In order to work batteries need to have a certain amount of instability built in, on a chemical level. Them electrons have to want to jump from one material to a more reactive one; there is literally no other way. There is no such thing as a truly "safe and stable" battery chemistry. Such a battery would be inert, and not able to hold a charge. Even carbon-zinc batteries are technically flammable. I think these guys are stretching the truth a little for the layman, or possibly for the investor.
Lithium in current lithium-whatever cells is very reactive. Sodium on its own is extremely reactive, even moreso than lithium. Based on the minimal lookup I just did, this company appears to be using an aqueous electrolyte which makes sodium-ion cells a little safer (albeit at the cost of lower energy density, actually) but the notion that a lithium chemistry battery will burn but a sodium chemistry one "won't" is flat out wrong. Further, shorting a battery pack of either chemistry is not likely to result in a good day.
These are more fun then lipos... I wounder if u pack a tesla full of these..will it manage to achive escape velocity after a crash? I mean gas cars and lithium batteries right now just turn car into lots fo smoke and flames..but these might really change how we see crashes...
Edit: I feel like I need to add an /s somewhere...the amout of serious replies to this comment are concerning 🤦
That explosion doesent seem much bigger than a firework thats smaller than the battery’s size. With as much as a car weighs and the amount we already do to protect batteries in electric cars i imagine the explosion from these could be easier to manage safely than a lithium fire. I also wonder how harmful the fumes are compared to lithium
Yep, less/no fire is very important when creating battery banks with many cells. The probability of single cell failure spreading to adjacent cells is reduced, making a catastrophic failure of the entire bank less likely.
LiPo batteries of the same capacity actually have the potential to be much more dangerous than the sodium cell shown here.
LiPo packs typically use flat, soft walled cells which are far more susceptible to being punctured. In the event of a puncture or overcharge event, high temperature enduring flames are produced, with the severity and duration largely depending on the amount of energy within the cell. LiPo batteries also degrade at a much faster rate (both over time and with charge cycles) and have been known to spontaneously combust in storage while at rest.
With the sodium battery, the thrust produced by the puncture could have been easily been overcome by properly securing the cell.
It is definitely that. That's kind of the point, actually. Sodium is easier to come by than lithium and does not require mining it from unstable parts of the world, nor relying on China.
The appeal of China is largely in the size of the labor force. Whether this tech is more or less feasible than cobalt and lithium, businesses will still want to exploit the large volume of cheap Chinese labor in order to build them.
You who are so wise in the ways of science, can you explain to me if this is safe/will be super dangerous if exposed to water? Doesn't sodium, like, blow the fuck up when it comes in contact with water?
Well, metallic sodium liberates hydrogen real fast on contact with water, which I guess is tantamount to the same thing.
Yes. But not to the same level as just dropping a brick of pure sodium in a bathtub. In a battery like this there is not pure lithium/sodium/whatever just sloshing around inside. The sodium is tied up being chemically bonded with whatever the anode and cathode materials are. Only a minority of the available sodium is actually free in the form of ions carrying the charge from cathode to anode.
Just as with lithium-ion chemistry batteries, it is vital that the cells remain sealed from the outside because the materials inside will indeed react with air, water, and the water in the air. Exposing the innards will cause a rapid exothermic reaction, i.e. it will get very hot and optionally go off bang.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I was asking because I wondered how viable this would be in boats/ships, outdoor areas, off grid cabins, et cetera. Seems like it's basically the same thing, then, right? Like, proper battery maintenance and you're good?
Yeah throwing a piece of sodium metal into water will cause a violent reaction. Even touching it with your finger is bad because of the moisture on your skin.
But sodium chloride (table salt) dissolves in water easily and safely, resulting in an aqueous solution including sodium ions.
A couple decades ago I worked at a place that did power generation turbine controls.
One thing I worked on was a redundant sync check for connecting turbines to the grid. A turbine has to be brought up to speed, about 3600rpm in the US, before being connected to the grid. The sine wave coming out of the generator needs to match the sine wave on the grid.
