So Where Are We With Solid State Batteries? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant [Music] hey what's up yeah i figured that's what you're calling yeah i know i'm planning on going i'll be there yeah you gonna have a big turnout sweet need to bring anything you sure i'll bring a bottle of wine yeah that's cool yeah totally yeah um i'm looking forward to it man i'm looking forward to hanging out in a room full of people all bringing the same air without a hint of anxiety about it okay all right see ya [Applause] what is happening temporal spatial bubbles acting up again the what there's been this temporospatial bubble that's been floating around the house lately and it just sometimes pops me into other points in time just ignore me i'll be out in a minute i'm sorry the temp what let's pretend i'm not here i'll bounce out in a second i promise just go back to whatever like like what what are you working on right now it's a video on solid state batteries seriously that's so crazy i'm working on a follow-up to that one right now how weird is that no that video does really well oh yeah cool um so what what year are you from august 2020 so i mean does anything interesting happen yeah i'm trying to get some work done right here so if you don't mind it's just kind of rude hey you're the one who came into my dining room why don't you go to the coffee shop or something oh yeah that that's that's not an option how come you could go though why aren't you there well i was going to i just i didn't feel like putting on shoes oh yeah that's that's challenging that's a good reason to not leave your house yeah i'm grateful dude what's your problem man why don't you just go work upstairs or something can't amy's on a video call video call why isn't she at work she is at work she quit teaching nope dude what's happening oh my god yeah you really want to know you want me to tell you please fine there's no way that i'll get through it before the bubble collapses but fine um we're gonna start so so there was this market in wuhan china okay i need more sleep is this underwear [Music] a lot of things have changed over the last year you've probably noticed a thing or two but with the pace of change in technology especially in battery technology it's no surprise that one of the biggest questions i get asked is what is the state of solid state batteries and i'm happy to say that the state of solid-state batteries is solid there are many companies trying to okay all right i know yeah it was funny it was funny but uh if i'm gonna continue this video you battery be quiet not so much with that one okay there have been some advancements with solid state batteries over the last year and what with tesla's battery day coming up soon we hope uh i thought it might be a good time to kind of take a look back and see what's happened with solid-state batteries how close are we to this revolution that we keep expecting yeah i covered the basics of solid-state batteries in last year's video so i can just point you to that one if you want to get caught up i also really seem to think that we are around the verge of a revolution that was going to change the world oh 2019 joe so young so naive so the main problem that solid state batteries seek to fix is the problem of dendrites now obviously there are other advantages like lighter weight more energy dense but it's the lifespan of solid-state batteries that seem to get people most excited and it's because it prevents dendrites dendrites are the little metal formations that tend to grow on the electrodes of lithium-ion batteries in these little battery select heights are what form after repeated charging cycles especially if you charge a little bit too fast and this is why your laptops and your phones that's why the the battery level keeps kind of degrading over time that and you know planned obsolescence so you have to go buy a new one so the solution of course is to get rid of the liquid electrolyte and get a solid electrolyte that won't let those dendrites form hence solid-state batteries so there's a lot of people putting a lot of money into this technology and what with our devices taking over our lives and the internet of things becoming more of a thing the technology of battery storage is going to become more and more important and as someone who talks a lot about electric cars to the annoyance of some people this is something that gets me really excited so here's some of the most promising updates in the world of solid state batteries and the first advancement worth noting is something called battery butter well you think battery butter sounds weird i've got almond milk in my fridge almonds don't have teats i prefer cow's milk but my body's not a fan anyway the butter in question refers to the electrolyte which is actually somewhere between a liquid and a solid it's not quite solid but it performs more like a liquid i can't believe it's not liquid you might say it was whipped up as a combined effort by scientists at chalmers university in gothenburg sweden and jiotang university in china and the results are pretty impressive it can handle about 10 times the amount of energy that a standard electrolyte has to contend with and the second maybe bigger thing about this electrolyte is it's spreadable which makes it more simple in the manufacturing process and just like peanut butter is made by grinding up peanuts and a little bit of oil battery butter is made by grinding up a ceramic electrolyte called lagp and a little bit of ionic fluid basically liquid salt lagp is what they call a nasicon compound or a sodium superionic conductor and they mix it through a process called melt