Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes triple the density of lithium batteries | Hacker News Reader

Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes triple the density of lithium batteries

newatlas.com

199 pointsbornelsewhere157 comments

Actually good article if you continue reading. Comment from an independent expert:

"Research has shown vertically aligned – or even just well distributed – carbon nanotubes have far greater properties than randomly placed carbon nanotubes," said Dr. Shearer. "I am not surprised a x10 in conductivity is possible. Controlling the placement of carbon nanotubes is really the way to unlock their potential. The issue in commercialization is the cost associated with producing aligned carbon nanotubes. My guess is the cost would be much more than x10."

Even if it was x10 the cost right now, I would expect that cost to go down a lot as the engineering gets better. Looks interesting.

Even if the cost was x100 of the current technique, if you could double energy density you would find applications. Remember that this is just a part of the total cost of a battery.

Right, there are plenty of places now that would be willing to pay a premium for increased density. The airline industry comes to mind.

Given that presumably Tesla's goal is to take battery costs down by 56% in 3 years from (108 - 140 $/kwh) to (50 - 70$/kwh) and widely held consensus is that 100$/kwh is the price point at which EVs are no brainer on upfront costs with ICE cars, i feel that there is a long way to go.

However, i think any successful real world demo starting with niche applications will help. We need all the battery tech to succeed.

Electric airplanes need significantly better energy density.

"significantly" sells it short. Electric airliners need a couple orders of magnitude of improvement to even come close to viability.

Jet engines are significantly less efficient than electric engines so it’s lithium ion has 1/20th the useful Specific Energy at takeoff, though that gets worse as the flight progresses and fuel is burned or batteries age. On the other hand for ultra long range flights electric jets can cruise as higher altitudes which makes up for some of that. Also having 1/3 the 15,000 km range of some aircraft is perfectly viable.

IMO, Due to cost savings electric aircraft would likely become common at around 4x the current Specific Energy and fully take over at about 10-20x.

PS: Energy density is fine for lithium ion, the issue is energy per weight (Specific Energy) not energy per volume (Energy Density).

An airplane will weigh less, the more jet fuel it uses. A battery powered airplane does not have an obvious way of losing weight in this manner, further limiting range.

Talking about 5.000 km is hard: While it won't get you from London to New York without some post-crash landing swimming, the current largest electric plane can fly ~100 miles at around 114mph, with 9 passagers.

I see that you take the laws of physics into account, but allow me to state this for the sake of the conversation: In order to replace jet fuel, we must match what we could call it's useful energy density (energy/kg * efficiency). While electric engines are probably more efficient, we're still up to 2 orders of magnitude away – that's requires a 50-100x improvement of energy density, while maintaining the needed high discharge characteristics, developing a sufficiently efficient electric jet engine and taking into account the increased weight. All at a price where people won't need to save up for years, in order to visit their families.

While I hope to see a zero emission future in my lifetime (actually a negative-emissions might be needed for at time), I feel like putting batteries into airplanes is a bit too much "Silicon Valley Sophism" – shoving the same solution at each and every problem, rather than figuring out what the core of the problem is.

I do love electric cars, but they are not for everyone('s budget). Perhaps the solution is synthetic fuels, combined with carbon capture and a cheap, clean and reliable energy source, such as nuclear power. I know this isn't exactly cheap or readily available either, but it seems like one would bypass a lot of the issues above, by focusing on the source of the problem: Non-neutral use of carbon fuels.

From what I've read, ONE order of magnitude higher density is all we need for commercially viable eletric airplanes. We don't need an additional 10X, as you are suggesting.

No they don’t. 400Wh/kg is sufficient when combined with structural efficiency and aerodynamic improvements. Over 1000 mile range should easily be feasible there in a new, clean sheet design incorporating best of everything and a 400Wh/kg battery.

Serious question, would nuclear powered planes be viable? As far as energy density goes it seems pretty hard to beat!

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Yes, both USA and Soviet experimented with nuclear powered planes during the 60s. The problem was how to shield the pilots from radioactivity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft

They also experimented with nuclear powered drones. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a33565112...

And Russia now claims to have a nuclear engine that can make a cruise missile fly for days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

What if there were a reactor type which would require no, or much less shielding because all it emits is mostly hard ultraviolet light?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb

I read that as using UV light to transfer energy to the working fluid, not that the actual nuclear reaction itself would be any different to any other nuclear reactor.

