Solid State Batteries - has Goodenough nailed it again??

[Music] hello and welcome to just ever think lithium-ion batteries or hydrogen fuel cells to power our vehicles until recently that was the extent of the debate in the e V enthusiast community but just when you think the battle for supremacy is between two major technologies along come a bunch of other market disruptors like graphene sodium iron super capacitors ultra capacitors and solid-state batteries and it's the last of these solid-state batteries that look like becoming a commercially viable product maybe even as early as 2020 so as usual I'm keen to learn how it all works and why solid state is better than liquid state so these electrolytes then in a lithium-ion battery and frankly most other types of battery they're usually either a liquid or a polymer which is a sort of gel and guess what in solid state batteries electrolytes are not liquid but solid there's a massive amount of research going on all over the world to try and find the best materials for these solid electrolytes scientists are testing all sorts of things like glass ceramics and lithium sulfide amongst others but why lithium ion batteries seem to bring a massive commercial success for over 30 years so what's the problem well firstly there's that short circuit thing I mentioned earlier a short circuit in a lithium ion battery is definitely not something you want an unexpected trouser surprise can mean many things all of which usually involve some level of embarrassment especially as you get older but when that surprise is a mobile phone spontaneously combusting with the ferocity of an incendiary device then it's less of an embarrassment and more of an existential crisis and it's the liquid electrolytes that are the culprit all of which are generally extremely flammable apparently it's all to do with the dendrites it turns out dendrites are a bit like stalactites and stalagmites in caves little bits of material that slowly build up over time to become long filaments inside a lithium ion battery these dendrites are built up from lithium which grows on the anode in extreme cases they can grow so long that they can pierce through the separator and touch the cathode on the other side when that happens you've got a short-circuit a dead battery and very possibly an inconvenient conflagration so if a solid non flammable stable alternatives can be found you immediately get a dramatic improvement in safety it also means you can squeeze everything together so you use less space and that's good news no matter what you're using whether it's a car a mobile phone or a laptop and then there's energy density some of these companies are claiming that they can achieve up to three times the energy density of the best lithium-ion batteries on the market today so who are the main players in this battle for global supremacy well there's Japan's big car and battery companies for a start Toyota Honda Nissan and Panasonic are in a partnership called consortium for lithium-ion battery technology and evaluation center or libtech and they're backed by 14 million dollars of government money libtech hopes to develop a solid-state battery that doubles the range of electric vehicles to 800 kilometers or about 500 miles by 2030 over the current 400 kilometers or 250 miles for the time being though it's targeting a more modest range of about 550 kilometers or 340 miles by 2025 then you've got high under in South Korea and they seem to be really taking a lead in developing all available options for clean energy in transport as we saw in the previous program they've invested in ionic materials which is a us-based materials technology company developing a solid polymer electrolyte that they claim will enable low cost and high performing solid-state batteries no firm dates for release yet but watch this space not to be outdone the European car makers are also having a crack at solid-state technology VW has thrown a hundred million dollars of investment into a company called quantum scape if they're successful then the range of the existing eGolf that we looked at a couple of weeks ago could more than double from 300 kilometers or about 186 miles to 750 kilometers or more like 466 miles and Volkswagen a-- targeting a market release for this of 2025 BMW which teamed up with a company called solid power and they're hoping to open their battery cell competence center in 2019 to develop new energy storage technology BMW are suggesting that they'll have a solid-state battery powered evie ready for market by 2026 then we get to the independent and some might say maverick developers and entrepreneurs chief among these are James Dyson and Henrik Fisker Dyson knows a thing or two about batteries and motors thanks to decades of extremely successful cutting-edge research and development into vacuum cleaners fans and hand dryers in the light in 2015 Dyson BOTS at t3 a company that's been developing solid-state technology and new back in 2014 announced that they'd achieved a battery with an energy density of 400 watt hours per kilogram which compares very favorably to the best lithium-ion batteries available