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triffid_hunter t1_izw6ezd wrote

Reply to comment by Ishpeming_Native in Low-cost battery built with four times the capacity of lithium by BlitzOrion

> What is the size of the battery? Could it be installed in a cell phone, an electric bicycle, a cordless drill, a car, a house?

I think you're missing the point of the article, it's describing a specific way to arrange the cell electrodes so that the sodium/sulfur chemistry actually functions - the technology could be used to make any size battery once it's commercialized.

The battery in your mobile phone and the hornsdale power reserve (ie a state/province scale battery) have almost the same chemistry, so asking about the size of a battery made with a particular process as if they had any relation with each other is kinda redundant.

> How far away from manufacture is it?

Heh that's a tough one - there's been so many of these sort of papers that have made big claims then faded into obscurity with nothing ever actually coming of it, and so little information from large scale manufacturers about specifically which papers' techniques they're using that the commercialization pipeline is very opaque.

> Are there any estimates of its cost?

Well sodium and sulfur are much easier to find than lithium, and lithium's cost is skyrocketing while the cost of lithium batteries is falling and they're gonna meet in the middle at some point.

I'm more concerned about the apparently critical role of molybdenum in this paper, since it's rather rarer than lithium - but perhaps someone can work out how to get a similar advantage from more common materials now that they know what to search for?

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moiaussi4213 t1_izwcs6j wrote

I think the size here refers to energy density.

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triffid_hunter t1_izwd3xv wrote

But then they go on to say

>> Could it be installed in a cell phone, an electric bicycle, a cordless drill, a car, a house?

which indicates they're thinking of a physical size, as if the chemistry dictates a fixed size somehow - hence why I pointed out that mobile phones and grid-scale storage can both use the same chemistry, so the question as stated doesn't make much sense

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moiaussi4213 t1_izwdq3x wrote

It goes both ways. Of course you can put various battery technologies into cell phones, technically, but having a 500g cell phone with 4h of autonomy doesn't make sense nowadays.

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PagingDrHuman t1_izxi4th wrote

There's actually quite a big element for scalability of the battery cell size, as intelligent controlling charges of multiple different cells is often how many different high power battery installations work. In fact the word battery itself is a reflection of the inherent multiple quantities of power cells arranged in a group or battery.

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