8 ms·

Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

95 points by bornelsewhere 5y ago

anoncow 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
- xor99 5y ago
  This research has been ongoing for a long time: Development of the sodium-ion battery took place side-by-side with that of the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, by the 1990s, it had become clear that lithium-ion batteries had more commercial promise, causing interest in sodium-ion batteries to decline.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Yet again, the useless milliamp-hours per gram for one component of a cell instead of actual energy per unit mass for a whole cell. What is the Watt-hours per kilogram????
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  And J/cm³. That's usually the limiting factor for phones, I think.
- rsfern 5y ago
  The uni press release sort of buried the lede, but if you read the methods section of the paper they are doing these measurements in a coin cell with a sodium anode. This is early stage cathode optimization research, everyone reports current density and charge-discharge curves because the power density requires both high current density and stable operating voltage. Also you want minimal degradation with charging cycles. You can integrate those discharge curves to get power density if you want, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to really add at this point in the research pipeline. You need to scale up from the lab form factor anyway to get something reasonable to work with https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z
- FabHK 5y ago
  Need to multiply by the (average) voltage, and incorporate a fudge factor for the other components of the cell, I think. (P = UI, where P is power in Watt, U voltage in Joule per Coulomb, I current in Coulomb per second. And what we seek is specific energy, ie energy per mass, in J/kg or Wh/kg.)
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Watts = Volts * Amps Any reason you've defined it as: (Amps * Seconds * Volts) / (Amps * Seconds) * (Amps * Seconds * Seconds) ? Fairly sure but not positive that I've reduced the units to base SI units correctly...
    - FabHK 5y ago
      ha, you're right, the Ampere is the SI base unit for purposes of definition, but the Coulomb is arguably the conceptually simpler one... (though Volt is definitely derived). So, in terms of "intuition" (left) and SI base units (right) you have: Watt = J s^-1 = N m s^-1 = kg m^2 s^-3 Volt = J C^-1 = N m A^-1 s^-1 = kg m^2 s^-3 A^-1 Ampere = C s^-1 = A
nixass 5y ago
"new battery tech" and "fusion is 10 years away" - name better duo
- adrian_b 5y ago
  This might have a little more chances to be real than most such announcements, because this is not really "new battery tech". They use the same components that are traditionally used in some of the most popular non-rechargeable lithium batteries. What they claim is that they have found a special electrode construction and some additives that allow such batteries to be rechargeable. It remains to be seen if they will ever succeed to make these batteries survive enough recharging cycles to be competitive with the existing lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. The claim for much larger capacity is due to the fact that the normally non-rechargeable batteries have an electrode entirely of lithium, unlike the current rechargeable batteries which store the lithium in the pores of the electrode, so the quantity of lithium is much less than in the non-rechargeable batteries.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    That's somewhat promising, as manufacturing is why new consumer batteries are always years behind the tech.
- PhantomGremlin 5y ago
  We had a similar one yesterday: "Cancer treatment breakthrough". @dang wound up changing that one to a different article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342527 The thing about batteries and about cancer treatments is that there has been very meaningful progress over the years. In contrast, the fusion timetable seems to be getting worse. Now ITER is projected for "full fusion in 2035". So it's actually more than 10 years away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
  - Sniffnoy 5y ago
    I mean, that's ITER. If fusion is ready soon it'll likely be via ARC. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is aiming for SPARC (demonstration reactor) in 2025, ARC (commercial reactor!) in 2030. That's obviously an, um, ambitious goal, and we'll see whether that actually happens; but it's not like ITER is the only possibility. Which is good because even once ITER is turned on, it's hard to see the that direction ever producing anything commercially viable...
poisonborz 5y ago
For how important it is to modern society, the somewhat stagnating state of battery technology in comparison is baffling. Obviously there is a lot of $ thrown on this problem (securing the constant flow of such hopeful articles in the since the 2000s) but per feeling most of the gains since the Nokia days comes from improving HW/SW efficiency.
- api 5y ago
