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Samsung Develops Battery Material with 5x Faster Charging Speed
- djrogers 9y agoIf even 10% of the battery 'breakthroughs' we've seen on these pages in the past 5 years had come to fruition, we'd have 20Kw batteries that charge in 10 minutes on our phones. Oh, and they'd be 100% recyclable but that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles.
- jacquesm 9y agoIt's the exact same thing with solar panel technologies. But then if you look at the long term, 10 or 20 years, you see that there really is an underlying current (...) of steady improvements that eventually make it to the market or that reduce cost. But the vast majority are hype.
- mark-r 9y ago"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates
- njarboe 9y agoMost humans seem to understand linear growth pretty well. It is hard to get an intuitive feel for exponential growth.
- wickawic 9y ago"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” - Al Bartlett
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoIt's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth. If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them. Hypervolume grows exponentially. One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually. Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it. What is the shape of that space? You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.
- flatfilefan 9y agoAn interesting way to look at human thinking patterns. Is there any book on it? I never completely figured out Aikido with it’s joint locks and levers. Maybe talented aikidokas have a grater capacity to visualize/fill this type of activity?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoHonestly, it's just a mash-up of a few Buddhist ideas and a few math ideas: You can model what you're doing as a phase space, which is the product space of the state of each thing you control. This generally has a lot more dimensions than three. (You see this in robotics; a 5-axis CNC has a 5 dimensional phase space for position (5 axes of motion), plus a few more dimensions for things like speed and coolant flow.) That mashed up with the meditation idea of starting with your focus on something really small -- the soles of your feet, for instance -- and drawing it up your body until you can feel all of it. If you do the two, you can slowly draw yourself into awareness of higher and higher dimensional phase spaces, which shows you a curve of exponential growth. Well, okay -- I also followed Terry Tao's excellent advice on dealing with higher dimensions, to stop trying to picture math and start trying to find systems that expressed it in what they did. You can often get a feel for a system doing something more complex than what you can directly picture.
- 9y ago
- philipkglass 9y agoThere can also be a very long lag between initial research and industrialization. PERC cell technology for high efficiency solar has been growing rapidly to multiple gigawatts of manufacturing capacity over the past couple of years. It's expected to account for over half of all monocrystalline cell manufacturing within the next few years. 10 years ago PERC cells weren't available on an industrial scale, even though the technological basics were discovered, explored at the lab scale, and published in the 1980s. It took a lot of manufacturing advances and market evolution before PERC technology was both practical and profitable to manufacture for large scale use. http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/ http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/ Likewise, I expect that some battery ideas that are published and "go nowhere" will eventually reach industrial scale, but only much later.
- ngold 9y agoAnd you would be able to stab and cut them without exploding. The tech exists but I would imagine patents are doing their magic lawyering.
- fmihaila 9y agoIf the absence of vastly superior batteries were only due to patents, someone would be producing them right now and enjoy the exclusivity. While there are numerous promising approaches, usually announced with great fanfare, they tend to only work in the lab. The hard step is scaling them up to mass production such that the economics make sense.
- make3 9y agoWell at least it's not a Wired article, so the chances are much better
- userbinator 9y agobut that wouldn't matter because they'd last for 100k cycles. That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements. "100% recyclable" is good for them (and "biodegradable" even better), because they can act "green" while continuously making products that don't last and have to be recycled, expending even more energy and creating profit in the process. "The best kind of planned obolescence is environmentally friendly planned obolescence."
- mplewis 9y agoI'm not so sure. If Apple came out tomorrow and said "no more battery swaps, ever," they'd have a consumer advantage over Samsung and Google phones.
- baddox 9y agoThat’s probably true for smartphones, which would still have other significant improvements every year or so (like displays, performance, and networking) to incentivize owners to upgrade.
- aphextron 9y ago>That's precisely the sort of thing that most manufacturers don't want, because a battery designed to last effectively forever means less recurring revenue on replacements. That's ridiculous, tinfoil hat thinking. Longer cycle life = cheaper battery = higher profit + happier consumer.
