Iron Battery 2.0: 250X More Power! Publication announcement (fixed)

[@PeterAllenLab]

This is the fixed video with corrected nickel oxidation states. For folks who subscribe, I apologize for the duplicate videos.

[@ashwinchander1837]

What is opinion on cheaper alternative to lithium ion batteries because seriously, the type of metals used for lithium ion batteries most resources are concentrated in south american and African countries, the overall cost of these lithium ion batteries are higher, now for a automotive application point of view what type of batteries needs o focused or built using cheaper materials without using lithium and cobalt?.

[@garybrown2039]

Hello, I just wanted to say thank you for publishing all of this. I’m certainly going to test this in time. Until then thank you for your hard work.

Corrected video but... when you talk about discharging a battery at it's highest rate and it _still_ takes a lot of time that *means* you have an extraordinary high rate and high capacity battery there. I like seeing people having 0 (zero) basic *understanding* about the subject _revolutionising_ the entire planet with their findings. You do this kinds of confusions in a _fixed/revised_ statement, it means you either never revise/proofread your statements of understand nothing of them. And thus only undermines the credibility of a technology two centuries old.

[@ryanatkinson2978]

This is super cool, and the fact you're making this all open source and explained well on KZbin is really great. Thank you!

[@FBPrepping]

Thanks for this Peter. I´m a metallurgist, and for years I´ve been willing to build some affordable DIY batteries to deal with the frequent outages in my country (Venezuela). It´s sad to see some of my acquaintances (like one Dr. in Electrochemistry I know) that instead of using their knowledge and skills in something productive preferred run away to live in other countries. I´m going to check your papers and once I can build my own, will upload the results in my channel. Take care!

[@ifzq0]

Cool hermano. Here is from Brazil. Build your prototype and then put your video link. 😀👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

[@wujeson3921]

We have developed vanadium flow battery succefully for more than 25000 recycle times. which is much better and longer lifespan than pure iron battery I think!

[@sergeyvaninsky]

The price of nickel is not that high. For large stationary energy storage applications, an iron-nickel battery would be a good reliable solution.

[@christopherleubner6633]

They are ideal for this application, takes all kinds of abuse, indefinite life, and when the time comes stupid easy to recycle. Keep them watered and they will last many many decades.

[@christopherleubner6633]

They are beyond reliable, one in a 1940s forklift came back to life in 2006 after sitting stone dead for decades. They were gonna scrap the forklift but I decided it was worth a try to fix it. The charger needed new rectifier diodes that replaced a unobtainable mercury tube rectifier. Hooked it up and it charged up overningt. The battery is durable, to say the least with the only maintenance needed being adding distilled water once a month since the charging voltage was a bit too high. The forklift was still being used daily in 2013 when I left. A lead battery would be useless scrap metal with a year of sittling flat.😮

[@zonta71]

The blessings of Open source. Thank you for the videos. checked the other videos after seeing V2.0. thats is a substantial increase in capacity Sir. Congrats. So a 40ft container is 76Kw capacity. getting that down to 20ft might actual get some diy folks in the offgrid community to attempt a build. congrats again on peer review papers. 1luv

[@aleksandar7393]

What would be the cost of such 76kw battery?

[@perpetual4958]

@@aleksandar7393 Video says 400K, 367K Plus tens of K in foundation for that 100+ Ton container.

[@kardia04]

Thanks for all your work! Me and my Dad are making this a wee winter project

[@stancooper5436]

Thanks for open licencing this. If cost per wh is the overriding factor this sounds like a winner, although 1000 cycles is a little on the low side. For a solar setup I would probably prefer supercapacitors, available off the shelf for under a buck per wh but with superior endurance of ~20,000 cycles.

[@teknosql4740]

If you are using supercapacitor mean you use the electric immediately after charging, because the self discharge is very high

[@absolute___zero]

@@teknosql4740 like 15 percent per day, but you can make a bunch of supercapacitors yourself using activated carbon and graphite, so it is very cheap, supercapacitors are dropping in price like the inverse Moore's law on silicon chips.

