The Sodium-Ion Battery Is Coming To Production Cars This Year -CleanTechnica

There is a new battery technology coming out every month. I am still waiting for smart phones that fully charge in 5 minutes and last all week. Surely these things exist in the lab but by the time the general public gets one its 5 - 10 years down the line.
They exist, but you are probably the only one willing to buy one at ridiculous price, or the military.

Seriously, people love to buy toys that last half a day worth of charge if they look sexy.
 
I don't think people will find more problems with sodium other than lower density vs lithium. If anything it should be a safer cheaper choice for most technology if the economy of scale is the same. One day when we run out of room to improve lithium and we need something cheaper and less capacity we can go to sodium. This is what I learned from a battery researcher I know.

Plus we will never run out of sodium as they are so cheap mining them out of the ground or salt lakes / ocean evaporation.
 
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Reminds me of a Marine that I knew, was telling me how the military has batteries the size of D cells that can start a truck, I think he was pulling my leg but who knows.
I'm sure it's possible. We've all seen these extremely small jump boxes that can start multiple cars on one charge. I have one and it's barely bigger than my hand. I'm sure if it was designed to only start once it could be a small as a D cell. It doesn't sound like it would be cheap though.
 
I’m all good with better battery technology; the issue I have here with soda ash is that it is one of the most critical components to container glass manufacturing and is already a stressed supply chain. Sucking a vast majority of this supply for battery use will not only increase its cost and negatively impact 50,000+ jobs in the glass industry across the country (and its environmental impacts of not having as much glass!), it appears we will be selling a good portion of that natural resource to China, for their enrichment at our expense.

Just my .02…
FWIK, China is already one of the largest glass producers in the world - wouldn’t they be able to make their own sodium carbonate? Many glass producers have/had a chlor-alkali division just to produce lye with bleach as a major by-product - that lye gets turned into sodium carbonate.
 
FWIK, China is already one of the largest glass producers in the world - wouldn’t they be able to make their own sodium carbonate? Many glass producers have/had a chlor-alkali division just to produce lye with bleach as a major by-product - that lye gets turned into sodium carbonate.
I don’t know what chemistry China uses for their glass. All I know is from my experience here, and for that we use soda ash. There may be other fluxes that promote lower melting points and fewer undissolved byproducts (which soda ash performs in our formula) that are more abundant in China and used there because it’s cheaper/more abundant/both.
 
The-sodium-ion-battery-is-coming-to-production-cars-this-year
Wonder battery coming "next" year - I hear that since 30 years now. Well it never came.

Remember Musk saying we are on Mars in 2022? Or we have full self driving cars next year in 2013?
Well we are not on Mars, and 10 years later we still don't have full self driving cars.

I'm always looking at track records, when it comes to this kind of prophetie.
 
How will the current chargers, built for lithium, deal with other battery chemistries? do we need another charging infrastructure?
I believe the actual charging control is handled by the on-board charger in the car. The physical charger you plug into your car just responds to what the cars asks of it so the charging infrastructure should work for various battery types.
 
I believe the actual charging control is handled by the on-board charger in the car. The physical charger you plug into your car just responds to what the cars asks of it so the charging infrastructure should work for various battery types.
On our Model 3, the on board charger is used at home with a 240V NEMA 14-50 circuit. It pulls 30A to 32A max.
Outside the home, on a Tesla Supercharger, the Supercharger by passes the on board charger and charges at a much higher rate.
 
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I believe the actual charging control is handled by the on-board charger in the car. The physical charger you plug into your car just responds to what the cars asks of it so the charging infrastructure should work for various battery types.

The charger is in the car, what you plug into the car is an EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment) and contains circuitry that tells the car how many amps it can supply, and supplies either 120V AC or 240V AC.

That's for Level 1 and Level 2 charging.

DC fast charging works differently, but there's still a standardized interface for it, so it's likely compatible with any battery.
 
GE had an excellent high temperature sodium battery that they stood up a factory in NY a few years ago for. It had promise for heavy industry and stationary. As usual, undercut by my dumping other tech into the market.

Na ion has promise as an aqueous chemistry if you can handle the lower density, IMO. With the typical organic electrolytes, the same baggage as Li-ion shows up safety-wise.
 