quenching which creates some post crystallization on the nanoscale which both gives it its texture but also supercharges its conductive properties see it's like a butter sandwich you know anode on one side battery butter in the middle and then a cathode on the other side you know like the butter sandwiches your mom used to make butter sandwich actually thing the only hang up is that in lab trials it took a lot of pressure like an extreme amount of pressure to make this work and that might be a hindrance when it comes to mass production but they are working on it bottom line is it might have 10 times the density of lithium ion batteries but it might be three to seven years before it even starts to become mass-produced but in the meantime i guess we'll just have to see what they churn out lots of puns in this video all right next up is samsung and on march 9th of this year they published a paper where they declared that they had found a breakthrough in solid state battery technology it was developed by the samsung advanced institute of technology and it was spearheaded by engineers yuchi ahara yonggun li and dongmin m and in the paper they claim that it can last for a thousand cycles with no degradation gets 900 kilowatts per liter and has a columnic efficiency of 99.8 percent columbic efficiency refers to how efficient it is at discharging the energy that it's stored so it's made of a standard nmc cathode with a stainless steel anode and an aluminum collector but of course the secret sauce is the solid electrolyte which they call a sulfide solid electrolyte or sse which goes by the evocative name of li6ps5ci sexy but the smart thing that they do with this is they actually mix some of the cathode material into the electrode with something called lzo or lithium zirconium oxides this kind of pumps up the efficiency and increases the conductivity and that stainless steel anode makes it so that the lithium ions actually lay a little bit more flat and smooth across the aluminum collector so yeah it makes it so that the ions lay flat it's almost more like electroplating like an electroplating technique whereas in a liquid electrolyte what tends to happen is lithium ions tend to sort of bunch up in specific spots and that's how the dendrites get formed so that's pretty cool because you get to still use lithium which holds a butt ton of energy now another thing that helps to reduce the amount of dendrite formation is a silver carbon layer right in the middle of the battery what the silver does is it lowers the nucleation energy and that helps the lithium ions to bond a little bit more smoothly to the anode it also lowers the possibility that you'll ever actually see this silver is expensive to say the least and even though it's not a major component of the battery when you do it over a mass scale that adds up gets expensive and it's not like a drastic improvement over current lithium ion batteries like the 2170 cells that are in the tesla model 3 it gets about 680 kilowatts per liter so you know a thousand is more it's about 30 maybe 35 percent more but are people gonna be willing to spend twice as much for that i mean it's it's hard to say but you know this is still an early technology and future iterations might start to lower reduce the amount of silver and make it a little bit more palatable mit aka the massachusetts institute of technology aka geniusville is also working on a new solid state technology that uses nanoparticles and you guessed it lithium this concept is the brainchild of professor julie and by the way you know you can trust him because he only has two syllables in his name that's that's how you know someone's smart right two syllables julie is a professor at the battelle energy alliance where he teaches nuclear science and engineering and he's a professor of materials science and engineering as well he's also a fellow of the materials research society in the american physical society so you know we're we're basically the same person now lithium for all of its energy storage goodness does have one achilles heel when it comes to solid state batteries and that's the fact that it kind of expands and contracts as it charges and discharges and this constant expanding and contracting in a space where it can't really move around can cause it to eventually fracture or detach from the battery completely now most efforts to overcome this problem have included mixing in materials that can have a stabilizing effect on a lithium but dr julie and his team took a different approach their approach involves two additional classes of solids mixed ionic electronic conductors or miec and electron and lithium ion insulators or eli the miec forms something of a honeycomb shape an array of hexagonal tubes that kind of gives room for the lithium to expand and contract without destroying the overall structure of the battery like you can imagine a balloon inside of a pipe it can expand and contract inside of the pipe but it doesn't change the shape of the pipe and the eli works sort of like a binder between the miec walls and the solid electrolyte layer which sort of prevents it from damaging the tubes and so far things look pretty promising in the lab anyway they were able to put it through 100 cycles without seeing any cracking of the lithium metal layer which makes this the first actual functioning non-reactive solid metal solid-state battery focus on the word metal there because most of these technologies involve some kind of ceramic or glass electrolyte lee and his team expect that this battery would be about 75 percent lighter than current lithium ion batteries so say a tesla model s which has a 1200 pound battery