Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China The burgeoning sodium ion battery industry is poised for a big year, says one analyst, though the US and its friends may miss out as China whizzes by. Shazan Siddiqi, senior technology analyst at IDTechEx, who recently wrote a report on sodium ion battery (SiB) production, told The Register next-gen SiBs with improved life …
To be blunt though, the Chinese don't acknowledge our patent system at all so you have to wonder why we would acknowledge theirs. The issue is much more that we will need to steal all their research and tech knowledge to make any kind of an attempt to catch up with their lead at this point. And that is much harder to do than you'd like to think, because Western tech knowledge leaks into China through the many factories, but it really doesn't come the other way so much.
"To be blunt though, the Chinese don't acknowledge our patent system at all so you have to wonder why we would acknowledge theirs."
There are many US patents awarded to Chinese entities. They patent things at home and in the US at the same time so if the US plays the game of not recognizing things patented in China, they'll have to ignore the same patent issued by the USPTO.
David Banner wants to know, when will we have potassium batteries!
Sodium burns with a bright yellow flame in water/air. But potassium is so much cooler with its purple (and UV-C) flame in water/air. Oh and it is radioactive (0.01% potassium-40), Who does not love the idea of walking about with a concentrated personal gamma ray source in their handheld devices. Which reminds me, it is probably time for a banana - I feel like I am low in potassium!
The problem with natural Caesium is that it is almost not radioactive at all (there are microscopic traces of Caesium-135 in natural Caesium - but it is almost negligible compared to caesium-133, which is listed on Wikipedia as being 100%). Caesium need to be made radioactive through man made processes.
Surely you would choose Francium with a half life between 4.8 minutes and 22 minutes as your radioactively hot source "battery". But of course making, selling, and using a Francium battery in the time window allocated by nature would be an extreme challenge at any scale at all when half your atoms change after, at best, 22 minutes.
If you lose 50% of your atoms in 22 minutes you can solve that by simply having lots and lots and *lots* of atoms.
If you start off with a battery weighing in at a couple of hundred tons, it should be able to power a 'phone for weeks.
> I'm holding out for the Caesium batteries for my radioactive power sources.
Hawaiian Sea Hunt Mystery, © GROSSET & DUNLAP, INC., 1960, The Biff Brewster Mysteries, by 'Andy Adams'
""Cesium!" Understanding came to Hank Mahenili. Any informed engineer knew the importance of this element. "Just what is cesium, Dad? And what is it used for?" "Technically, son, its atomic number is 55, and its atomic weight is 132.91. Its use?" Mr. Brewster smiled. "I’ll tell you this, we’ll never get to the moon without it." "You mean it’s used in rocket propulsion?" Biff asked. "That’s right, Biff. It’s a high-thrust, long-life rocket propulsion fuel. Most costly." "More than gold?" Li asked eagerly. "Much more, Li. If you and Biff had about ten pounds of it between you, you’d have your education paid at any college you wanted to go to— M.I.T., Cal Tech— any of them." "Wow! Must be worth more than a thousand dollars a pound, then," Biff said, his voice filled with amazement."
Fortunately this boys' book is a travelog with villains and isn't even intended to be scientific education. And FWIW, this is the least-good of the several Biff Brewster books I have read.
Ironically, Silicon Boride nanotubes are GREAT for holding surface charges within Supercapacitor-based battery packs! How do i know? Our parent company NCA aka North Canadian Aerospace created Boron Nitride, Sheet Graphene, Silicon Carbide and Silicon Boride nanotubes for in-house designed and built Supercapacitor battery packs installed within Ford F450 Superduty test trucks that can go 1600 miles or 2400+ km on a single charge WHILE towing 25,000 lbs or 11 000 kg AND carrying five heavy 250 lbs each druver and passengers!
V
No they didn't, unless you meant the company charged their prototypes up and loaded them onto gas powered trucks and drove them cross country.
This is another unsourced wingnut claim like the 200mpg carburetor, water powered cars, zero-point energy, and gravimetric crystal power generators.
Na S batteries have been around for a long time. British Rail did a lot of research on them in the 1970s. They showed "potential" :-) in spite of the engineering and technical challenges. Apparently some people weren't too happy at the thought of large amounts of molten sodium and sulfur/sulphur* travelling around at 100mph, so more effort was probably spent on stationary installations.
*Sulfur is preferred international IUPAC spelling (Wikipedia), sulphur tends to used be UK
I don't recall the British Rail stuff but I do know that a couple of well known (at the time) UK companies set up a joint venture in the 1980s to look at what might be achieved with a standard small commercial van with an electric motor and sodium/sulphur battery.
