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
I agree about the press release. Though they do run it out to ~100 cycles without too much apparent further degradation, so it’s probably not dead on arrival as a contender against Li-ion?
That's a good point, although I am not sure whether the "six times" claim was based on the first cycle or the subsequent cycles (partly because the authors didn't make it themselves). Even if subsequent cycles are 1/3 as the first, that could still mean twice as much charge as li-ion.
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]
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????
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
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.)
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
5 years to construct a commercial fusion reactor after the demonstration? And it's nuclear, even if there isn't nasty fission products, there's still neutron degradation that needs to be shielded.
Again, I'd be happy if cheap fusion appeared, but it doesn't have a good track record.
Well, sure, like I said, it's ambitious; there's no guarantee this is going to actually work. But it's not like the people working on it haven't thought about the problem. They have an interesting approach to the neutron degradation problem, using a liquid blanket that can be circulated, so you don't have to deal with the problem of replacing solid shielding after it becomes too degraded.
I remember when fusion was 50 years away, then 40 etc. It’s not dropping 1:1 but lower numbers do presumably represent progress.
That said, even if it worked it’s unlikely to be cost competitive due to the dramatic price reduction in wind, solar, and batteries.
PS: ITER’s first plasma is scheduled for 2025, but I think their holding off on DT fusion even if technically it could work on day 1. Which largely comes down to funding, they don’t have anything in the construction pipeline in case there is issues with ITER’s design so they want to be able to modify it after testing without concern for radiation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
You didn't x off any of the reasons. This list of common pitfalls is nice, but without marking which pitfalls apply you've added nothing to the conversation
But it seems afterwards people have done the easy part, pasting the list, & not the hard part, reviewing the article closely enough to share with others what hard problems the tech still faces (of course, even that case received a "Yet another example of a glib response..." comment)
In theory that would be fine if devices continued using the same amount of energy. Instead of charging my phone every night, if I charged it every six nights, it doesn’t need to last for as many charge cycles either.
A lot of compute on devices is currently battery limited. Manufacturers try hard to keep a charge at one day but don't really care beyond that. If we instantly replaced batteries with ones that lasted 5x longer and lasted 1/5th the cycles, I'd expect phones to instead use 5x the power in a single day since all of the metrics that currently resist waste right now would not longer be launch blockers for power-hungry features.
They also mention a rapid drop-off in capacity after the first cycle in the article itself (3600 mAh to 1200 mAh). The main point the authors are making is that the discharge process is rechargeable rather than a single discharge. The press release uses this finding to make rather ambitious claims.
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.
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.
> Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?
Perhaps. That, however, is probably not a solvable problem. It's trivial to come up with a list of reasons that something will not work/cannot be made to work. And there are many cases of inventors creating something that many other previous inventors failed to create.
If it can be done and it's worth being done, someone will ignore the pessimists and do it. Maybe the pessimists will reduce the amount of competition that their life-changing creation has to contend with, and maybe it'll turn out to really be a life-changing invention. That'll be life changing for the inventor and possibly the pessimist who now gets to benefit from this impossible creation.
All of that, aside, for us -- the consumer -- it's nice to know how likely a product like this is to actually become a reality in the next few years, and I specifically came to HN to find out why the press release was trash, frankly. To the inventor, it's sometimes helpful to not be aware of what is impossible so that you can accidentally discover it isn't... or maybe it is, but exploring that more deeply reveals something about a "possible" design that is an improvement.
Luckily, snarky comments by HN user Cthulhu_ do not generally tend to decrease investment by VC firms or Wall Street into potential new technology companies.
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.
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.
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.
Many problems important to modern society are unsolved: Cancer, malaria, poverty, politics, Coronavirus, fusion energy, universal language translators, education, etc.
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