[@iniyanzayden369]

Flow batteries would be ideal in this case

[@aokiaoki4238]

Zing iodine I think is the best alternative

[@johnslugger]

*You can simply use one Iron Cathode and one Carbon Anode in the Edison Battery if you use Nickle Potassium Sulfate as the electrolyte.*

[@christopherleubner6633]

A factory i worked at had a forklift we were going to scrap that had a NiFe battery. Went ahead and repaired the charger for it and the battery form the 1940s still worked 😮 Then replaced the hydraullic hoses and it came back to life. This was in 2006.was still being used dayly when i left in 2013. 😮😮😮

[@christopherleubner6633]

Ni-Fe batteries are incredibly robust, a forklift used at a electroplating shop that dated back to the 1920s still worked despite the battery and the frame being the only truly original parts 😮😮😮

[@kennethanderson7642]

This is excellent work. Thank you for following through and bringing this to a satisfying conclusion.

[@omaral-halabiah2851]

I wish you a bright future in the field of iron batteries

[@1kreature]

Awesome work! 2 more orders of magnitude and it will be only considered "poor" energy density. The hard part here seems to be the inert electrolyte though, but that is the whole point! Can't wait to see what you do for 3.0! Expecting great things!

[@blogobre]

So if I've done my sums right, a shipping container is 1070kwh of storage. Not sure if you can fully discharge, though that's a lot of juice for 4 homes, especially if 'efficient', looks like 10+ (20kWhr x 3 days) Looking over the included component costs it seems like a huge part of the costing is with a few items.

[@Buzzhumma]

Oh Peter, dont go matey. I really liked watching this development from a professional scientific perspective. It was great. I hope you go on to developing something else that we can all learn along the way . I know all good things must come to an end but just not education. 👍🏻

[@PeterAllenLab]

Thanks for saying so! I'm making videos again, but not about batteries very often.

[@mooneym.3642]

So while lead acid is about ~30 Wh/L, 0.25Wh/L still leaves something to be desired. I think it means that in order to replace a lead acid battery with an iron battery to get the same energy we would have to have 4x30=120 iron batteries of the same size? All that work for 1000 cycles too. I respect the effort btw.

[@czechyorker]

This looks promising. Thanks for the update.

[@Freempg]

Form Energy is also doing interesting work.

[@bugfeatures]

I think the most important factor is Wh/$ It does not even Matter if the output power is low. If you try to build e.g. a off grid structure, you need to account that it sometimes can be cloudy for weeks and the battery has to last so long. Compared to that, a charge/discharge time of 48h is not a problem as long the battery is big enough.

[@PeterAllenLab]

I agree - the price/performance is the key. We're getting there. The 3.0 iteration is coming and has significant improvements.

[@aadhithvarathan5432]

I think we should try the same chemistry with Zinc instead of Iron in Anode. Zinc is also very abundant. Aluminium is also a good option but we need to remove oxide layer and use an electrolyte that has an electrochemical window of at least 2.2V.

[@wujeson3921]

Vanadium electrolyte can be recycled almost 100% after 25 years operation. it never be wasted. so vanadium flow could be more cheaper and mature currently as I know

[@absolute___zero]

@@wujeson3921 vanadium oxides are poisonous , this is exactly why I stopped looking at vanadium batteries. So far the best battery I have found (after silver-zinc) is sodium-nickel chloride (the salt battery) , it needs thermal isolation and it takes sometime to warm up, but it is lasts for 10 years and it is very powerful. I think salt battery is the way to go. salt is cheap,nickel is not that expensive. But if you have got money , go for silver-zinc

[@archivistdeveloper4058]

Excellent work. I look forward to seeing more.

[@ParadoxPerspective]

Good science! You should consider a collab with the Tech Ingredients channel. I'm not educated enough to comment with any authority, but it seems like the bottleneck here is the available surface area for ion exchange. It would seem that there would probably be a pretty sharp dropoff of delivered power when concentrations dip a bit. Maybe solve this by banking the solutions in storage tanks, and flowing the solutions across one another in a reaction cell. You would invest some energy in pumping the solutions; but since the storage tanks can scale, this should be a viable tradeoff to make. It seems more viable than trying to have infinite area for ion exchange to occur over.

[@magnitudematrix2653]

To increase your surface area of your carbon you should use turbo stratic graphene or flash graphene by Dr. James Tour. Or you should get some rebco tape and experiment with it as well

[@justthinkalittle8913]

Ok, just hear me out. What IF we did use want to use that "costic" electrolyte? What would happen?