Even when it reads "It would be operated at temperatures of up to 22,000°C where the vast majority of the electromagnetic emissions would be in the hard ultraviolet range." ?

edit: Sigh.. disregard, cf. https://web.archive.org/web/20080109011832/http://www.nuclea...

Another problem is crashes or accidents

I don't know. Sure, if you can build batteries with the energy density of gasoline, you can build an electric plane with them. But is this really necessary?

Right now, we have relatively large, relatively fast, jet planes. Do we need that size and that speed to be commercially viable? Could we also run a larger fleet of smaller, more automated planes or helicopters? If there was no kerosene left by tomorrow morning, would there really be no alternative?

I probably have a skewed perception because I play with small fpv drones, but any weight saving like this usually opens up a whole world of new possibilities we never bothered to imagine before. This will certainly help existing delivery drones and drone taxi projects.

> If there was no kerosene left by tomorrow morning

I suspect the medium term solution would be to make some, either from other hydrocarbons or plant cellulose, or even by the US Navy seawater CO2 to liquid fuel process.

> I don't know. Sure, if you can build batteries with the energy density of gasoline, you can build an electric plane with them. But is this really necessary?

Only if you value overseas travel... It currently takes ~16 hours to fly from SF to Singapore depending on weather. Any longer, and you're going to see a lot of that travel disappear.

Only if you value overseas travel... It currently takes ~16 hours to fly from SF to Singapore depending on weather. Any longer, and you're going to see a lot of that travel disappear.

It takes that long because it's more efficient to do it in a single flight. Taking off and landing are a massive waste of time and fuel. If we only had short range planes people would change their destinations in some cases or they'd plan layovers as part of the trip. I don't think you'd see that many people just stop travelling abroad.

In the era when planes had to do that, there was not much trans-oceanic travel. The Pan Am flying boats, the "China Clippers", went from San Francisco to Hawaii to Midway to Wake to Guam to Manila to Macao to Hong Kong. It took a week.[1]

[1] https://tripsintohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Clip...

Indeed. Though like in the olden days the large number of stopovers might cut down demand somewhat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_Route#Multiple_stops

it's not really true that ultra long range direct flights (eg. from sfo to sin) are more efficient.

the efficiency gain by not taking off and landing is eaten away by the efficiency loss of having to carry so much fuel (which also comes at the expense of useful load..)

It's not difficult to imagine in-flight recharging from something like a KC-135 running a big fat generator. If you're recharging capacitors, connect time would probably be a minute or two.

I'm not so sure about that being an acceptable solution for civilian transportation… Even assuming automation can eliminate the risks and training overhead associated with in-flight refueling, there are still be some major hurdles that would need to be addressed before this could be considered a viable solution. The 3 big ones that come to mind are:

What happens if the KC-135 misses the rendezvous? What if the charging port fails to work for some reason? What about the carbon footprint of these airborne generators?

Plus, now you have the weight of the capacitors to carry around all the time, further reducing the effective payload.

> What happens if the KC-135 misses the rendezvous? What if the charging port fails to work for some reason?

The same thing that happens today with combustion aircraft: the crew makes an emergency landing if they can, or bails out and waits for a Seahawk to pick them up.

This actually happens with fuel-driven aircraft regularly today.

Bailing out seems a bit problematic for passenger aircraft.

I kinda enjoy the ability to get to the other side of the world in 24 hours.

> if you can build batteries with the energy density of gasoline

Actually significantly worse than that. A plane gets lighter the longer it flies, especially at takeoff when everything is at max thrust. A battery becomes more and more dead weight the longer you fly.

I wonder if this could be solved for with detachable take-off booster. Gets you up in the air, then returns to the airport.

Couldn't you just start with a cable that detaches and is pulled back to the landing strip?

A "third rail" along the runway and a dodgem/Scalextric type conductor springs to mind.

Just make sure it detaches properly, you don't wanta a dozen wire to yank you in mid ascend

I keep seeing numbers around 500 miles range floated for 8-12 passenger electric aircraft.

Fire up google earth and start drawing 500 mile radius circles around metro areas.