  Batteries haven’t stagnated. Costs have come way down, densities have gone up, and recharge times have gotten faster. It’s just been more incremental than revolutionary. Totally new battery ideas are in development but usually it takes 10-20 years for them to mature and have the potential to compete with existing tech. The hard parts are usually reliability, safety, and most of all manufacturing. Manufacturing is the hard part for a lot of things. We can make 1nm and even smaller chip nodes today but not in quantity. The yield is really low, so these are prototypes and would be fabulously expensive if you tried to get some made. The “latest” node is the one we can manufacture with sufficient yield to be economical.
- wffurr 5y ago
  Hardly stagnating. Improving rapidly, perhaps. Not an exponential curve, but steady linear growth in capacity. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > For how important it is to modern society ... Many problems important to modern society are unsolved: Cancer, malaria, poverty, politics, Coronavirus, fusion energy, universal language translators, education, etc.
nikkinana 5y ago
I'd rather have another gas engine from China now than this shit.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it. [ ] your claims are lies. credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633630
- kyriakos 5y ago
  Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    Will it? If I found a way to build a legitimately better battery then I would just answer these questions. Some batteries also have very specialized uses where they optimize for different things. I don’t need crazy numbers of recharge cycles or high current draw in, say, a smoke detector, but longevity is nice.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    No. When you can read several “breakthrough” articles any a topic a month, every month for decades they stop being interesting. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, today’s cure for cancer and 10x density battery are no different than any other: almost certainly nothing. People handing out money to researchers and new tech businesses need to be skeptical too. The public just needs to be exposed to these things much later when they have a higher chance of becoming real.
ricardobeat 5y ago
If Lithium is dangerous, Chlorine is taking it up a notch. As far as I understand it basically sets anything it touches on fire, and at high concentrations is deadly within a few breaths.
- mianos 5y ago
  It can combust when it comes in contact with many substances but much less so than lithium. It is a lot more toxic than the lithium salts in batteries.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Can't chlorine be easily neutralized by something... basic, like soda (the powder) or other cheap and safe carbonates? A small amount if them could even be a part of a battery's coat, to allow more time to safely react to a leak.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  While that is true, using it safely in batteries is a solved problem. The Stanford researchers have just found a method to modify the existing non-rechargeable lithium-thionyl chloride batteries, to become rechargeable. Lithium-thionyl chloride batteries have been used for almost a half of century in applications requiring the highest reliability and you can buy them easily from many stores.
molticrystal 5y ago
While it was interesting at first, by peppering inaccuracies or at best oversimplifications, it makes me doubt the veracity of the rest of the content. For example: >Non-rechargeable batteries have no such luck. Once drained, their chemistry cannot be restored. Rechargeable batteries have limited cycles due to problems, mainly solidification or breakdown of electrolytes that prevent restoration, but there are others like mechanical effects. Most "Non-rechargeable batteries" can actually be restored as well in the same sense of those labeled as rechargeable ones, but usually have a much lower cycle count due to these effects. For example can usually get a few cycles from your alkaline batteries, as long as you are trickle charging them since they don't usually have good venting.
- rsfern 5y ago
  Par for the course for a uni press release, unfortunately. Not picking on Stanford at all, it just seems to be a common theme Unfortunately the paper is not open access and I don’t think there’s a preprint, but from my quick read it seems pretty competently executed. (I’m a materials scientist but not a battery researcher.) The cool thing about this paper IMO is that they’ve found a way to make rechargeable an established battery concept that’s known for high energy density. It also seems like maybe the cathode degradation over time could be better than in conventional solid state Li-ion tech, but I’m not really sure
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > Not picking on Stanford at all, it just seems to be a common theme Fair to pick on Stanford when they put out releases containing false information. That other institutions also lie isn't an excuse.
    - rsfern 5y ago
      Fair enough, I don’t mean to excuse this, just making it clear that I’m not singling anyone out