[@Jkauppa]

how about iron-copper(air) in CuSO4 water at 1.1V? its rechargeable, just remove the iron electrode from the solution to prevent the self-discharge, so iron instead of the typical zinc, the CuSO4+Fe->FeSO4+Cu typical plating reaction, reversive/rechargeable, iron-copper electrodes should give only 0.78V, so its not the basic reaction, its either a more complicated Fe/Cu swap or oxygen plays a part in the voltage difference, iron air standard potentials would give about 1.6V but water decomposition at 1.23V limits it to that voltage at max.

[@claygraner4450]

What will be needed to scale this up for a solar battery collection system.

[@HenriBMaciel]

I'm gonna have to wait for the 3.0 or more. I was just thinking... 250mw per Liter = 1W in 4 Liter So if 12V x 0,083 A = 1 Watt If I wanted to use 5kw of appliances at once that would be 5000 / 4 = 1250 1250 Liters of battery (not counting how deep the cycles can be) Then that price tag, omg Imagine the work hours one would have to put in to make 1250 liters of that. Meanwhile a 12V 100AH deep cycle GEL lead acid battery is 175,99

[@EctoMorpheus]

It's 250mW per liter, so to get 5kw you'd need 20000 liters, not just 1250... Just making it worse 😂 Still, it's a very good start and awesome that this is open source. If someone manages to improve this one order of magnitude (as opposed to the 2 orders of magnitude between version 1 and 2), suddenly we're talking about a very useful and very affordable battery. I hope this line of work continues!

[@wolfeatsheep163]

Please do a scalable dumb people version maybe mimicking the size of a car battery to help with the density output understanding

[@jeffstout6567]

Grrr.!! these are not available on your Amazon links. Are they’re any updates on availability? Thanks

[@renaissanceman5847]

"I am happy to announce that..." while looking like his dog just died.

[@wojtekbratek5156]

First I thought is to use Graphene to lower internal resistance.

[@johansen5192]

Thanks for sharing your research on Y/T.

[@orowizard1369]

This is all above my head, but, I think he was trying to make a more inexpensive battery using cheaper and safer materials. I heard that the Edison iron oxide batteries are still working at high efficiency (for them) after 50 plus years or something like that. What I would like is a simple, DIY, open source, relatively inexpensive battery that the less intelligent (me), could duplicate to run a house full of electronics with for several days or in series/parallel for weeks. (I don't know, just wishing). You seem exceptionally bright, it would be nice if you could find the time to make a simple detailed video of such an item. You could become famous and/or rich if done, methinks. lol

[@johansen5192]