You probably don’t need gasoline density equivalents for short haul flights, but we’re still really far off from where we need to be.

the problem with jets is stratospheric water vapor in addition to all the CO2 they emit (quite a lot in itself).

FWIW, I just learned about "Wright's Law" via Sandy Munro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

Electric vehicles are right at the bottom of the curve for "amount of money consumers are willing to spend for more energy per gram/ml".

I'd expect this kind of tech to debut in premium phones and laptops, and work its way down.

Wholesale LFP price in China been <$100/kwh for quite a few years, yet...

Even if it was 10x the cost, it's supposed to last 5x as long so long-lived applications like perhaps commercial vehicles would only be 2x the cost even if they don't take advantage of the smaller size & weight to require less capacity.

IF this is true, it would be a massive breakthrough. Truly monumental. Hence, I am skeptical.

But otherwise, this would be a massive thing. a 2x capacity per weight advantage of batteries? Without an increase in space? That comes down to doubling the range of EVs, and making electric planes and rockets a lot more viable.

A 3x capacity per space advantage means roughly a 3x improvement in your phone and laptop battery capacity. Or, more likely, a slight improvement in your phone and much thinner phones. On laptops, we might see the return of more ports.

A 10x speedup of charging? That makes all-day EV travel a lot easier. It makes topping off your phone something you can do a minute at a time, rather than an hour long process. It means, with wireless earphones, you can re-charge them in a minute and almost never be without them.

If even a third of what they claim here is possible, it would be amazing.

>Or, more likely, a slight improvement in your phone and much thinner phones. On laptops, we might see the return of more ports. //

Please, no. I don't understand the utility of making something so expensive be so fragile and hard to hold. My phone is 5mm thick, that's already too thin for me.

Does anyone want thinner phones or is it just a marketing thing?

The thinner the phone, the thicker the case I can put on it with the same total thickness. It's incredibly rare to see a case-less phone in the wild these days.

It’s not incredibly rare at all. Phones these days are engineered well and they’re much less susceptible to fall damage. I’ve dropped my case-less iPhone X on the ground half a dozen times and it’s only collected a few dings on the corners.

I always found the older, entirely aluminum iPhones way too slippery to hold onto without a case.

I heard somewhere that in Holland every bicycle + lock weighs 5kg. If you have a cheap 5kg bike no one wants it and you don't have to lock it. If you have an expensive 1.5kg bike you need a lock that weighs 3.5kg to protect it.

In tour de France, bicycles under 6kgs are forbidden. Bicycles under this weight are incredible expensive and dangerous. Using metals like titanium and carbon fiber.

Most light and simple(no suspension) road bicycles weight usually 10 kilos, most mountain bikes do weight 15-20 kgs.

In Holland, most bicycles you see on the street are simple and cheap.

I think seanc probably has the idea of the saying right but with the wrong specific numbers.

It's more like 20% of the bike's cost should be in locks.

And a 1.5kg bike? What kind of bikes are you looking at?

You're off by a large amount. I'd say its closer to 15kg, and bike quality and weight aren't that correlated here. It's a lot more about maintenance and not being rusted to hell w.r.t. how likely a bike is to get stolen.

In general, since we are so flat a country, bike weight doesn't matter much. We'd rather have extra fancy stuff on a bike than have a lighter bike.

Wholly dependent on your environment. I don't see a case very often where I'm at

I don't use a case. If it were meant to be used with a case it would come built in. Iphones could easily double in thickness without making it harder to slip into a (male) pocket.

There are pockets for women's clothing?

The battery life on my oneplus 8 is the best I have ever had on a phone, and the difference it makes is massive. If I am ever faced with the trade-off between thinner phone and bigger battery, I'll take the bigger battery every time.

It would be pretty cool if we could make something like the folding tablets in Westworld.

I think phones and tablets will keep getting thinner, because you can always buy a cover to make it bigger. And it's better if more of the bulk of the phone is protective material rather than sensitive electronics.

I think eventually phones will basically be just a display, with no ports (wireless charging only), no buttons, and then you'll get covers with extra battery, ports, or whatever you want.

I do want a slightly thinner phone, or maybe for some of that extra space to be used for padding / reinforcement. This phone is almost always in my pockets, if it is thinner, it fits better.

