Interesting that lithium batteries become huge financial and industry thing with billions, if not trillions around all that Lithium mines, Lithium processing plants and so on.
Meanwhile, Lithium electrochemistry is not the only electrochemistry useful for making batteries.
Everybody know "Lithinum battery" as set expression, but very few understand something about it.
I bet not many of you here ever heard about Sodium-ion batteries. As you could guess, it is a same thing as a Lithium-ion batteries, but without Lithium. :)
And it's not some scientific paper or lab experiment - they are mass produced in all possible forms, including 18650. And you could easily buy them on aliexpress or other Chineese online shops without any problems and for a price of LiIon. For years already.
NaIon batteries sligthly differ from LiIon, and close to LiFePO4. Nominal voltage is 3.1V, charge cut-off is 4.1V, discharge cut-off 1.5V, more charge-discharge cycles than LiIon, do not afraid of deep discharge and cold. And they do not catch fire when case is damaged, overcharged or overdischarged. All that without Lithium.
They are perfectly real, working, cheap and on the market for years. And could be mass-produced on same equipment used for manufacturing Lithium batteries.
And not a peep in mass-media.
I found them long ago on aliexpress and bought few Sodium Ion 18650 to play with. They already outlived few Lithium Ion 18650 I also use in flash-lights and still works great, especially in cold weather. They are better than Lithium Ion batteries in real practice.
I waited for some movements about them in industries and business, but still nothing.
Imagine, you invested trillions in Lithium shit, and suddenly better Sodium Ion alternative pops up. Sodium is abundant everywhere, you don't need to have access to specific places to get enough for battery manufacturing. There is no any sense to rush for acquiring Lithium deposits and so on. Sodium Ion batteries will shut down whole bubble of Lithium business. So, public just cut from information about Sodium Ion batteries, while they are in mass-production and on the market at least for several years already.
Sodium-ion batteries are three times heavier and only produce about half as much charge. It's just the way the chemistry works. They're really useful for some applications, like home solar shortage, but you wouldn't want them in a phone or a car.
I know from experience that lithium ion batteries don't perform well in cordless hand tools in the winter time in the Denver area. These may be an alternative to them for winter application
Real thing, sure. SiB are better withstand cold. Not that they will run outdoor in winter like it's nice summer day, but they are able to provide noticeably more current in cold and, what is important, will not turn to garbage if you discharge your tool and leave it for few winter nights in non-heated shed.
One thing to consider - is lower voltage per cell. LiIon is 3.7-3.6V and SiB is 3.1-3.0V, and LiIon discharge cut-off is in the best case is 2.5V (actually deadly for LiIon battery) and SiB is 1.5V nominal so if you want to repack tool battery with SiB, adjust BMS in battery pack accordingly. Usually it is just a resistor replacement on BMS board. Read BMS IC datasheet for how to set discharge cut-off voltage to desired value. Another option is to make a tool battery from larger number of cells. Say, for 18V battery use 6 SiB cells in series, instead of 5 as with LiIon.
Usually in cordless tools it is BMS in battery that cut-off power when it see battery drained, cordless tool electronics continue to work even with lower voltages.
Also, choose high-current cells, like with LiIon. They have lower capacity in exchange to electrodes being made more tough to sustain high discharge current. It is important for cordless tools that could draw significant current.
I'll also recommend to slighlty lower charging cut-off voltage in charger from 4.2V to 4.0. I didn't notice any bad side-effects from charging SiB to 4.2V, but manufacturers write 4.0-4.1V in datasheets. Also, it will lengthen LiIon batteries life too, since they will be charged to ~85% and this is good for them. LiIon degrades when stored fully charged, maximum LiIon cycles and longest life achieved when charged to 70-80%.
Apart from cold, if you use cordless tools constantly, look at Lithium Titanate batteries (LTO). They have tens of thousands charge-discharge cycles, the only drawbacks are that they rarely made in 18650 format and have a low cell voltage of 2.3V, so to make 18V battery f.e. you will need 8 cells, not 5 as with LiIon/SiB. In exchange you will get really long lasting battery. LTO is also vulnerable to the cold, so, not an opton if you really need to work below 0°C.