How will the current chargers, built for lithium, deal with other battery chemistries? do we need another charging infrastructure?
You can’t even use a charger intended for a specific lithium battery with a different chemistry lithium battery.

I’ve been in coorespondence with a Chinese Sodium battery supplier for my hobby EV

3.1 Volt prismatic Sodium Ion have been in the market alongside cylindrical for about a year.

The cell I was looking at is 200ahr and very similar to LifePO4 but not quite.

Of interest sodium batteries can avoid hazmat by being shipped fully flat 0 volts.

Sadly due to the language barrier I’m not getting a warm fuzzy and won’t order.
The gen2 sodium ion are on the market but I can’t validate the sources.

https://news.yahoo.com/sodium-ion-batteries-gaining-traction-150000318.html

Historically I could go to diyelectriccar which is international to get on a group buy, that community totally imploded years ago so it’s hard to get peer reviews of various diy sources.
 
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/04/22/the-sodium-ion-battery-is-coming-to-production-cars-this-year/

IMO, it takes a few unnecessary swipes at the "fossil fuel" crowd so I moved past the editorializing.
Not sure how I missed this but very interesting. I am SURE the industry is trying to further develop this type of battery. It would only make sense if they could, EV prices I suspect would come down substantially ? Turn the industry upside down? Unless it's physically impossible? I guess time will tell if EVs are ever to be a majority in the next 30 years, something has to give. On all kind of fronts, one of them would be to have the car generate its own electricity and not rely on the grid which is no where close to being able to support anything at this point.
 
Wonder battery coming "next" year - I hear that since 30 years now. Well it never came.
And that magic battery won't ever come. Lithium is among the most active metals on the periodic chart. In fact, when it comes to moving ions back and forth (rechargeable) Lithium is king.

Electrochemical energy storage has finite, well known limits. Gasoline has 112K BTU/gal and "physically heavier" diesel has 138 BTU/gal. No amount of research will turn gasoline into 224K BTU per gallon.

It is rather disheartening to see the (now hundreds of) billions of dollars poured into "new" battery technologies. As they are chasing nonsense claims of 3x to 10x energy density.

Maybe it is good to say it this way, The battery case, separators, anode, cathode, insulation, electrical and thermal conductors all take up a specific amount of room and mass. There is no getting around any of this. Even a room temperature superconductor would only reduce battery pack weight by a percent or maybe 2.
 
And that magic battery won't ever come. Lithium is among the most active metals on the periodic chart. In fact, when it comes to moving ions back and forth (rechargeable) Lithium is king.

Electrochemical energy storage has finite, well known limits. Gasoline has 112K BTU/gal and "physically heavier" diesel has 138 BTU/gal. No amount of research will turn gasoline into 224K BTU per gallon.

It is rather disheartening to see the (now hundreds of) billions of dollars poured into "new" battery technologies. As they are chasing nonsense claims of 3x to 10x energy density.

Maybe it is good to say it this way, The battery case, separators, anode, cathode, insulation, electrical and thermal conductors all take up a specific amount of room and mass. There is no getting around any of this. Even a room temperature superconductor would only reduce battery pack weight by a percent or maybe 2.
I’m unsure of your post, but the OP article doesn’t say anything about increasing the energy density by 3 to 10 times more.
It does say sodium ion batteries are on par with lithium batteries of just years ago and that in itself may say a lot.

To me it sounds like sodium batteries are around the corner. If the article is correct with lithium costing up to $80,000 at its peak per ton and only $300 per ton for sodium what do you think auto manufacturers will move towards?
Based on the article alone, I can tell a sodium-based battery in a second vehicle used around town if it’s produced in a much lower cost vehicle would be a grand slam.

Every vehicle on the market has compromises of some sort so even if a sodium ion battery doesn’t hold as much energy, it’s just one of many compromises of designs across all fuels and levels of vehicles
 
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As stated Gen 2 Sodium Ion batteries are already in production. (CATL)
@$40 a kwhr (Gen2 cells) density doesn’t matter as much.

There are a couple folks outside the far East who have bought a cell or two for testing.

Sadly due to the language barrier it makes difficult/risky and inflated freight.

This makes me sad all the diy folks went under, without boots on the ground it’s pretty risky and overpriced to buy cells just for yourself outside a group buy.
 
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