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oriel

Really it is encouraging for advancement areas like this.

Reminds me of the "revolutionary battery checklist": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930

edit: removed the paste of the checklist because of spam.

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“No week goes by without a revolutionary battery technology”

- Engadget, circa 2010

While this is true, a tiny start-up with big claims is different from the world's largest battery manufacturer (CATL) already spooling up production with the intent to scale.

And that is why batteries have become so much better now than they were 20 years ago.

Eh, not really. Most "battery breakthrough!" press releases are about some new exotic chemistry while most mass produced battery improvements in the last 20 years have come from incremental improvements to existing chemistries and better packaging.

Meh, the devil's in the details with a lot of those announcements. A surprising number of them are things like... it will be 50% better 5-10 years from now!

That's actually incremental improvement if you think about it in annual improvement terms.

It is, except for the fact that the future isn't guaranteed, so there could be unforeseen problems with scaling up, and that 50% improvement never gets delivered. As mentioned upthread though, CATL has expertise in that area, and "end of this year" is so a trackable claim, unlike the claims about gallium-based batteries.

I agree. Its also not uncommon that the "old" tech improves incrementally during the same timeframe, mitigating the seeming impact.

Hard carbon anodes were one of these "exotic" new elements, but are now just standard.

Silicon anodes will be the same.

Sodium ion still has shills screeching about how it'll never come despite being last year's news.

Lithium Manganese batteries are another one of these exotic chemistries that arrived without fanfare.

Have they? Other than lithium based batteries getting cheaper per kilogram so that year by year, more battery use cases have switched over from inherently worse chemistries? Even just ten years ago, eneloop were still the hot thing for many applications outside of laptops, mobile phones and the odd Tesla (ten years ago was when Model S was still the fresh new successor to the converted Lotus)

Is eneloop not still very much a thing? Maybe not the brand, but the technology. The vast, vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes are AA or AAA, and that means NiMH. To go lithium means 18650, and I don't really see much of that happening outside flashlights and other niche products.

Why does going lithium mean 18650? 14500s have always existed. I think there’s even smaller than that but I haven’t personally checked in a bit.

Form factor smaller than 1865 with energy dense formula is rare. Chinese made LFP but only a handful of mfgs make them anymore. So size doesn't matter, but it basically matters :D

LFP is going to be manufactured in north america soon

Nothing except flashlights and yard lights seem to use them either. Probably because they're not exactly safe enough for frequent swapping applications, consumers will drop them on their tin foil crack smoking rig and make a fire or something.

There are many companies making rechargeable lithium batteries in AA and AAA form factors. I have a few dozen I use for my door lock and Xbox controllers.

Internally these are a pretty normal small li ion or lipo battery (3.70 to 4.2VDC range) and a DC-DC converter to output 1.5V

Sure, if a device uses the form factor, then eneloop or the same approach by a different brand are even more ahead of pre-eneloop NiMH than they used to be: all the high-current use cases that were the weak spot of eneloop have long migrated to lithium-based.

But AA and AAA are increasingly rare not only because of price but also because of the ubiquity of USB charging, and because of the way the powerbanks that USB charging enabled weakened the "carrying spares" argument for AA a lot.

In essence: yes, the vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes continue to be AA or AAA (if we can agree in ignoring the ubiquitous CR2032). But costumer devices that use interchangeable standard size batteries have become super niche, at least outside a few fields where you expect years on a set of batteries. To go lithium means going fixed battery (unless you identify with the performance flashlight subculture, again something I very much agree with)

Lithium mostly exists as pouch cells in consumer devices, standardized batteries in general are rare. AA/AAA is mostly used on extremely cheap stuff, or stuff that one expects to last 5 years or more so nobody cares about recharging.

I hope we eventually get a consumer friendly standard for lithium though. It could be so much better than cylindrical cells, we could have all our cheap gadgets using micro versions of the power tool slide on shoe concept or something. Kinda unbelievable the ISO isn't trying to standardize prismatic type cells.

Cheap cynicism is fun, but Wh/kg has been steadily increasing since the '90s https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

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