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Comment by raumgeist | Hacker News Reader

I think, apart from finding better Batteries altoghether, we should build multi-tier batteries inspired by biology. Humans have bloodsugar, sugar in the Liver and then fat. All of them have their respective properties with availability and amount. This way, engineering tradeoffs could be allocated much more fine grained. For example, a while ago I read about a startup building an energy storage where they heat up large amounts of sand to store the surplus of renewables. This could serve analogous to the fat in humans.

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Biological power is marvelous, but really inefficient. All that sugar and fat in entire human body only generates 50-150 Watts.

CATL is kinda doing that for EVs. They're making battery packs that are a blend of sodium-ion and lithium-ion.

Sodium-ion isn't as energy dense as lithium-ion and it has a slightly smaller power efficiency, but it's a lot cheaper, has better cold resistance, and can deliver more power at low states of charge.

Use the two together and the thinking is you can get a sweet spot that performs better across a wider range of conditions your cars are likely to experience.

Humans do that because we're big and extra complicated. The closest analogue is probably a hybrid car, though ideally you'd want one that can create synthetic fuel from its battery. But I suspect cellphones are properly analogous to e.g. bacteria that have much simpler energy storage.

I think I've heard of sodium, lithium hybrids. But that's only 2, what's the fat? Gasoline, LPG hybrid? Shit gets expensive fast. Probably 2x cost of just a sodium or ion EV? The human body is too amazing.

I look to a future of regularly servicing the immune system of my battery.

That reminds me of the gel packs in the USS Voyager. At some point they became “infected” and they needed to the raise their temperatures to let them destroy the infection!

The good news is that humans already exist, so you can already use them. It will give them something to do with AI replacing them elsewhere.

You might not like the efficiency of that type of battery, though.

sorry in advance , but my POV is .

Most of the things that we copy directly from humans do not work in terms of robustness.

Its like instead of harddrive use human DNA to store the data for 3T years,but no-one is mentioning the bandwidth speed here(which is the most important thing) etc,

I know it has some usecases.Also "one spoon butter is more energy dense than a battery"

but how we are gonna use butter(I dont know enough bio) but it is way harder to convert energy .

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