There is no better battery (2008)
manifestdensity.net
manifestdensity.net
The rate of change seems glacial compared to the rest of the computer industry, but it's unfair to imagine that no change is occurring. Properly sexy stuff is happening in battery technology and we'd be extremely foolish to imagine that batteries are at a dead-end.
Now, we could see a super capacitor or something like that one day which may change things, but so far those have yet to materialize.
If you look at this graph ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg ), which is from a wikipedia section linked in the article, there are materials that hold more energy both per unit volume and unit mass than gasoline, we just haven't been able to exploit them yet. Isn't that the whole of materials engineering progress?
Do you mean watts (power or rate of conversion) or watt hours (total energy stored)? I'm not positive but I believe you said it correctly, which is to say that the NiMh batteries don't store more energy than their NiCd predecessors. They can only discharge it faster (can push a higher wattage but still has the same total energy capacity).
Tesla now makes cars with a very useful range using standard Li-ion batteries and good thermal management, I wonder the author thinks of the Model S.
http://gigaom.com/2013/01/14/13-battery-startups-to-watch-in...
I agree with the article author. I was convinced after reading chemistry professor Daniel Nocera a few years ago, after he became famous for discovering a cobalt-phosphate water-splitting catalyst, for the first time enabling hydrogen generation under normal conditions (neutral pH). He had been looking for it for some time (his "holy grail" of renewable energy).
He's a proponent of solar and hydrogen (collecting energy from solar and storing it in hydrogen) and a detractor of batteries. He (convincingly) argues that battery tech is fundamentally limited by the physics of charge separation. The only way to beat that limit is to store the energy in chemical bonds - as fuel - like nature does.
His paper "Chemistry of Personalized Solar Energy" is a good place to start.[1] Just the introduction and conclusion - you can skip the middle (its dense orbital theory).
Dude, the amount of current you're going to need for a 5 minute charge is going to put such capabilities only in the hands of businesses for decades at least.
Basically, it's like running a fleet of 30 cars all at once for five minutes.
Dude, the amount of current you're going to need for a 5 minute charge is going to put such capabilities only in the hands of businesses for decades at least.
I'm not in research like this, so I just hear things fed off of Y(HN). I've heard of some interesting devices like the carbon nanotube based supercapacitors (was that what it was?). Who knows?
So, there is a better battery. And it's inevitable.
But what we care about is when that research will result in better batteries _that_ we can buy.
He's not commenting on the tech so much as the wisdom of ASSUMING it will be better in a certain time frame.
He's saying, it's not wise to build a business on top of the idea that battery tech will progress predictably or at all.
I disagree, because any business built on that will be the first to exploit it properly when it comes out, as a competitive advantage. But if they're wrong, they'll deal with the downside risk of, you know, being wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-sulfur_battery
Seeing how much progress is being made extremely rapidly on getting these types of technologies into the marketplace, the idea that the last five years have been stagnant is difficult to believe.
Unless, of course, all battery research was stagnant under Bush? I suppose that's possible, and what we've seen is the standard 5-10 year research backlog starting to catch back up to a lack of funding for oil alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
Wikipedia says that fuel cells are typically "stacked" (placed in series) since each one only makes 0.7v, but if a new tablet is designed to save space by using only a single 0.7v cell and upregulating the voltage with a boost regulator, won't the total efficiency even with regulator losses still be far above li-ion?
http://news.cnet.com/IBM-pours-a-shot-of-methanol-for-ThinkP...
The most important shifts have been in cost ($/kWh), but there have also been improvements in energy density (Wh/kg), power density (W/kg), and cycle life.
Some of this is due to electronics improvements, but a lot is due to better cell design and manufacturing, funded in part by higher demand.
Since all atoms are approximately the same size there is a limit to how many bonds/volume you can have, and since all chemical bonds are roughly the same amount of energy there's a limit on how much energy/volume you can store with chemical energy.
The book then argues that hydrocarbon fuels come very close to the ideal energy density, and have many other advantages over batteries (weight (they're formed with light elements), extremely safe byproducts CO2 H2O, simple ingredients).