squarefoot 5y ago
"sodium chloride (Na/Cl2)" I'm not chemist, but if I recall correctly, sodium chloride is NaCl, not NaCl2, ie common kitchen salt.
- rsfern 5y ago
  The primary reaction at the cathode is reported as Na + 0.5 Cl2 <-> NaCl (Reported in the paper, which is unfortunately not open access. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z)
twoslide 5y ago
Really interesting to compare with the publication itself: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z They don't mention six times more charge anywhere. Rather, the novelty is that it they make a discharge reaction re-chargeable for the first time. The final paragraph hints at a rapid drop-off after the first discharge: > The battery delivered about 3,309 mAh first discharge capacity and was cyclable at 500–1,200 mAh. One can see a benefit in that a previous single-use battery could be cycled (e.g. a hearing aid). The press release claim is such a stretch as to be essentially a lie: > a high-performance rechargeable battery that could enable cellphones to be charged only once a week instead of daily and electric vehicles that can travel six times farther
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Must be incredibly frustrating to be a researcher and see the media absolutely butcher things you worked on
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    "The media?" Isn't this a press release from their own University?
    - serf 5y ago
      there is usually a separate department that does that kind of release. the author is listed as a 'Freelance editor and writer and content provider for Stanford University' on LinkedIn, assuming it's the right 'Andrew Meyers from Stanford'.[1] [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-myers-0275b47 https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-myers-0275b47
  - manquer 5y ago
    The PR dept butcher is what you mean, this is a internal press release. I won't necessarily assume that it was really a PR /media debacle, I have seen researchers encourage such reports for exposure / project funds etc. After all we wouldn't really be discussing this if not the overblown title.
causi 5y ago
Rule #1 for any battery article: if Ctrl+F "patent" doesn't find anything, close the page without reading it. If it's not practical enough to patent you will never see it in your hands.
malchow 5y ago
Novel chemistries in nano scale in the lab are fun to puzzle about, but pure silicon anode Li-ion batteries really are coming in the next six months, notably from Enovix, and will actually change things. A 2x density upgrade that's real is a whole lot more interesting than a 6x density upgrade that isn't ready for commercialization.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Have these been independently tested with production form factors? Battery startups seem to have a lot of middle-level fraud in them where they have nice demonstration piddly level cells with great numbers that the internal teams know won't scale to real uses. I did see they are actually funding a factory... but I only saw a couple stories on "wearables" which implies very small batteries. Ugh, and a SPAC. I really want these various startups to succeed much like I actually wanted Nikola Motors to succeed and Lordstown to succeed, but the Tesla stock explosion is going to bring these hype-shells out of the woodwork.
  - malchow 5y ago
    Yes, they've been independently tested with production form factors at sampling quantities by major global OEMs: https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/9231246c-a419-46bb-be35-a437e75e1dbd https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/9231246c-a419-46bb-be35-a.... So this is the real one. You're right – lots of bad actors in the battery space. Investors don't really understand how wide the chasm is between prototypes and low-DPPM autoline production ready for grown-up purchases.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      Well I'm rooting for them, battery density has kind of stalled at a chemistry level it seems, I haven't seen as many exciting announcements like there were in 2020.
- specialist 5y ago
  Any news site recommendations for us curious noobs? I've been watching The Limiting Factor. I don't think I'd heard about Enovix yet. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid... Update: Scanning your posts, you're in the biz. Of course you have a bead on things. Open to recommendations, nonetheless.
chrisbrandow 5y ago
The chemist part of my brain is immediately nervous seeing Na metal + Cl2 gas anywhere near each other
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Is that worse than current runaway battery fires in non-LFP lithium batteries? Edit: I'm reminded of a joke someone told me about making very high density batteries. There's a name for a substance that packs as much energy as possibly into the smallest space possible: A bomb.
michelb 5y ago
More features to add to the upcoming superbattery to end all battery problems. If we get all the battery innovations promised in the past 30 years, our energy problems are solved.