today the ones that Tesla use in their cars which have an energy density of 230 what hours per kilogram Dyson are really going for this in a big way with a 2 billion pound or 2.7 billion dollar investment in the batteries and potentially three new electric vehicles planned for release by 2020 Henrik Fisker is an automotive designer and entrepreneur who can count the BMW z8 Aston Martin db9 Aston v8 Vantage and the Fisker Karma amongst his achievements his fisca Inc company is developing a new vehicle called the e motion which will use all solid-state battery technology fisca have recently ramped up their activity to try to bring their original launch date of 2023 forward to 2020 presumably in response to the growing competition and massing around him the final slot has to be reserved for the massively undervalued genius and father of the lithium-ion battery mr. John Bannister good enough back in 1980 good enough on a team of chemists at Oxford made several key breakthroughs including the use of cobalt for the cathode which brought lithium-ion batteries into reality he got ripped off by one of his research partners at the time and as a result he never saw a penny for his invention an invention now so ubiquitous but our modern lifestyles would be almost impossible without it in recognition of his achievements and the fact that he's still going at the age of nearly 96 John gets pride of place right at the top of our muppet genius chart and he hasn't finished yet in 2018 good enough in partnership with professor of engineering physics at the University of Porto Maria Elena Braga another candidate for the genius board published a paper in the journal of the American Chemical Society their paper claims a solid-state battery that operates at room temperature has double the energy density of existing lithium ion batteries can be fast charged and fast discharged as a plasticizer to help it react to changes in volume and store lithium ions uses a low-cost cathode so no more need for cobalt to be mined from jeebies countries like the DRC can be charged up to five volts as a life cycle of 23,000 charges which equates to charging your mobile phone every day for 63 years without killing your battery and that actually increases its capacity with a number of charging cycles but wait I hear you cry how can it possibly achieve this last claim surely that goes against all the fundamental principles of conservation of energy 1/2 quite simple really according to John Hellena this happens because the li+ - glass is not reduced on contact with metallic lithium thus no passivating interference layer contributes to a capacity fade instead the discharge capacity increases with cycle number as a result of dipole polarization in the li+ - glass electrolyte leading to a capacity increase of the li+ - glass plasticizer electrostatic double layer capacitor and if you have any ideas about what any of that might mean please send your answers on a postcard - what the slightly simpler terms that you and I can get our minds around they appear to be claiming that their new breakthrough overcomes every single problem of current battery technology many people are skeptical that all this will turn out to be true but the research has undergone and is continuing to undergo peer review which is how good science progresses so I think at this stage the best thing we can do is to keep an open mind and hope the old Johnny be good enough has actually nailed another world-changing phenomenon there's no doubt it's an exciting time in the world of renewable energy but in the midst of all this optimism it's worth remembering that all this is in the context of a global population utilizing one-and-a-half planets worth of resources every year and increasing their use of fossil fuels and co2 emissions all the time a combination of calamities that doesn't show any sign whatsoever of slowing down anytime soon and which is demonstrably unsustainable even to the most ardent denier this coming Monday the 8th of October 2018 the IPCC the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are due to release their interim climate progress report ahead of the cop 24 meeting in Katowice in Poland in December I'll be taking a close look at that report when it comes out and then after that we'll be focusing on the really huge scale clean energy technologies currently in development that will vie to become the powerhouses of our global civilization as we move through the 21st century that's it for this week though please do subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell to get alerted whenever a new program comes out and you can do that by clicking this link here as always thanks very much for watching have a great week and remember - just have a think see you next week [Music]

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Views: 261,509

Rating: 4.7283669 out of 5

Keywords: Solid State Battery, Electric Vehicle, Electric Car, LIthium Ion, Renewable Energy, Climate Change, Global Warming, Super Capacitor, Ultra Capacitor, Electrolyte, electrolysis

Id: ifLxkO0w6B4

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2018