Battery degradation

Diddums

Diddums

Diddums

Caporegime
Joined
24 Oct 2012
Posts
25,854
Location
Godalming
As a society we're moving more and more towards electric power for everything. We now have electric cars, bikes, soon we'll have electric semi trucks, there are even entire homes that have gone off grid and live off battery power alone. This does make me wonder about battery degradation and the environmental impact of our reliance on these batteries. I remember when I was a kid that I used to have a remote control car which used nickel cadmium batteries. These were absolutely rubbish in terms of performance and battery life compared to today's tech but it did highlight the shortfalls of rechargeable batteries. They'd last a few months and before I knew it, the car's run time would be down to minutes before dying, and the batteries would need to be replaced. Now this isn't such a bit issue nowadays, but it is still something I've been wondering about. It's no secret that phone batteries for example degrade over time, reducing their energy holding capacity to the point of needing replacement.

And what about the bigger stuff? We have cars that run on batteries and although I'm sure those batteries are conditioned to the nth degree to keep their vitals up, they will still degrade over time.

So what happens to these dying batteries? What's the life expectancy of today's tech, and where to next?

Just thinking out loud a bit here, I'm rather curious where we're going to go from here and whether our reliance on batteries is sustainable in the long run.
 
Most electrical components degrade over time such as capacitors and the moving parts in motors, but I can see where you're coming from.

I guess it's just part of our throwaway society, lots of people can't even have a coffee now without a plastic capsule being thrown away.
 
Mobile phones present probably one of the worst set of conditions for lithium batteries. Lithium batteries degrade relative to their charge level and their temperature. However most people fully charge their phones any chance they get and have them in their pockets stewing when they are not being used, generating lots of their own heat with quad core processors and hot screens.

RC Cars/Planes/Heli's do a different kind of torture to batteries. They typically run them at very high currents which generates heat and drain a 2Ah battery in 7 minutes. Usually people then rapid charge them, while still warm, a double whammy for life expectancy.

Electric cars on the other hand, as you point out, go to great lengths to maximise their life. They are warmed when too cold, cooled when too warm and are hardly ever run to the kind of current that can actually produce, although running an electric car on a track will certainly get the battery heating up.

I am told that modern electric cars have battery warranties that will cover them for 10 years before they lose enough capacity to need replacing, which is usually 40% loss or so.

The real threat to solar/renewable power for the masses comes not from maintaining and replacing batteries but from commercially motivated government realising that solar + battery makes zero money for "Big business" in the form of energy retailers. They would prefer that whlie you are out at work all day the bulk of the energy you produce get's sold back to the grid at about 1/10th the actual value so the tories ex Oxford friends in these large companies can make a killing out of solar.

I expect heavy regulation of personal micro-gen systems that use batteries in coming years. Probably though tying them into building code and regulation. Making it so that you must have a certified system installed by a certified installer without batteries in order to pass "code" and get home insurance, a mortgage or to sell your home.
 
Diddums said:
As a society we're moving more and more towards electric power for everything. We now have electric cars, bikes, soon we'll have electric semi trucks, there are even entire homes that have gone off grid and live off battery power alone. This does make me wonder about battery degradation and the environmental impact of our reliance on these batteries.
Click to expand...

Dyson. They've gone from producing corded vacuums with 5 year warranties to cordless vacs using batteries with 2 year warranties because apparently their cordless vacs are now so good that Dyson have stopped developing corded...like that explains them cutting the warranty in half and stuffing their vacs with batteries they expect to be binned in anything over 2 years. The rest of the developed world is taking steps to reduce and reverse this throwaway culture and there's Dyson heading in the other directs with two middle fingers up not giving a damn.
 
It is a genuine concern. But the more we move to battery driven technology then the more demand there will be. The company that finds ways to greatly extend battery life will reap huge, huge rewards. Such a reward will very likely result in a breakthrough in the next 10 to 20 years.

In other words the bigger a problem it is, the greater the chance of solving it.
 
PaulCa said:
Unless that problem is a source of revenue in itself.
Click to expand...
While that's true, every battery company will be terrified that another compnay will make the breakthrough that will result in their product being redundant. So they will all be striving to be the first.

Potentially they may get there and choose not to release it until others seem close.

I guess it's a bit like Kodak not wanting to change to a digital business model because their film business was so profitable... Until their competitors moved to new technology and wiped them out.
 