Lie. Real figures:
:)
Interesting that SiB with lower capacity in practice will last noticeably longer in, say, flash-light, because you could drain it to 1.5V or even deeper without any consequences, the same discharge will kill LiIon instantly. Also, this SiB have 3000 cycles (still have 98% of capacity after ~1500 cycles), this LiIon had only 750 (nearly dead with 30% after only ~500). Price was the same.
In any case, nowhere near "three times".
Lithium and Sodium does not constitute all mass of battery. There is metal case, electrolyte, separators, anode and cathode and so on. Lithium and Sodium are less than 10% of battery weight.
Lie. Charge depends on amount of Li+ or Na+ ions involved in chemistry. So, with everything equal there is no any difference in charge. Moreover, since Sodium ion batteries allow much deeper discharge, with everything equal will show larger practical capacity than Lithium ion, You will have to severely limit LiIon discharge to preserve LiIon life.
Chemistry is identical. Lithium and Sodium are metals from the same group, so their chemistry is pretty similar.
Lithium have no any preferences in area of possible maximum capacity over other metals from same group, including even potassium and cesium.
Also, Lithium batteries have a half-century of tuning and engineering, while Sodium ones are relatively new technology. And still Sodium batteries already show better overall performance over LiIon, especially taking in account number of cycles.
China is already making EV with SiB, and also there are regular SiB 12V car batteries on the market. Latter have better performance in cold weather with much less weight than lead-acid ones.
And any sane person will always prefer a battery that wouldn't suddenly catch fire, just because it sit in cold discharged for some time or was overcharged.
Meanwhile, where exactly did you get your assumptions? Did you personally have an expirience of using Sodium batteries instead of Lithium ones to make this statements, or just read something somewhere? What exactly did you read in latter case and where? Why do you trust that sources?
Never trust a person who says "Lie" as though it were a complete sentence.
A sodium atom is 3.3 times heavier than a lithium atom; that's basic chemistry. You can confirm it with a single glance at the Periodic Table. And that does indeed translate to battery weight and energy density.
Here, have some sources, instead of just relying on someone burping out the word "Lie" when presented with facts he doesn't want to be true.
"Sodium ion gravimetric energy density is currently around 130 Wh/kg to 160 Wh/kg."
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/22/sodium-ion-batteries-a-viable-alternative-to-lithium/
Lithium-nickel energy density is considerably higher - up to 290 Wh/kg. Not precisely three times, because atomic-level chemistry doesn't translate perfectly to actual finished battery cell metrics - but considerably higher.
https://www.battery.mba/resources/lfp-vs-nmc-vs-sodium-ion
Here's a whole industry whitepaper about the benefits and drawbacks of using sodium-ion tech in EVs. The industry is not "keeping it from you" in some kind of conspiracy. They're openly trying to figure out the best applications for it and where it can supplant lithium and where it can't.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-vehicle-batteries
Do you understand that battery weight is a sum of many things, not just lithium?
Average 18650 cell have only 7% of weight in Lithium.
Lithium alone, can't be a battery. So, you are still a liar, repeating marketing lies based on closing eyes on 93% of battery weight and then discussing how Sodium is heavier than Lithium.
Meanwhile, just weighted LiFePO4 cells, just for fun:
So, your "three times heavier" SiB is a pure bullshit, even if calculate energy density according to voltage and capacity.
Also interesting experiment is to measure real capacity during cell lifetime. Tells a lot about what Lithium Battery Industry become.
F.e. if you buy cool 2800mAh 18650, and measure it new, it could even show slightly more than 2800mAh of real capacity. However, if you use it a little, capacity will stabilise at around 2000mAh and then will drop with a slower pace. Just like you paid extra for some additives that give a burst for capacity for few first charge-discharge cycles and then burned out, turning cell into standard 18650 with 1700-1900 mAh for 500 cycles.
Never saw this with LTO, SiB or LiFePO4. But I also never saw exaggerated capacity on that cell types too. It is only LiIon thing. :)
So, I'm in great doubt about exaggregated figures of LiIon energy density. Probably you could really create a cell with announced capacity (290Wh/kg), but it will sharply drop after few charge-discharge cycles and will fall to typical ~190Wh/kg ( 1.8Ah * 3.7V / 0.035kg ) LiIon density with typical 500 cycles.