- mark-r 9y agoIn an ideal world with infinite competition and perfect knowledge about competing products, perhaps you'd be right. But in the real world where we live, it happens all the time. Start by reading about the Phoebus cartel: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... I remember my first electric razor. It failed after a couple of years, so I took it apart to find out why. I discovered that the electrical contacts to the motor were just little pieces of graphite, and when they wore down to nothing the razor was finished. Definitely planned obsolescence in action!
- jp555 9y agoYou mean if journalist’s versions of research come to fuition? Those breakthroughs, when applied to scaled up battery manufacturing give us the 5%-10% compounding annual improvement we see. A doubling at least every 15 years is pretty good!
- madengr 9y agoYep, solar cells are similar. So many 20% efficiency increases, they should be at 200% by now.
- icebraining 9y agoIf every year you lose 20% of your money, how long does it take until you're in the negative?
- madengr 9y agoIf you have a solar cell that starts with 20% efficiency, how many years of “20% increase claims” does it take to reach 200% ?
- BurningFrog 9y agoPart of it is that even if 100% of them come to fruition, it takes a few years at least for the tech to be in batteries you carry around. We have been spoiled by the web to expect a whole other time scale, but physical technology still takes the time it has to take. My - not very informed - impression is that battery technology actually is moving very fast, considering the timescale constraints.
- Skunkleton 9y agoEqually interesting is the claim of increased capacity. I wonder how impractical this is to manufacture? Edit: better source here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01823-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01823-7
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- _grep_ 9y agoSo far there is no way to reliably mass produce graphene. There have been claims in the last year or so that we're getting closer, but nothing real yet.
- hwillis 9y agoIt seems to be very practical. The researchers made special effort to verify that, which is unusual. The silica nanoparticles are just fumed silica of a certain size, which costs <$1/lb. The final product can be added directly to the cathode slurry. The growth process is the only remaining question, but it seems very tame. Methane is the carbon feedstock, and the furnace is only 1000 C. It doesnt have the pitfalls of normal graphene production because they arent concerned about monolayers etc- I would say their product has a lot more in common with expanded graphite than graphene. Because of that I expect its similar in cost to synthetic graphite, which is roughly equal to natural graphite.
- philipkglass 9y agoThis looks closer to an industrial product than many new battery technology announcements. The cathode chemistry isn't exotic. The efficiency is high and stable (supplementary table 3). The rate capability is good. The specific energy is quite good. The cycling stability is pretty good. The trickiest part looks like the chemical vapor deposition of graphene onto SiO2 nanoparticles. CVD is a slow growth process that I normally see applied to creating precise, thin layers on flat substrates. I think it would be hard to scale this up to industrial (tonne per day) quantities of coated particles. Is it possible to replace that process with something like a fluidized bed reactor? I'm out of my depth here regarding paths to scale-up -- I have a chemistry background, but I'm not qualified to comment on most chemical engineering.
- serkanyersen 9y ago> chemical vapor deposition of graphene onto SiO2 nanoparticles I thought I was watching an episode of Flash for a moment.
- nothis 9y agoPfff, but he's not qualified!
- fernandovitor 9y agoimagens pdf
- fernandovitor 9y agohacker
- fernandovitor 9y agocvc duaw
- voldemort1968 9y ago"I'm out of my depth here" Could have fooled me.
- marknadal 9y agoThis is some explosive news! ;)
- saagarjha 9y ago> Additionally, the battery can maintain a highly stable 60 degree Celsius temperature, with stable battery temperatures particularly key for electric vehicles. Isn't this only necessary because Lithium-Ion batteries need it to maintain efficiency and longevity? Is this also an issue with graphene?
- mrguyorama 9y agomeanwhile if my phone maintained 60 degrees in my pocket, I'd be rather unhappy
- Mrtierne 9y agoWhenever I see an announcement for battery technology I'm always just waiting for Musk's reply.
- executive 9y agoIs this the Galaxy Note 7?
- zeep 9y agoit used to be
- georgespencer 9y agoWhat could possibly go wrong
- userbinator 9y ago...and 5x shorter cycle life? Observe the noticeable lack of any mention of how many cycles a cell will last at this charge rate. It is well known that ordinary li-ion cell can be charged extremely fast too, as long as you don't charge so fast it heats up rapidly and goes into explosive thermal runaway, but it shortens the lifetime considerably.
