A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
>She did say that large battery banks that might be spun off from this research stand to not only have higher capacity, but also be substantially lighter than lithium ions. Although, she adds, perhaps the greatest weight savings will come not from comparing one battery cell's mass with another. “The biggest difference would be that you don’t have to have the same stainless steel bunkers in each of the cells,” she says.
Not flammable is a big deal in battery tech. We try to pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller cells, so continuing to improve the capacity makes inadvertently releasing all that energy even more dangerous.
Here's another cool project working on that problem with a solid polymer electrolyte. Video shows it continuing to provide power while being sliced into pieces with scissors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik
(You can look at it like a path through the solution space. If you keep letting someone pick which attribute to improve, over and over, you eventually hit infinity/infinity/infinity, but different users will take very different paths to get there. At any particular count of improvements, their ideal batteries are significantly different.)
And with regard to kickopotomus's comment, you can get away with a much higher cost if you're targeting the right niche.
> They also published a graph that showed an increase in capacity over more than 300 charge-discharge cycles. (This increase, however, pales in comparison to the cell's at least 23,000-cycle lifespan.)
And once they dig into details, the "apparent increase of entropy" is further exposed as bait. Sounds pretty credible, and not controversial
> She says their glass electrolyte is a ferroelectric material—a material whose polarization switches back and forth in the presence of an outside field. So charge-discharge cycles are effectively jiggling the electrolyte back and forth and perhaps, over time, finding the ideal configuration of each electromagnetic dipole.
> “This is what happens as you are charging and discharging,” Braga says. “You are aligning the ferroelectric dipoles.”
Some materials and devices also benefit from being broken-in; where properties which impede utility are degraded more rapidly than properties which positively contribute to it.
When people pour concrete they get a certain strength out of it. But if they vibrate it, air and excess water gets removed, and the concrete aligns together to become more cohesive.
This is the case for normal lithium-ion batteries as well; they perform better at 120°F than at 70°F (and lose significant performance at even lower temperatures).
It is kind of amusing that cranking it a few times until it peters out from lack of charge, waiting for the heat to spread internally, then firing it right up as the capacity recovered due to temperature overcompensates for the previous drain, is a valid thing to do.
I would say that some betavoltaic devices would qualify, and perhaps some phase-change stuff that I can't recall right now. Supercapacitors are essentially batteries but I seem to recall they actually do ion exchange as well.
No need for the stainless steel bunkers to isolate cells. This IS an important breakthrough (if verified).
If it has the energy bound within and accessible there must be some way to release it and some would be faster than others.
There's no rule that having lots of bound up energy has to be dangerous, that it has to be possible to release it quickly. There's enormous amount of potential energy in pure hydrogen gas. If you can just fuse the atoms. But it's incredibly hard to release it.
The candle energy density number is very biased, as you still need to bring O₂, which weights a lot.
I wish there was more evidence of confirmed working prototypes. It sounds too good to be true, like the 2018 announcement.
Miracle batteries are like Alzheimer's cures and memristor computers: they show promise in the lab but fall down hard when used to develop products people actually use.
Well that's just nonsense.
Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.
Agreed. As far as I remember, the chemical batteries in phones circa 2005 behaved like this: you'd get gradually improving battery life over the first few cycles and then start to experience normal battery deterioration.
So long as nature is paid back its entropy in full it seems to be happy.