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Sodium ion batteries vs LiFePO4

Sverige

A Brit in Sweden
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Docan are offering sodium ion batteries now at $90 per 220Ah cell, with attached spec sheet, but I’m not very clear on how they compare to LiFePO4. Anyone using these already? Maybe we will need a further forum section, as currently there is just “DIY LiFePO4 batteries”.

Quite a steep charge / discharge curve in contrast to the flat graph we are accustomed to.
IMG_8822.jpeg
 

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That's a pretty wide voltage spread. Which means you'll probably need to stay within a much narrower SOC range.

e.g. say you build 16S battery. The battery voltage range for full discharge would be ~60 V to ~38 V. I can see that being problematic for many inverters.
 
Well if these batteries do take off, then I guess a whole new set of compatible equipment needs to come out. Inverters, charge controllers, BMSs, etc. but you’re right - if the spec sheet capacity is based on discharge down to 1.5V/cell then the real world useable capacity is likely a lot lower.
 
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It seems like the advantages of sodium batteries being pushed by the sellers are “high” cycle life (4,000 cycles - lower than LiFePO4 ?), tolerance of charging at low temps to -30C, 3C to 5C discharging and ability to discharge to zero volts without damaging the battery.

I suppose some of those might be advantageous to some installations, but not particularly mine, so the only way in which these might look like a better option is if they become cheaper than lithium and they will have to be a lot cheaper to account for a shorter cycle life and less ideal discharge curve.

I suppose it will take many years of widespread use of this battery technology before we learn the true limitations and best practices. I remember when LiFePO4 first came out, being told they could be over charged and over discharged with no negative effects and that they would basically last forever, and it’s taken a long time for us all to develop the more nuanced understanding we now have.
 
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This might help:


"Existing sodium-ion batteries have a cycle life of 5,000 times, significantly lower than the cycle life of commercial lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is 8,000-10,000 times."
 
Sodium Ion is still a fairly new chemistry and is being "considered" by the EV sector, none have chosen it yet (with the exception of a couple of Chinese Automakers, NB they have partnerships with CATL to do so). Even BMW who just announced that all of their new models from 2025 will be using LFP and they are considering the "possibility" of Sodium Ion after 2028.
BMW executives also shared they are working on sodium-ion batteries, which are by no means a great solution in terms of sustainability, yet perform poorly in terms of energy density. While they are a sought after solution in China even today, where users sacrifice longer range for the benefit of a lower price, there is still a lot to be improved to implement the battery in Europe.

The voltage curves are also "unusual" and there are currently no solar gear that are programmed to support Sodium-Ion.

The next logical step from LFP will be to LMFP (Lithium Manganese) which have higher density and efficiency.
 
"Existing sodium-ion batteries have a cycle life of 5,000 times, significantly lower than the cycle life of commercial lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is 8,000-10,000 times."

I have yet to see a datasheet claiming 10k cycles on LFP, unless you do 80-20 or something. Standard LFP cycle lief is 100-0 until 80% of original capacity. 5k cycles is a lot... They were at 2k cycles not too long ago for NaI.
 
e.g. say you build 16S battery. The battery voltage range for full discharge would be ~60 V to ~38 V. I can see that being problematic for many inverters.

I looked at a different chemistry that had a broad range of voltage which the big reason I dropped it was outside the voltage tolerance of most items.

Aside from inverters, this can fall outside the voltage range for most 48 VDC accessories.

I looked at nIckel iron batteries because up to 30 years of use could come out of that, but that also had a huge voltage range that was outside the range of the most common inverters. I did not find an inverter that would operate in that range. Also I was looking at a 12 VDC set and this operated outside the standard 12 VDC range of most my 12 VDC appliances in the RV, but would operate with a converter.

Jus this year, the company I was going to get these batteries from, Iron Edison, went out of business.
 
Front ending a sodium battery with a bidirectional DC/DC converter which sets a constant 48V to keep the rest of your system happy and lets the sodium battery wander over its whole voltage range might be a solution.

But such a device would need to handle high currents (sodium discharging down towards 1.5V per cell will have an increasing current if the output power is to remain the same), so would be an expensive device. Another reason sodium batteries will have to become a lot cheaper than LFP to look like a viable alternative in home energy storage.
 
I have yet to see a datasheet claiming 10k cycles on LFP, unless you do 80-20 or something. Standard LFP cycle lief is 100-0 until 80% of original capacity. 5k cycles is a lot... They were at 2k cycles not too long ago for NaI.
Depends on DOD I guess and there is this:

In standard environment, and for 1C cycles, we can get from the chart the below life cycle estimation for LFP :

  • 3 000 cycles at 100% DoD
  • 4 500 cycles at 80% DoD
  • 10 000 cycles at 60% DoD
 
Here is another article on the subject:


From what I read the benefit to sodium Ion over LFP will be in recycling and impact on environment.

They could also be made in countries that don't have lithium available or worry about Chinese supply chains.

Added: The Sodium Ion also appear to work better in a wider temperature range "-40℃~80℃" so for cold regions they won't stop charging below freezing or require a heat source like LFP.

 
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Depends on DOD I guess and there is this:

In standard environment, and for 1C cycles, we can get from the chart the below life cycle estimation for LFP :

  • 3 000 cycles at 100% DoD
  • 4 500 cycles at 80% DoD
  • 10 000 cycles at 60% DoD

Yes, exactly, as I said - but the standard testing done by manufacturers is 100% - 0% (per the datasheet), so that should be the comparison if you want to do apples to apples.
 
Seriously people, Sodium ION has promise & potential, like Lithium Sulfer & Solid State BUT it's just not there yet... Spinning your tires on these chemistries may be interesting and even fun but not practical or viable yet... Solar Equipment does not yet support these chemistries and even BMS systems to support them are terribly far & few between and certainly not in retail hobbyist land.

Remember that this sector has many issues. Slow Moving to change, most companies cannot even agree to basic standards for interoperability or communications let alone how to support the various battery chemistries THAT DO EXIST NOW and those that are coming to market... ESS systems will also be behind EV battery development by at least 5 years, maybe a little less but not by much. This has always been the case, heck there are still several companies that force people to use "User Defined" settings for anything other than FLA/AGM because they just haven't gotten around to it. Some of those are Big Popular Tier-1 producers no less.
 
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Does something with the voltage curve of sodium ion pair more easily with some ultra capacitors? They both have wide voltage ranges. Might be a match made in heaven.
 
I have reviewed that spc sheet, and made some posts on Amy's FB page. Here is my assessment, in comparson to a similar specification and test sheet for the newest EVE LFP 280AH cells (from earlier this year):

The charging rule for these na-ion cells is: contant voltage at 3.95V (at up to .5C, with lower limits applied in high and low teratures), WITH a charging invoked when current fall below .05C. It is unclear to me whether there might a substantial voltage differntial "hump" to push energy into the cells, making lower voltage "float" charging inneffective.
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The LIFESPAN of 4000 cycles is stated with a pretty aggressive 80% energy storage requirement on the cells. But, the cells are allowed to drop to 1.5v in their test procedure, and downstream power-consuming devices might refuse to run at such low voltages. They did not discuss any need for compression of cells

The EVE value for new 280AH cells is 8000 cycles,. But EVE EVE pretty much demands a minimum of 3000 Netwons (around 306 KgF in sea-level gravity, or 680 lbs) on the large faces of their new 280AH cells within a battery pack assembly. (Their maybe new maximum "recommended" value is all the way up to 7000 Netwons, over 1500 lbs. The minimum instantaneous value before alllowing the new model to fail from ezxcess compression is all the up at 10,0000 Netwons). THEY DO NOT SPECIFY any lifepsan expectation for uncompressed cells. and the specification contains a lot of material concerning this requirememt to place the cells within compressed battery packs. In both cases (EVE LFP and the spec sheet for these sodium-ion cells) they push the cells all the way through the allowed range of SOC (EVE stopping at 2.50 volts): Less aggressive use may allow for longer lifepsans.
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The charge/discharge graph in the first post of this Thread is well-copied, no X-Axis scale or units were provided. The maximum voltaqe shown in the two overlaid graphs is more than 4000 mV (4.00 volts), which can not be reached by charging the cells per instructions. The minimum voltage shown in each curve is also more than 2.00 volts, significiantly higher than than 1.500 rated minimum.