95 points by bornelsewhere 5y ago

anoncow 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery

xor99 5y ago
This research has been ongoing for a long time: Development of the sodium-ion battery took place side-by-side with that of the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, by the 1990s, it had become clear that lithium-ion batteries had more commercial promise, causing interest in sodium-ion batteries to decline.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Yet again, the useless milliamp-hours per gram for one component of a cell instead of actual energy per unit mass for a whole cell. What is the Watt-hours per kilogram????

LinAGKar 5y ago
And J/cm³. That's usually the limiting factor for phones, I think.
rsfern 5y ago
The uni press release sort of buried the lede, but if you read the methods section of the paper they are doing these measurements in a coin cell with a sodium anode. This is early stage cathode optimization research, everyone reports current density and charge-discharge curves because the power density requires both high current density and stable operating voltage. Also you want minimal degradation with charging cycles. You can integrate those discharge curves to get power density if you want, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to really add at this point in the research pipeline. You need to scale up from the lab form factor anyway to get something reasonable to work with https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z
FabHK 5y ago
Need to multiply by the (average) voltage, and incorporate a fudge factor for the other components of the cell, I think. (P = UI, where P is power in Watt, U voltage in Joule per Coulomb, I current in Coulomb per second. And what we seek is specific energy, ie energy per mass, in J/kg or Wh/kg.)
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Watts = Volts * Amps Any reason you've defined it as: (Amps * Seconds * Volts) / (Amps * Seconds) * (Amps * Seconds * Seconds) ? Fairly sure but not positive that I've reduced the units to base SI units correctly...
  - FabHK 5y ago
    ha, you're right, the Ampere is the SI base unit for purposes of definition, but the Coulomb is arguably the conceptually simpler one... (though Volt is definitely derived). So, in terms of "intuition" (left) and SI base units (right) you have: Watt = J s^-1 = N m s^-1 = kg m^2 s^-3 Volt = J C^-1 = N m A^-1 s^-1 = kg m^2 s^-3 A^-1 Ampere = C s^-1 = A

nixass 5y ago

"new battery tech" and "fusion is 10 years away" - name better duo

adrian_b 5y ago
This might have a little more chances to be real than most such announcements, because this is not really "new battery tech". They use the same components that are traditionally used in some of the most popular non-rechargeable lithium batteries. What they claim is that they have found a special electrode construction and some additives that allow such batteries to be rechargeable. It remains to be seen if they will ever succeed to make these batteries survive enough recharging cycles to be competitive with the existing lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. The claim for much larger capacity is due to the fact that the normally non-rechargeable batteries have an electrode entirely of lithium, unlike the current rechargeable batteries which store the lithium in the pores of the electrode, so the quantity of lithium is much less than in the non-rechargeable batteries.
- zamalek 5y ago
  That's somewhat promising, as manufacturing is why new consumer batteries are always years behind the tech.
PhantomGremlin 5y ago
We had a similar one yesterday: "Cancer treatment breakthrough". @dang wound up changing that one to a different article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342527 The thing about batteries and about cancer treatments is that there has been very meaningful progress over the years. In contrast, the fusion timetable seems to be getting worse. Now ITER is projected for "full fusion in 2035". So it's actually more than 10 years away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- Sniffnoy 5y ago
  I mean, that's ITER. If fusion is ready soon it'll likely be via ARC. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is aiming for SPARC (demonstration reactor) in 2025, ARC (commercial reactor!) in 2030. That's obviously an, um, ambitious goal, and we'll see whether that actually happens; but it's not like ITER is the only possibility. Which is good because even once ITER is turned on, it's hard to see the that direction ever producing anything commercially viable...

poisonborz 5y ago

For how important it is to modern society, the somewhat stagnating state of battery technology in comparison is baffling. Obviously there is a lot of $ thrown on this problem (securing the constant flow of such hopeful articles in the since the 2000s) but per feeling most of the gains since the Nokia days comes from improving HW/SW efficiency.

