Boffins build ant-sized battery, claim it's tough enough to start a car Electronics continue to shrink to ever smaller sizes, but researchers are having a tough time miniaturising the batteries powering today’s mobile gadgets. Step forward, bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes. Smartphones use smaller power packs than they did five years ago, it’s true, but that’s because their chips and radios are …
I'm with you M'Lord. No idea why you got a downvote. Stupid people I guess.
The amount of people who immediately post on some sort of research tech with this sort of shit is astounding. It's as if they don't want this research to be done. Thank god there are some people who do actually do this sort of research, whether successful or not. If the commenters here did it we would still be living in caves, using flaming torches for lighting.
Hazarding a guess that the downvote is from the OP :-)
One thing that research critics frequently miss is that whilst a laboratory development may well miss the original objective, it is rarely wasted. It becomes a solution ready and waiting for the right problem to present itself.
Two examples that spring to mind: the accidental development of the post-it note (3M research scientist looking to develop an ultra-strong glue missed the project goal but accidentally invented the post-it), and laser eye surgery (scientist invents ultraviolet laser that appeared to do nothing except cut skin, considered worthless at the time until it was realised that it could be used to reshape corneas with no thermal damage to the surrounding tissue).
Research is never pointless.
The problem with this is in order to satisfy modern safety concerns the anode and cathode must be separated by some find of polymer membrane. This is almost always the rate limiting step and is a large part of why Li ion batteries are not as good as they should be.
Having said that it still represents a step forward. That particular technique for producing nano structures has been around for years but this is a nice commercial angle.
Given that abused li-ion batteriy cells become "terrorist" cells and explode with byproducts being leaked including hydrofloric acid, personally i'm all in favour of erring on the side of safety and building all of the safety features in that are physically possible.
And even then we still get occasional devices going up in smoke.
<over simplification>
The conventional electrode is 3D but the part that reacts (the exposed surface) is pretty much 2D - think "outside surface of a tube", surface = 2 x Pi x radius x length.
"3d" electrodes have much more complex reactive surfaces - think "lots of hollow spheres with both inside and outside exposed", surface = 8 x Pi x radius(squared) x number of spheres.
</over simplification>
I've lost count of the number of stories I've read over the years about awesome advances in battery technology that will increase battery capacity two fold, ten fold or in this case so many fold that a battery a few square millimetres in size could start a car.
What I want to know is: what happened to 'em?
Coz they all say they'll be on the market in 5 years, I've been reading about them for 10 years but my phone battery still only lasts a day
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in the end electricity storage is governed by a few very basic laws and you cant break em.
Chemical (battery) or electrostatic (capacitor) storage may improve, but not radically. What would be nice is to e.g. find a way to exploit nuclear binding energy without the need for a 2,000 tonne shielded reactor, an oversized kettle and a steam turbine..
Imagine a penny sized widget with a 2 pin socket in it, capable of delivering 100W for 10,000 years..
D'oh, thanks guys.
So, not much use if it can pack the punch of a bullet but can only release it all in one go like a bullet (as supposed releasing slowly like a candle). Gotchya.
And to the AnonIdiot, the...
Oh, forget it. If you don't understand after 3 posts, you're not going to understand now.
Not quite: cm^2 . μm yields a dimension of volume so overall we get power.volume^{-1} (power density), but multiplying cm by μm looks definitely a bit odd.
However, it's W, not Wh, so we have power, not energy, density that is being described. It's a critical difference, if our ant size battery can only supply this power for a fraction of a second it's a non-starter. If it can sustain that for several hours, then we have something pretty spectacular.
So what's this, a King-size battery that's Bliss for mobilie users? Or a Bliss that makes you the King of electric appliances?
At any rate, when I read that the same people who invented it are now looking for ways manufacture it in quantities, I can't help thinking of Buckyballs.
Paris because Bucky isn't around...
... is that when manufacturers make longer and better lasting batteries, tech companies make kit that just wants to consume more and more power.
If you stick one of today's phone batteries into a Nokia 3310 it'll probably last months without a recharge. (Just theoretically, obviously.)
"Well duh! When you design hardware, you design it with the limitations of the technology at hand."
Not in the case of mobiles, with these you design it to work within the limitations of technology that will be on the market in ~5 years time, you then crowbar it into today's technology and launch as the latest must have...
I'm not looking for instant mass market availability, but if you make stupid claim like "can start a car from a fag packet sized battery" or something to that effect, show a good quality video of exactly that. I don't care if it's a prototype that cost a ton - just show it, no tricks.
If not, how about waiting to actually find the thing is viable before trying to attract gullible investors.
Classic vicious circle. Without investment it may well never make it to the prototype stage, without a working prototype investment may be hard to come by. If the tech has genuine promise that would be a shame.
Of course now the paper has been published we could just sit back and wait until the Chinese manufacture it...
Your "Classic vicious circle" is no such thing. The original poster was talking about gullible investors, i.e. those who have not got the sense to look behind the claims before investing. They hear the hype and then invest based on that.
At this stage, the only ones investing should be those who have the sense to look behind the curtain and are therefore fully aware of all the risks involved.
Protecting the gullible does not stop the smart ones from investing if they view it as a good investment, hence no vicious circle and therefore a downvote.
For what it's worth, I did not downvote you, even though I think the original point stands.
They're making claims to dazzle people because the truth would probably be less glamorous. But in reality, potentially more interesting.
I agree it's hard to get funding on projects like this - but then there are a lot of "green" companies in recent years that have had investment in - and have fallen apart. So, there's that precedent.
Current comercially available technology is roughly on the order of a D sized lithium-ion battery being able to start a petrol car engine. That's not capacity or energy though, it's power. The Energy in a Li-ion like that is about the same as in the much smaller (by dimensions and weight) battery in your phone.
As for 3D electrodes, Edison invented a similar thing for the Edison battery. If I've understood (and remembered) correctly, he made thin sheets of material, which he then shredded coated onto thin sheets, which were shredded and coated onto sheets, repeated until he arrived at a sheet with a total surface area several orders of magnitude larger than the dimensions as measured by a ruler :)
OK, let's do the math.
Typical starting current for a car - somewhere between 100 and 500 amps. Let's assume 100A to make it easy.
Nominal voltage: 12V
Power to start a car: 1200W
Volume of this battery needed: 16 cm^3
So for once, the claim of a battery a few millimeters in size is almost believable (granted, it would be a few millimeters in thickness, and centimeters in width and height).
units
You have: 1200W / (7.4mW/cm*cm*um)
You want: cm^3
* 16.216216
/ 0.061666667
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