I wouldn't mind too much if it meant I could put a case on it and have it be the size it is now.

A phone with a wide screen is hard to hold. I'll begin having issue with thickness only if it starts cutting fingers.

Marketing.

I would like to see phones and batteries decoupled; i.e., phones without batteries. Most people use phone cases anyway; put the battery in the phone case. Replace the case as desired.

Most Android phones used to have swappable batteries. Too convenient and not thin enough, I guess.

With the latest iphones, I already stopped night charging and just top it up whenever I'm close to a charger, i.e., in the car or in the kitchen.

> A 10x speedup of charging?

Not possible with existing infrastructure. The limiting factors are cooling the batteries and feeding them enough power. On small scale like laptops it's possible to speed up charging but not at large scale like cars.

That isn't to say it may be possible in the future but it isn't now.

It increases the charging speed by reducing the heat produced while charging.

If it makes charging more efficient (less energy converted to heat, more stored) then it would improve the charge rate but not by 10x.

Charging rate is typically limited by thermals. If you drop heat by 10x you can bump charge speed by the same.

The main way you can make batteries charge faster is my reducing the heat produced. This is the first limitation you hit anyway

What exactly is an "electric rocket"?

Rockets that use electrical pumps for the fuel and oxygen pumps. Usually rocket engines use some of the fuel and oxygen to run these pumps, which makes them a lot more complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket) Is the big player in the field afaik.

Magic? Non-satirical response, there's companies like Rocket Lab that make electrically powered turbopumps to simplify their rocket engines but that comes with very steep power requirements. The Electron rocket literally has lithium ion packs that drop away from the rocket as they are depleted and the weight of those packs really starts to add up because those turbopumps use absolutely insane amounts of power to keep up with the pressure and fuel flow requirements of the engine.

Not counting turbopumps for chemical engines there is also an electric propulsion when in space.

To expand on this there's these things called ion thrusters that use an electrically generated magnetic field to accelerate gas particles at extremely high velocities out the spacecraft thereby generating thrust. These are stupidly efficient but also very low thrust. Due to the high power usage I don't see much of an application for even incredibly dense batteries as you still need a sufficiently large power source anyway - though I'm no rocket scientist.

Presumably a rocket with a power source separated from its exhaust, and that flings its exhaust material out with an electrically-powered device.

So basically think of a 'reverse railgun'.

I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket) Which uses electric power to pump the fuel and oxygen into the nozzle.

That's an ion thruster. They've been around for a while.

Every railgun is a thruster - or gun for that matter: https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

A 3x increase in density does approximately nothing to make electric airliners more viable. We need more like a 100x increase before we see an electric 737 or A320.

This is the second time in this discussion someone mentions electric planes being viable and you respond with electric airliners not being viable.

Those are (in most peoples terminology) entirely different things.

Having viable light electric aircraft could revolutionize flight even if every aircraft for more than 20 people would run on kerosene for the next century.

I don’t think anyone is expecting a battery powered 737 any time soon. But a battery powered Cessna 172 with a 30 minute range would be huge.

This. Enhancing drone flight times, or other automated/semi-automated airborne machinery would be an absolutely huge win for industry and commerce as a whole.

I can state from experience that you're mistaken in what you think people expect. I work in a field very closely aligned with electric aircraft, and people who say "electric planes" without further qualification virtually always mean "electric 737s".

I also strongly question your assertion that viable light electric aircraft could "revolutionize flight". What exactly would the revolutionize? 2 seat electric trainers already exist, but the niche they fill is tiny. You're not going to move the needle on aircraft emissions with anything short of electric airliners. The rest of it is just a way to keep the research funded until we get there.

100x increase? Is that based on calculation based on the energy density of fuel vs batteries alone? Because there's a lot of efficiencies to be gained if you make a battery electric plane from scratch. And are you considering only a fully fuelled plane? Because many routes will only use a small fraction of the potential fuel capacity.

Look at the Maxwell X-57 for instance. If you don't have fuel in the wings, and you can use small electric take-off propellers on the wings, you can make the wing much thinner, which reduces drag.

You can potentially fly higher with electric planes, since you no longer have to think about air densitys impact on engine efficiency.