It's one of those things where people perceive the problem as being bigger than it is. I drive a four year old Leaf that has zero perceivable degredation; still showing 12/12 battery health bars.

I've no idea how long the battery will last. But early signs suggest it will be a fair amount of time. Cars with a larger battery and thermal management should see longer lifespans.
 
Diddums said:
soon we'll have electric semi trucks
Click to expand...
Semi??
You're in England, dear boy. We don't have semis here... especially if you pronounce it "Sem-ai".
It's an Artic. :p

I imagine batteries will just keep going to landfill, until some bright spark finds a way to make them into summat useful like house bricks.
As for what's next - Thorium would be nice.... Solar, Wind and Wave, if you have to.
 
Certainly something that will need to be looked at for the second hand car market.

Will the battery warranty be transferable to the new owner and will the cost of a new battery make buying second hand far less attractive.

On a side note I had a drive in an electric car yesterday and the acceleration was great. Want to try a Tesla now and see the difference :D
 
The environmental impact of mining the materials for battery manufacturing is ridiculous..

In the Jiangxi rare earth mine in China, Abraham writes, workers dig eight-foot holes and pour ammonium sulfate into them to dissolve the sandy clay. Then they haul out bags of muck and pass it through several acid baths; what’s left is baked in a kiln, leaving behind the rare earths required by everything from our phones to our Teslas.

At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling.

And, as in every stage of the process, mining has hidden emissions. Jiangxi has it relatively easy because it’s digging up clay, but many mines rely on rock-crushing equipment with astronomical energy bills, as well as coal-fired furnaces for the final baking stages. Those spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the process of refining a material destined for your zero-emissions car. In fact, manufacturing an electric vehicle generates more carbon emissions than building a conventional car, mostly because of its battery, the Union of Concerned Scientists has found.
Click to expand...

source: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/teslas-electric-cars-might-not-green-think/


Norilsk is rated one of the most polluted cities in the world, thanks largely to the 350,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide emitted annually by the city’s nickel factory, which was decommissioned last year. In 2016, Norilsk Nickel made headlines when an overflow of oxidised nickel waste turned the city’s Daldykan river red.
Click to expand...

the Cerro Matoso mine in Colombia, where residents of nearby communities and mine workers have reported elevated rates of deformities and respiratory problems associated with exposure to pollution generated by nickel mining and smelting
Click to expand...

source: https://www.theguardian.com/sustain...en-environmental-cost-electric-cars-batteries

.
 
ttaskmaster said:
Semi??
You're in England, dear boy. We don't have semis here... especially if you pronounce it "Sem-ai".
It's an Artic. :p

I imagine batteries will just keep going to landfill, until some bright spark finds a way to make them into summat useful like house bricks.
As for what's next - Thorium would be nice.... Solar, Wind and Wave, if you have to.
Click to expand...



Ha! Artic! Drew a blank for some reason this morning, resorted to using crap language. I apologise profusely.
 
Does semi not mean semi-articulated? ie. it is a cab/tractor unit and coupled trailer? Where as an "artic" or articulated lorry has a boogie so it's tractor unit - boogie - trailer.

I think this applies in the whole world. A semi-articulated lorry is not an articulated lorry.
 
There are Model S's out there from 2012 (6 years old)

There are also a group of people keeping track, this is the most recent update I could find:

https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-data/

Battery degradation is one of the biggest concerns for electric car owners and potential buyers, but data from Tesla battery packs have been very reassuring so far.

Now the latest data shows less than 10% degradation of the energy capacity after over 160,000 miles on Tesla’s battery packs....

....The data clearly shows that for the first 50,000 miles (100,000 km), most Tesla battery packs will lose about 5% of their capacity, but after the 50,000-mile mark, the capacity levels off and it looks like it could be difficult to make a pack degrade by another 5%.

The trend line currently suggests that the average battery pack could cycle through over 300,000 km (186,000) before coming close to 90% capacity.
Click to expand...
 
Also most ICE cars don't get anywhere near to the figure that the manufacturers state.

For instance my 2013 BMW 530D official combined figure is something like 49mpg

My trip computer says my average over the life is 42mpg.

That's a 15% difference.
 
The quoted combined figure is really only there for comparison purposes between different vehicles.

It isn't going to tell you what actual combined mileage you'll get. How could it?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom