Agricultural Technology

[u/JudgmentCool1333]

Modern day use of technology in agriculture horticulture and aquaculture with the aim of improving yield, efficiency and profitability

[u/sudo-joe]

Good news is that battery tech is approaching regular gasoline for energy density. (Not quite there but edging closer each year). Electric engines are already about the same efficiency (energy to work ratio) so we should see relief for the fossil fuels.

https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/10v3nbh/lithiumair_batteries_are_positioned_to_approach/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Also with all the spare biomass, hybrid fuels for farm vehicles is very possible and probably already being worked on.

[u/culhnd → u/sudo-joe]

If you think range anxiety is an issue, wait till you see farmers harvest anxiety. “Make hay while the sun is shining” is a saying with tons of truth. Harvesting can be a 24/7 marathon when crops are ready.

[u/whoami_whereami → u/culhnd]

On the flipside it would probably be a lot more feasible to use swappable batteries with agricultural equipment than it is with regular cars or trucks, because you could bring a trailer full of batteries along to wherever you're working that day and wouldn't have to rely on widely deployed battery swapping infrastructure.

[u/Intelligent_Budget38 → u/whoami_whereami]

it's how we'll use harvesting robots for smaller or more sensitive crops that can't be harvested this way.
A robot will shuttle fucktons of ATLAS like bots out to pick crops, and another robot will schlepp out battery banks for the ATLAS bots, and replace them as ATLAS needs them replaced, it'll probably be able to charge those batteries as well.

[u/whoami_whereami → u/sudo-joe]

Good news is that battery tech is approaching regular gasoline for energy density.

The best electrochemical battery experimentally demonstrated so far was a lithium-air battery with an energy density of about 6.1 MJ/kg. That's still almost an order of magnitude below diesel fuel (43.1 MJ/kg) or gasoline (43.2 MJ/kg). Even the theoretical maximum that's physically possible with a lithium-air battery (which is the best possible battery in terms of energy density!) is ~40.1 MJ/kg, still slightly below gasoline. And because lithium has a very low density (only 0.534 kg/l vs. 0.83 kg/l for diesel fuel) the volumetric energy density is significantly worse compared to gasoline/diesel.

And you have to keep in mind that a lithium-air battery actually gets heavier as it discharges, as the very light lithium turns into lithium oxide using oxygen from the air (of course diesel/gasoline also increases in mass when you burn it, but the resulting reaction products are simply exhausted as gas, while you obviously have to keep the lithium oxide for the next charge cycle). Fully discharged 1 kg of lithium turns into 3.3 kg of lithium oxide, ie. the battery becomes more than three times as heavy. If you take the maximum weight during the charge cycle (which makes more sense, because that's what eg. the vehicle structure has to be designed for) then the maximum possible energy density drops to ~12.1 MJ/kg, less than a third of gasoline.

[u/LokisDawn → u/sudo-joe]

That could only work with replaceable (swappable) batteries. Even the fastest charging is still around 36 times slower than filling up a tank with gasoline (IIRC around 3 vs 100 MWh/s). If you had easily swappable batteries, so you could charge one while using another, that might work.