The main challenge with electric airplanes is not really the batteries. You could probably make viable short-haul planes with todays technology. The problem is you're basically starting from scratch, as a plane optimised for electric engines is most likely vastly different from a 737 airframe. It'll take decades to design and optimize radically new airframes.

We might never see planes crossing the pacific ocean with batteries only, but that doesn't mean electric planes aren't viable. By some calculations you can do 500-1000km routes with todays battery tech already, and there's a shitload of those. Maybe you'll have to fly 2-3 smaller planes rather than one huge one to cover the same route, but that can be a good thing. You could use smaller and more local airports. Electric planes are much more quiet after all. Operating costs with electric planes are way lower, so it might not be more expensive either.

With a 3x+ capacity you can start talking about covering most of the routes within a continent. So what if you can't do transcontinental? I think we can make enough biofuel to cover that if most other flights are electric (and/or hydrogen)

An electric airliner would be able to operate at much higher altitudes, and thus much more efficiently.

Looking only at energy density is naive.

Big if true, but I really don't need a thinner phone. Marketing will most likely salivate at an easy to break phone. Therefor I really hope this breakthrough is fake.

I've seen iPhone ads advertising how hard to break they are recently, if that has a basis in reality and isn't purely marketing spin then we're fine.

Reasons I'm suspicious:

* article leads with "in production" but it sounds like they are still at the design phase. production of prototypes maybe?

* they are doing a lot of "talking" and "partnering" but not so much selling mentioned.

* they are "known for" their similar work in the ultra-capacitor market but the linked page's top comment is "still waiting for a product".

* PR about raising funding and starting soon but not a lot of PR about actual products and results.

Am I being too cynical - does anybody know if they are for real?

"If its too good to be true..."

Its healthy to be skeptical until an extraordinary is proven.

Meanwhile can I interest you in investing in my hydrogen truck company called TeslaNikola? Its carbon free, costs close to nothing to run. We have a working prototype capable of going downhill.

Too bad Nikola Tesla didn't had a middle name.

How about Wardenclyffe, or Smiljna - both sound like reasonable company names to me.

Niagra?

> Am I being too cynical

Nope, I don't think so; battery breakthroughs are reported (probably) several times a month, but what eventually becomes available to the consumer is more evolutionary than revolutionary; we've NEVER experienced a 2x jump in battery capacity for example, it's always been incremental.

That said, I may need to take that back; this page (https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-io...) seems to indicate that li-ion battery capacity seems to have doubled or tripled since 2010, while prices dropped by 87%.

The author probably doesn't know how we read articles like this. A wild discovery in it self is fun but one doesn't expect to see products (anymore/any-time-soon).

Then towards the end he writes: "The company has moved past its pilot unit and now has a full production unit up and running"

Articles like this is why I want a service which lets you "bookmark" the article and have it tell you whether it panned out a few years later.

There's not much you can do here other than Defer Judgement yet again, at which point you'll have forgotten about it anyway.

What you want is a piece of paper and google, no?

I'm not being facetious, I find a piece of paper pinned proudly on my wall catches my eye better than yet more crap on my PC and/or phone.

The reddit RemindMe! bot.

Save the article to pdf and attach it to a future calendar event?

If it pans out and is useful, I guess you will be using it by then ? Close too it anyway ?

Bad headline. This increases power density, not energy density of lithium batteries, by decreasing internal resistance. That potentially increases charging speed. They claim by 10x.

Car charging stations are going to need megawatt chargers if this works.

They talk some about the possibility of future silicon batteries using this technology.

Wrong. From the article:

> Also, because there's gaps in that ultra-lightweight nanotube scaffolding and less extraneous binder and additive materials, a battery containing a given amount of active material can become much, much lighter and more compact. Energy density, both by weight and by volume, stands to jump by factors of 2-3.

There are both power and energy density increases!

We'll see. They ought to get the power increase, just from using something more conductive. The energy density increase looks like more of a maybe.

This isn't the first company to claim carbon nanotube batteries.[1]

[1] https://www.chasmtek.com/solutions/carbon-nanotube-lithium-i...

Sure, but your claim was that it's a bad headline, when in fact the headline is reflected in the article. You're shifting the goalposts.

Disclosure: I've worked on the software side of the battery industry, and am skeptical of any battery I'm not holding in my hand.

skeptical of any battery I'm not holding in my hand.

