Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium

Na-Ion can be a lot less expensive. But it’s a lot heavier. (Not a problem for grid-storage.)

As a flashlight enthusiast, I’d be very interested to see if sodium batteries are any better.

Just make a flat battery and roll it up. 🧌

Material scientists hate this one trick.

Well I’m all about developing new technology and allowing the very best to sell the most.

Maybe someday in the future there will be an alternative to lithium batteries that really is better. But as you said, Sodium batteries aren’t as good.

They are actually better than Lithium in several ways. Sodium batteries have most of the capacity of Lithium batteries by weight, around 80% if I recall. But what they have to offer is being completely non-flammable, tolerant to wider temperature ranges, and they are made of materials that are cheap and abundant almost everywhere. It’s much better than having to source Lithium and Cobalt.

We could put Sodium batteries everywhere to power the grid since they are super safe, should be fine outdoors even.

There are cylindrical cells available. The capacity is pretty low, 18650 cells are around 1.5AH and 26700 cells are around 3.5AH. They discharge down to 1.5V, so you will get less capacity if you use them in something designed for lithium cells.

Because we’re speaking English, not Latin?

Quare loquimur anglicus?

What’s that supossed to say?

Most likely because the news is in English. And why would Natrium be better on an international forum?

It is Sodium in most Latin languages (despite Natrium being Latin), in Hindi and in Arabic. And Chinese has a different root. Among the 10 most spoken languages (according to Wikipedia), only Russian is using Natrium.

As a native English speaker, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call NaCl just “Sodium”, it’s always called “Sodium Chloride”.

I always said salt, of sodium chloride for NaCl. Who is using sodium for table salt? The only time I heard that associated was when saying that table salt is a source of sodium, which is true.

I’m a PhD candidate in chemistry. I’ve never once seen sodium refer to the salt, sodium chloride. Sodium is the metallic form or the atom.

However, why sodium, tungsten, lead, antimony, tin, silver, gold, mercury, iron, and potassium and not their Latin forms? Natrium, wolfram, plumbum, stibium, stannum, argentum, aurum, hydrargyrum, Ferrum and kalium? I don’t really know. Mostly it’s just fun trivia for me to tell the undergrads.

I’ve never heard natrium before. I guess I could learn. We could also call pineapples ananas.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/ZRRL_bi_62A

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Battery-licking good!

They are already in production, and sold to consumer, since few days. A french start up is selling an electric screwdriver with a sodium battery.

So the answer to the question about what to do with the excess salt from desalination plants, is make batteries?

Now we just need a lot of swimming pools for the chloride.

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium(www.economist.com)

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Our Rules

Approved Bots

Community stats

Community moderators