Batteries the Li-ions share

The big news in batteries for tomorrow anyway, is Lithium-Ion, highly regarded as the battery with the fastest growing and most promising battery chemistry.

Pioneer work with the lithium battery began in 1912 under G.N. Lewis, but it was not until the early 1970s when the first non-rey.

The Maganese Lithium-Ion battery has a durability problem.

The iron phosphate Lithium-Ion battery takes care of the thermal runaway problem, but it has a lower power ratio.

Lithium-Ion is a delicate medium and there are issues with aging  tough this aspect of Li batteries does not seem to be an issue in every case.

The advantages however, lie in lithiums efficiency, among other things.

Typically, you have twice the energy capacity of a nickel cadmium battery with lithium ion and the Li batteries behave much the same as a NiCad battery when it comes to drainage.

Of course, the issue with NiCad batteries was always to do with memory issues and having to run a battery right down before you could charge it. That doesnt happen with Li batteries.

Other advantages include safer disposal at the end of the Li cell life too. Correct storage, in a cool place, can minimise the aging of a yet to be used Li battery.

And all of this means there is still some work to be done on the Lithium-Ion battery for automotive purposes. However, research is continuing at a truly remarkable rate which has led some car manufacturers to speculate that the day of the Li battery has all but dawned.

In the meantime, modern battery applications for the very latest automotive technology  namely the hybrid car  revert back to a nickel bassed battery, specifically, Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH).

NiMH is a major step up from the lead acid battery most drivers recognize under their hoods. But, like the Li battery the NiMH units are not without their problems.

While more powerful than lead acid, NiMH batteries have not been the saviour and the long-term cost provider that battery engineers had hoped.

The power of nickel batteries comes from the raw material, which is getting more expensive due to increased demand.

And that brings us back to good old Lithium-Ion technology.

Several auto companies, including Subaru, Nissan, and Mitsubishi, have produced concept cars that use lithium batteries.

Toyota made it there first, using Lithium- Ion batteries in a production vehicle when it placed a four-cell lithium pack in its Vitz CVT4, a vehicle only available in Japan.

With the Vitz and more recently, the Prius, Toyota could look at replacing their Nickel Metal Hydride battery with a Lithium-Ion battery. That little jump is effectively 2 to 4 years away which would put it right on track with the Prius revamp scheduled in 2008.  Being cost effective however, puts it a little further away, but were used to that, Prius was known to us for a good long time before it was released for sale. Overseas speculation is that Prius wont be the first Toyota hybrid that has a Lithium-Ion battery inside.

Interestingly, Toyota is not tipped to be the leader in Lithium-Ion application. But Nissan might be.

Nissan has been playing around with Lithium-Ion batteries since 1996.

In 1996, Nissan developed a Lithium-Ion battery on a production vehicle for the first time anywhere in the world. Nissan currently uses the Compact Lithium-Ion Battery that features a thin laminated cell in their X-trail FCV. The Lithium-Ion battery is only about half the weight and volume of a conventional cylindrical battery, while delivering about 1.5 times the output.

All hybrids currently produced employ an internal combustion engine, a generator and an NiMH battery though this is soon to be eclipsed by the Lithium-Ion battery. The question is, which company will be the first to charge ahead, so to speak?

Price is still the biggest hurdle. Li-Ion cells remain far more expensive per watt of output than NiMH.

Proponents of Li-Ion technology, though, say as production volumes take off, costs will plummet and that its nearly inevitable that the batteries will be hitting the streets en masse sometime soon.

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