Re:Why is California wasting millions on hydrogen fuel pumps?
by paulmd on Monday March 07, 2022 @05:19PM
(#30594110)
you can't keep increasing battery capacity indefinitely either, batteries become more reactive as the electrode potential increases, so there's physical limits to what batteries can (safely) deliver too.
Unfortunately a lot of the battery capacity gains of the last 15 years have resulted from loosening these tolerances for fire/explosion, I'm thinking about lithium-ion and lithium-polymer chemistry here. Lithium-iron-phosphate is an example of a safer chemistry, but it also has significantly lower energy density, it's probably still better than NiMH but not anywhere near as much as lithium-ion or polymer types.
That means that if you are looking at an iso-safety sense, the gains have been much slower than "maximum potential even if you are ok with batteries exploding when overcharged/overloaded/punctured". We have just been ramping up our tolerance for batteries of the latter type.
Unfortunately a lot of the battery capacity gains of the last 15 years have resulted from loosening these tolerances for fire/explosion, I'm thinking about lithium-ion and lithium-polymer chemistry here. Lithium-iron-phosphate is an example of a safer chemistry, but it also has significantly lower energy density, it's probably still better than NiMH but not anywhere near as much as lithium-ion or polymer types.
That means that if you are looking at an iso-safety sense, the gains have been much slower than "maximum potential even if you are ok with batteries exploding when overcharged/overloaded/punctured". We have just been ramping up our tolerance for batteries of the latter type.