@@orowizard1369 You're right, I was too critical; I've cleaned up my earlier post. If you want to build a battery in your garage to power your house, one way is to simply buy Lithium batteries and spot weld them together with nickel strips in the configuration you want. The problem is, you'll probably burn down your house because there are cooling problems and balancing problems that people don't even think about. They just weld together mountains of 26650 cells and let her rip - not always a great idea. If you want to avoid using lithium for cost or sustainability reasons, then really the only tried and true, off the shelf, batteries are the lead-acid deep cycle batteries, along with the Ni-based batteries: namely the Ni-Fe (Edison), NiCad, and NiMH. All the other batteries are still in development (Metal-Air, etc etc), or are too complex (like flow batteries) for the average DIY person. I won't lie, the NiFe battery is very hard to build yourself. The paste at the (+) and (-) has to be prepared very carefully and pressed at very high pressure onto a substrate of some kind. Battery mfgs do this with an expensive machine called a calendering machine. Edison himself did it by using hydraulic presses and 'pockets' for the (-) - sort of like making a briquette - and by ramming Ni hydroxide at 10,000 psi into 1/4" dia. tubes for the (+), not something most people can do. Modern manufacturers press the active materials onto Ni felt, or Ni perforated sheet, or Ni foam substrates. You can buy these substrate materials on eBay, and perhaps that would be the quickest way to succeed. Trying to nickel-plate your own steel parts is not that easy. Ni plating is a science in itself. The NiCad battery uses very similar mechanical construction to NiFe. Problem is, Cadmium is expensive and toxic. The all iron battery idea (as expressed in this video and accompanying paper) sounds great but has several engineering challenges. Fe is not typically used in this manner for the cathode. First of all, it's a mess. Fe (III) oxide is messy, it contaminates the electrolyte with red/orange gunk, it doesn't contribute much in the way of voltage, and it's hard to push Fe back and forth between II and III oxidation states in this manner. Keep in mind, you're only getting maybe 0.7 or 0.8 volt from this configuration, and that's open-circuit voltage (that means no-load)! And by sticking a cellulose acetate membrane in between the (-) and (+), as was done here, you're increasing the impedance even more. In all the years Edison and Jungner and others worked on the alkaline rechargeable battery concept (and keep in mind Edison at this point in his career was a force to be reckoned with, he had a full-blown industrial laboratory with probably 50 assistants with all kinds of skills in electrochemistry and metallurgy) in all those years ~1900-1925 or so, no one bothered patenting anything using Fe hydroxide at the cathode (the + plate) for very good reasons. They patented almost everything else for the counter electrode to the Fe (-), but never iron hydroxide. So to answer your question, if I was dead-set on building a home battery from scratch without using Li-ion, I would probably focus my efforts on either lead-acid or Ni-Fe. The good news is that you can find lots of technical information on lead-acid battery construction. These were developed in the 1860's and pretty much perfected by 1900. There are lengthy treatises that discuss the physics and chemistry in great detail from the ~1910 era, and by WW-I these batteries were used by US Navy for submarine propulsion and the military published manuals on the design and operation by this time, so you can get all the info you need online no problem. In the early 1900's, big cities had big central battery power plants which used massive lead acid batteries, and even as recent as 1990(?) the dept. of energy ran a massive (~10 MW?) battery plant in Los Angeles area, so you wouldn't be the first one doing it that way. Modern deep-cycle Pb-acid batteries use heftier plates, and there's been talk of pumping the electrolyte and keeping it fresh all the time. On the other hand, if you wanted to avoid the hassle of dealing with sulfuric acid and getting it all over yourself and your clothing, as well as breathing lead fumes and hacking off your neighbors as you melt down various lead components, then you could try building a NiFe battery. But these aren't easy for the reasons I stated.

[@mianaliahmed9886]

Any updates on this?

[@PeterAllenLab]

Trying to publish the 3.0 paper now, but it's a slow process

[@mianaliahmed9886]

@@PeterAllenLab Thanks a lot !!

[@absolute___zero]

I see a little elephant in the room: Nafion suspension 227k ... this is two thirds of the cost of battery manufacturing. I wonder if we go to Galvanic Cell from Luigi Galvani made in 1790 , should be more powerful if we buy copper and zinc with these 227k bucks

[@GrantSR]

How do we turn this into a flow battery?

[@adolfrobespierre4778]

what would be needed to increase life cycle?

[@sevdev9844]

Interesting. But is it cheaper than a Edison battery? Or will it be? 1000 cycles isn't that much.

[@305dan89]

Can you use a magnet to speed up the flow of electrons? Reversing polarity on charge/discharge?

[@mehmetozturk9477]

I wonder what's new..

[@kapytanhook]

Charge and discharge efficiency omitted, 60% or less has to be assumed?

[@justthinkalittle8913]

why not just keep the potassium sulfate? its really not that bad. unlike lead sulfuric acid

[@GrumbleGrumble2]

Why did you decide to use iron instead of a Daniell cell? Isn't the theoretical power density higher with the Zn-Cu chemistry of the Daniell cell? Aren't Zinc and copper also reasonably plentiful compared to Lithium?

[@JobvanderZwan]

Well, I can't say how common they are compared to lithium, but in general copper is rare enough these days that copper theft has become a real thing so I'm not so sure about them being plentiful *enough*

[@PeterAllenLab]

Daniel cell is definitely higher energy and power density. But you can't beat iron for abundance.

[@johanson321]

For the simple reason that Daniell cell's aren't rechargeable.

[@skepticalopen-mind4031]

I'm glad it got less sodium My pressure is going up already

[@KavinTeenakul]

Hi Peter, I read your paper on Iron Battery 2.0. It is not clear to me why you use iron choride + K2SO4 instead of iron sulfate + K2SO4 electrolyte? Is it because you need chloride ion? Thanks.

