Aluminium-Air Batteries Could Give Electric Cars 1600 KM of Range

why do we light firecrackers when we can just light candles or paper or even wood that's easy because it's a lot more exciting and a lot more violent metals don't catch fire in our day-to-day experience and this is because of a few different reasons one is that they're good conductors of heat so it's hard to localize the heating to one spot then they have high ignition temperatures they're solid crystalline structures so only the surface ever comes in contact with oxygen the atoms on the inside are insulated from the air and since burning is essentially reacting with oxygen to form oxides no burning occurs so if we want to burn a metal we have to increase its surface area which we can do by powdering it we also have to increase the availability of oxygen atoms which we do by adding oxidizers compounds that release oxygen when heated this combination allows the metal to burn releasing a casket of light and heat and this of course is how you make sparklers now energy is energy so it's only natural to wonder if you can load up your car with sparklers and drive off into the sunset if such idle thoughts preoccupy you you've come to the right place because here's everything you need to know about aluminium air batteries you already know what we need to do get aluminium and oxygen to react with each other now aluminium is more a fuel cell than a battery aluminium forms the anode it loses its electrons and goes into the electrolyte oxygen from ambient air makes up the cathode it is filtered for co2 and flows into the electrolyte by taking up electrons the oxygen and aluminium then combine to form aluminium hydroxide the electrons traveling through the external circuit can power whatever you want a motor perhaps and that's pretty much it it's a fuel cell what are you gonna do it's kind of like a hydrogen fuel cell except you don't need platinum as a catalyst and instead of a volatile gas that is hard to contain you have a solid chunk of metal which admittedly disintegrates into a white powder over time but still as two houses of energy go it's one of the universe's premium budget offerings to use smartphone lingo see aluminium really really likes oxygen you don't find aluminium metal in nature because it likes nothing better than to hang out with its non-metallic friend we nailed down most major metals thousands of years ago gold copper iron tin silver were all out the way before jesus was even a glint in mary's eyes nickel uranium and titanium were done by the 18th century but aluminium despite being the most common metal in the earth's crust held out till 1827 and when they first figured out how to extract it it was more valuable than gold so that aluminium can that you forgot to put in the recycling bin thousand dollars that state of affairs did not last though because of its lightweight and versatile properties we soon decided that we want several tons of it on the daily so mass production began but it still took a long and energy intensive process to get aluminium metal i'm not gonna get into the details but there's a great animated film extolling the american spirit that explains it brilliantly here's a gist you take the ore crush it seed it with crystals lower its melting point by mixing in cryolite and pass gargantuan amounts of electricity through it till aluminium metal can be compelled to part with the oxygen it took so much energy and so much pollution that a concerted campaign had to be started to recycle aluminium cans which continues to this day look how proud apple is of its recycled aluminium devices think of it like this when you hold a piece of aluminium metal you're holding a good chunk of all the electricity and heat it took to convert it from alumina to metal it's pretty much solid electricity with the potential to release 8 000 watt hours per kilogram 40 times the specific energy of lithium ion batteries and add power with fossil fuels but syrah you ask if it likes oxygen so much why doesn't it just react with it my beer can doesn't explode on the contrary it's chilly and perfect after only a few minutes in the fridge excellent question the answer is it does react with oxygen but only on the surface the oxygen and aluminium atoms are then separated by an unyielding passive layer of aluminium oxide and that's why we can use aluminium so well once it figures out that oxygen isn't available it hunkers down and gets to work in aviation electricity transport etc in an aluminum fuel cell we want to keep the reaction going so we put additives in the electrolyte to prevent the formation of that passivation layer this allows the aluminium oxygen reaction to continue until the anode is exhausted some of the energy of the aluminium is lost through heat though so while the theoretical value is 8 000 watt hours per kilogram practical applications end up closer to 1200 watt hours per kilogram that's still six times what lithium ion batteries give you and since internal combustion engines are inefficient compared to electric vehicles it still more than keeps up with fossil fuels too log nine materials