Um, yes. Still, this seems to be a reasonable way to go, especially since the developer claims to be able to make layers of carbon nanotubes cheaply.

Nawa, though... They announced in 2019 that they would be shipping ultracapacitors by the end of the year. But their products page doesn't list any. They're not a vendor known to Avnet or DigiKey. They announced a super-bike with ultracapacitor boost in 2019, and there are pictures, but none show the bike in motion.

Megawatt car charging stations are already a thing. The Tesla V3 supercharges are a 1MW power source, but right now they split that between four charging ports.

Battery power density is certainly going to continue increasing through a variety of means. It will be very interesting to see how these sort of power rates are handled safely via charging cables in the future!

This sounds great. But I first heard of these guys last year around this time when they announced their "NAWACap Ultracapacitors" where you could get a 1000F capacitor with a .1 mOhm ESR @ 1kHz. That was when they announced they were in production. So I reached out to the various distributors I used and put in cash-ok sample request[1] for one. Not a peep in 10 months. It is entirely possible that someone came in and said, "We will buy every capacitor you can make for the foreseeable future." but that generally results in causing the manufacturer to ramp up capacity to maximize revenue until there is excess capacity :-).

So what is the deal? Can they build stuff or are they a bunch of scientists who can get something working in the lab or one-off and fail miserably at making it a product? (They would be in good company to be sure if this were the case, just it helps to be a bit more forthright about.) The other argument against the hypothesis that someone is buying everything they build is that they have yet to show up in the Thomas register[2]. If their entire capacity was booked they would have quite the revenue stream.

You can of course buy carbon nanotube arrays[3] made to order, the last time I checked (about 2 years ago) they were over $5,000 qty 1. So not something I'd make into a general availability product. But if the NAWA guys can actually print these sheets with no trouble at all maybe Aldrich could use them as a supplier and get the price down to something more accessible?

I'm really interested in a reasonably high voltage (say 48V+ super capacitor in the 800 - 1000F range) even better if it weighs less than 50 lbs. But I've got a railgun out back that doesn't do squat without a 500kW power source.

[1] Basically this is saying you're willing to pay list price for quantity 1 to get a sample, as opposed to demanding a free sample which involves lying about market opportunity :-)

[2] https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/capacitor-m... These guys basically have teams of people trying to figure out where to get stuff, so they usually know who is actually shipping.

[3] Get your own carbon nanotube array, 1 x 1 cm https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/687812?...

I had the opportunity to work in one of the world best nano technology lab.

My supervisor once told me that he refused to work on nano-structured batteries for an obvious reason: These are impossible to recycle.

Science these days is often more about the headline (even better if you do the cover of Science) and less about real (societal) benefits.

Carbon/silicon batteries would be pointless to recycle - ordinary environmental substances (sand and dirt). Just burn them or sequester them. So that's good news.

It isn't obvious to me why would they be impossible to recycle.

Yeah, just burn it all, collect the volatiles. Actually no idea how battery recycling works.

Carbon nanotubes seem to be the real life version of chemical vat accidents or radiation exposure in comic books.

I think they also fed some carbon nanotubes to a spider and managed to get stronger silk. Like what's going on here?

I'm hoping that the scientists involved know what they are doing because from a layman perspective it just looks like carbon nanotubes can be added to anything to give it super powers.

> carbon nanotubes can be added to anything to give it super powers.

I am fairly certain the super power nanotubes give your lungs is cancer.

Which is a super power in a way.

But super-powered lungs tend not to function so well.

Yep. Inhaling carbon nanotubes has similar effects on the lungs as inhaling asbestos from what I've heard

Graphene as well: there's a running gag that adding graphene makes everything better, except for products.

So like every battery breakthrough that's ever been announced, I'll applaud, and then ignore it until I have one in my pocket. The lithium batteries we have right now are Goodenough, after all.

The rule of thumb is that battery density increases by roughly 8% per year. Expect this to go into production in 15 years.

Or a cheaper, more durable, but less efficient version in 10 years.

I've yet to see these carbon nanothings on the market. It's been 10 years now that we hear about carbon revolutionizing everything and it never pans out.