With SiB you have your honest 125Wh/kg (1.5Ah * 3.1V / 0.037kg) but with more than 2000 cycles.
To have same or better total use as one SiB cell have, you need 3 LiIon cells. :)
Do you still want to talk about weight (and price)? :)
And it is just few years of SiB technology development, in comparison with half-century of LiIon tech. I would not be surprized if within next few years SiB will reach honest 160Wh/kg density in mass-production, so you will need 4 LiIon cells to make same use as 1 SiB cell.
And again - with all that obvious superiority, SiB don't need all that trillion dollar lithium industry and market.
And you didn't answer the main question - do you have real personal expirience with SiB, or you just copypaste some articles from internet?
I didn't copypaste articles, I linked them so everyone could read them themselves.
Meanwhile you... weighed two AA batteries you have lying around, on your kitchen scale? Without doing any measurement whatsoever of how much charge they hold?
That's roughly the equivalent of weighing a pound of lettuce and weighing a pound of peanut butter and then saying that lettuce and peanut butter have the same number of calories because they each weigh one pound.
And also, you bought a commercial AA battery, and now you're saying there's a conspiracy making that kind of battery unavailable?!
It's not AA batteries. It's 18650 batteries. And yes, on kitchen scale. See, how easy you could check things by yourself?
I measured all capacity values by myself. By discharging on the load, not from some stupid numbers of how many mAh was pushed into a cell some chargers show.
I don't care about battery weight at all. Rechargeable battery is so inferior fuel tank, that it does not matter how much this shit weight and what volume it have. In any case it will be too much for that tiny amount of energy they could store.
It was you who start that bullshit about "sodium batteries are 3 times heavier". They are not. You lied.
I bought not AA, but 18650 batteries. 18650 is twice larger than AA. 18650 dimensions encoded in this number, they are 18mm diameter and 65mm in length. How you could think about AA with 18650 dimensions right before your eyes? Supposedly, like you can't see a conspiracy I'm talking about. :)
SiB are mass-produced,for a years already, but I bet you heard about them for the first time from my post. :) How it could be that all mass-media soaked with everything lithium, lithium here, lithium there, litium investments, lithium technology, lithuim EV and lithium power storages, but nobody dare to tell a thing about sodium batteries? Lithium-connected stocks should stay high, aren't they?
And all you have to do to answer that question is simply look up the specs. Lithium-nickel batteries hold considerably more charge-per-gram than sodium-ion batteries, making them the ideal choice for phones and cars, two of their main applications. Nobody wants a heavier phone that dies sooner.
Source must have been the news. YouTube. Pop science. Etc
gravimetric energy density wh/kg is a measure of energy storage per kilogram of battery weight.
volumetric energy density wh/l is a measure of energy storage per liter of volume.
sodium can not beat lithium unless we invent new elements to pair it with.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2023/ph240/prout1/
see little chart. that dot is sodiums potential. the only edge sodium has.... IT'S CHEAPER THAN DIRT!
but is the end battery a fraction of lithium batterys cost? noooooope.
sodium sucks. (unless YOU are selling batteries)
so that's the real test here. what did you pay for the sodium 18650's?
because you can buy top of the line best of the best sony/lg lithiums for 3-5 bucks each.
I don't have to. I have personal expirience with all kind of electric current sources, including even betavoltaic and aluminium-air cells. :)
In practical use, I found SiB cells superior to LiIon in reliability and longevity. On par with LiFePO4 in longevity but without that annoying full-charge storage degradation and coldfodia.
I'll easily trade slightly lower capacity to the few times more cycles and sustainability to environment conditions.
150 roubles each with shipping. IDK, less than $2 at the time
Best by what measure?
Main problems of LiIon is cold and cycles. Are "best lithiums" better than SiB in that?
Really, I hate all rechargeable batteries. I think it is a dead-end tech and stupid idea. Worst fuel tanks ever. And even around this stupid things I see a conspiracy to push one of the most unreliable and short-living type with trillion dollars bubble and shadow censorship.
Definitely something I will investigate further. Thank you