a company based out of bangalore india is making these batteries and promising not just lower costs for the batteries themselves but running costs of only 7 cents per kilometer range anxiety can be a thing of the past since you can go 3000 kilometers with the same battery weight as there is in the tesla model 3. and charging won't take hours either all you need to do is swap out the aluminium anode cassette for a new one and you're good to go for another 3000 kilometers a process that will take no more than 90 seconds even faster than filling your fossil fuel vehicles log 9 materials has already moved on from the lab not only are they powering their office with these batteries but they've got a car modified to work with the aluminium fuel cell too and it has a range of 1000 kilometers now i was curious about just how heavy the aluminum cassette would be would it be something you can change at home or would you have to go to a facility or station of some kind using the numbers from this 2002 paper the weight of the anode should be 31 of the total weight of the battery assuming a mileage of 167 watt hour per kilometer and specific energy of 1200 watt hours per kilogram you get a total battery weight of 130 kilograms and the anode will be 31 of that so 43 kilograms that's pretty heavy almost me heavy so ordering one home is probably not very likely in india at least we're used to hauling 30 kg lpg cylinders around but 43 kgs might just be beyond the bill so it'll have to be a facility of some kind where the cassettes are changed tesla already tried something like this in california so it's not completely novel and their batteries weighed 400 kgs and up so why did they abandon it well elon says that people just didn't care for it just using tesla's fast chargers was more than enough and the fact that it could have cost 60 dollars while requiring an appointment to come in probably worked against it though there has been some speculations that the whole thing was some kind of a gimmick to qualify for california's zero emission carbon credits either way we know it's possible a chinese company called neo has already done 500 000 battery swaps with a network of 131 stations look at those robots go [Music] but it's definitely not as simple as shoving a host on a fuel tank you will need to plan it out in advance and while neo is way cheaper than tesla it still costs 20 dollars per swap on subscription so we started out all fresh and excited as usual but i can sense the tide turning against us it's there somewhere i can feel it the bane of dreamers and inventors everywhere slayer of free energy devices and other things that feel too good to be true the calculator so the claim is seven cents per kilometer pause the video people and place your bets will it be close to the mark or will it be a complete exaggeration we've already worked out the basics a range of one thousand kilometers total battery weight 139 kilograms and anode weight 43 kilograms this anode needs to be replaced after 1000 kilometers now aluminium can be shaped into anything you want so let's just take the bulk cost of aluminium two dollars per kilogram so you'll pay eighty six dollars for the thousand kilometer anode plus the twenty dollar swap fee that's hundred and six dollars for every thousand kilometers that comes up to eleven cents and once you factor in the fact that you also have to add water every few hundred kilometers you're at still 11 cents what is cheap so but that's still 50 percent more than what we were promised 11 cents or 8.2 rupees per kilometer is way too much but wait what's this white sludge at the bottom of our electrolyte it's aluminium hydroxide that you can sell if you vaguely remember the word stoichiometry you will know that we can figure out the moles of each molecule in that reaction according to this equation for every part of aluminum used you get around three parts of aluminium hydroxide so 43 kilograms of aluminium yields 125 kilograms of alumina and if we sell it and split the money between the customer and the company we do indeed get to 7 cents which is under five rupees and exactly as promised great so is this the end of tesla are the gigafactories being torn down as we speak not quite yet there are fundamental physics problems to overcome making one kilo of aluminium takes 15 kilowatt hours of electricity and releases 10 kilos of carbon dioxide the fact that you recycle aluminum hydroxide does not put much of a dent in these numbers so if your main pitch is sustainability some serious innovation needs to happen there what about cost if you do a comparison between the tesla model 3 and an exact replica which uses an aluminium fuel cell instead of lithium ion the aluminium fuel cell car will not only have a much higher range but will also be cheaper over a 15 year life span though the price difference will even out because of the anode replacements and in terms of convenience it'll be much worse you'll have to get the water filled and sludge removed every 300 kilometers and a few times every year you'll need to go down to the nearest facility and get your anode replaced