Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge
news.stanford.edu
news.stanford.edu
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z
They don't mention six times more charge anywhere. Rather, the novelty is that it they make a discharge reaction re-chargeable for the first time. The final paragraph hints at a rapid drop-off after the first discharge:
> The battery delivered about 3,309 mAh first discharge capacity and was cyclable at 500–1,200 mAh.
One can see a benefit in that a previous single-use battery could be cycled (e.g. a hearing aid). The press release claim is such a stretch as to be essentially a lie:
> a high-performance rechargeable battery that could enable cellphones to be charged only once a week instead of daily and electric vehicles that can travel six times farther
the author is listed as a 'Freelance editor and writer and content provider for Stanford University' on LinkedIn, assuming it's the right 'Andrew Meyers from Stanford'.[1]
I won't necessarily assume that it was really a PR /media debacle, I have seen researchers encourage such reports for exposure / project funds etc.
After all we wouldn't really be discussing this if not the overblown title.
All other things being equal (unlikely to begin with), these would be furiously cheaper to make, and wrest production from China.
Even at half the performance of lithium, this would look tempting.
This is early stage cathode optimization research, everyone reports current density and charge-discharge curves because the power density requires both high current density and stable operating voltage. Also you want minimal degradation with charging cycles. You can integrate those discharge curves to get power density if you want, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to really add at this point in the research pipeline. You need to scale up from the lab form factor anyway to get something reasonable to work with
(P = UI, where P is power in Watt, U voltage in Joule per Coulomb, I current in Coulomb per second. And what we seek is specific energy, ie energy per mass, in J/kg or Wh/kg.)
Any reason you've defined it as: (Amps * Seconds * Volts) / (Amps * Seconds) * (Amps * Seconds * Seconds) ?
Fairly sure but not positive that I've reduced the units to base SI units correctly...
Watt = J s^-1 = N m s^-1 = kg m^2 s^-3
Volt = J C^-1 = N m A^-1 s^-1 = kg m^2 s^-3 A^-1
Ampere = C s^-1 = A>Non-rechargeable batteries have no such luck. Once drained, their chemistry cannot be restored.
Rechargeable batteries have limited cycles due to problems, mainly solidification or breakdown of electrolytes that prevent restoration, but there are others like mechanical effects.
Most "Non-rechargeable batteries" can actually be restored as well in the same sense of those labeled as rechargeable ones, but usually have a much lower cycle count due to these effects. For example can usually get a few cycles from your alkaline batteries, as long as you are trickle charging them since they don't usually have good venting.
Unfortunately the paper is not open access and I don’t think there’s a preprint, but from my quick read it seems pretty competently executed. (I’m a materials scientist but not a battery researcher.)
The cool thing about this paper IMO is that they’ve found a way to make rechargeable an established battery concept that’s known for high energy density. It also seems like maybe the cathode degradation over time could be better than in conventional solid state Li-ion tech, but I’m not really sure
Fair to pick on Stanford when they put out releases containing false information. That other institutions also lie isn't an excuse.
I did see they are actually funding a factory... but I only saw a couple stories on "wearables" which implies very small batteries. Ugh, and a SPAC.
I really want these various startups to succeed much like I actually wanted Nikola Motors to succeed and Lordstown to succeed, but the Tesla stock explosion is going to bring these hype-shells out of the woodwork.
You're right – lots of bad actors in the battery space. Investors don't really understand how wide the chasm is between prototypes and low-DPPM autoline production ready for grown-up purchases.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid...
Update: Scanning your posts, you're in the biz. Of course you have a bead on things. Open to recommendations, nonetheless.
They use the same components that are traditionally used in some of the most popular non-rechargeable lithium batteries.
What they claim is that they have found a special electrode construction and some additives that allow such batteries to be rechargeable.
It remains to be seen if they will ever succeed to make these batteries survive enough recharging cycles to be competitive with the existing lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
The claim for much larger capacity is due to the fact that the normally non-rechargeable batteries have an electrode entirely of lithium, unlike the current rechargeable batteries which store the lithium in the pores of the electrode, so the quantity of lithium is much less than in the non-rechargeable batteries.