api 5y ago
Batteries haven’t stagnated. Costs have come way down, densities have gone up, and recharge times have gotten faster. It’s just been more incremental than revolutionary. Totally new battery ideas are in development but usually it takes 10-20 years for them to mature and have the potential to compete with existing tech. The hard parts are usually reliability, safety, and most of all manufacturing. Manufacturing is the hard part for a lot of things. We can make 1nm and even smaller chip nodes today but not in quantity. The yield is really low, so these are prototypes and would be fabulously expensive if you tried to get some made. The “latest” node is the one we can manufacture with sufficient yield to be economical.
wffurr 5y ago
Hardly stagnating. Improving rapidly, perhaps. Not an exponential curve, but steady linear growth in capacity. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
wolverine876 5y ago
> For how important it is to modern society ... Many problems important to modern society are unsolved: Cancer, malaria, poverty, politics, Coronavirus, fusion energy, universal language translators, education, etc.

nikkinana 5y ago

I'd rather have another gas engine from China now than this shit.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it. [ ] your claims are lies. credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633630

kyriakos 5y ago
Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  Will it? If I found a way to build a legitimately better battery then I would just answer these questions. Some batteries also have very specialized uses where they optimize for different things. I don’t need crazy numbers of recharge cycles or high current draw in, say, a smoke detector, but longevity is nice.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  No. When you can read several “breakthrough” articles any a topic a month, every month for decades they stop being interesting. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, today’s cure for cancer and 10x density battery are no different than any other: almost certainly nothing. People handing out money to researchers and new tech businesses need to be skeptical too. The public just needs to be exposed to these things much later when they have a higher chance of becoming real.

ricardobeat 5y ago

If Lithium is dangerous, Chlorine is taking it up a notch. As far as I understand it basically sets anything it touches on fire, and at high concentrations is deadly within a few breaths.

mianos 5y ago
It can combust when it comes in contact with many substances but much less so than lithium. It is a lot more toxic than the lithium salts in batteries.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Can't chlorine be easily neutralized by something... basic, like soda (the powder) or other cheap and safe carbonates? A small amount if them could even be a part of a battery's coat, to allow more time to safely react to a leak.
adrian_b 5y ago
While that is true, using it safely in batteries is a solved problem. The Stanford researchers have just found a method to modify the existing non-rechargeable lithium-thionyl chloride batteries, to become rechargeable. Lithium-thionyl chloride batteries have been used for almost a half of century in applications requiring the highest reliability and you can buy them easily from many stores.

molticrystal 5y ago

While it was interesting at first, by peppering inaccuracies or at best oversimplifications, it makes me doubt the veracity of the rest of the content. For example: >Non-rechargeable batteries have no such luck. Once drained, their chemistry cannot be restored. Rechargeable batteries have limited cycles due to problems, mainly solidification or breakdown of electrolytes that prevent restoration, but there are others like mechanical effects. Most "Non-rechargeable batteries" can actually be restored as well in the same sense of those labeled as rechargeable ones, but usually have a much lower cycle count due to these effects. For example can usually get a few cycles from your alkaline batteries, as long as you are trickle charging them since they don't usually have good venting.

rsfern 5y ago
Par for the course for a uni press release, unfortunately. Not picking on Stanford at all, it just seems to be a common theme Unfortunately the paper is not open access and I don’t think there’s a preprint, but from my quick read it seems pretty competently executed. (I’m a materials scientist but not a battery researcher.) The cool thing about this paper IMO is that they’ve found a way to make rechargeable an established battery concept that’s known for high energy density. It also seems like maybe the cathode degradation over time could be better than in conventional solid state Li-ion tech, but I’m not really sure
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Not picking on Stanford at all, it just seems to be a common theme Fair to pick on Stanford when they put out releases containing false information. That other institutions also lie isn't an excuse.
  - rsfern 5y ago
    Fair enough, I don’t mean to excuse this, just making it clear that I’m not singling anyone out

squarefoot 5y ago

"sodium chloride (Na/Cl2)" I'm not chemist, but if I recall correctly, sodium chloride is NaCl, not NaCl2, ie common kitchen salt.

