot the efficiency of heat engines versus time and expect that we'd soon be beyond 100% efficiency, whereas the Carnot limit is about 77% for a hot reservoir at 1000 C and a cold reservoir at 20 C.

Thermodynamics presents hard limits for many things. Plotting things on a log y scale versus time is fine- until you run up against a limit. When you do, the line will turn to the right and go flat. That turn may be gradual or sharp.

That said, I do agree with you that there is still a huge amount we can do to improve battery performance on all metrics- energy density per unit volume and per unit mass, cycle life and manufacturing cost per kWh stored. We're nearly perfect in charge/discharge efficiency with Li-ion technology already. There's plenty of economic driving force to fund that development. 

I'm confident that the optimal solution for stationary and mobile/vehicle applications will be different in the end, and I see the fact that we're not there yet as strongly suggesting that we're not there yet..


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## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

As to the specific example of the primary Al-air battery: brief research shows that once you have pure alumina (aluminum oxide), it takes between 14 and 15.5 kWh/kg to produce aluminum in the melt- all of it electricity. Additional energy is required after that to produce a final product form like a battery electrode.

Phinergy's website claims that "aluminum has a high energy density- 8 kWh/kg".

8/15 isn't a very efficient process. Let's forget for a moment about the energy and cost of collecting that alumina, or more likely collecting the batteries themselves, disassembling and reassembling them etc.- if indeed the peak efficiency is only 50%, it doesn't sound that hopeful to me. I don't know where the other 7 kWh goes in an aluminum "smelter", but it goes somewhere, and if you could reduce it to 1 or 2 you can bet the huge produces like Alcoa and Alcan would be doing it now.

The Holy Grail is an aluminum-air or zinc-air secondary battery- one that can be recharged rather than recycled. Those are elusive for a wide variety of reasons, but if one day they can be made such that they actually last for many charge/discharge cycles with a decent cycle efficiency and without too much parasitic mass, they could spell a rather sudden end to the use of IC engines in passenger vehicles.

If the primary batteries are indeed only 50% efficient, the efficiency of a future secondary battery is definitely in question.


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## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

[


Moltenmetal said:


> Phantom: there are always limits. In some cases we've been very clever at removing the limits as we've gone, and in other cases we've talked a lot about it but it has never happened- hydrogen is a great example. Many people have made the mistake of extrapolating Moore's Law to fields to which it absolutely does not and cannot apply. In fact, even Moore's law has been falling upon hard times since about 2013 from what I've read. Growth is still exponential, but the rate is falling.


Absolutely correct - and I for one certainly do not believe it will go on forever. The point, however, is that it doesn't need to. 

We may never achieve energy-density parity with good old diesel fuel - but in practical terms it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that we get at least two more cycles of prices dropping by half, with average battery life on the order of 5,000 cycles, and it is all over for petroleum save perhaps in airliners. Theory certainly allows this much, and even a "reasonableness" test suggests that we can do better than that. 24M alone suggests a price drop of 75%. Other solutions may beat that.

The future looks bright for EVs. We just need a bit more patience.


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## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Moltenmetal said:


> As to the specific example of the primary Al-air battery: brief research shows that once you have pure alumina (aluminum oxide), it takes between 14 and 15.5 kWh/kg to produce aluminum in the melt- all of it electricity. Additional energy is required after that to produce a final product form like a battery electrode.
> 
> Phinergy's website claims that "aluminum has a high energy density- 8 kWh/kg".
> 
> ...


All correct. On the other hand, there may be some applications where high energy density is more important than efficiency.

As solar cell prices keep coming down, the ability to capture and store energy in a high density medium and storing it indefinitely may be very attractive for some niche applications, and the cost of the initial energy to charge may be so cheap that "we just don't care about the inefficiency."


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## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

As bad as the aluminum air round trip efficiency seems to be, it is better than the round trip efficiency for a renewable source hydrogen fuelcell vehicle...with 60% out of both the electrolyzer and the fuelcell and another 90% and probably less than that for pretty modest H2 storage in range terms, it absolutely sucks. It isn't simple or cheap, either, and never will be. I'm confident that we can do a lot better using another approach, whether that be an improved conventional battery or an air-driven solid-fuelled fuelcell like the Al-air "battery".


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## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Moltenmetal said:


> As bad as the aluminum air round trip efficiency seems to be, it is better than the round trip efficiency for a renewable source hydrogen fuelcell vehicle...with 60% out of both the electrolyzer and the fuelcell and another 90% and probably less than that for pretty modest H2 storage in range terms, it absolutely sucks. It isn't simple or cheap, either, and never will be. I'm confident that we can do a lot better using another approach, whether that be an improved conventional battery or an air-driven solid-fuelled fuelcell like the Al-air "battery".


Absolutely.

Still, there are many "true believers" in Hydrogen just as there are in all sorts of other over-unity physical and political theories. The world will progress in spite of them.


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## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Hey good luck - hope you make a mint!


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