[@PeterAllenLab]

We did try direct iron sulfate at one point, but it did not perform as well. My hypothesis at the time was that the precipitation of iron solids under our conditions made a product with better properties (maybe more porous, smaller crystals). But it was really an empirical choice.

[@tonysu8860]

I assume this was your graduate student's thesis/project. Congratulations on what can be considered a success. Any plans for attempting a 3.0?

[@PeterAllenLab]

Thanks! Yeah, my students did a great job. Alas, I had to suspend research. The university shrank my department and I got cut.

[@nosuchthing4789]

@@PeterAllenLab that sucks! Maybe you could lean on Patreon?

[@ahfoo1429]

@@PeterAllenLab Ouch! I went through the same thing. That sucks. We live in strange times. Fascinating how your work gets cut just as Honeywell and the big boys get into the field commercially. It's good to know that iron flow batteries are going mainstream but the situation in academia. . . this is unfortunate to hear. I was following these videos with great interest.

[@pwood5733]

Could even store power station electricity also

[@marcangelodonelo5656]

How much will this battery cost if it will be a prismatic cells like those of lishen/eve cells

[@wesKEVQJ]

I found yor video because I was daydreaming about an iron-iron chloride battery, This might sound environmentally bad, but wouldn't a mercury electrode be impervious to hydrochloric acid? Like a cell with mercury at the bottom and a sheet of iron above it with a seperator. Then you could use a thick enough piece of iron that it wouldn't use all the acid. The only thing I don't know,( because I'm not a chemist) is what would happen when the iron chloride touches the surface of the mercury. Would it make an amalagam or would it just stick to the surface? The only reason I ask is if it makes an amalgam it would work better becasue you wouldn't have dentrites form. It wouldn't be too environmentally bad because the mercury would just sit in a plastic cell.

[@PeterAllenLab]

There are a couple of issues, one being that that iron anode will just react with the HCl and water to make iron chloride and hydrogen. Using high pH stops that. Then the next issue is what reaction happens at the cathode? You need something to take up those electrons and mercury metal can't do it. It's a useful electrode in some applications despite its toxicity, but you need something oxidized. I don't know what would do that in that context. Molten metal batteries are really interesting, though. Here's an explanation of the Sadoway battery: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jH-mdGuHfN6Sq5I

[@wesKEVQJ]

I guess I was thinking there would be a reaction between the hydrogen and the mercury. Looking up mercury hydride I see that that would be a mistake. So you are saying if you want electricity from iron and hydrochloric acid you would have to put the hydrogen through a fuel cell or burn it in a generator. Would the reaction be difficult to reverse or recharge back to iron and hydrochloric acid with electrolysis? I'm assuming there would be some heat involved also.

[@markgeurts258]

Do you have any estimates about how long this batery will last in theory, if it sits in a enclosed HDPE container? Does it compeat with a zink bromine battery in terms of durability? Keep up the good work and good luck, greetings from germany.

[@PeterAllenLab]

We ran about a thousand cycles and it held up really well. It can lose moisture and die, but the chemistry seems really robust. I have never worked with zinc-bromine so I can't compare.

[@nytime5573]

@@PeterAllenLab Can battery be salvaged or refurbished after those 1000 cycles? Which parts should be totally replaced to get a 'new' battery? And how degradation past 1000 cycles looks compared to other most affordable options line lead-acid or LiFePO4? Thanks for sharing and your work.

[@KyrychenkoAnton]

I'm a bit confused with this calculation kzbin.info/www/bejne/sGfZlJWOgbB9iJI , mb you can clarify this to me.. So having estimation for 0.34 $/Wh (dont know why its wH, mb I missing smth), its more expensive then even LiFePO4 batteries which are currently lets say 0.2 $/Wh (lets say because its could be found cheaper but for clearance and some additional costs lets say 200$ per KWh). LiFePO4 has also > 1000 cycles (but not more than 2000 lets say for sure, you didn't mentioned yours upper boundary). And for 107 m^3 for 367000$ if 0.34$/Wh is correct - it will store 1079 KWhs - 1.08 MWh, right? The same volume of 107000 liters LiFePO4 battery will store (with average 325 WH/L density) 34775 KWh - 34.78 MWh. So to sum up it appears to me that its not only takes 35 times more volume for same energy as LiFePO4 (which I can understand) - it also cost 170% more (0.34 vs 0.2 $/Wh) - which as I understood was the whole goal of battery - to be big, heavy, but cheaper, not pricier? Did I understood smth wrong - like there's infinite number of cycles and big "cheap" green checkmark comes there, or that you can restore capacity with only replacing iron which is only 2k of 367k? or its a mistake and its 0.034 $/Wh mb xD?

