Are there any good websites to gauge battery development progress as opposed to the vital, but often ephemeral research progress.
Commercial cells have 500-800 cycles in their lifetime (until their capacity falls to 80%) and are universally made on reel-to-reel machines. There are a ton of difficulties moving from a coin cell to a prismatic/pouch cell to a cylindrical cell, but I can't understate how encouraging it is that they got to 100/400 cycles.
> Are there any good websites to gauge battery development progress as opposed to the vital, but often ephemeral research progress.
Not that I know of, sorry.
Here are some I've thought of, please suggest others:
1. Cost of raw materials - even if the tech improves, will it still be expensive?
2. Charge/Discharge cycle count - thermal and mechanical stresses
3. Power to weight ratio; power to cost ratio
4. Manufacturability - does it require novel manufacturing techniques or can it be integrated into an existing product line
5. Round trip energy losses
6. Safety
Raw materials can be important, but only very rarely and it can also be misleading. By far most of the cost comes from the complexity and time of manufacture. That makes it tricky. For instance sulfur is far cheaper than other anode materials, but there will never be a cheap sulfur battery- it's way too complicated.
It helps to know the basics[1] of battery manufacture: it's a decades old process and highly optimized. The gist is that you apply coatings to a reel of tape. If it sounds like it can't be put on a tape very easily, it will probably fail the sniff test. Solid/ceramic electrolytes and most kinds of nanotechnology fall into this category. Coating a tape is cheap, but using an electron microscope or laser on every battery is not.
>2. Charge/Discharge cycle count - thermal and mechanical stresses >3. Power to weight ratio; power to cost ratio
Critical. Any article, paper or press release will stress the interesting part of the battery; it's up to you to figure out how relevant it is. If the article emphasizes the current capacity, check the voltage of the chemistry. If it emphasizes the energy density, check the power density. If it emphasizes the weight, check the size. If it emphasizes safety, check everything. This is often nontrivial though. It's possible to tweak your numbers to balance things out- if you scale back the storage level you can increase cycle count, etc. If a paper has improved everything, it has a shot at being a next gen chemistry. Of course it may also be bullshit.
In my experience just remembering to check the other attributes of the battery will weed out 90%+ of bad articles. Most people are honest, they're just obligated to play a certain game to keep their funding up. Unfortunately there still are folks who will publish garbage though.
7. Energy density (as opposed to power density; i.e. c-rate matters)
8. Temperature sensitivity (many batteries lose voltage at low temps, e.g.)
9. Ability to hold a charge
"These discoveries usually concern materials that can only be produced in a laboratory environment on a very small scale. What makes our invention so promising is that the technology for mass production of this material is already within reach due to its similarity to an existing production process for solar cells."
By what metric..? The amount of energy and power involved in the two uses is completely different. Do you happen to know the bulk cost of silicon, or how much silicon is used in solar cells, or how much of a solar cells cost it makes up, or what process is similar?
You're not doing much more than a kind of free association. For actual context, spheroidal graphite powder is up to $10,000/tonne[1] and metallurgical silicon is around a quarter of that[2].
[1] http://www.mining.com/web/battery-grade-graphite-set-for-rec...
[2] https://www.metalbulletin.com/Article/3208513/Silicon-prices...
The bulk cost of silicon is a moot point. That's like asking how Pizzas can be made more cheaply if you reduce the cost of the flour involved. It's the extreme precision ultra pure processing that makes it expensive, not the bulk materials.
Batteries don't require 6N precision. Silicon anodes can be 99% pure and work fine. Metallurgical silicon is ~99.9%. Only the bottom shelf ferrosilicon stuff is <99%.
My point is that you're making assertions that you don't fully understand. Why would batteries suddenly need extreme precision ultra pure processing? That doesn't make sense.
> It's the extreme precision ultra pure processing that makes it expensive, not the bulk materials.
That's my whole point. The expensive part is left behind because it doesn't have anything to do with batteries. The part that's left over is fancy sand and a mylar-making machine. The same machine used to make the very cheapest solar cells, the kinds in old calculators. The kind of machine that made the monitor you're reading this on. Not the 9N part.
Full solution - all with Silicon.
If that's possible - and they can improve the cycle count... or do it cheap enough to make up for a low cycle count... or all of it - improve it, make it cheaper AND under one roof?
Even if that were true, this is a release by a company... they aren't going to give away their technology for other people to use.
That's what licensing agreements are for.
I just think that if I was a solar company that could use my equipment to produce batteries as well? That would be high on the priority list to include in packages...
Companies sure do love bundling things together.
I would expect the battery to be in the basement/garage/etc and not on the roof with the panels.
Cost, Reliability, Capacity
You could list cost of materials, number of cycles with 80 percent capacity left, capacity in Wh/kg.
But it would still be incomplete. Maybe some "driving cycle" style standardized tests for various uses. Also manufacturing scenarios.
Hard to create something non gameable.