Battery made of aluminum, sulfur and salt proves fast, safe and low-cost (opens in new tab)

At this point I strongly distrust any 'breakthrough' article about research at MIT. After hundreds of these, I'm fairly convinced that any time a grad student pours liquid into a beaker, MIT's marketing department is out publishing the fact that Flubber has just been invented and we're all going to be saved by bouncy flying automobiles.

I mean, congrats on the great marketing department. But it's tiring to be disappointed over and over by the hype.

Ars [1] has a pretty decent article with a bit more depth. Still no mention of the cell's basic voltage which I thought was like the number one piece of information for a new battery chemistry.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/new-aluminum-sulfur-...

> The team says that this battery design would be best suited to the scale of a few dozen kilowatt-hours, like powering an individual home from renewable sources.

I'm curious to know if this would also be suitable for grid-scale storage, it seems like an odd ommision in the article. The description certainly implies that this would be a good use but I wonder if there is an issue that I'm not seeing that would make them less useful for that?

Not being flamable sounds like a good thing for house and charging station level storage, although heat management might be an issue in smaller houses. I've always been a bit uncomfortable about the idea of a large li-ion battery pack in my house, given the difficulty of extinguishing fires that involve them, I'd be happier with something like this assuming the thermal management could be dealt with.

The challenge of course is scale. It is very easy to build a high powered and fast charging batteries as a one-off in a lab. Trying to produce a million a month is an altogether different proposition.

Hear hear, the next breakthrough like the last 20 ones we had in the last ten years.

Though it's still Li-Ion, LiFePo and plain old Lead Acid in practice.

No information about energy density and vague information about "..the new battery cells can withstand hundreds of charge cycles, and charge very quickly..."

So it does not have enough density and thus useless in BEVs and if amount of charge cycles is not counted in thousands, then it is kind of useless for renewable storage as well. But at least it is cheap.

"They can not only operate at high temperatures of up to 200 °C (392 °F) but they actually work better when hotter – at 110 °C (230 °F), the batteries charged 25 times faster than they did at 25 °C (77 °F). Importantly, the researchers say the battery doesn’t need any external energy to reach this elevated temperature – its usual cycle of charging and discharging is enough to keep it that warm."

I feel like they're willing to hype anything. I'm sure this would be good for certain niche applications, but a standard operating temperature that high rules out a ton of uses and requires its own safety considerations.

I have no idea of the chemical reactions, but generally heat means wasted energy. I wonder what the efficiency is like for charge/discharge. And if they're used on a large scale how that heat dissipation would effect the local environment or climate change.

So I need a kettle of boiling water to warm up the battery in my electric bike, before I can ride off in the morning? Also, boiling-hot molten salt - I don't want that spilling on me in the event the battery is ruptured in a collision.

(Sure, I don't really want lithium salts splashing on me either; but molten salt at 90C?)

Would this also be a lot easier / safer to recycle?

Battery "breakthrough"s are a dime a dozen. There are usually fatal flaws.

Wake me up when you can buy them.

...so it's probably huge then?

"its usual cycle of charging and discharging is enough to keep it that warm."

Sounds like thermal loss to me...

Now it’s time for MIT or the like to correspondingly design a high-torque 1.5VDC electric motor.

Doesn't salt corrode aluminum? Maybe not these specific salts?

I'll buy twelve.