Nanoparticle boffinry could boost battery life The secrets to a longer battery life may lie in the shape of nanoparticles. That's according to a Stanford study published in Nature Materials today. Lithium-ion batteries can be made smaller using nanoparticles as their tiny size allows for faster charging and greater energy storage – which is useful for smartphones where …
...except where's the quote that goes something like this:
"We expect to see this reach the consumer market in about 5 years"
All kidding aside, this type of research sounds great not only for better batteries, but for materials engineering in general. The more insight there is on how nanoparticles behave the better, and hopefully it get us one step closer to manufacturing that magic space elevator material to boot.
"The engineers found that icosahedral nanoparticles, which have 20 different sides, stored less energy than cube- or pyramid-shaped nanoparticles."
This seems sort of predictable - the Hydrogen will react with the Palladium nano-particles via the surface of the nano-particle and, for the same mass/volume, an icosahedron will have a lower surface area than a cube or pyramid shaped nano-particle.
But I guess that's why they were testing them in the first place.
We can improve anything when we have more people measuing it.
Our problem with electric powered devices is energy density. For electric cars the combination of space needed to create and then store the energy is greater than using fossil fuels to get a shaft to turn. When we learn how to create sufficient electrical power to power an automobile using less space than a fuel tank and 30% efficient fossil fuel heat converter than we will rid the landscape of electric generating power stations.
We need better ways to measure how electricity is generated. Today we know electricity is not a natural form of energy therefore we need to learn how to transform natural forms of energy to electricity using a smaller foot print.
Thanks for that bit of wisdom. A quick Googling gives several examples of natural electricity including the intriguing telluric current effect, no need for man's intervention nor big electrical storms.
Then there's things like just about every nervous system on the planet that functions on some level due to electrical currents. But I digress.
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