Rechargeable Batteries

Here I give a brief overview of different rechargeable batteries that were developed throughout the 20th century, from early lead acid batteries to modern lithium ion batteries, going to NiCD & NiMH along the way. 

We see that radical new technology, Li-ion developed by Sony in 1991 was not done by an existing battery manufacturer, since those entrenched players hate incumbent radical disruptive technologies, since the commercialization of new better batteries eats into the major battery makes profit margins, since they are usually heavily invested into the production of an earlier battery technology, like NiMH at Panasonic in the early 1990s. 

Starting Lighting & Ignition PbA or Lead Acid Batteries & Later Improve AGM & Sealed Variants 

Lead Acid or PBA took the market lead over Nickel Iron Edison Battery back in the early 20th century, when electric cars were more common the gasoline or diesel engine powered cars. These early battery electric vehicles only went about 12 MPH for about 25 miles per charge around town, in urban city environments where people had the money from white collar jobs to buy EV's. These were luxury vehicles for people with high incomes, were made 1 at a time by craftsman who invested more than 300 man hours of labor into custom making each new automobile. 

Super High Pulse Current NiCD in Power-tools

Nickel Cadmium or NiCD became the superior battery in mobile applications with better energy & better volumetric density than PbA technology. It was able to give out huge current peaks & was 4x lower mass & had 3X better energy density. NiCD perform so well they were used in power tool battery packs until the early 2010's, when LFP & Li-ion batteries made such tools with the new batteries much lighter, equating to lower wrist, elbow & shoulder stresses as these lithium ion power tools are about 1/2 lighter than the NiCD versions they supplanted.

Most portable electronics sold through the early 2000s, including all the first mobile phones, had NiCD batteries. Later versions had NiMH batteries for a brief period as a memory free solution, since NiCD really like to be fully charged, then fully discharged, stored nearly dead, then charged to full before use. This made a NiCD electric vehicle less feasible. NiMH much more flexible with better energy density & did not suffer from common failure modes of partially charged NiCD batteries, making them useful in electric passenger cars launched by a few different automakers worldwide in the 1990s and early 2000's. 

NiMH was a good intermediate technology between NiCD & Li-ion, enabling some modern EV's in the 1990's that never sold well because of the huge price premium & short range & slow recharge times of such vehicles when compared with the gasoline powered model years versions of the same vehicle, like the RAV4EV from Toyota! There was even a lead acid powered EV1 from GM, later powered by better NiMH batteries. Toyota used the NiMH batteries in all of its hybrid synergy drive vehicles until very recently when cheaper Li-ion batteries that are lower mass started being used as the traction battery in Toyota & Lexus Hybrid vehicles as of 2022. 

We can see many different grades of different batteries. For example, the old style flooded lead acid was further improved with glass fiber insulation in AGM or absorbed glass mat batteries that addressed some of the vibration failure shedding modes of flood batteries, thought AGM batteries have to be charged to a slightly higher voltage than flood PbA, in order to fully charge. Lead Acid batteries work really well for peak pulse starting current applications to crank engines by giving hundreds of amps to the electric starter motor for a few seconds during cold start or engine startup. Once the engine of a typical vehicle is running (operating, rotating), the engines alternator generated electrical energy to recharge the vehicles 12 SLI lead battery, while also powering all the other electrical loads in or on the vehicle. 

The 12vdc mobile power system became standardized in RV's, trucks, cars, boats, marine vehicles & even early aircraft, and continue in low voltage lighting systems in landscaping & in hobby applications. For example, many mobile ARRL style HAM radio systems run on a Sealed AGM lead acid battery with 6 series 2vdc cells all connected so that the total voltage is 12.8vdc nominal, around 10.5vdc fully discharged under load, and fully charged at 14.26vdc. 

Today there are more than 100 emergent battery chemistries other than Li-ion being developed. O-Na-ion batteries are trending for commercialization because they offer similar performance to lithium ion batteries but at much lower costs because of the far greater abundance of Na or Sodium as a major constituent of NaCl or regular salt & component of sea water. This means that Sodium much cheaper than lithium with far greater availability worldwide at an almost inexhaustible scale. 

Though sodium ion batteries are bulkier & with lower performance, that just means they will find use in grid energy storage applications, while lithium ion batteries will continue to energize mobile electronics & electric vehicles, where the lower mass & better energy density offers superior premium value, even if they are more expensive, they weigh so much less & have so much better performance, and have a long history of development since Sony commercialized Li-ion batteries in 1991 to energize the WalkMan. 

At this time in the early 1990 in Japan the other Japanese battery manufacturers were so invested in NiCD & NiMH that they were unwilling to make Li-ion batteries for Sony, so at an enormous internal cost of over $3500 USD / kWh, the earliest Lithium Ion batteries, prismatic durable strong versions made like modern aerospace satellite cells, laser welded in an inert environment while the entire production of early lithium ion batteries done in clean rooms to protect the anode, cathode & electrolyte & foils & insulators from contamination. 

Li-Ion Batteries are Sensitive & Easily Damaged / There are Tricks to Help, Keep Reading

100% charging causes capacity loss or fading

Discharging below %5 charge causes capacity loss

Charing while battery frozen destroys the battery

High temperatures in hot climates damage Li-ion batteries, see Nissan Leaf battery fade in hot weather

Li-ion vent with flame if shorted or punctured, causing some smartphones to catch fire, see YouTube, if the charger malfunctions while they are being overcharged all night long, held at 100% charge as current keeps leaking into the battery, causing swelling & puffing of the LiPO cell, something many people with RC toys powered by LiPO or lithium polymer Li-ion batteries are familiar with; bloated puffing cells! 

Fortunately, you can make a lithium ion powered smartwatch or smartphone or laptop battery last 5X-10X  longer if you keep the charge between 30-80% & avoid going above 90% or bellow 10% state of charge. I am talking about boosting cycle life from 1000 cycles to 5000 cycles, and calendar life from 3 years to 10 years. 

It's the top 10% between 90-100% charge that causes anode lithium ion insertion loss, where some of the lithium ions get stuck in the hard carbon anode material. Deep discharging causes the lithium to form micro-dendritic shorting filaments between the cathode & the SEI layer on the electro-separator film, but also causes cross reaction losses in the electrolyte chemicals, such that deep discharging below 10% also causing capacity fade acceleration & calendar life reduction. 

Foam Batteries

Nano Wire Batteries

Solid-state Batteries

Metal-air batteries

The battery business expanding by 20% per year as electric vehicles are selling by the hundreds of thousands, as more than 2 millions passenger electric vehicles powered by lithium ion batteries of different chemistries like NCA, LFP, LiCOC, NMCA, NMC, NAM, and a few others, like Lithium Sulfur or LiS- though they are only used in military applications, due to their short cycle life, usually only 50 cycle to EOL or end of life. 

Defense drones use LiS batteries because they have 1000wh/kg, fully more than 2x better than Li-ion in terms of energy density- this enables the electric silent stealthy drones to have greater endurance or flight duration, longer range per charge. The military industrial complex budget not sensitive to regular battery replacements like a consumer with a DJI photography drone that takes $100 batteries, such that the consumer expects to get at least a few hundred cycles & 3-5 years of use out of high quality expensive RC battery packs like that! Feasibility dominates consumer battery technology, interesting given what Tesla Tabless 4680 battery did when it started offering energy storage at $80 per kilowatt hour, making the 4680 cells have the lowest cost per unit of stored energy of any battery or mobile energy storage technology- really leveraging high volume production cost per unit advantages to the fullest!