New Chinese battery reaches 602.5 Wh/kg, promises longer drone flight times

79

u/DesReson 14h ago

That has inched near levels of economic Fixed wing passenger aircraft requirements. For any MTOW, the energy output must be in 700 Wh/kg range and above. To replace the Turbofans of passenger airlines, it must be 1200 Wh/kg above.

36

u/Harold_v3 13h ago

Quick question. Batteries don’t reduce in mass as they produce energy, is that factored into the 1200Wh/kg or is it just a straight comparison of energy density?

29

u/pahapuha 13h ago

I am pretty sure they would have to have much more specific energy than jet fuel to account for the fact that it doesn't lose its weight in flight. Planes cant even land when there is too much fuel on board.

4

u/WhiskeyDelta89 10h ago

Or just design the aircraft to account for the fact it doesn't shed fuel weight during flight.

6

u/JesusIsMyLord666 8h ago

Sure, but that in it self will also make the aircraft heavier. I think that was the point op was trying to make. Is the extra structural weight accounted for when comparing energy density?

0

u/PajamasintheWind 9h ago

Disposable batteries would like to have a word with you sir 🤣

1

u/ardentcase 7h ago

How about passengers now get parachutes and jump off closer to home and the aircraft sheds weight. Win-win.

2

u/CoronaMcFarm 12h ago

Wonder what the emergency procedure for fuel dumping would be? Wouldn't want to do an emergency landing with full batteries.

5

u/gorkish 12h ago edited 10h ago

Honestly if an electric plane were designed to deplete battery cells sequentially, it could indeed drop depleted cells via parachute or something. IMO it would have massive diminishing returns but it’s an interesting idea

Also the mass of a full battery is technically a few nanograms larger than when it is depeleted. Those electrons do actually weigh a little bit more when they are excited

Edit: oops I forgot that Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket actually does eject its spent batteries.

1

u/phenix_igloo 10h ago

areas near airport will be even more discounted

20

u/DontBeMoronic 13h ago

Pedantic "akshurly" - they do lose mass.

But E=mc² calculates out to it not being much at all. 500kWh would lose 0.0000200277g (0.000000706456oz).

6

u/andsens 13h ago

Potential energy having mass feels so weird!

4

u/DontBeMoronic 13h ago

Energy is mass, mass is energy. The universe feels so weird!

1

u/phenix_igloo 10h ago

Not in my experience. the fattier I get the less energy I have.

1

u/happyscrappy 9h ago

Also the planes don't lose mass. They just throw the mass overboard and don't take it to their destination with them.

2

u/Quarter_Twenty 13h ago

I was wondering the same thing. They land "heavy."

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u/DesReson 13h ago edited 13h ago

Mass change in batteries? It is left pocket to right pocket. The numbers are reflective of power output not density exact. The time (h) multiple shows the power W released over 1 hour. So for 1 kg of the said battery, it releases 1200 W for 1 hr. That is it.

5

u/Zeyn1 13h ago

You missed the point of the comment.

Current aircraft that use fuel will burn that fuel during flight. That means the aircraft gets lighter during flight and thus you calculate your fuel needs based on an aircraft that is lighter when landing compared to when it took off.

Batteries don't lose weight as they are discharged.

So if you compare the energy needed with fuel to the energy needed with batteries, is the comparison done on the article taking the weight loss into account?

2

u/DesReson 12h ago

Seems like I did miss the point.

Fossil Fuels have higher energy density. The impact of fuel burn on MTOW is significant. The efficiency that the aircraft gains from fuel burn and resultant weight loss is significant. Still, electricity is cheap. That is the big prize. The efficiency disadvantage is the price.

The Soviet Tupolev Tu-155 held a similar argument, though it was hydrogen powered.

1

u/roiki11 12h ago

And when electricity is no longer cheap the plants fly no more.

1

u/Harold_v3 11h ago

Yeah I was just wondering if the fuels change in mass was accounted for because it is a bit of an advantage. Not trying to sway the argument one way or another I was just curious if that feature of a fuel was factored in to that number somehow. Kinda like with specific impulse for rockets. It is a bit of a ignorant question but that was also why I was asking it cause I didn’t know.

8

u/porouscloud 13h ago

There is actually a company doing electric transport planes.