It's probably going to be like with AI. People talk about it for years and nothing substantial happens and then suddenly it takes off. I was working on AI around 2005 (we called it neural networks). There were no good libraries, the literature was difficult to understand and nothing really worked (at least I didn't get it to work). I was still a student and pretty disillusioned by the whole idea. A few years later the field took off and now it is ubiquitous.

I don't know, it seems like AI/ML are on the cusp of the "Trough of Disillusionment" themselves. And they've been talking about Graphene, Nano-tech since I was in high school.

it just stopped being AI. night mode camera on recent android and iphones were top of the line AI couple years ago. DLSS (deep learning super sampling) is allegedly borderline magic; it'll just be DLSS sometime next year. google translate and alpha zero are most definitely amazing AI.

carbon nanotubes? yeah.

Can't we use AI to design carbon nano tube construction processes?

I’m excited for new battery tech, almost entirely due to my niche interest in powered paragliding.

Electric paramotors require a lot less maintenance than their gas-powered counterparts, which need servicing after every 10 hours of flight. I’d love to buy one, but I am not interested in becoming a two-stroke mechanic.

One of the big names in the sport has said that his only reservation to recommending electrics is their flight time, currently about 45 minutes vs 1.5 hours for gas.

This advance, assuming these motors use lithium batteries, which I haven’t checked, bumps them up to 2h 15m on one charge and makes them more compelling. I thought I’d have to wait a decade to get this kind of gain, so this is pretty awesome news.

Battery noob here: Will this achieve the energy density of fossil fuels? In other words, a 50 litre tank of petrol gets me around 500 km. What will a similar volume of these batteries get me?

Not even close, but that's not so bad. ICEs will probably always have their place but most people can go without, especially in Europe (Americans are very loud about how they need to drive 3000 miles to work everyday so I won't bother arguing that)

You can fit an entire Italian town in the size of a freeway interchange in Houston:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/highway-interchange-ho...

Our cities were designed to be spread out to make them less susceptible to atomic weapons in the 1950's (not a joke).

So... Yes, we need cars. It really is a long way for many of us.

Granted, not to take away from the point of different use cases, however Sienna is a very small medieval-era town that one can walk across at leisure and the Houston interchange is one of the most complex in the US. So it is somewhat of a hyperbolic comparison.

I agree that very common suburban and rural vehicles, respectively, are SUVs and pickup trucks. But I am curious what portion of urban drivers use a vehicle that most of the time far outclasses their average use case. I would like to find data on this but it seems to me like often people own a vehicle for the extreme outlier use case.

Why would you want a vehicle that only covered 95% of your use cases?

It's like condoms - better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

It certainly makes sense on a personal level but when one multiplies this thought process by a given population there starts to be a compounded issue of excess material going into the construction of the vehicles, excess fuel being used to move them, and excess parking space used to store them, to name a few.

Redunancy and efficiency are common tradeoffs we are constantly trying to balance. It's only a question of how important the effects of downsides are.

Sometimes someone dies as an immediate result, and for some it means waiting for another 5 minutes.

> Will this achieve the energy density of fossil fuels?

I think non-fossil-derived synthetic fuels have the potential to become a major player in the overall transportation picture.

Liquid fuels have significant energy density advantages. Producing them synthetically should allow for removal of various impurities that cause pollution issues today. And not pulling them out of the ground would get around the non-renewable angle.

To be clear though, I think this situation is different from the big Ethanol push we've had in the Midwest the past 20 years.

Everything I've seen about Ethanol is that it is ridiculously inefficient in terms of inputs vs outputs and basically just exists as a subsidy program for farmers to ensure we have enough food supply to avoid ever having shortages.

But I think synthetic fuel could be a big thing in the coming years, particularly since all automobile infrastructure already centers around easily refillable liquid fuels.

I think a fairer comparison might be to compare weight of IC Engine + fuel tank vs electric motor + battery.

IC and Fossil fuels still win out (particularly if you swap to gas turbine) but the numbers are much closer.

No, current batteries have about 1 percent the energy density of gasoline.

Note that most of the energy in gasoline gets wasted as heat in a car, only a part gets used in winter to heat the cabin. So there's a factor of ~3 that you get back in that comparison. So the more comparable number is more like 3-4%. Still very low of course. The electric motors are also lighter than what creates equivalent power for gasoline so there's another small amount you recover there. ~5% is probably reasonable.

