I’m guessing you are also an electric vehicle owner?
Because that is real world talking right there… it’s happened multiple times to me!
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I wonder what parts of asphalt are affecting the charge rate. Is it the entire composite material or just certain kinds of carbon molecules?
Why on earth would you let your teenager drive your car? But anyway, if you are concerned that your car isn’t plugged in for any reason, you could check your charging app on your phone. You could also perhaps set up a ITTT to alert you if your car isn’t on charge by a certain time.
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It’s gilsonite, specifically.
“Asphalt” is a generic term like “naptha” or “soda pop” - it’s accurate, but imprecise.
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All joking aside, my guess is asphalt has three valuable properties.
- It’s carbon molecules bond readily to the graphene nanoribbons.
- It’s strong and rigid, but not too brittle.
- Most importantly, the porous structure provides plenty of surface area. Because conduction electrons are mutually repulsive, they tend to move mostly along the outside of the surface in the metallic crystal they belong to. I would strongly guess that the large surface-area to volume ratio is the main culprit in the rapid charging. Unfortunately the full article is behind a paywall
Energy density is, though…
Consider that you’re average 6-cell lithium-ion laptop battery weighs in at just over half a pound or a little under 0.3 kg. A typical figure for a modern battery is a little under 10 watt-hours per cell, or a little under 60 Wh in a 6-cell Li-ion battery. That works out to about 200 Wh per kilogram. The article reports the Tour lab achieved 943 watt-hours per kilogram. That’s more than four times the same energy to weight ration. However, it’s really important to note that consumer electronics batteries are lithium-ion, not lithium-metal.
The discrepancy here is due to the much higher limit on Li-metal . Non-rechargeable lithium batteries you buy as AA battery packs are Li-metal. The problem is that until a couple of years ago, no one knew how to reliably make them rechargeable. According to the article, the lab achieved 500 charge-discharge cycles, about a third of what Li-ion batteries are good for before they can only reach half their original charge. But bear in mind that they store four times the energy density, so they’re already in the same league, provided the lab’s results are accurate. And they charge in a fraction of the time.
They’re also almost certainly much more expensive to manufacture than Li-ion batteries (which have the benefit of years of economy of scale), even if they’re cheaper than the lab’s own previous porous Li-metal process. Even if this new process is commercially viable and can be brought to market in a couple of years, don’t expect to see these in anything other than specific use cases (such as long-distance electric vehicles), until manufacturing can be scaled up to match existing rechargeable Li-ion and non-rechargeable Li-metal batteries. To get a very rough idea of how long that might take, it took about half a decade for non-rechargeable Li-metal batteries to become competitive with alkaline batteries.
TL;DR - These can last longer per charge, have a comparable overall lifetime energy capacity, and charge a lot faster. Hope to see them in electric lorries and high-end electric cars in a few years, and in consumer electronics sometime within a decade.
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You’re right. A step change in energy density would quickly bring the era of ICE to a close. Even, now, it feels to me like we are at the tipping point where electric cars finally good enough for mainstream investment and R&D. It’s not going to go back the other way.
Electrification of HGVs and Buses is also getting momentum. The massive torque will transform how they drive. Larger vehicles proportionately use much more of their energy to accelerate (and waste it on deceleration) rather than to push air (where the energy is lost forever). HGVs stand to benefit bigly from electrification due to the re-gen potential.
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I suspect, based on the massive funding for battery research, that rechargeable Li-metal might well surpass Li-ion within a decade in charge-discharge cycles, on top of their advantageous energy density. Of course carbon nanotube batteries might surpass both. The money pumped into battery R&D almost guarantees the technology will progress relatively quickly.
One advantage even for passenger electric cars could be much smaller and therefore lighter batteries, a big part of their curb weight. Same for consumer electronics. I don’t think we’ll see a lot of phones (or whatever comes next) lasting 10 years, but the batteries will be the size of RAM chips, which would be a big boon to things like wearables.
Definitely.
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I sure wouldn’t let my kids drive my cars if I had better options… and if you’ve ever actually used an electric or hybrid car’s phone app you have to be kidding.
My family’s tried to use Nissan’s CarWings system and Toyota’s Entune, and that garbage makes Android Auto look like a bloody space/time interociter.
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Thus utterly negating any green good done by the Tesla with the manufacturing carbon footprint from the other car even it it sits there most of the time.
That’s true. But the alternative would likely be that they would still have 2 ICE cars sitting there. 4 or 5 cars per household is the standard around here.
The better option is to not let them drive your cars.
I’ve not used a e-car app. Sorry to hear that they’re crap.
YMMV, I live in a dense urban area with good transit and many people don’t own cars. A Tesla owner could use a Zipcar for road trips just like many people here do.
He opened the green curtain made of fleshy leaves, and said
“I show you the excess of the Asphalt a Montmartre”
“Hey we were just manufacturing some batteries at your neighbor’s house, and we have all this leftover asphalt. I noticed your lithium batteries are looking pretty shoddy so maybe you’d be interested in helping us use the rest of it?”
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When I was 8 or 9 (during the Carter administration), and then-current events led me to believe there’d be no more petroleum before time I reached the age that I am now, I used to wonder if we’d have wire mesh (like bumper cars use) hung over all the streets.
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I like the idea of Teslas as car-share vehicles in dense areas. A condo could have a fleet of them available to the residents like Zip-cars. I hope we’ll ultimately transition away from private car ownership towards public and active transport solutions, with shared vehicles plugging the gaps.
Hmm. I wonder how much less waste heat would be generated in heavy summer traffic? Normal braking turns kinetic energy into heat via brake friction. And then there’s the general waste heat of ICEs. It doesn’t seem that much per vehicle, but millions of them in a poorly ventilated, already hot city add up.
Nice to see lithium batteries with true grit.
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If I hated my children and wanted to cripple their chances of having successful, happy and useful lives that’d be great advice!
They’re almost certainly worse than you can imagine. Typically car apps are developed during the vehicle design and production stages, and by the time the car is a year old, the apps are no longer supported. Even during the brief period a car app is actively maintained, they usually run on a very small number of OS versions, carriers and devices. The car makers have zero incentive to make apps work after the sale, because none of their competitors do.
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I’m pretty shocked to find that lack of access to a car as a teenager crippled my life, and that my parents hated me! Maggie Thatcher was more liberal; according to her, it was only after the age of 30 that using public transport meant that your life was a failure.
Depends on where you live. AIUI, in considerable parts of the United States, you basically can’t do anything beyond your home if you don’t have an access to a car.
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