Future of Battery Technology

A supercharged 6.2 liter engine cranking out 707BHP in a 4400# rear-wheel drive car???

Holy CRAP!

Oh wait....
Never mind.
I was reading the wrong (???) part of the article.

Let me wipe the slobber off my desk and get back to work!

 

The former Soviet Union was also keenly interested in batteries for the same reasons. Given a properly trained crew, a good hull, and a dash of luck submarines running on electric motors are quiet enough to sneak up and goose an SS(B)(G)N....however (comma!) when they snort?
They're loud enough to animate a corpse.....and they had to do it with masts exposed.
Satellites also prompted much of the more recent battery development.

These days, there are a new breed of SSP (Air-independent propulsion submarine) boats in production by Sweden and Germany that are looking promising. The former uses a Stirling cycle diesel and the latter are tinkering with fuel cells.
Air-independent propulsion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Published endurance with these systems is on the order of 14-21 days which make them perfect for coastal defense, but the US Navy has never been what you would call "Early Adopters" and we have to be a blue water as well as a green water Navy.
(238 years of tradition, untrammeled by progress!)

As far as H{2} storage is concerned, we're already having to deal with H2 and O at three and four digit pressures.
Humans are not going to be air-independent any time soon, and so submarines will probably have to go AUV for the same reasons as the wing-wipers are going to be replaced by UAVs.
My last major submarine casualty was an explosion/fire caused by a rupture in the H{2} discharge line from one of our two oxygen generators.
We were saved by the fact that it happened when the off-going watch was preparing to fight a major fire drill and there were people literally staged at the fire hose stations getting ready to fight the fake fire when the real one occurred.
The only tragedy occurred when the fire didn't cause enough damage for us to break patrol and pull in some place for a little R&R.

Like radiation, H2 is a risk that you can mitigate with sensors and caution....just like LOX.
One interesting thing about the H2.
I believe that people were tinkering with sensors to detect elevated H2 in the water.
Since most submarines move rather slowly when they're not dashing and drifting....these were worrisome enough to compel thoughts of storing H2 inboard., and we've always had to store the O2 inboard.
About a million years ago I participated in similar sensor development for other submarine by-products.

 

Flow batteries are old news. There problem for transporation are they are bulky. Figrure that tech is at least a decade from commericialization for anything in a car at volume.

There is definitely reason to develop these batteries

Here Comes A 'Flow Battery' Technology And A $20M Plan To Bring It To Market - Forbes

Lithium chemistries are fine for transportation. Don't let any of the vocal negative pr from Toyota or Fiat make you think otherwise. It simply is too expensive to build a $25K 200 aer camry, you know the mass market inexpensive car. It is fine to build the chinese desired car 50 km (31 mile) EREV phev, and looks like it will be fine by 2018 when R&D on the car is complete a $40K 200 mile aer bmw 3 series competitor (Tesla 3).

To get that mass market car, battery prices need to drop, and indeed they look like they will drop 7% /year in the foreseable future. Prices drop because less expensive materials, and less lithium can be used. Sometime to continue the curve we will get zn or other battery chemistries, but this is evolutionary. IMHO the aluminum air recyclable battery looks more promising than flow to really increase range.