Electronics > Power/Renewable Energy/EV's

Current and future battery technologies?

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scatterandfocus:
How are things looking on the battery technologies front these days?  It has been some years since I had a good look.  Back then, graphene was looking promising, and there was some promise in molten salt batteries.  Now I am also seeing hemp batteries being worked on.  Maybe someone here has kept up with this stuff and can offer some thoughts on current battery technologies and where things might be headed in the future.

Siwastaja:
No actually manufacturable "breakthrough" technologies in sight AFAIK. A lot of press releases, as always. But you never know. One of them might be up to something.

Breakthrough likely not needed, though. Li-ion optimization (series of "small breakthroughs" and micro-optimizations) has not slowed down, and energy density has reached around 290Wh/kg, demonstrating approximately 40% increase per 10 years (1998 - 140Wh/kg; 2008 - 200 Wh/kg; 2018 - 280 Wh/kg). Usage of expensive active material is still going down, don't have exact numbers but price per capacity is clearly dropping a lot faster then the energy density is increasing.

AFAIK silicon is now being successfully used in the anode (not alone, but together with graphite/carbon).

Future? Based on what I have heard, it's fairly safe to assume the current development still goes on until about 350-400 Wh/kg. Halving the price per capacity seems possible. This is something that will happen during the next 10-15 years. IMHO, these expected numbers (Wh/kg and $/Wh) enable almost 100% electric mobility, because even with the current numbers, we are already pretty close. It might not be enough for 100% revolution in aircraft, though. I guesstimate somewhere over 500-600 Wh/kg would be preferred for that. For limited range aircraft commute, in busy central Europe for example, the li-ion technology we see in the next 10 years could be acceptable.

Any real breakthrough is possible, and would be a massive extra boost, but it's extremely hard to know based on press releases. Most (99.99%) lead to nothing, and there is a lot of competition from investor money.

scatterandfocus:
Siwastaja, are you familiar with Robert Murray Smith and his youtube channel?  Some pretty interesting stuff over there.

FreddieChopin:
Li-Po batteries with graphene coated electrolyte offer a promise to improve capacity.

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