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AI comes up with battery design that uses 70 per cent less lithium
(www.newscientist.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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Also, lithium is of pretty low concern when it comes to the materials in current cells. Stuff like cobalt and nickel are more critical and would be larger news.
LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.
Yes, also Lithium Manganese Spinel cells have been around since 1996 and also don't contain any nickel and cobalt. This is good but many vehicles and devices still use NMC and NCA due to the better specific energy density which is where LFP is limited (but can output more power and is much safer). Tesla (and every EV manufacturer) compromises on the battery depending on what chemistry they use, where if they could reduce the need for expensive metals while maintaining specific energy it would be pretty newsworthy.
Yeah, for cars, energy density is the name of the game. We honestly don't need more output power and Tesla is not one to care about safety lol.
But indeed for grid storage, those chemistries are much more useful where energy density is less critical.
this work does nothing to address this, and they also include yttrium, because they focus on solid electrolytes for some reason (probably because chemical space is smaller)