pack it would only weigh 400 pounds with this technology not only lighter but easier and cheaper to make like 80 percent cheaper mostly because it uses manganese which is a very plentiful element so we'll see how this comes along it's still in the research phase but it is a very promising development but the question is will it be good enough [Music] that's right it's time to talk about the man the myth the legend john good enough everybody yeah the last video was basically just a big sloppy wet kiss on his 98 year old mouth it was indecent good enough and his partner maria braga had been working on a conductive glass electrolyte solid-state battery good enough just to reiterate was one of the people who developed a lithium-ion battery back in the 70s and developed ram seriously legend so the design that good enough in braga i've been working on is known as a sodium battery sodium of course is short for sodium ion conductive laminated polymer ceramic polymer solid-state electrolyte and they say science is unapproachable and like the other ones on this list this one is a bit of a sandwich the future is gluten people but this sandwich has a negative electrode made out of a non-reactive polyethylene oxide or peo and this creates a polymer matrix into which pseudonitrile is added this makes it more thermally stable aka it doesn't get hot and the positive electrode features another polymer matrix this one known as polyacryl nitrile and then sandwiched between those two is a nasicon type ceramic electrolyte kind of like what i mentioned at the beginning of this video now all these enhancements basically it comes down to a couple of things it increases the conductivity and it prevents the dendrites from entering the electrolyte membrane and that's kind of what we know right now details are still sparse but it seems to be coming along pretty well we'll keep an eye on that one now all these advancements are good news obviously but the big question is of course when are we going to see these in mass production where are we going to see these in evs when is this going to change the world well it's going to be a while on that there's a long long road between success and a lab and success in the marketplace i mean keep in mind again lithium-ion batteries were first developed in a lab in the 70s and it wasn't really until the 90s that we started actually seeing them in devices and really it's only been the last 15 years or so that it's really kind of taken over and changed things of course the pace of change and the advancement is happening faster and faster now but that same pace of change also applies to regular lithium ion batteries like we're using right now and it makes me wonder by the time these are actually in the market will lithium-ion batteries have advanced to the point that it kind of makes this redundant i mean there was just news last week of a new chemistry that gets 20 percent more energy out of a lithium-ion battery and tesla's working on their dry electrode technology which may or may not be revealed on battery day soon it really might be the case that by the time solid state batteries really hit the market lithium ion will be competing at almost exactly the same specs so what can we really expect with solid state batteries so we always put battery technology in terms of evs but we may be missing the bigger picture here because you know solid state batteries pack such a punch in such a small space and we're seeing more and more things being connected all the way around us there may be another whole use case for solid-state batteries here like medical devices for instance you know if you need something powered inside of your body you probably want it to be in something that's not going to explode this might make you an anti-dendrite things like heart rhythm monitors neural stimulators and other injectable technologies and then there's the internet of things which is supposed to grow to 41 billion connected devices by 2027. have i mentioned something about an e-waste problem but again everything from cell phones to smart watches laptops game controllers bluetooth headsets the list goes on these are all things that are going to be lighter more powerful and you might not need to recharge them for days this might be where solid state really leaves its mark and it might actually be in the near future but going back to evs for a second i did mention briefly a second ago that tesla has their upcoming battery day uh right now it's scheduled for september 22nd we don't really know what we're gonna find out but we can have fun speculating can't we speculation time so battery day's been postponed over and over again this year because apocalypse but it apparently is going to be a really big deal because elon really wants it to be a big event that's why he kept postponing it so that people can actually show up for it and in the q1 earnings call he said it would be quote one of the most exciting days in tesla's history we expect we'll finally see what their merger with maxwell technologies is going to bring about maxwell is known for their ultracapacitor technology but the headline is probably going to be more about their dry electrode technology dry electrode batteries it's thought could increase energy density by a third but more importantly be really cheap and easy to make this might not be a totally dry electro battery it might be a little bit of a hybrid with tesla's original technology but we'll see but it really might be the production of these batteries it's going to be the big story you know elon's been talking for a long time about building the machine that builds the machine and this effort has