
Australia first to test new lithium-sulphur batteries - ntalbott
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2228681-a-new-battery-could-keep-your-phone-charged-for-five-days/
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glutamate
This is a much better article with more technical details yet accessibly
written: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2228681-a-new-
battery-c...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2228681-a-new-battery-
could-keep-your-phone-charged-for-five-days/)

Publication link:
[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/1/eaay2757](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/1/eaay2757)

~~~
dang
Changed from [https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/supercharging-
tomorrow-...](https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/supercharging-tomorrow-
australia-first-to-test-new-lithium-batteries). Thanks!

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philipkglass
_However, lithium-sulphur batteries may face similar ethical problems to
lithium-ion batteries. The metal oxides in lithium-ion batteries are typically
nickel, cobalt or manganese, which are expensive and diminishing in natural
stores. They also have associated ethical problems: a significant proportion
of cobalt is sourced by child miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
for example.

“In order to have much cheaper energy and more ethical batteries, we need a
radically new energy storage system,” says Shaibani. The researchers will
further test battery prototypes with a view to manufacturing them commercially
in Australia in coming years._

It appears that Shaibani is saying that their new battery chemistry _is an
example of_ a radically improved battery that removes ethical problems while
it improves energy density. The way the New Scientist article is written, that
preceding paragraph makes it sound like Shaibani's new chemistry still needs
improvements to remove cobalt.

There is already no nickel, manganese, or cobalt in this new lithium-sulfur
cathode (nor in most lithium-sulfur cathodes). See Table S1 in the
supplementary table for elemental analysis:

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2019/...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2019/12/20/6.1.eaay2757.DC1/aay2757_SM.pdf)

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scythe
I've read dozens of papers on Li-S over the years because of how much
incredible potential the technology seems to have. The "dirty little secret"
seems to be not the charge cycles (which are less than, but similar to, other
batteries), but the large amount of electrolyte required, which reduces the
effective energy density of the battery. There are all sorts of papers
reporting high-capacity and durable cathodes but fewer that address the
electrolyte problem, so I'm curious to see what their plan for that is.

A few papers about the electrolyte problem are e.g.:

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.7b00123](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.7b00123)

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.2017059...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201705951)

~~~
foxyv
For utilities I don't imagine that electrolyte is a big issue as there is
plenty of space and you aren't lugging them around like you are in an EV.
Maybe their plan is to use it mostly for grid power?

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lolc
Sounds too good to be true! Did I read right? A fourfold increase in capacity
with no downside? Going to production this year? How did I miss this until
now?

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rasz
Yes, definitely fourfold, shipping in 5 years!!1

Meanwhile Li-ion batteries were invented in seventies, it took 20 years to
commercialization. First cells had 100W h/kg, and 30 years later we are slowly
approaching 300W h/kg.

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jpm_sd
Sion Power has been working on this technology "since 1989".

[https://sionpower.com/about/](https://sionpower.com/about/)

It still only lasts a couple of hundred charge cycles before wearing out:

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/1/eaay2757](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/1/eaay2757)

"The cells are stable for more than 200 cycles..."

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clutch89
You misread that, it doesn't wear out after 200 cycles, it maintains 99%
efficiency after 200 cycles.

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mhandley
Even if it did wear out after 200 cycles, you could still use it as part of a
hybrid battery pack. Imagine 50% lithium ion, 50% lithium sulphur. If LiS has
4x the energy capacity of LiIon, you'd have 2.5 times the maximum range of a
pure LiIon pack. But most of the time, you don't drive anywhere near the full
range, so you discharge the LiIon pack first, and only dischange the LiS pack
on those rare days when you need the extra range (or if you only very very
rarely need the extra range, dischange the LiS half occasionally to avoid the
LiIon half wearing out first).

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brink
Am I correct in assuming that a four-fold capacity in electric vehicles is
coming? That will likely decimate oil dependency.

