
Chemists one step closer to new generation of electric car battery - lelf
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-chemists-closer-electric-car-battery.html
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Animats
_An ultra-thin nanomaterial is at the heart of a major breakthrough by
Waterloo scientists who are in a global race to invent a cheaper, lighter and
more powerful rechargeable battery for electric vehicles._

Another minor advance in surface chemistry, heavily overpromoted. This seems
to be standard operating procedure in "nanotechnology". At least the headline
says "one step closer", not "invented new battery".

They made a similar announcement back in 2009:
([http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v8/n6/full/nmat2460.html](http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v8/n6/full/nmat2460.html)).
Here's what they said six years ago: _The Li–S battery has been under intense
scrutiny for over two decades, as it offers the possibility of high
gravimetric capacities and theoretical energy densities ranging up to a factor
of five beyond conventional Li-ion systems. Herein, we report the feasibility
to approach such capacities by creating highly ordered interwoven composites.
.., Reversible capacities up to 1,320 mA h g-1 are attained. The assembly
process is simple and broadly applicable,..._ That battery turned out to last
for only two or three charge cycles. Now they claim to have fixed that.

There are at least eight other LiS battery research projects
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery))
and at least three startups (oxisenergy.com/) (sionpower.com/) (polyplus.com).
Sion Power has shipped some usable batteries, which were used in the Zephyr, a
solar/battery powered all electric UAV that stayed up for 14 days.

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ChuckMcM
Excellent collection of references. As with most things batteries are more
than just chemistry. I will be interesting to see if they can mass produce
cathodes using this technique.

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breckinloggins
I want to believe...

Does anyone know if there's a site that tracks all the "major breakthroughs"
from the various sciences and treats them as a thing with a lifecycle, so you
can go back and check whether "fantastic result X" has any of the following?

\- followup papers / research

\- additional grant money

\- commercialization steps achieved

That's what would be really great: treat each of these as the start to a
potentially longer story.

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Egregore
Quote from the article:

"Very few researchers study or even teach sulphur chemistry anymore," said
Nazar. "It's ironic we had to look so far back in the literature to understand
something that may so radically change our future."

I wonder if is there a structured database of scientific material to address
such research?

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vamin
I'm not aware of any structured databases of published research articles, but
this project (a database of computed properties for materials) has generated
some interesting insights into batteries and other technologies:

[https://www.materialsproject.org/](https://www.materialsproject.org/)

For example, check out the papers on phophates as Li-ion cathodes in
About->Publications.

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breckinloggins
"It's ironic we had to look so far back in the literature to understand
something that may so radically change our future."

No, it's expected. Fundamental science rarely "ages", it just might be a while
before it can find applications. I hope for a future where scientific
discoveries don't fade, they are just input into some distributed semantic
database as a "fact". Combined with researchers who are taught to use these
tools and to think in a multi-disciplinary fashion, this could really
accelerate the pace of discovery and invention.

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rdtsc
It seems battery technology field has a lot of "great breakthrough just around
the corner" type announcements. Seemingly more so than other fields.

Wonder if "improved" battery idea is much easier to sell to investors who
maybe not as tech savvy, but nevertheless everyone thinks they can understand
the idea of "better battery" rather than say special coating for turbine
blades.

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mrfusion
Could the gigafactory be repurposed to produce these batteries? Are they
expecting to handle technology shifts like these every few years?

~~~
jimmcslim
The unfortunate reality might be that we have reached the limits of what
chemistry can physically achieve with battery technology and there are no more
significant shifts to be dealt with...

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ars
One nice thing about sulfur is we have a tremendous amount of it left over
from cleaning it out of oil.

There's so much of it just sitting in huge piles it's effectively free.