been put under the mysterious name project roadrunner the idea is to build a system that can build batteries at per kilowatt which it's generally agreed that would put it on parity with internal combustion engine cars and this is why they purchased high bar systems was to streamline their production because basically all they do is inject electrolyte into batteries that's like it's like all they do is build pumps for that so there's been a lot of evidence for a project road runner in action for example the staff at fremont uh went from 115 to 400 people recently we're also expected to hear some updates about their production of lithium-ion phosphate batteries in conjunction with catl over in china and the big deal about that is that they don't have any cobalt in them and he's been teasing a million mile battery for a while now so we might hear something about that so there's a lot of speculation about what we'll see people have been speculating for a while now but whatever it is we will definitely cover it on the podcast i'm a part of in case you don't know somehow i'm on a podcast called our ludicrous future with tim dodd the everyday astronaut and ben sollins the everyday tesla guy but we do a podcast every single friday and that's where we cover kind of breaking news and batteries and technology and space and that kind of thing i try to keep the videos on this channel to be a little bit more evergreen and not really chase news so much because i do that on the podcast so if you're not following there i'll put a link down below you should definitely go check that out because that's where we keep track of that stuff i also want to point out a couple of good videos on solid state batteries have been done by my friends matt farrell and the guys over at 2-bit da vinci they covered some stuff that i didn't quite get to here and they did a really good job so share the love go check out those videos i think i'll put them down below you'll get a little bit more information out of that but let me know what are you expecting from battery investor day do you think that solid state batteries actually have something coming up around the corner do you think that the pace of innovation in lithium-ion batteries might actually outshine solid state in the long run talk amongst yourselves in the comments and by the way if you've been watching this whole video with a little bit of confusion because battery technology is just a bit much i get it but one place you might want to go to get caught up on that is the electricity and magnetism course on brilliant in this class you'll learn the basics of the forces that power our lives including whatever it is you're watching this on right now through 95 interactive exercises you'll learn concepts like coulomb's law which i mentioned earlier to capacitance lorenz forces electric fields and much more and once you've absorbed all that you can move on to some other courses on brilliant like the classical physics courses the quantum mechanics courses applied science computer algorithms even competitive math and the thing about brilliant that's so brilliant is that it teaches you these things by solving problems this wires your brain to think like a scientist and superpowers your problem-solving abilities that can pay off in every area of your life plus you can do it on your mobile device and even offline so you can take it with you wherever you go and they've got daily challenges so if you want a little bit of random brain nugget every day to just kind of keep you sharp it's a great way to spend 10 minutes or so while you're procrastinating getting work done and if you want a little taste of what i'm talking about here they do have some weekly brain teasers and puzzles that you can check out for free if you go to brilliant.org answers with joe and the first 200 people that sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all of their courses will get 20 off your subscription so yeah brand's a lot of fun if you haven't had a chance to check it out i invite you to check it out so brilliant.org answers with joe link is down in the description big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are supporting this channel making all of this possible and just being an awesome community and all that kind of stuff there's some new people that have joined let me murder the names real quick we got bt aiken stipulation uh marcus lurie julia gregory rochelle racine dr benjamin coleman nick charles joseph mixon dustin danny van heck joe carpenter jared moutos hack matthew crabtree julian gomez and joshua simpson thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos and just join an awesome community you can go to patreon.com t-shirts available at the store it answers with joe.com store there's also hoodies mugs stickers other stuff it supports the channel it supports a designer in prague that does a great job on these and they're just they're just fun to wear so yeah you can go to answers with joe.com store have fun please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here click on that google thinks you'll like it there's others down on the side probably that have my face on them and i invite you to go check those out and if you do like them maybe think about subscribing i do come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 627,663

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, solid state batteries, tesla, lithium ion batteries, samsung solid state, john goodenough, electric cars, solid electrolyte, EVs, breakthrough battery technology, project roadrunner, tesla battery day, elon musk

Id: nGmZ3Q0pC40

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020