[@PeterAllenLab]

It's true that Li-ion reported prices have come down and are now lower than the price we calculated for the iron battery. But I think if we re-calculated the price with current materials prices, we would also be lower than we were when we ran those numbers. And the big drivers of our higher cost are things like the separator, and we were basically paying retail prices for those. Li-ion prices depend on massive economies of scale and our price is pretty comparable even without. Plus... I'm a little skeptical about the $.2/Wh from Alibaba cells. I bought a couple of cells like that and they only actually stored a fraction of their stated capacity.

[@jimpifarre4601]

could you build it like a capacitor instead of a battery...?

[@PeterAllenLab]

Roll it up? Maybe. I'm not sure if it would work well or not. I'm not experienced constructing things that way - materials and glues would need to be selected carefully

[@simonlinser8286]

great stuff thanks for your work!

[@AlexthunderGnum]

Awesome. Thank you!

[@chandraprakash2658]

i'm working on mettalic sodium batteries. need helps on current collector. internal resistance is so high. suggest me material on current collector side

[@PeterAllenLab]

The best we found was a high percentage of carbon black (Ketjenblack). Good luck

[@randallstovall5728]

Could this be used to purify iron? Like if you were scavenging could you build a battery from scrap and rusted iron and end up with a usable for that could be used to metalwork?

[@PeterAllenLab]

Maybe? I think conventional smelting might be more efficient. These still need to be prepared with other ingredients. But this paper shows that scrap metal can be processed for a similar battery: doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00295

[@randallstovall5728]

@@PeterAllenLab I don't think it'd be an ideal final product. I just through it would be a simple way to start the refining process.

[@hillbillybassfisherman8181]

does it help a battery to put 8 cups of epton salt per quart of destilled water on low heat on stove to turns clear an use that in lead battery instead of just plain destilled water?

[@PeterAllenLab]

I doubt it. I'm not a lead-acid expert, but it would add sulfate ions and magnesium ions. There are already lots of sulfate ions. Magnesium ions will increase the conductivity and self discharge rate. So I see a clear downside and no good upside.

[@ryanlebeck259]

Would a ferrofluid containing the electrolyte assist in current flow and collection?

[@PeterAllenLab]

I don't know. I'm not familiar with ferrofluid compositions. The only ones I know are oil-based and that probably wouldn't work well. I don't think the magnetic properties would have any effect.

[@ryanlebeck259]

@@PeterAllenLab I was more thinking that the ferrofluid could be piped through a tube and that a wire could be coiled around the tube to make an Iron flow battery of sorts that is powered solely by iron.

[@rescueteam5]

Good job. Good Luck

[@davidtindell950]

Your statements that “this is not IDEAL” are among the greatest understatements of this 21st Century ! ….

[@Photomonon]

BINGO - Brilliant!

[@miguelangelsimonfernandez5498]

Excellent, thanks.

[@wolfgangpreier9160]

I can buy 100Ah LiFePo4 cells from a retail shop in the Czech Republic - not even @ Alibaba which cost me 18,68 cents/Wh. You must increase the power and capacity by at least a factor 10 to make your cells in any form attractive.

[@David_Mash]

Any news?

[@PeterAllenLab]

My former student is working on another publication, but it's slow going.

[@IIIRotor]

In Africa's case, the weight is actually a benefit.

[@alexanderfl-ts3171]

Cause it's won't get stolen easily?

[@jamespossible2601]

Great share.