Lucas Chloride Electric Vehicles was the name, based in south Birmingham (Evelyn Road? >>EV<<elyn Road? Yes really). Top man at Chloride was Michael Edwardes of British Leyland infamy,
Decent idea in principle, just a bit before its time. And/or mismanaged. Or both.
A decade or two later, a different company (Leyland DAF) who already had a product in the Transit-class sector designed and built a lithium battery powered version of their standard Sherpa van. Parent company went bust and some very shady pillock called Mandelson saw no point in sending enough UK taxpayer funds (or even Russian oligarch funds) to LDV to get the van to market.
Or something like that.
(i was based in Brum while some of this was happening).
China is probably leadng overall on batteries – it saw both the need and the opportunity years ago – but it's not the only game in town. Japan also has advanced Na-Ion batteries and Northvolt in Sweden is also producing them. They are heavier than Li-Ion but have several significant advantages: they are much cheaper and easier to make and last longer and have technically greater energy density, though this depends a bit on how you measure i. This makes them ideal for stationary backup storage such as for power. At the same time, the additional weight makes them less suited for mobility or consumer devices but that's okay if demand for lithium for domestic and industrial installation decreases. Long term you have to hope someone cracks (sic) hydrocarbon fuel cells.
Others can manufacture these batteries too, but this is all about cost, and cost is about scale. While Northvolt is producing its first cells and companies in Japan and "the West" still have to convince investors and governments about the viability of their products, the Chinese have already ramped up to tens of megawatthours of installed SiB grid storage.
This means their supply logistics are also already up to scale, and development and shipment of their first generation of products based on SiB has already been completed. They can sell their products to other countries right now.
Not just grid storage. BYD is already building sodium ion battery factories that will start making sodium batteries for its cars. That's only going to increase their price competitiveness and given BYD cars have a standardized blade battery it would likely be easy to roll out across their existing models so I can see them rushing that out. While the west ums over it being "inferior" to li-ion china is going to show them otherwise. Then we'll have to claim na-ion is a security risk and we need to ban it :D
Yeah, China is leading battery tech on almost all fronts, at least at scale. That's what really matters here. And since they just stole the IP we were planning to hold back from them, we aren't going to be able to jump start production without some serious trade wars. Even if we slap huge restrictions onto our domestic markets, and the rest of our allies follow suit, China can flood the rest of the world at or below cost and all we can do is whine about it. Maybe complain to the WTO and possibly lose due to the anti-competitive tariffs.
Much like the Gigafactories, we can try to ramp this useful tech up to scale domestically, but it won't keep the Chinese at bay or free us from their global influence in the modern battery market.
At least I can probably ditch the car battery in my old clunker in a few years with one not composed of lead and concentrated acid.
And since they just stole the IP we were planning to hold back from them
I'm not a China fan, but that theft claim has been waved around *way* too casually without any data to back it up (a bit like the manufactured Huawei security scare) that I've started to become quite suspicious of it, especially since the US isn't shy of stealing ideas either. What evidence exists? China has bright people too (even just from a population volume statistical perspective), and they've been messing with fun chemistry for a lot longer then the West (especially with stuff that does kaboom) so it's not impossible that they have developed some things on their own.
There are enough sites out there spreading BS (OK, possible one less now Alex Jones has finally got his comeuppance re. Sandy Hook), no need for one more.
No, Na-ion costs are driven by the materials needed to produce them on which China no longer has a stranglehold. Production is largely automated and robots in Malmö cost as much as those in Xianjiang.
But credit to China and Chinese companies for pursuing alternatives, knowing the problems with Li-ion, whilst people like Musk were trumpeting marginal advances in the technology.
robots in Malmö cost as much as those in Xianjiang
Direct access to the rare earth materials to build the robots (you need permanent magnets) is ironically again a factor, as is the cost of labour so I'm not so sure costs are really equivalent. There's also the (already often mentioned) scale aspect in play here.
"This makes them ideal for stationary backup storage such as for power. "
The market for stationary batteries is a good one for used EV battery packs since they'll need a place to go and even with a 1/3 reduction in capacity, they would still be a giant stack of energy and cheap. That's the competition for Sodium Ion.
"the best part is, the NaIon battery was invented by an American company, using DoE grant money, but the company couldn't raise sufficient capital to bring them to production, so the Chinese bought them out."
The DoE grants should have a clause that any technology developed with grant money can't be sold to any entity outside of the US.
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