Came across a nice video by “Subject Zero Science” regarding some breakthroughs in solid state batteries by Samsung. Subject Zero does some nice videos, such as Breakthrough Solid State Battery – 900 Wh/L Samsung [2020] posted on Youtube a few days ago, check him out. I’m not a chemist or materials engineer, but all we need to know is the energy density of Samsung’s new battery is 900 Wh/L (vs 3800 Wh/L for Gasoline vs 190 Wh/L for Lithium-ion) and a battery life of 1000 cycles. By comparison lead
Gasoline: 34.2 MJ/L (9500Wh/L)
Lithium-ion: 1.74 to 2.8 MJ/L (483 to 778Wh/L)
Samsung Solid State Battery: 3.2MJ/L (900Wh/L)
Which looks like about a 40% improvement, which is a big deal for battery powered applications which I’ll be talking about in more detail in a future series. This can make a huge difference in applications where current battery technology is marginal. However, I’ll temper my enthusiasm until I see a real product with specs released. Things to look out for are a) what is the cost, b) can they remove or reduce the hazardous and expensive materials, c) how does it perform at low and high temperature conditions. So we’ll watch this development carefully but I’d guess, assuming Samsung is successful in developing product components on this technology, it will take a couple years for this technology to appear.