I have no way of knowing the actual SOC remaining at 2.0 volts, and I wonder whether I'd find the capacity and lifepsan of cells to be acceptible my I limited my usage to a more narrow range of operating voltage. (With my LFP, battery packs, I charge to a maximum of 3.50V and apply a minimum cutoof value of 2.9 volts, also using a "float stage" of only 3.20 volts when not travelling and needing high SOC. )
- - -
The temperature limits are similar, but with a bonus of about 10 degrees for charging in low temperatures (at or below freezing). The specification allows SOME charging to occur down to -10C, with the full charge rate (5.C) alreasdy allowed at zero degrrees. My LFP cells can't take anythng at all below freezing, and shouldn't be subjected to the full charging rate (also .5C) until about 8 degrees.
- - -
The ENERGY DENSITY is comparable per kG of mass, but the packing into space is about 50% worse. (The "weigth" of cells per unit volumem is about 50% less, requiring bigger cells to reach the same amount of energy storage). In my application (a travel trailer with extremely limited space for battery packs) that's a pretty severe penalty, I won't be buying these. But the price is decent, and the elimination of increasingly rare 'lithium' from the build requirements might be compelling advantaqes for other persons, and that lithium-free technology might provide even better pricing in the future.
 
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Does something with the voltage curve of sodium ion pair more easily with some ultra capacitors? They both have wide voltage ranges. Might be a match made in heaven.
Although the we don't know the X-scale in used the image charge/discharge image, I'm assuming that it is linear. The corresponding voltage curves of a capacitor are logarithmic, and there would be "a lot of weirdness" in in pulling power from parallel devices of the two types.

It is generally desirable for a power supply or battery bank to present constant voltage for downstream devices. The discharge voltage of LFP cells is a lot more stable (through its declining SOC within an ongoing discharge process). Lead-Acid chemistries tend to have a bigger drop off, but helper devices (e.g., alternators with automotive ECM control) are widely used to keep operating DC voltage differentials within a fairly tight range most of the time.

If large portion of the total power taken from the cells (in discharge) would occur at the voltage extremes of the curve, then a DC-to-DC converter might be required to provide a more "even" voltage to sensitive consuming devices (such as Inverters).

My own RV Inverter will try to run while input voltage is withjin the range of 11.0 and 15.0 volts. Using a 4S battery pack, that's a minimum operating voltage of about 2.8 volts per cell.

If I may view the graph with a linear X-axis corresponding SOC percentage, a 4S battery pack of the soldium ion cells, however, would only offer 'nearly 220AH' of power storage if allowed discharge from more than 15.6 volts (at high SOC) all the way down to around 8.0 volts. The discharge curve would fall below my minimum of 2.8 volts when about 40% of the battery remains unused.

Only about 90AH of the '220 AH' battery pack would be usable. The 40% 'minimum reserve' proportion is approximately DOUBLE the propoortion of unusable power in my LFP packs. My LFP packs asre about 75% usable (top to bottom), while these would be - maybe - about 50% usable, because I would be unwilling to charge them all the way up. My battery bank would need to 50% larger (in AH), with an even bigger penalty in storage space consumed by the cells.

I'm not considering that at this time,.
 
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If as claimed we start seeing them around 1/3 the price of lithium iron phosphate then it compensates for a lot of the potential reductions in lifecycle and usable SOC. The price is really the benefit here, twice the size and same weight for KWH but a lot less cost. I tend to think we will probably see some home storage options next year with some updated inverters that support them and I doubt existing storage inverters will support it given the voltage curve goes outside the usual 42-58V range. The Lithium Ion's do have a steeper curve so its plausible it could work. It does look like they will become the most economic option but its all going to depend on how much of the cell production cost savings is passed on in the final products.
 
The advantage over LFP - safe temperature range, widely available sources for sodium.
Disadvantages: voltage range doesn't match current equipment, BMS's needed, unproven, volumes are higher/kWh. few producers (so far).

These would seem to be a niche product - at least for the present - remote telecom stationary use in -30c to plus 80c temps without needing heating/cooling energy may be good immediate applications.
For our ESS systems this could be a great (future) option since we spend quite a bit of time discussing heating and cooling battery storage areas. Lower cost and easier to source base materials sound good, if mass produced, these could be far cheaper to make, and production closer to point of use would cut freight costs as well.
Will follow along and see how this technology develops, how it performs.
 
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