ADSL works using the wire from your house to the phone company equipment. A much shorter path and with less interference (still, the wiring may be bad, which limits transmission rates)
The battery analogy would be creating a fuel cell in a AA (or whatever) form factor. It circumvents the limits on battery technology by not being a battery, in spite of plugging into the same physical slot.
(NB: I am not a DSL technician, I could be wrong).
Electric trains don't run on batteries.
Wireless charging is getting better.
Electricity which is "too cheap to meter" would mean we didn't need 'great' battery tech, current tech would be ok.
The other way to solve this problem is to say "burning hydrocarbons have great energy density, and the global transport industry is already tooled up to use them, so lets use those as our 'battery' tech", and just find:
- a good way to turn our global energy output into stored chemical energy in hydrocarbons
- a good way to use hydrocarbons in small-scale non-transport devices (phones?)
Obviously nuclear batteries are going to be a long time coming (I'm not even aware of any theoretical way to make, say, a fission reaction release electrical rather than thermal energy), but if you expand on the definition of "battery" a bit from something you just plug in to recharge to something that maybe requires being physically swapped out and reprocessed, there are some very promising avenues of research.
The one I'm most excited about is the vanadium boride-air cell, which has a practical energy density on par with diesel fuel. The catch is that is likely impractical to make one that can be recharged by simply reversing the current through it, so it would require a network of reprocessing plants and battery-exchange facilities.
A lot of inventions were based on nature, e.g. wings for flying. Who knows, one day maybe a battery invention will also be based on biology.
If we could come up with a reasonably-efficient way to produce gasoline (or an equivalent) in a renewable way, that would be wonderful, but it wouldn't be a battery.
Still, it's only half the problem. We also want an efficient and compact way to turn electricity into energy-dense chemicals. AFAIK, that doesn't exist in nature; we'd have to start from scratch.
But the lines might be more blurred than my thinking indicates.
Many batteries also use oxidation reactions. That's not how you define a battery. I think the main difference is batteries release all the energy as electricity without associated heat, but fuel cells are partially electricity, partially heat.
http://www.akbars.net/images/battery%20energy%20density.png
... would imply that this is overoptimistic by at least 2x.
(2) Today's supercapacitors have very poor energy density even compared to batteries. What they do have is good power density, meaning they can deliver their limited energy very fast.
(3) Boosting the energy density of supercapacitors will happen but requires many years of great strides in nanotech. Research like this, involving 3D nanostructures with enormous surface area: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-sponge-like-graphene-supercapac...
1/2 * c * v^2
Where c is the capacitance in farads, and v is the voltage. That will produce a value of joules. Note that the capacitor is rated for a given voltage, so that goes in as v.
Converting watt hours to joules goes like this: A watt is one joule per second, so a watt hour is 3600 joules.
Very good explanation on the general math and physics of capacitors, current, heat and energy storage, plus awesome demonstrations at the same time :)
Double the lifetime for a 10% increase in upfront costs would be a huge win. It isn't sexy enough to make it into the news, but there is progress here.
The LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) field is really hot right now.
COPs of 6-20x (and sometimes more) are being reported.
Several labs have been burned to the ground who experimented with it and had a run-away reaction that was not expected.
Whether it's Fusion or Transmutation or something else, the results are real and we are seeing heat anomalies that can't be explained, in table-top devices that use Ni nano-powder, some catalysts, a loading current and heat, and nothing particularly radioactive or difficult to procure.
Also findings of direct EMF generation were reported recently, which could potentially bypass the heat-to-electricity step and the wasted energy in the Carnot cycle altogether.
LENR is a fundamental shift in the energy storage density the author is talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
"By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead,[6][7] and cold fusion subsequently gained a reputation as pathological science.[8]"
"A small community of researchers continues to investigate cold fusion,[6][11] now often preferring the designation low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).[12][13] Some have reported that, "under certain extreme conditions", they observe excess heat effects by interaction of hydrogen or deuterium with palladium, nickel or platinum.[14] Since cold fusion articles are rarely published in refereed scientific journals, the results do not receive as much scrutiny as more mainstream topics.[15]"
LENR is a fundamental shift from science to pseudo-science
http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&material...
And that's just for a quick bite.
See the slideshare for more relavant info.
Doesn't appear to be promising.