as for the tesla you can charge at home at any of the superchargers or at the office parking the aluminium air system is not as flexible you can get the anode replaced only at the anode swap stations or ass neo from china might sound similar on the surface but it's really not yes they do battery swaps but people still have the option to just charge their electric cars normally if they want no one wants to be tethered down buying their cassettes from a single company in order to drive their car we've already gone down that road once with inkjet printers do we have to do it again plus i haven't even attempted to tackle the zillions of issues with unwanted anode reactions hydrogen production and anode deactivation that have plagued the technology since it first came to be is there any real incentive to move to aluminium air batteries well surprisingly the answer is yes see in india we receive a lot of solar energy through the year it is not inconceivable at some point in the future that we will over build our solar capacity in order to make the most of that overbuilding is a technical term by the way it doesn't mean that you built way more than you need it so it definitely sounds like that anyway this means that at times during the day we will have extremely low or even negative electricity costs it happens the uk for example has a lot of wind energy available and so on occasion they're paid to consume electricity during these windows the alumina could be transformed back into aluminium at very low costs since to 40 percent of the cost of aluminium is tied up in electricity there will still be some emissions since oxygen binds to carbon during electrolysis but it's still way better than the issues surrounding the lithium-ion batteries let me be clear this is not as simple as melting aluminium cans at 600 degrees celsius it's pretty much a repetition of the original manufacturing process we touched on earlier but it's still a well-known well-understood tested and optimized process something civilization is comfortable doing on a large scale lithium ion batteries end up in landfills 98 of the time and most evs running on the roads today have been sold in the last 10 years so they haven't reached the end of their lives lithium ion batteries don't have a closed cycle like aluminium air batteries can have from day one then the most obvious point aluminium is far more abundant in the earth's crust than lithium a thousand times more abundant another benefit is that because of lower cost for the battery aluminium air technology lowers the price of entry to emission-free vehicles everyone knows that we indians are budget conscious or price sensitive the truth is we're skint so if we can defer some cost to the future without incurring too much penalty we'll do that if a lower price encourages even five percent more people to adopt electric vehicles it'll make a massive difference so there you go disadvantages the anode needs to be replaced at a dedicated facility every few months you need to get the electrolyte replenished every 300 kilometers advantages a clean source of energy if the aluminium is smelted using renewables a closed cycle that won't lead to the batteries ending up in landfills not waiting long hours to charge the vehicle the av market is currently all in on lithium that does appear to be the future for now perhaps with changes like four boeing cobalt in favor of nickel and further reductions in price per kilowatt hour beyond that you have hydrogen and biofuels which work great for larger vehicles finergy might have the right idea though in that 2014 demo they used an aluminium air battery to charge a lithium-ion battery that ran a vehicle they drove only 300 kilometers or so but have a possible range of 1600 kilometers so the main purpose of aluminium air batteries could be as range extenders for lithium-ion cars though it does need mentioning that the paper written about this test mentioned a system level specific energy for the battery of 250 to 400 watt hours per kilogram for context the same value for a tesla model 3 would be 150 watt hours per kg a significant improvement but not several times higher as most articles seem to claim meanwhile log9 materials is also looking at stationary storage replacing the diesel generators of telecom towers with their batteries which would be a quiet and carbon free replacement finergy has already deployed stationary storage solutions the size of shipping containers that can provide 5 megawatt hours of energy and there are other applications as well one thing is clear metal air batteries are definitely going to find their uses in this great energy transition and as they get better they may yet pose serious threat to lithium-ion batteries more options and more competition can only be a good thing i hope you enjoyed this video hit the like button if you did and jump into the comments to see what people are talking about i'll see you really soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Tech for Luddites

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Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021