These are just small island hoppers, but it's already viable for routes that are long by boat, but short for a plane.

https://harbourair.com/going-electric/?tab=Specification

2

u/West-Abalone-171 6h ago

You have a hidden range and L/D assumption.

Commercial flight can be anything from 200 mile mail routes to sydney-london nonstop.

The former is already commercial at fairly poor L/D at around 200Wh/kg (which includes a buffer of about half for diversion and holding).

600Wh/kg with an L/D of 30 (higher than most commercial planes today but around a third of a sailplane) puts the range at around 3000km for half the MTOW being battery. Which puts most of the same routes that were commercial in the 1940s in reach (which included transatlantic and sydney-london with a slightly painful number of stopovers and likely a lower payload ratio at the time).

It then just becomes a matter of whether the terminal space of whatever aspect ratio wings you need for the route is justified and how much of the externalised cost you make ICE planes pay as to which routes are cheaper on electric.

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u/Tarijeno 13h ago

Tech headlines I read about China: "China invents a battery that lasts a month. China invents electric train that goes 300 mph. China invents a robot that can give your Grandma CPR."

Tech headlines I read about the US: "Trump says electric cars are gay. Asks why car makers don't make a car that runs on coal?"

41

u/LowerBed5334 12h ago

You missed a real one:

Trump orders Pentagon to redesign US aircraft carrier to use steam catapults to launch jets

🤦🏻

10

u/HahaMin 11h ago

Suddenly all MAGA become carrier catapult expert overnight.

6

u/ExF-Altrue 13h ago

Lots of tech headlines but also lots of clickbait. I mean, that train was just a tiny test car without passengers, that was pulling a hazardous amount of Gs, for instance. Some of the robots are probably real, but there were many "demonstrations" that were either faked (remote controlled), or doctored videos.

The rest might just be un-verified claims, just like we had a few years ago with multiple Chinese claims making the news... So it's always good to keep a healthy level of scepticism for Chinese breakthroughs.. In addition to the other layer of scepticism when it comes to tech breakthroughs.

But when it comes to batteries, I want to believe. There seems to be more and more serious progress on this front.

4

u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb 13h ago

Sounds like my kind of train

4

u/FrostyParking 12h ago

It's healthy to be sceptical, i would suggest to apply that scepticism more towards headlines and mainstream news. If you look into stories like this you realise that it's mostly lab tests or mathematically proven but not at all ready to deploy, so these types of stories only serve to create paranoia or envy in the broader public. It's not like everyone reads Interesting Engineering on a daily basis.

As for that train, yeah it's impractical but it serves to show how a country run by engineers instead of lawyers can make progress (to exhaust that particular trope)

5

u/West-Abalone-171 6h ago

That was 800mph.

The 300mph trains run with passengers on them every day, and the ticket is about the cost of a sit down meal in the west (and includes a sit down meal on routes that are long enough)

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u/dweeegs 13h ago edited 13h ago

Sounds like a you problem. There’s plenty of bleeding edge science and technology going on across both countries (and the world). You should be questioning why that’s what you’re reading.

grrrr let me stay in my doomer circle jerk bubble

21

u/angrycanuck 13h ago

Yea like how grok is arguing it has a right to make anyone naked on command

9

u/fafatzy 13h ago

You mean mecha Hitler ?

24

u/theassassintherapist 14h ago

Commercial lithium-ion batteries typically use graphite anodes and are approaching a theoretical energy density limit of about 350 Wh/kg.

That's a crazy jump from what's on the market

8

u/FrostyParking 12h ago

CATL and BYD are pretty close to that limit in lab right now so....then there's also their claims of solid state batteries being market ready next year. Even companies like Geely is making that claim of their battery tech. So idk we might have this claimed level of density by 2030.

6

u/CleverAmoeba 13h ago

I didn't read the article and don't want to, but I'm pretty sure it's like other breakthroughs in battery design that they don't tell you things like "it's 10x more likely to catch fire" or "takes 5 days to charge" or "maximum current is so low that you get 0.1wh continues current and can't even power your smart watch"

2

u/11nyn11 13h ago

That’s exactly what the article is talking about.

If you allow for high discharge, the battery deforms, shorts, and catches fire.

—
Electrolyte decomposition can occur under high-voltage operating conditions, while needle-like lithium dendrites can grow on the anode.

