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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> [...] research [...] the QUT team describes a design

Yeah ok cool, join the giant pile of revolutionary battery designs and remind me when it's a physical product, tested, verified and ready for mass production.

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People like to make this snarky comment a lot while ignoring that over the last 30 years batteries have in fact become enormously more energy dense. The revolution came a tiny bit at a time and it is here.

Serious question, has this been the case? I was under the impression even Tesla/Panasonic couldn't figure this out and ended up just stuffing more batteries into the unit rather than making the cell themselves denser.

Right, but it’s been incremental steps in improving a “boring” technology, not the new and revolutionary replacement that ends up getting voted up to the top of HN.

I lived through the transition to lithium ion batteries in the first place, that was pretty revolutionary.

They also took about 20 years to go from the lab to the electronic store shelf, and another 20 years still before they were first put into EVs.

Revolutions do happen, of course. But incremental improvement is both necessary and often overlooked.

Absolutely agree, it feels like I'm reading about revolutionary battery tech on a weekly basis, with no actual products in sight.

Nobody's impressed unless someone triples battery density overnight with a radical new chemistry, but lithium-ion energy density has tripled since 2010.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-io...

There's a long road between the lab and production, but having all this cool stuff in the lab suggests that the long-term trend can continue for a good while.

How come aa batteries are still 2000-2500 mah still?

They won't be being made with the latest tech, since consumers aren't too battery life sensitive and changing up the production lines costs.

Well there are:

https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/l91.pdf

But the problem isn't just capacity its maintaining the traditional zinc-carbon voltage profile. There were a bunch of much higher capacity Li/AA batteries from various manufactures that used buck converters inside the "cell" but they have fairly short lifespans, and efficiency loss due to the electronics.

For a lot of cases, companies just abandoned the AA form factor and embedded a rechargeable battery.

Why is “lithium” a buzzword? A lot of products (especially Sharper Image and the like) advertise “advanced lithium technology” as if a rechargeable battery is a premium feature for a reusable product.

In fairness, the desire to see a new chemistry is not purely an attraction to the new and shiny:

https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/energy-1/pursuing-a-...

> ...the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country that produces more than 60% of the world’s cobalt. A significant amount of cobalt in the DRC is mined by children...

And the remaining 40% are not a candy countries either: Cuba, China, Russia. The only standout is Australia.

Then, the whole of world's refining, and relevant battery chemical industry is in China.

It seems to me that the problem is not the chemistry, but the geopolitics that allows using raw materials that were made under such conditions. I bet Congo could get their act together if other countries actually gave them proper incentive.

The linked article’s source is a 2018 Fortune article [0]. As it won a Pulitzer Prize, the article is mirrored on their site [1].

The parent’s linked article claims that a significant amount of the largest cobalt producing area is mined by children. The source article states that industrial-scale output dwarfs the production of the more than 100,000 so-called artisanal cobalt miners which include an unknown number of children.

I can’t say that I’m not saddened by thinking of kids, mine or others, mining for a living. The first image that comes to my mind is b/w pictures of Welsh coal mining kids. Stepping outside of my frame of reference, I can see the set of interests that bring about children mining in the DRC.

Congolese activists working to end child labor say poverty has driven up the numbers. “Because of the economic crisis, there are about 10,000 of them,” says Hélène Kayekeza Mutshaka, who coordinates a monitoring program in Kolwezi that the government began last year, to try to stop children from mining cobalt. Mutshaka says she faces strong resistance from poor families, who have long sent their children to dig for minerals in order to supplement their meager earnings. “They believe they can try to make it into the middle class if they work as artisanal miners,” Mutshaka says.

I’m less sanguine than the article about getting less child labor by moving on from cobalt. The likely scenario is that the industry moves to another similarly rar-ish element and the child miners in DRC move in to another hazardous occupation since the perceived rewards outweigh the risks.

0. https://fortune.com/longform/blood-sweat-and-batteries/

1. https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/blood-sweat-and-batteri...

Did it now? Because Toshiba Libretto 50CT came out in 1997 using 1200mAh 17670 cells. Today, after 23 years you cant buy 3x the capacity even in 18650 form factor, with best cells available topping out at 3500mAh.

>"There's a long road between the lab and production"

Very well put, and often overlooked. As is the road to actual viable commercialization.

That graph seems to miss some of Panasonic's cells back in 2010. We definitely saw 3100mah 18650 cells 11 years ago.

Chart most battery metrics over time and you'll see great progress in the past few decades.

edit -- somehow clicked on wrong comment

It looks like you responded to the wrong comment. From context, I think you intended to respond to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26015036

Thanks, it is weird how the brain works where you could swear you are clicking on one spot, but end up clicking somewhere else. Just like when I come home from the grocery store with diet soda instead of regular -- I'd be looking at one product, reach for it, and somehow grab the wrong one.

Every time this happens I swear it is a glitch in the matrix or something.

As soon as I read graphene, immediately I thought this looks like a pipe dream. We have been hearing about it for years now.

Anyone know if any product with graphene as a main component ever been mass produced?

In the Supporting Information[1] it says that the graphene acid they used was made from "commercial Fluorinated graphene oxide".

So I imagine that is not a huge issue.

[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202004560 (pdf at the bottom)

IIRC there is only one lab which produces grapheme efficiently enough for research purposes, which supplies many other researches.

When many labs will efficiently produce graphene, we will have made a step towards small-scale industrial production. Not yet, AFAICT.

You can buy Li-Ion batteries for drones, robots, RC, etc. that claim to use graphene. Turnigy, for example.

There's a great way to save yourself time on these battery articles. Ctrl+F "patent". If they haven't bothered filing for a patent they have zero faith it will ever be scalable.

and you probably post this same comment on every battery article.

That doesn't address their point. There really is a steady stream of 'promising new breakthroughs' in battery technology that never go anywhere. I made the same observation independently, years ago.

To add to the sample size of n=1, a few months ago, there were many articles about “nano diamond” batteries that will supposedly solve the radioactive waste problem. Dave Jones of EEVBlog debunked it pretty quickly: https://youtu.be/uzV_uzSTCTM

Basically, every few months, a company comes out with claims that battery tech or e-waste has been revolutionized, but it’s always a bunch of bunk claims made using a multitude of weasel words.

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