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Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range

201 points by breve

by himata4113

10 subcomments

lots of exciting battery developments in general, especially if donut labs by some miracle is not a fraud.
it was a bit worrying as there was somewhat of a stagnation in battery chemistry, but having non toxic/dangerous battery storage is going to make off-griding so much more attractive.
technically speaking, if every household had solar panels and batteries it would not only be cheaper than the grid it would also have complete independence from oil fluctuations, weather disasters and centralization.
now if you combine that with electric cars that charge off your off-grid system and transition to eletric appliances instead of something like gas the benefits keep stacking all while being pretty much net neutral post manufacturing.

by porsager

1 subcomments

It's surprising how far there is from discovery to production for these kinds of things. It's 14 years ago now that I designed the front cover for Advanced Energi Materials[1] wherein my friend described his similar discovery of the incredible properties of LiMnO4 with Carbon Nanotubes. Even though he had it working with measurable improvements in the 20-40x range he said it would take 10-20 years to reach a state for mass production.
[1] https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aen...

by Animats

3 subcomments

"CATL’s “Naxtra” sodium-ion batteries achieve an energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg, the company said, putting it on par with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries."
Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.

by Grimblewald

4 subcomments

BYD / Denza z9 gt claim 10-70% in 5 mins, 97% in 9 mins. With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results? I don't know enough about this space to know if I am missing something here, but would love to know because something about this feels more exciting than i think i am grasping. anyone know?

by leecarraher

0 subcomment

I understand charge time is a concern, but it is'nt the theoretical limitation of really any battery technology. From the computing parlance it's embarrassingly parallel. More, smaller cells allows for more current => faster charge times. theoretical limitations: energy density, number of cycles economics limitation: material and manufacturing costs. infrastructure limitations: grids to power these charge rates at scale Sodium Ion is promising because it drastically lowers the material cost. Cheap batteries can help solve the infrastructure problems as energy reservoirs, but I am more or less not swayed by the fast charge time break through. I can show doubling charge time with some AAs.

by Peteragain

0 subcomment

Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set up the production line to make one small one, and the next one better. Repeat. This is a far better approach with developing tech, and applies to power provision. The challenge is to get a market for the early versions when we all know the next will be better. Saying LiPo suck, and Chinese Tech is bad? Just part of the PR sales pitch to get us to try the better alternative. I'd bet on non rechargeable mag-air batteries made with sea water and off peak wind power myself :-)

by hbarka

2 subcomments

I still remember in 2016 when Elon Musk made a big announcement about his "acqui-hire" of the Dalhousie University EV battery research team led by Dr Jeff Dahn. There was much fanfare and announcements of million-mile batteries and 3% increase in energy density every year. Moving on from miracle batteries to Thai rescue to Hyperloop tunnels and presently to data centers in orbit.

by cyberax

5 subcomments

Just remember, the US Na-Ion battery startup died last year with _products_ _in_ _warehouses_ just because it couldn't get a UL certification. All it needed was a bridge loan.
And the government did nothing.

by thescriptkiddie

0 subcomment

note that the quoted 170Wh/kg is about the same as currently available LiFePO4 cells and half that of the best available NMC cells

by readthenotes1

2 subcomments

by dboreham

2 subcomments

People posting claims about EV charging time should be required to also post the size of cable required. And the grid capacity needed to provide their fast charging at a typical 8-bay charging site.

by WarmWash

5 subcomments

I don't know what chemistry exactly these cells are using, but in sodium-ion batteries, prussian blue analogs as they are called are common anode materials. Overcharging these cells can lead to a release of hydrogen cyanide gas, notoriously known as Zyklon B.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.

by freakynit

0 subcomment

How much assumption we can make here that advanced AI systems, kinda like Google's Alphafold, but customized for chemistry, is helping accelerate such breakthroughs?