[ad_1]
Electric vehicle batteries are a problematic business: about half of the carbon generated by the car's construction is dedicated to the lithium-ion cell system, they weigh heavily – the Tesla Model S's 1,200 pounds, even at 85 kWh size – and then there is the charging time, which for your current average electric car is measured in hours and not in minutes.
What about the emerging technology of circulating batteries, a type of cell using refillable liquids to generate electricity, intended for the next generation of clean vehicles? Well, it's promising, but not yet there either.
A reader from Jalopnik asked why other technologies were not being tested and I, your electrochemical correspondent who was typing batteries, was summoned. He asks:
As a regular Jalopnik reader, I would like to know more about the emerging technology of electric battery powered vehicles. From what I have read so far, they seem to promise a more practical response to the deployment of electric vehicles than the current generation of electric vehicles and can avoid many of the disadvantages of hydrogen fuel cells that have prevented the widespread adoption of this technology. .
As a fast refueling technology, they could lead to much lighter electric cars (since you would not need a battery with a range of 200 km if you can refuel in five minutes). interests driving enthusiasts, not just environmentalists. I did not find a good overview of various academic and commercial research and development projects related to vehicle batteries.
This is a good question because, although the development of large scale batteries has stagnated for most of the 20th century, we have other options, some of which are incredibly good.
The most obvious alternative to lithium-ion batteries with a high chemical consumption that supplies almost everything from Teslas watches is called a "flow battery". Unlike some alternatives, they currently exist and are used in large-scale energy storage, essentially composed of electrolyte reservoirs. They have huge benefits, including the fact that, unlike lithium-ion cells, they work better when you make them really big, at a minimum of 20 kWh.
They also have a huge advantage in that instead of being recharged by sending electricity directly into the cells, which then electrochemically absorb energy to store the charge, a flow battery is "charged" by recycling all the liquid and introducing it again.
In a sense, it's incredibly simple and incredible. You can insert an electrical charge into a solution that essentially consists of water (unlike the chemicals needed for lithium-ion batteries) in tanks, and then push it into the vehicle's cell when needed. Charging time can be reduced to half an hour at 5-10 minutes.
All the load is done outside the vehicle, which means the tanks can capture a source of energy during off-peak hours and keep it until rush hour . For energy networks like the United States, which still rely heavily on fossil fuels, this could be the best green option we have to reduce vehicle emissions. Pretty amazing, right? Should we look at this, surely?
Well, people are. Or at least they say they are.
In 2014, Jalopnik announced that the European company nano_Flowcell was manufacturing crazy hypercars "fed with seawater". Of course, we had to point out that they also sounded like bullshit, because of the way they sounded, unfortunately, like bullshit.
Reminder: Quant Water-Salt Water Powered cars always look like Bullshit
Last year, nano_Flowcell introduced the Quant E, a truly striking gull-like supercar that …
Read more
In theory, the physics of the concept is solid: two massive tanks of electrolyte liquid in one car, one negatively charged, the other positively, would meet and create this sweet and sweet juice. This is how the flow cells would work in a vehicle. What was disconcerting was how they managed to get their electrolyte so concentrated that it claimed to contain more than five times the energy density of the Tesla battery fluid, which would mean that it was there. 'a breakthrough scientific breakthrough that definitely put them in the Nobel prize.
Well, we are in 2018 and they have not made a car. I thought I would check what our friends were preparing, and that may be good news: in April, they said they were looking for a site for a plant in the second half of this year. If they make to have a magic salty concentrate, something that at this stage of the 21st century does not seem at all improbable, so everything is fine. Until proven otherwise, the car is in the same limbo as your girlfriend who totally exists and goes to another school, and no, your friend would not know her. (It's a school in Canada.)
Feasibility studies have been done to determine what should be done to use DC batteries in electric vehicles, but there are some colossal obstacles to further lithium-ion research. And this despite the fact that Panasonic, the partner of Tesla, has recognized that we are already pushing the limits of its capabilities.
Most alternatives to LI batteries, such as lithium-air batteries, have major life-cycle problems. This is not the case for Flow batteries, which do not degrade for more than 20 years in industrial use. However, they are plagued by other problems that the ubiquity of LI cells has partially overcome.
Flow batteries do not have the energy density of chemical batteries, which is partly why they are so robust, but also makes them somewhat limiting. for vehicles because you will need, in essence, two huge fuel tanks to get a good run. Most of the feasibility studies on their conversion into vehicles involve buses or other large vehicles within relatively short reach, as they depend on a regular filling of the flow tanks – this particular study has suggested every 18 miles.
Flow batteries are extremely useful for network management. Japan has a few that hold 60 MWh of energy. But unless you have a huge electricity generation facility, they do not work quite well. Although you can power them out of the grid – and they have potential for storage at home – the idea that a regular gas station could generate the energy needed to fill several mWh energy storage tanks would be almost impossible without a small nuclear reactor.
One of the other problems with Flow batteries is that they rely heavily on a metal called vanadium, which looks a bit like something that Marvel has made and you may have guessed, not just hanging around.
There is a mining operation and a large deposit of batteries has recently been discovered in Nevada. But this is the only recent discovery and the mining project is not yet active in this country. While scientists are furiously looking for an economical and available alternative, vanadium is currently a huge obstacle to the creation of mass flow batteries.
There is also the problem with a battery of what to do with recoverable energy. Electric vehicles can considerably extend their range by recovering energy during braking and then re-injecting it into the battery. But that would not be trivial with a flow battery, which "charges" by reversing the flow of electrolyte, not receiving DC power.
So, if you use a flow battery, you have to accept the fact that this thick thing is only going in one direction. It may be less of a problem if you can refuel in seconds, while remaining a loss of efficiency that limits your autonomy. Flux batteries are always heavy, especially with their lower energy density, so any loss of power remains a major problem.
As with the idea of integrating solid state graphene batteries into cars, which Fisker absolutely wants to do, the problem is that we have not developed the technologies. At the end of the day, we may be able to do this – and, as some studies suggest, flux batteries can be amazing as an EV solution to replace lithium after a decade.
This idea offers a major opportunity to move away from national power grids towards localized, battery-powered power, not only for electric vehicles, but for all electrical demands. The problem is not only that nobody has built one, but also that we do not have the grid to do it. It would be possible to convert the fuel tanks of existing service stations to store and charge an extremely stable electrolyte. But it would be much harder to connect them with electricity generation.
Countries without an established network are the first to use some new technologies. Unfortunately, unless a viable and widely available vanadium alternative is discovered, it is unlikely that flow batteries could be part of it, limiting their current development potential.
So it's not impossible that we end up with magically charged cars electrolyte, as if I ate a Powerade before producing an electrochemically complicated copy at my lunch break. But this is unfortunately not as trivial as simply being able to connect a continuous-flow battery.
So for the moment, long live lithium ions.
Hazel Southwell is a freelance journalist covering motorsports, electric vehicles and more. She lives officially in London and unofficially on the departure side of Heathrow Terminal 2. She has a cat.
Source link