rsfern 5y ago
The primary reaction at the cathode is reported as Na + 0.5 Cl2 <-> NaCl (Reported in the paper, which is unfortunately not open access. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z)

twoslide 5y ago

Really interesting to compare with the publication itself: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z They don't mention six times more charge anywhere. Rather, the novelty is that it they make a discharge reaction re-chargeable for the first time. The final paragraph hints at a rapid drop-off after the first discharge: > The battery delivered about 3,309 mAh first discharge capacity and was cyclable at 500–1,200 mAh. One can see a benefit in that a previous single-use battery could be cycled (e.g. a hearing aid). The press release claim is such a stretch as to be essentially a lie: > a high-performance rechargeable battery that could enable cellphones to be charged only once a week instead of daily and electric vehicles that can travel six times farther

thatguy0900 5y ago
Must be incredibly frustrating to be a researcher and see the media absolutely butcher things you worked on
- Someone1234 5y ago
  "The media?" Isn't this a press release from their own University?
  - serf 5y ago
    there is usually a separate department that does that kind of release. the author is listed as a 'Freelance editor and writer and content provider for Stanford University' on LinkedIn, assuming it's the right 'Andrew Meyers from Stanford'.[1] [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-myers-0275b47 https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-myers-0275b47
- manquer 5y ago
  The PR dept butcher is what you mean, this is a internal press release. I won't necessarily assume that it was really a PR /media debacle, I have seen researchers encourage such reports for exposure / project funds etc. After all we wouldn't really be discussing this if not the overblown title.

causi 5y ago

Rule #1 for any battery article: if Ctrl+F "patent" doesn't find anything, close the page without reading it. If it's not practical enough to patent you will never see it in your hands.

malchow 5y ago

Novel chemistries in nano scale in the lab are fun to puzzle about, but pure silicon anode Li-ion batteries really are coming in the next six months, notably from Enovix, and will actually change things. A 2x density upgrade that's real is a whole lot more interesting than a 6x density upgrade that isn't ready for commercialization.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Have these been independently tested with production form factors? Battery startups seem to have a lot of middle-level fraud in them where they have nice demonstration piddly level cells with great numbers that the internal teams know won't scale to real uses. I did see they are actually funding a factory... but I only saw a couple stories on "wearables" which implies very small batteries. Ugh, and a SPAC. I really want these various startups to succeed much like I actually wanted Nikola Motors to succeed and Lordstown to succeed, but the Tesla stock explosion is going to bring these hype-shells out of the woodwork.
- malchow 5y ago
  Yes, they've been independently tested with production form factors at sampling quantities by major global OEMs: https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/9231246c-a419-46bb-be35-a437e75e1dbd https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/9231246c-a419-46bb-be35-a.... So this is the real one. You're right – lots of bad actors in the battery space. Investors don't really understand how wide the chasm is between prototypes and low-DPPM autoline production ready for grown-up purchases.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Well I'm rooting for them, battery density has kind of stalled at a chemistry level it seems, I haven't seen as many exciting announcements like there were in 2020.
specialist 5y ago
Any news site recommendations for us curious noobs? I've been watching The Limiting Factor. I don't think I'd heard about Enovix yet. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw/vid... Update: Scanning your posts, you're in the biz. Of course you have a bead on things. Open to recommendations, nonetheless.

chrisbrandow 5y ago

The chemist part of my brain is immediately nervous seeing Na metal + Cl2 gas anywhere near each other

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Is that worse than current runaway battery fires in non-LFP lithium batteries? Edit: I'm reminded of a joke someone told me about making very high density batteries. There's a name for a substance that packs as much energy as possibly into the smallest space possible: A bomb.

michelb 5y ago

More features to add to the upcoming superbattery to end all battery problems. If we get all the battery innovations promised in the past 30 years, our energy problems are solved.