If they are mismatched when the huge breaker closes, it’s not a shock or fire hazard, it’s an explosion hazard.
Is it even possible to have energy storage of any kind that is truly safe and stable? Some are better than others, of course.
considers
Kinetic energy of a body in orbit, I suppose. Like, you want to accelerate the Moon, you get a bigger orbit. We pull energy out of it via tidal generators, and in theory, we could speed its orbit up, increase its altitude.
I mean, it could theoretically smack into something, but it's not gonna hit the Earth very readily, and the speed of an object that isn't in Earth orbit, like an asteroid or something that hasn't been captured by Earth's gravitational field, is probably more of a factor in a collision than the speed of something that is.
At a smaller scale, I expect that thermal energy storage can be pretty safe, as long as you keep it within bounds. Like, if you wanted to insulate a lake and crank its temperature up or down ten degrees, probably not a lot that it could do even if the insulation was penetrated. The rate of energy release is gonna be bounded by convection.
I guess in my head I was implying that it was energy humans store for other humans to use at grid scale. When I said "of any kind” I guess that’s not what I meant, lol.
So in my line of thinking, you’re right about e.g. using the sun to heat a rock. But if we use the sun to heat something for electricity generation, or we heat some medium for energy storage, I bet that will be pretty potent.
Besides, past the small scale into the smallEST scale, it’s all just energy anyway, man. 😎
Doesn't take into account the reactivity difference with the matrix either. Solid state batteries are in a vitrified matrix essentially, and glass don't burn. Would make a lithium solid state battery likely safer than this.
Long-time offgridder here. Would love to have a reasonable alternative to lead-acid or lithium. Opted for lead-acid again on the last battery swap around 5 years ago. Squeezed about 12 years out of the last set -though they were pretty degraded by that time. This bank is depreciating faster, probably because of increased use.
Lead acid batteries seem to be less and less reliable lately. The warranties are shorter and shorter as well, which is the best supporting evidence I have beyond needing batteries more often for the 4-5 vehicles I maintain.
For real. It will take up a lot more space than lithium, but if it lasts way longer and should end up being cheaper, it would definitely be the winning choice. Solar array on the roof and a huge outdoor battery in a shed against the house and no more electric bill, ever.
Make firefighter's jobs a lot easier. Hell you don't even need a firetruck to tell the people outside "Yeah, it's fucked, nobody's coming out of there"
The shitty thing right now is grid connection is required by pretty much any building code, and the utilities are getting wise to solar. They're moving a lot of the fees from power use to connection and line maintenance. My family was looking at solar, but since 2/3 of their power bill is just to be connected to the grid it wouldn't save enough to make economic sense.
its big shallow ponds of saltwater. Folks just feel like lithium has to have a monkey's paw catch to it, but it's one of the least ecologically damaging material to extract from the earth.
Just bought and installed 20kWh of gently used AGM batteries, hopefully by the time they wear out they'll have been the last lead-acid cells I own. Nice to see sodium actually hit production.
The claimed 10x C rate of lithium would be insane as lithium already has great power density. At that point it's practically a capacitor, and could even be used to replace the much hated automotive starting batteries. Wonder how it handles low temperatures.
Battery technology is changing all the time, but it's only highly visible when we switch fundamental systems. NiMH batteries had a number of improvements that increased energy density and charge cycles, but most users only saw they were NiMH batteries. The same applies to Li-ion batteries. Overall, rechargeable batteries have gotten 6 to 10 times as energy dense and cost has been reduced to about 5% per Ah over the last 30 years. This didn't happen because research wasn't leaving the lab.
All good points. The main takeaway here should really be about what this particular breakthrough offers, which is an abundant, more environmentally-friendly source material that could be used to replaceLi-Ion in a lot of use cases. And maybe most/all uses with its own improvements over time.
And also that advanced materials science is hard. Yes, there will be a lot of apparent dead ends as well as a lot of dead ends that lead to new paths of research when coupled with as-yet unperformed research. It may be cool to say, "Yet another piece of research that won't leave the lab," but all comments like that (and the upvotes they receive) indicate is the complete lack of understanding those users have about the field in question.