- baddox 9y agoI wasn’t aware that faster charging shortens lifetimes. Does that mean that (using completely made-up numbers) that a battery will reduce to 80% its initial capacity after 10,000 slow charges, but after 10,000 fast charges its capacity would reduce to, say, 50%?
- userbinator 9y agoYou have the right idea, but your completely made-up numbers are not even close --- the standard is 80% capacity after 500 cycles at the normally specified (1C) charge rate. If my vague recollection of the last time I read about this is correct, at 2C (twice as fast), after 500 cycles the capacity remaining may be more like 20%. It's definitely nonlinear. Heres an "entry" article: https://kabru.eecs.umich.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/StarAware-ICCPS16.pdf https://kabru.eecs.umich.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/St... and you can follow the references from there (into SciHub etc. if need be.)
- hwillis 9y agoRead the paper, it has the same cycle life at 5x the C rate (compared to plain NMO chemistry).
- csours 9y agoSo it seems that this cannot be immediately scaled. I wonder if Samsung/Apple will incorporate this in a super-luxe phone, which could perhaps bring it to scale.
- mark-r 9y agoI think the better application would be car batteries - you have huge incentive for a really fast charge. Imagine charging the battery in the same time it takes now to fill your gas tank!
- m3kw9 9y agoWhat about the other rather important attributes like discharge rate, losses, temperature stability?
- hwillis 9y agoDischarge rate appears similsrly improved (iirc), losses aren't really dofferent, temperature stability is increased, cycle life is increased vs. no additives, but they didnt test with additives.
- arnoooooo 9y agoIndeed, but you'll need to be able to supply the current. Tesla superchargers are the exception; other than them, 50kW is the max you'll get. For cars, having twice the capacity with the same charge speed would be enough, since you can charge slowly when you sleep, what matters is that the car can handle the distance you can travel in a day.
- orliesaurus 9y agoAnyone else clicked this hoping Samsung would announce "a battery that won't blow up your phone and will last more than your current battery" and then reading the comments felt every single one of those dreams and hopes being shattered, one by one?...
- orliesaurus 9y agoWelp I guess I was the only one
- rurban 9y agoIt's not new battery material. It's just a better anode coating with a graphene layer, only a normal lithium-ion battery. Same strategy as most improvements there. Means time to market could be much faster. Problem is that this graphene layer is extremely thin, one atom. Mass-production, what they claim to do, would be a killer app for much more than just batteries, but for batteries it's the easiest win.
- ficklepickle 9y agoIs it possible that this announcement explains the crazy recharge rates announced during the Tesla truck unveil? Experts were skeptical[1] that their recharge rates and capacity were possible with current gen tech...unless Elon knew something they didn't. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/tesla-s-newest-promises-break-the-laws-of-batteries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/tesla-s-n...
- krolley 9y agoExperts are right to be skeptical that it's possible with current gen tech. As usual, Musk is probably extrapolating charge speeds to when the truck will be finally delivered, which is in what, 2020?
- dba7dba 9y agoBefore Tesla and Panasonic joined forces to mass produce the batteries, there were many many rumors that samsung was in negotiation with tesla to supply the batteries. I wonder of Tesla will look into working with samsung.
- ec109685 9y agoCharging the batteries in parallel is the correct explanation for why the truck’s recharge speeds are possible.
- hwillis 9y agoNo, the two have nothing to do with each other. The Tesla Semi charges slower than the model S does already- it takes roughly the same time to charge a battery regardless of how large it is. That Bloomberg article is not talking about the battery itself, its talking about the charger- the wires hooking up to the battery.
- matco11 9y ago...And suddenly, Tesla’s battery technology progress implied by the semi’s announcement looks conservative
- bufferoverflow 9y agoGraphene coatings for anodes/cathodes is something Robert Murray-Smith has been talking about on YouTube for years, many people called him a scam artist, even though he never tried to sell anything. https://youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith https://youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith
- gokvokbok 9y agoMy Galaxy S6 continues to shine at taking about 24 hours to charge for about 2 hours life. Fuck I hate Samsung and their bloatware.
- AJRF 9y agoPainting the bike-shed here. We need capacity, not recharge speed.
- hwillis 9y agoMost people disagree. It's rare to drive >500 miles between charges, but most people will want to spend less than 20 minutes charging when they want to go long distances.