> The heart of any electric car is the battery.
one way to look at it, sure.
> It makes up around 40% of the value…
well, that seems a bit arbitrary, but as not an expert myself, seems… fine.
> …and we rely on it to keep us moving.
well, sure, it is a required part of the car. we also rely on the wheels to keep us moving.
> And yet we know very little about them.
what in the actual…
Of course he was talking about a much lower level than you need to understand when it comes to actually using them.
There are actually a lot of things we know how to deal with when it comes to engineering but have a poor grasp of the low level details. There was a great example in the Feynman Lectures where he says this about friction (Volume 1, section 12-2):
> It is quite difficult to do accurate quantitative experiments in friction, and the laws of friction are still not analyzed very well, in spite of the enormous engineering value of an accurate analysis. Although the law F=μN is fairly accurate once the surfaces are standardized, the reason for this form of the law is not really understood. To show that the coefficient μ is nearly independent of velocity requires some delicate experimentation, because the apparent friction is much reduced if the lower surface vibrates very fast. When the experiment is done at very high speed, care must be taken that the objects do not vibrate relative to one another, since apparent decreases of the friction at high speed are often due to vibrations. At any rate, this friction law is another of those semiempirical laws that are not thoroughly understood, and in view of all the work that has been done it is surprising that more understanding of this phenomenon has not come about. At the present time, in fact, it is impossible even to estimate the coefficient of friction between two substances.
That was written around 60 years ago. Anyone here happen to know if it still holds?
Not really the same question but I attended a talk by some top tribologists at my uni and I asked them if friction really was independent of contact area (as F=μN would suggest), their reply was that it roughly was, but not really if you were very precise or varying parameters. It would appear that the equation is a good approximation, like classical Newtonian physics.
the math produces results that are understood but not, because the math is calculating with some implicit inclusions, and things get weird when you start explicitly including.
the answers make sense, but not quite for the questions being asked. (but the answers are valid for a question, and more importantly, immediately useful for making dollars.)
unfortunately the vagueness of this will likely irritate a doctor. it certainly did years ago.
> "Reaction rates at spatially heterogeneous, unstable interfaces are notoriously difficult to quantify, yet are essential in engineering many chemical systems, such as batteries and electrocatalysts..."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06393-x
It's a much harder problem than working with pure crystals or gas-phase molecules or similar, which makes sense, as a half-discharged battery is a very messy system at the molecular-atomic level. See also news story on the above article:
> “We discovered at the nano scale that variation of the carbon coating thickness directly controls the rate, which is something you could never figure out if you didn't have all of this modeling and image analysis,” Bazant says.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/pixel-analysis-yields-insights-lit...
So, the field seems to be progressing steadily - and more funding for fundamental solid-state materials science research makes sense, too.
> But BYD is also a car maker in its own right
Yeah, it's actually the largest electric car manufacturer in the whole world.