[@13thbiosphere]

Chinese solved cheap mass production of lithium iron phosphate and now they're starting to develop sodium iron currently 160 kW per kg.....what kind of energy density are you achieving

[@romteb]

according to the 250mw/liter figure (and if it is meant to say 250mwh/liter) that would be 1000 time less than li-ion

[@13thbiosphere]

@@romteb sounds like a fun kindergarten experiment

[@PeterAllenLab]

That was power density. Energy density is a little better than that: at least 10000 mAh/L or ~3000 mWh/L. Still not a contender with Li-Ion. And, unlike power, the ceiling is pretty low. We're accessing 50+% of the iron in the cell. So if we managed to access 100% of the iron, we would probably not even double capacity. You can see the data in the paper, Figure 6B. 8 ml cell discharged deeply, but not to completion. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2020.e00171

[@patrickd9551]

@5:10 so let met get this straight, for 367k you can store energy at 34 cents/wH over 1000 cycles? I tried to compute that into something functional, but it doesn't make sense. Okay apparently it should be sufficient to power 4 homes for several days. I can do that. My home consumes 10kWH per day, so I would need 45 kWH for this equation. I can buy 304Ah LFP batteries for about 90 euro. 48 of them would render me just over 45 kWH capacity. I would need 3 BMS's each around 600 euro each. So a grant total of 6120 euro and I can store those in the corner of my shed. Not to mention they can perform 4000 cycles. Look, don't get me wrong, I love the idea of open source and open research as much as the next guy. I contribute to open source projects myself. But, as please prove me wrong, this feels rather pointless to demonstrate an entire shipping container costing at least 15 times more, taking up at least 25 times the space and has a quarter of the lifespan. Or at the very least please provide additional insight by comparing to a regular cell and pointing out the differences.

[@PeterAllenLab]

You're not wrong. Every year li-ion gets cheaper. When I started this project in 2017 the economics looked better. That being said, this has zero economy of scale, so it's hard to compare. In general, yeah, I'd buy a commercial solution. This is more of an exercise or maybe in the very long term this is the start of a sustainable solution.

[@patrickd9551]

@@PeterAllenLab As I'm seeing battery tech progressing, I think Iron Salt batteries have more validity in the flow type battery type. Just adding storage by adding more electrolyte basically. There have been quite a few improvements in that area recently, but it isn't that user friendly anymore I'm afraid.

[@chinabluewho]

Host is made up of 50% Christopher Walker and 50% Ed Norton.

[@Scroty68]

and a pinch of Brent Spiner for the pot.

[@davidcampbell6500]

Look at Moto Flux motor.

[@jackjackson3356]

What you've done maybe grand, yet still not accessible to all. You came up with a battery that will power 4 homes for few days ? What could be the average cost of such a battery ? What would be the volume of such a battery ? What would be the weight of such a battery ? What would be the life of such a battery ? If divided into several batteries what would be the weight and volume of the smallest battery ? Now you can still make lots of money yourself by selling a practical guide on how to construct such a battery. Or by manufacturing such a battery in a warehouse upon request...Not all people are handyman ! What is your email address Peter Allen ? It still can be open source as well !

[@cybrwerks]

rust it faster

[@stormmind]

Hi Peter! Great work! What do you think about this iron battery? m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/i3XNmIaJhJ5rjKs

[@jaredharvey1511]

I second the notion. I was wondering about an open source iron air battery. Seems like that would also be interesting and perhaps useful.

[@prototype9000]

No such thing as electrons

[@Withnail1969]

so 4 litres of battery to store 1 watt? Useless then.

[@Tore_Lund]

Usually power density is per area of one electrode, not volume? So yes decreasing distance between electrodes and increasing the area, like with a rolled up cell, will improve power density. Why dismiss KOH? It is not corrosive to other things in a car than Aluminium, so easily contained in a battery. Poisionous, yes, but how many people drink electrolyte from a battery by accident? Yes abetter option is NaOH which is not poisionous in the same way as KOH but still a base, but very cheap and readily available. Edison cells used nickel plated steel plates or steel woll to save cost. they were not all using pure nickel electrodes.

[@kapytanhook]

Watts are not stored but watt-hours are. 10wh/l is not terrible for static applications. About 30 times less than lipo. With a car size set of 10k batteries on the grid you could power a house all night My big worry is the efficiency, also 1k cycles is useless for grid. Full replacement in 3 to 5 years