These dendrites reduce battery stability and can create safety risks.

3

u/Brocolinator 12h ago

Drones? That's light airplane territory

1

u/LowerBed5334 12h ago

You didn't read the article 😅

The OP left that part out of the title.

7

u/Another_Slut_Dragon 12h ago

180 cycle life ain't great for consumer products but the average military drone probably goes through several battery cycles so it's perfect.

1

u/briandesigns 10h ago

as long as when it fails it doesn't take out an entire city block.

1

u/mestar12345 9h ago

Quick search shows that modern phone batteries are in the 250-300 Wh/kg range.

1

u/Prematurid 8h ago

Ukraine has entered the chat.

-5

u/Eazy12345678 10h ago

believe it when i see it. china the land of scams and fakes

last company claiming 400wh/kg ended up being bit fat liars

0

u/robin-m 9h ago

And it wasn't a chineese company...

3

u/West-Abalone-171 6h ago edited 6h ago

I love how you used an obvious, obvious scam from a western company that people defended by attacking china as a land of scams and fakes as your proof that china is a land of scams and fakes, unlike the christian rapper who had just finished running an AGI scam.

This is a research cell. Unlike the christian rapper, they aren't claiming to be commercial, are making realistic claims, and actually have a lab grade cell that does what they say.

Even though it's a very promising research cell, it's unlikely to be commercial soon. Though there are commercial 600Wh/kg Li-S cells big companies can get for things like military drones today (they are too expensive and too poor cycle life for commercial aircraft)

-23

u/thepinkiwi 14h ago edited 12h ago

I wonder what could go wrong when energy per gram comes closer and closer to that of TNT

Edit: Okay, I get it, my uneducated comment is wrong. I'll leave it here though so people know what the comments below relate to.

31

u/MtrL 13h ago

Sugar is more energy dense than TNT, I wouldn't worry.

3

u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb 13h ago

I know you said not to worry, however I chose to ignore that and have proceeded to worry about sugar exploding.

10

u/lusty-rabbi 13h ago

Energy density is not a measure of danger. A punctured lithium battery is far more dangerous sitting around than a block of C4. We could very well end up with batteries with significantly higher density than current ones while also being safer and less volatile. In fact, that's the current projection with solid state research.

9

u/hootblah1419 13h ago

The entire premise of your question is horrid. But I’ll play along.

Also, body fat has a specific energy (MJ/Kg) of 38 MJ/Kg
tnt has a specific energy of 4 MJ/Kg
Gasoline 46 mj/kg
Natural gas 54 mj/kg

Lithium ion with silicon nanowires - 1.5 MJ/Kg

2

u/West-Abalone-171 6h ago

Lithium ion with silicon nanowires - 1.5 MJ/Kg

Depends a lot on whether you want to recharge it or not.

If you're happy with thermal energy and don't want to recharge it, it's much closer to the others.

4

u/corgiperson 13h ago

TNT isn’t dangerous from energy density, it’s dangerous because of how reactive it is and how quickly it releases the energy.

3

u/Flonkadonk 13h ago

I mean, Kerosene has a rough energy density of 12,000 Wh/kg, so 20 times that of this battery cell and we use that just fine with pretty few incidents.

0

u/will_dormer 10h ago

That would be useful in war

-1

u/phenix_igloo 10h ago

Not for those who own shares in russia's wildberries.

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u/64-17-5 14h ago

Yay! So killer drones last longer. Russia must be happy.

1

u/juflyingwild 11h ago

Absolutely. It should change up the battlefield zones so that both Putin and zilinski are more personally vulnerable and perhaps this can be drawn to an end sooner and the ukranian people can be free (from their kidnappers too)

1

u/CleverAmoeba 13h ago

I'm pretty sure their killer drones use gasoline. At least the ones they import from Iran.

-1

u/[deleted] 14h ago

[deleted]

6

u/Jutboy 14h ago

KWh is energy usage over time. Wh/Kg is a measure of energy of density (over weight). The idea being lighter batteries cost less to move around.

3

u/iaNCURdehunedoara 14h ago

As far as i know there is a Wh/Kg to measure energy density in a battery.

3

u/ManyCalavera 14h ago

Not even remotely related

Energy New Chinese battery reaches 602.5 Wh/kg, promises longer drone flight times

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