As a civilian, I'm surprised to learn, with all the technical improvements in mountaineering gear, that frostbite on gloved hands is still an unsolved problem.
I could imagine some kind of warm water tube system that takes heat from a heat exchanger on your chest and transports it to your hands and feet, and is pumped by the action of walking. Not sure if that’s been tried before.
There’s a lot of great engineers who’ve done a lot of climbing so my guess is pretty anything that works sufficiently well to keep hands and feet warm, is also too complex, expensive or bulky to be useful in really extreme mountaineering environments.
The last time I was on the periphery of mountaineering, performance enhancing drugs were commonplace. A breakthrough in performance enhancing drugs should yield new results in mountaineering.
Not to pick on you because that sounds like a legit idea for the environment those guys were in, but that's part of the "plot" of "The Complicator's Gloves"
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_complicator_0x27_s_glov...
Water and fuel are also heavy, which means climbers on big routes like this are usually riding the edge of starvation and dehydration for days, which further raises the risk of frostbite in extremities.
I feel like you just re-invented the circulatory system. I don’t mean that to be snarky at all, just that I think part of the problem with your hands is that your body starts sending them less blood to keep your core warm. I’d think that pumping more heat away from your core would be bad for survival.
But my climbing is also not on vertical rock at 25k+ feet!
Vacuum flasks are such an amazing invention. They really seem to work exactly like you would want.
You try making a few calls in -15C 5 m/s wind (typical 55 latitude continental climate weather in winter), then see the charge bar plummeting to zero when you attempt to call up a taxi so that you don't freeze to death.
About only thing you can do at that point is shove the phone into your panties to heat it back up and then hope what's left of the charge is enough and it doesn't refreeze while you're at it.
No, lithiums don't work much below 0C. Balloon payloads use insulation and heaters, but that obviously eats into energy available.
Since we're sharing anecdotes - EVs are extremely popular in Norway and YouTube is full of videos of people testing the cars in negative 40 or even 50 centigrade. They work fine even without battery preheat.
The phone can't get the current it needs exactly because the temperature is out of spec. This is the definition of "battery stopped working".
Now if you've got a tesla-sized one, and it has a good load, then you have another problem - you have to cool it, or it shoots above 50C and you get a dead battery eventually. I can imagine a 80% charge battery of this size heating itself in a few minutes of load even from -50C. Won't get the usual 2K cycles to half capacity in those conditions, but the car will still move. A bit.
In other news, Norway is overrated wrt colds courtesy of Gulfstream. Compared to say northern Kazakhstan it has a nice mild climate.
It's fine to acknowledge the reality of current technology while also being optimistic about the future. Operating EVs in cold remote areas requires diligence and preparation. It's a fact.
It's possible, in fact probable that your phone doesn't have one of the aforementioned formulations.
Edit: Also, these batteries aren't necessarily exposed to outside temperatures. Strategically placed near the body, they can be kept at higher temperatures for greater power efficiency - but if they are exposed to outside temps, they will not die as easily as your (pathetically useless in this situation) cell phone batteries would.
Thermal insulation requires thickness, almost by definition. Dexterity requires thinness, also almost by definition. It's hard
But mechanical parts of the space station can be as hot as 120C (250F) and as cold as -150C (-250F), so I'm pretty sure you do want thermal insulation :-)
Worth noting that 65% of all the injuries reported during spacewalks occur to the hand.[1] They “solved” it as in astronauts are not dying because of glove malfunctions. But there is plenty of improvement to be wished for with the solution.