There are additional factors that are application dependent. I'm not sure how much if affects road vehicles, but for aircraft that fact that fuel burns off, making the aircraft lighter as the tanks empty is a huge contributor to total range, so you would need to subtract some factor to account for the fact that batteries have a constant mass.

Nanotubes? It admittedly has been a couple years since I checked in on nanotube production, but I found they will be cheap.

Also, cycle endurance is paramount in a usable battery, did I miss that? High density batteries form dendrites when they discharge, gradually ruining the battery. The nanotube structure would probably help though.

Anyway, need cell cost, vol and mass density, cycles, temp ranges, charge/discharge raye. Those make for a competitive battery.

The article mentions expected 5x durability for the reasons you mention. Even if it was just 2x, that would be great.

I kind of wonder about how they're measuring durability. If it's by time, 5x is really good. If it's by number of charging cycles and it hold 3x as much power that's great.

The first person to manage to mass produce CNTs with any reliability around size, shape, resultant properties, alignment, distribution or really any quality will be a trillionaire...

Am I the only one who gets halfway through this and gets bombed with malware pop-ups?

In general I'm cynical about any big breakthroughs which aren't actually in production. Too many steps between the lab and manufacture. I'm not sure what their definition of "Production" is, but in my book production means it's in a customer's product on it's way to the end user. That's clearly not the case here.

This all seems sketchy enough, the sketchy advertising just completely sinks it for me.

A bit off-topic, but when you think about it, it’s interesting how our vocabulary is shaped by gravity.

I mean, why “vertically aligned” and not “horizontally aligned”, right? It’s not like the performance of the battery actually changes if you made it stand up or lie sideways.

Why are we expected to picture “vertically aligned” as |||, but “horizontally aligned” as ——, right? Could we have used different wording that is not influenced by our superfluous spatial perception?

We want words to communicate, not to abstract robots or something, but to people. Shared experience helps with that. Gravity is a universally shared human experience. So we use words with that bias without even thinking.

Should we change? Why? They communicate, which is the point of words.

Didn’t Maxwell Technologies already announce a similar breakthrough a few years ago, and isn’t that why Tesla bought them?

Some patent lawyers are going to wake up to some good news today...

They did the dry electrode thing. That makes manufacturing cheaper but nothing more.

Tesla is using the dry electrode thing. Maxwell has been working on translating supercapacitor tech into battery design for quite some time.

These material science innovations takes tens of years to bring to the market - and they will take a lot of time again.

A 3x capacity increase is huuuge but a >10x cost increase is prohibitive except for applications like aircraft.

Medical devices, wireless headsets, phones, drones, various pro-grade cameras and gear - there are many devices where expensive batteries would still be economical.

For some apllications, you need fixed amount of power, perhaps you could have 3 times less batties, at 3x the price. That frees up space and reduces weight.

Right. Maybe not a good bargain for cars, but for a lot of things with tiny to small batteries it’d be well worth it.

Would somebody buy an IPhone with 1-week charge, if it was double the price? Probably.

Cost of manufacturing something like this can only go down and there are plenty of applications where mass or power output/battery life of a device is much more important than cost.

Depends on what proportion of the BOM the electrodes represent. If the electrodes are, say, 1% of the cost of making a battery, than a 1000% increase in the cost of the electrode only adds 9% to the cost of the battery.

2018: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/scientists-say-new-material...

I haven't read the article and I have no intention to do it. I've been seeing breakthrough titles like this popping up every month for two decades now. It's not not worth the click unless lithium batteries are your hobby somehow.

Won't charging become an issue?

Anyone who cooks rigatoni pasta knows how to vertically align tubes.

Wow, if the coating is so cheap perhaps it can replace activated charcoal elsewhere, too. Would it also triple the capacity of water filters?

I'm not exactly sure you want carbon nanotubes in your water filter. They are mechanically very similar to asbestos and seem to likewise damage lung tissue. Probably better not to ingest them?

But the activated charcoal too contains all kinds of structures, including nanotubes. It's the filter construction that prevents them to end up in water (and they are much less dangerous in water than in air). If it can filter 3 times as much water before needing to be replaced, why not?

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