@dang wound up changing that one to a different article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342527
The thing about batteries and about cancer treatments is that there has been very meaningful progress over the years.
In contrast, the fusion timetable seems to be getting worse. Now ITER is projected for "full fusion in 2035". So it's actually more than 10 years away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
That's obviously an, um, ambitious goal, and we'll see whether that actually happens; but it's not like ITER is the only possibility. Which is good because even once ITER is turned on, it's hard to see the that direction ever producing anything commercially viable...
Again, I'd be happy if cheap fusion appeared, but it doesn't have a good track record.
That said, even if it worked it’s unlikely to be cost competitive due to the dramatic price reduction in wind, solar, and batteries.
PS: ITER’s first plasma is scheduled for 2025, but I think their holding off on DT fusion even if technically it could work on day 1. Which largely comes down to funding, they don’t have anything in the construction pipeline in case there is issues with ITER’s design so they want to be able to modify it after testing without concern for radiation.
Development of the sodium-ion battery took place side-by-side with that of the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, by the 1990s, it had become clear that lithium-ion batteries had more commercial promise, causing interest in sodium-ion batteries to decline.
I'm not chemist, but if I recall correctly, sodium chloride is NaCl, not NaCl2, ie common kitchen salt.
(Reported in the paper, which is unfortunately not open access. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z)
The Stanford researchers have just found a method to modify the existing non-rechargeable lithium-thionyl chloride batteries, to become rechargeable.
Lithium-thionyl chloride batteries have been used for almost a half of century in applications requiring the highest reliability and you can buy them easily from many stores.
Edit: I'm reminded of a joke someone told me about making very high density batteries. There's a name for a substance that packs as much energy as possibly into the smallest space possible:
A bomb.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
When you can read several “breakthrough” articles any a topic a month, every month for decades they stop being interesting. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, today’s cure for cancer and 10x density battery are no different than any other: almost certainly nothing. People handing out money to researchers and new tech businesses need to be skeptical too.
The public just needs to be exposed to these things much later when they have a higher chance of becoming real.
Perhaps. That, however, is probably not a solvable problem. It's trivial to come up with a list of reasons that something will not work/cannot be made to work. And there are many cases of inventors creating something that many other previous inventors failed to create.
If it can be done and it's worth being done, someone will ignore the pessimists and do it. Maybe the pessimists will reduce the amount of competition that their life-changing creation has to contend with, and maybe it'll turn out to really be a life-changing invention. That'll be life changing for the inventor and possibly the pessimist who now gets to benefit from this impossible creation.
All of that, aside, for us -- the consumer -- it's nice to know how likely a product like this is to actually become a reality in the next few years, and I specifically came to HN to find out why the press release was trash, frankly. To the inventor, it's sometimes helpful to not be aware of what is impossible so that you can accidentally discover it isn't... or maybe it is, but exploring that more deeply reveals something about a "possible" design that is an improvement.
The earliest instance of it _did_ offer this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26353853
But it seems afterwards people have done the easy part, pasting the list, & not the hard part, reviewing the article closely enough to share with others what hard problems the tech still faces (of course, even that case received a "Yet another example of a glib response..." comment)
[X] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
They mention 200 cycles, whereas 1000+ is common for li-ion.
Totally new battery ideas are in development but usually it takes 10-20 years for them to mature and have the potential to compete with existing tech. The hard parts are usually reliability, safety, and most of all manufacturing.
Manufacturing is the hard part for a lot of things. We can make 1nm and even smaller chip nodes today but not in quantity. The yield is really low, so these are prototypes and would be fabulously expensive if you tried to get some made. The “latest” node is the one we can manufacture with sufficient yield to be economical.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
Many problems important to modern society are unsolved: Cancer, malaria, poverty, politics, Coronavirus, fusion energy, universal language translators, education, etc.