
India Develops the World's First Iron-Ion Battery - doener
https://www.energytrend.com/news/20190826-15033.html
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NikolaeVarius
> it is only capable of 150 cycles of charging and discharging for the time
> being. At the present stage, the energy density of the battery is also only
> able to reach around 220 Wh/kilo, which is only around 55-60% of the 350
> Wh/kilo of energy density for lithium-ion battery.

Key Point

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taneq
The cycle life isn't too bad given that this is still at the "it works at all"
stage, not the "refined to be commercially viable" stage. Remember that 20
years ago the only practical bulk storage battery was lead acid and that had a
similar cycle life. We're just spoiled these days with LiIon and LiPoly being
so cheaply available.

Also the per-kilogram energy storage is far less important given the price
difference between iron and lithium. There's a huge market for stationary
battery storage where weight and even (to a lesser extent) size are non-
factors compared with cost per kWh.

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ac29
Lead acid batteries are lousy with a full depth of discharge, but for partial
discharges, such as car starter batteries, or solar powered telemetry
stations, they can easily have 1000+ cycles of lifetime. If an Iron-ion
battery could replace these applications economically, that would be a huge
market. Lithium iron-phosphate batteries are great for these purposes, but
cost nearly 10x more than lead acid.

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taneq
When you say "1000+ cycles" do you mean 1000 discharge-a-bit / recharge-a-bit
cycles, or an equivalent total energy storage to 1000 full cycles? If the
latter, then it's a bit misleading to discuss "cycles". You're actually
getting 1000 cycles to 10% depth of discharge, which is equivalent in terms of
total stored energy to 100 cycles at 100% depth of discharge.

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ac29
Anecdotally, when dealing with lead acid batteries, 1 100% discharge is _much_
worse in terms of cycle life than 2 50% discharge cycles or 10 10% cycles.
Other chemistries dont have this problem, or are less affected.

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rfrey
A lot of concern here about the 150 cycle lifetime. But if they could be made
cheap enough on a per-MWh basis, they might solve the (IMO) thorniest bit of
100% renewable strategies... seasonal supply balancing.

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rohan_shah
I've been reading and researching about batteries online for long now. But I
haven't come across any group/community that discusses on battery
technologies.

Anyone knows of any such slack/discord/Facebook/whatsapp group, then please
let me know.

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bigger_cheese
My Materials Engineering thesis (~10 years ago) was on anode technology for
Li-Ion batteries I haven't kept up with the field (I work in metallurgy
nowadays). I am not sure there would be any online Facebook groups or the
like, as with most academic fields I imagine battery research community is
still pretty insular.

At the time I found journal articles and conference proceedings were the best
resource to keep up with current state of the art.

A few journals I can recommend from memory:

"Journal of Power Sources" "Electrochemica Acta" "Electrochemistry
Communications"

Otherwise academics are usually good source you can try emailing professors
and/or grad students from local university, they may be willing to give you
some pointers.

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dangom
Here's the link to the publication in ChemComm:
[https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/cc/c9cc0...](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/cc/c9cc04610k#!divAbstract)

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robocat
Fantastic! What's the Voltage of it?

Each new chemistry discovered is another opportunity to evolve to become the
next battery technology base, or to service a specific market (consumer or
otherwise).

Every battery tech when invented has multiple downsides (e.g. 150 cycles) that
then require multiple new innovations to evolve to be competitive.

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solotronics
I wonder how this would compare for Wh/$ vs Lithium batteries?

