Student accidentally invents phone battery capable of 200k recharges | Hacker News Reader

Student accidentally invents phone battery capable of 200k recharges

businessinsider.de

17 pointscalchris4211 comments

Title should be changed to "Student accidentally invents phone battery capable of 200k recharges"

The battery will neither power a phone for 400 years, nor retain a charge for 400 years. (It's especially probable to interpret this latter one, since it's the only claim for which "400 years" is the right unit of measure.)

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PS. Specifying "phone" is a weird application. By their math, even if you had your phone for a decade, you'd only recharge it 5k times.

Ok, we changed it, albeit a little late. Btw, anyone being driven batty by an inaccurate title is welcome to email us for a quicker fix: hn@ycombinator.com. We don't come close to seeing all the posts here, but we do see (and reply to) emails.

Edit: turns out this thread is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12562392 though.

I cannot wait for longer lasting batteries because they will make it so you don't need to replace them in electric cars any more. Also it means instead of getting a new rechargeable battery in every device you can just have some standard ones and switch them from device to device as you get new ones, which would reduce costs and waste a ton.

For sure. The focus on "your cell phone battery" is a bit narrow. But I guess just a simple to understand example.

I fear that as devices shrink there's simply not enough room inside many of them for a workable compartment space that would allow for battery exchanges.

This seems like something that would still have commercial value even if it's expensive. space travel, undersea, other hard to reach places.

The wording is a bit misleading in the article. The battery cannot power a laptop for 400 years; but instead it could be used for (drained/recharged) for that long considering a regular laptop battery.

Safe to assume that it's intentionally misleading.

Original press release with footage / interview: https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/

Paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029

Is there another report with a comparison of the charge/weight, charge/volume and charge/price of this battery and an usual Li-Ion battery?

These are usual tradeoff. Nobody expect a mobile phone to be used more than 10 years, so if you design a battery to last only 10 years instead of 400 perhaps you can improve the amount of charge.

Ahh, happy accidents.. an engineer's best friend.

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