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vocatus_gate
Reduce it by a tenth?

~~~
nickserv
I know you're referring to the original meaning of the term, but a 10%
decrease in global oil consumption in the transportation sector would be a
great accomplishment. Not nearly enough of course, but so far we haven't even
been able to flatline.

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JoeAltmaier
Lithium-Sulphur has high energy per kilogram which makes it good for
transportation. Also high energy per dollar to manufacture which makes it good
for grid storage (where weight and size don't matter too much, but cost does).

At the nominal rate of 750 amp hours per kilogram for lithium-Sulphur is well
above normal lithium-ion batteries. But compared to gasoline, it raises the
bar from 1% vs gas, to 2%. Do I have that right?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
What makes electric cars viable isn't that batteries have anywhere near the
energy density of gasoline, it's that if you use them, you get to replace half
a ton of engine, transmission, alternator, fuel pump, emissions and exhaust
with a <100 pound electric motor, and have that cost and weight budget to use
for batteries instead.

This naturally makes battery improvements a huge win. If you double power
density you can cut the weight of the battery by _more than_ half for the same
range, since not only do you get the same power from a lighter battery, now
the car is lighter and requires less energy to accelerate.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nowhere near. The Tesla battery pack is 1000 lbs. There are entire cars that
don't weigh that. Race car engine is 200lbs.

And battery packs have cooling systems too. So no savings there.

Specific energy (watts-hours per kilogram) is the entire ballgame with
batteries and transportation.

~~~
audunw
> And battery packs have cooling systems too. So no savings there.

That's not quite true. At the very least, EVs require a much smaller radiator,
if it has one at all. Some EVs don't have cooling at all (Nissan Leaf),
although that increases degradation in hotter climates.

I think his point stands.. An ICE engine weight at least 200lb. With
transmission it could be up to 600lb. The Model S engine is 70lbs.

You "only" need to halve the weight of a Model S battery for the
drivetrain+battery to be in the same ballpark as an ICE drivetrain as far as I
can tell.

~~~
Gibbon1
You can look at actual numbers. Instead of a Model 3. Lets compare a Chevy
Bolt with a Prius.

Chevy Bolt is about 3500lbs Prius is about 3000lbs.

Chevy Bolts battery weighs 440 kg or about 968lbs.

Reduce the battery weight by 1/2 and save 484 lbs. So the weight drops to
3016.

So point stands if the battery power density improves 2X then the weight
penalty disappears.

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riazrizvi
Four decisions to make on cookies before being able to read the article? Are
you _trying_ to break the internet?

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davidhyde
I'd recommend using using "I don't care about cookies" and "Cookiebro" to
restore your sanity. Basically you want to automatically accept all cookies,
say yes to all cookie banners, then remove all cookies when you close the
browser except the ones you explicitly want to keep (for staying logged into
certain sites). Those two firefox extensions facilitate that.

~~~
close04
I'm using just uBlock Origin and since I haven't seen any cookie dialog I
assume it did the job just fine. YMMV.

~~~
hanniabu
Unless you're on mobile and then you're helpless and it's even worse because
the dialog takes up 30% of the screen, and the top sticky ads take up the top
15%, and then you have autoplay video ads at the top of the page filling up
the rest of the viewable area, then you go to try and scroll the page and then
a new well engineered ad has a delayed load to pop up right where you're about
to click....

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deepersprout
> Unless you're on mobile and then you're helpless

uBlock Origin is very reliable on my Firefox on Android.

You know, Safari and Chrome are not your only options on mobile.

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betoharres
funny how I saw many posts about Amazon fires and while Australia is burning
to the ground(which is showing to be much worse than Amazon fires), I can only
see a post about some battery; this makes me question this website..

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TheCraiggers
First of all, it's _hacker news_ , not a general news site. And while the
width of breadth of the type of news you'd find on here is larger than just
coding and other hackery, it's still at least usually based in technology.
Like batteries. Still, the official guidelines say anything "a hacker might
find interesting" and we seem to be a environmentally-minded bunch, so maybe
it would fly.

Second, it's based on use submissions. You think we should know something
interesting about the AU fires? Submit a good article about it I guess. If I
and others learn something interesting, it'll get voted up. That's how it
works.

