Battery Goo Could Power the Cars of the Future

[ssManae]

And for once, I really want to find some published papers to look deeper into some tech news posted here.

Even if this ends up not being very economical for use in transportation, it could be a huge boon for the alternative energy industry. Some of the biggest problems with green energy is the unreliable generation part of it. If this could be used as an effective mass storage method, it could possibly be good enough even for five-minute demand and allow green sources to keep some gas turbines spun down--or even offline completely for most of the day.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

I don't understand something. You mention that electric car owners can just "Fill up" their tanks with the goop. But the car isn't "burning" it, so where is the old goop going?

Is it just being discharged? In that case, would I have to first go to a gas station, empty out my gas tank (in a fancy recycle bin, I guess), THEN fill 'er up?

 

[ssManae]

So after some additional reading of the MIT release:

A) It's a DARPA-funded project and already licensed to a company partially run by the lead researcher and with 16 mil in capital investment. So... would be a little hard for an energy company to buy up and sit on it at this point.

B) It's not just one goop, it's two. It's sort of like a fuel cell, really: the two fluids flow past each other and transfer the electrons through a membrane. So you could imagine a system working where you have two tanks instead of one for the storage goo. You fill the 'in' tank, and as it gets pushed through the battery it fills a 'spent' tank. Go to a station, pump in some more goo, and just replace the spent tank with an empty one, and the station recharges the spent goo to go in to another vehicle.

They also are claiming ten times the energy density of a current lithium ion battery, so not only should it have no problems running en electric vehicle, but the pumping speed wouldn't actually have to be that fast. They're also expecting to be able to find different materials that could store energy more densely than the current lithium slurry, too.

 

[vivster]

i don't get it
if we pump that stuff into the cars where does the "empty" fluid go?

I thought as you pump it in, through a second nozzle you pumped the used material out of a seperate tank back into the stations supply to be recharged. Surely you'd return it somehow. However like much charge holding materials, won't it steadily become less effective at retaining a charge? Doesn't that mean it'd be incredibly difficult to ascertain what to charge if old material is mixed with new because you might never get the same charge from the same pump.

Problematic...

Additionally as someone in the Facebook comments noted, where do we get all the Lithium. It's a bit sparse on the ground on earth, compared to rest of the universe where it's the most common element in existance.

what we need is just better battery technology
i still can't believe that we can't even power a laptop (the most used thing on earth) for a whole day
we just need some breakthrough that raises the capacity at least tenfold
that's where our research money should be going into
like some clever way to recycle heat