Thank you. I try to keep that same message out there. Yeah, headlines make outlandish claims all the time, but they're all based on something, and every single one you heard in the last 20 years have added up to a revolution.
Before anyone complains about energy density of these being less than lithium, the applications where these are used would reduce the demand for lithium, making lithium cheaper and/or more available for other purposes where sodium-ion wouldn't work.
For anyone wondering how the density actually compares, it seems that sodium batteries are a bit more than half the energy density of the best lithium batteries, but are a less mature technology so that may improve over time.
Judging from that graph, it looks like the sodium ion batteries are about as energy dense as Li-ion was in 2020, which is far from useless. Li-ion may still be the best but at a point, there's "good enough" for many applications (eg cellphones) if the price is low enough.
I would happily take a slight reduction in EV range if it meant the battery was significantly less expensive and the number of charge/discharge cycles would last the life of the car. Someone else said that with a rated 50,000 cycles, one charge cycle per day would last 137 years.
They aren't rated for 50,000 cycles. The ones I have seen are rated between Lithium Cobalt Oxide and Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. They don't even come close to Lithium Titanate in charge cycles.
Not sure, but i get 420km range and it's dropped less than 5% after 110,000km, does 0-100 in 5 seconds. To be honest that's more than quick enough for me.
If it's nerfed a bit i definitely don't notice it.
Sodium based batteries have reached at least 247 Wh/kg in the lab at least. While lithium in the lab does have much higher instances, that isn't far off from current commercially available Li-ion EV batteries.
While such sodium batteries are not commercially available, it at least shows their potential to reach close to current EV batteries (around ~270 Wh/kg).
Sodium batteries are commercially available as of early this year. I've seen Hakadi and Sriko tested independently on Youtube -- they're the real deal (sodium has a unique charging curve), but they have the same/similar organic electrolyte as LFP cells (I believe Natron uses PBA on both anode and cathode plus water-based electrolyte).
The linked batteries all appear to have energy densities of about 130 Wh/kg or less.
I wasn't denying sodium batteries are not commercially available/viable, just pointing out that while currently available sodium batteries have lower energy density than lithium ion batteries, in the lab, sodium batteries have the ability to reach similar energy density to currently commercially available lithium ion batteries.
The linked batteries are plenty useful for many purposes. I would gladly use them for home energy storage, electronics, or recreation vehicle use. I'm generally wary of lithium battery safety in outdoor, or high heat environments, and look forward to safer options becoming more available/common.
These aren't going to shine as "I want to power my rc plane" batteries, but as someone else said, "[a house-powering battery] can be as large as it needs to be and buried in the back yard"
I'd love a giant sodium battery in a bunker that gathers energy from my wind/solar setup and powers everything without needing to connect to the US power grid.
As long as I can service my own windmill and panels with extra parts (I'm a big believer in both "have a backup" and "two is one and one is none" so always keep 3 spares of things around) I'm set on power during events that would shut down the neighbors.
The lower cost (and battery cost has been lowering drastically for many years based on my own RC dealings) will allow for mass-storage at low prices.
Opponents of renewable energy are running out of excuses, so they have to grasp at straws.
Definitely. This technology has showing up in a YouTube channel I've been watching for a while. Just Have A Think on YouTube does a pretty excellent job of tracking these kinds of advancements.
He did a video on NA batteries 3 months back, which was a follow-up to a 202(2?) video.
A full 100% sounds weird. It means complete overlap with the ASD assessment which itself isn't bulletproof. Weird like there were some mistakes in the data. E.g. all ASD pictures taken on the same day and getting a date timestamp, "ASD" written in the metadata or filename, or different light in different lab.
I didn't see any immediate problems in the published paper, but if these were my results I'd be to worried to publish it.
It sounds like the model is overfitting the training data. They say it scored 100% on the testing set of data which almost always indicates that the model has learned how to ace the training set but flops in the real world.
I think we shouldn’t put much weight behind this news article. This is just more overblown hype for the sake of clicks.
newatlas.com
Hot