
Free of Heavy Metals, New Battery Design Could Alleviate Environmental Concerns - Gys
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/12/heavy-metal-free-battery/
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HackOfAllTrades
A totally worthless article with almost zero information.

They say the electrolyte suppresses lithium dendrites, so my guess is the
anode is lithium metal, rather than carbon, silicon, or sulfur to absorb the
lithium.

But the don't actually say the anode is lithium metal. There's also some
nonsense about extracting materials from sea water, so it could be a sodium
ion battery.

Altogether a waste of time announcement.

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Accujack
For anyone but IBM to announce this, yes.

However... IBM is mostly about IP at this point, they are one of the few
companies in the world that still has a cutting edge research division in
house. They're responsible for a lot of the tech in present computer chips,
like silicon on insulator or copper chip interconnects.

Possible this is just fluff, but with IBM it's not guaranteed.

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AtlasBarfed
Have their armies of outsourcing services tanked that badly?

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r7brown
IBM was 'ready' to develop li-air batteries back in 2009 (link below). This
should be viewed as a research project until proven otherwise.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131201231910/https://www.ibm.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131201231910/https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smart_grid/article/battery500.html)

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AtlasBarfed
They didn't include recharge cycles in the properties they think they can beat
lithium....

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JBReefer
Why aren’t they saying what’s in it?

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blacksmith_tb
It's also free of details, apparently. But this sentence seems key: "three new
and different proprietary materials, which have never before been recorded as
being combined in a battery" \- that has "we're waiting for patents to be
granted" written all over it.

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Accujack
From the sound of it, this is a lithium anode battery with some new materials
tech in it, which might be a significant improvement in some areas over
present chemistries, kind of like how Lithium Ion Phosphate and Lithium Nickel
Manganese Cobalt Oxide have different characteristics and are used for
different purposes.

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ptah
> The materials for this battery are able to be extracted from seawater,
> laying the groundwork for less invasive sourcing techniques than current
> material mining methods.

marine life might find it "invasive"

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Nasrudith
Every goddamn time an alternative to mining the goalposts get mounted on
monorails and the new's sins exaggerated to atomic testing in a rain forrest
level.

The only marine life impacted would be microscopic in the sea water removed
and maybe the waste brine returned.

~~~
ptah
> marine life impacted would be microscopic

that would be disastrous as all marine life depends on those organisms.

it's not about shifting goalposts, it's about looking at the bigger picture.
the problems we are now facing is because of past myopia

