So you thought Lithium Polymer battery was good with its 150 Wh/Kg?
Well, there's a new battery on the scene which boasts 11,000 Wh/Kg! Lithium - Air!
Polypos has only gone and done the impossible!
Can you imagine 11,000 Wh/Kg?
Let me put that into perspective:
- If you put it on a Multirotor with a 15 minute flight time you'd have, 17 hours of flight time!
- If you put it on a plane with 2.5 hours flight time... It'd give you over a week flight time! I mean these arn't even the most efficient times, think of a plane with 4 hours flight time, now it'd be half a month of flight time!
- If you put one of these onto a Tesla car with it's 200 mile range.... It'd give you over 14 thousand miles range! That's nearly around the world!
The idea behind Lithium Air batteries is nothing new. Not having to carry half the battery around and just using the air is a great idea, especially with one of the lightest battery materials - lithium; but actually doing it - that's something else. There was always the problem of the electrodes being destroyed, however Polypos has found a way to protect the electrodes.
Wikipedia Lithium-Air Battery - if you want to know the exact chemistry and the problems!
Okay I'm hyping it up a bit much, it's going to be a long way off before we see these for sale, and at the moment they're getting no where near the theoretical 11,000 Wh/Kg - still over 1,000 Wh/Kg though! Plus I reckon PolyPos will be holding their Lithium air batteries close to heart, and it'll be the military who get's them first of course.
But look at what happened with lithium polymer batteries?
It's exciting!
For the moment, what we'll probably realize first is Lithium - Sulfur batteries. These boast 2500 Wh/Kg - still pretty awesome!
Check out more at The Polypos Website.
Also here's a really interesting article about these batteries.
Hope you found this interesting, and thanks for reading!
Comments
For now lets hope this will be implemented soon: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2015-06-17-study-finds-way-prev...
Ah, you're probably right. It'll probably all be vapourware.
Though, optimism beats pessimism right? I think the lithium sulfur batteries are pretty close.
Though if you want something that is a drastically higher energy density that you can get now, there's always fuel cell technology.
Horizon has been brought up before, but they've now got a range of ultra light high wattage fuel cells specifically for UAVs:
Horizon
Again a big problem with hydrogen is storage, of course it's got a great energy density by weight, but a really bad one by volume. Usually it is compressed, but that not only adds to the dangers (UAVs flying around with fuel air bomb ;) ) and you've got to carry a heavy tank around!!
horizon has "solved" this probably storing the hydrogen in a solid chemical (i'd imagine it's some kind of metal hydride). It is easily replenished by pushing hydrogen in at only 5 bar, and it'll release if allowed. Also there's no need to wait for charging!
This tech actually exists and you can buy it, though it might be rather costly!
As a side note another interesting development is butane fuel cells,there's a kickstarter going I've backed - a small butane fuel cell to charge your phone.
Kraftwerk
I think we should watch this space, there's a lot of development coming around!
This article explains a bit: http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-world-vexed-by-slow-progress-on-ba...
To quote: "But here’s a safe bet: Breakthroughs in energy storage technology aren’t coming. Not in the foreseeable future, at least. That’s because it takes years to convert “breakthroughs” in the lab into something that works at scale, under all the conditions of real life use. And the overwhelming majority of innovations don’t survive the process."
The article is two and half years old, the bottom of their amateur looking website says copyright 2009 and their last news update was a couple of years ago. As cool as this looks, there have been endless claims of breakthrough battery technologies over the past few years, none of which have come to fruition. Our battery tech inches forward at a glacial pace using old technology, the biggest innovations come from packaging from the likes of tesla and apple.
Not meaning to rain on your parade, this all sounds great and hopefully it or something similar will happen, we're all desperately waiting!
You will not see such thing in use until 100 years later. I bet :D
This is cool stuff but i'll wait till consumer grade tech comes out.
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