There's a lot of work to make sure this is actually a safe thing to use. I know lithium ion batteries are pretty dangerous, but you need to be damn sure this is as safe or safer. How does it hold up to heat, cold, punctures, short circuits, etc? What about degradation over time?
Also, there's a lot engineering that needs to happen about how to integrate the proper charging circuits. Plus all the work that needs to go into actual mass manufacturing.
In all there's a shit ton of work for any product to actually make it to a mass market.
Experience. At least let people experiment a little bit more before building huge fabs using technique A only to realise that technique B works at half the cost and twice the time-efficiency.
But isn't there are huge market advantage to using the technology now, before your competitors do. If you wait until technique B, then you loose out on the first (or early) adopter benefits, and probably lost customers to your competitors that implemented the technology before you.
I suspect that the reason we are not seeing this technology in practice yet, is because of how long the design cycles take. I am not familar at all with small device manufacturing, but it seems like it would take a lot of iterations to make everything fit together so tightly, and a year may not be enough time to introduce a different battery system. Especially a battery system that your engineers have no experience with.
Having said that, batteries do seem like a pretty stand-alone component of phones, so it may be possible to design a graphine based battery that replace an existing phone battery without modification to the phone. It might involve doing more work in the battery to emulate properties of the traditional battery that the phones were designed to compensate for, but it seems like there is enough room in a battery to do that.
The other problem I can see is that standard phones would likely be incapable of charging these batteries at full speed, which would only mean the batteries need a charger external to the phone.
Again, not as good compared to designing the phones with these batteries in mind, but still useful.
The main problem I can see with pursuing these batteries is that by the time you are ready to sell them, there may not be a long enough window before they become standard for it to be worth your while.
Makers of portable phone rechargers may be the compromise to those issues.
Regardless, excluding unforeseen drawbacks to this technology, I suspect we will be seeing it within 1 or 2 generations of phone.
> But isn't there are huge market advantage to using the technology now, before your competitors do. If you wait until technique B, then you loose out on the first (or early) adopter benefits, and probably lost customers to your competitors that implemented the technology before you.
I am pretty sure every half-decent company has a research team on graphene right now, it is just that they don’t have results yet because results take time and making sure that these results are correct takes even more time.
Furthermore, as you said – even if we now managed to build a battery that charges in half a minute, the surrounding infrastructure is not yet there, and especially with components as critical as batteries, you don’t want them to break/blow up at your customer’s place.
In my inexpert knowledge I can see a few problems, while they have probably seen potential, they have yet to prove it can scale. Then there is getting manufacturers of devices to buy in to super capacitors and even worse getting battery life obsessed consumers to accept 1/4 the life as current Li Ion batteries is better because it has nearly instantaneous recharge times.
In my experience, the reason people are obssessed with battery life is that when it runs out (which it does), then you are pretty much screwed until you can plug it in for the night.
I think that vendors could easily sell devices with a smaller capacity if they can charge in seconds. This seems like a benefit that is very clear, easy to explain, and understandable to a typical consumer, and it provides a near perfect solution to one of the major inconveniences of current phones. And, that inconvenience happens to be what people currently look to long battery life to mitigate.
Perhaps, I know I'd rather have a super fast charging phone that lasted a day than one that lasted 3 days and takes a long time to charge, but there are still people out there that seem to think the megapixels are the only thing that's important in a camera.
I think the vendors could already charge the batteries faster. A Tesla supercharger charges 40/85kWh in LiIon battery capacity in 30 minutes (from empty, it gets harder to push charge in as they get full). They use off the shelf batteries.
But the dirty little secret is of course that it's not necessary. You need one day of battery life, then people get home and charge it by their nightstand. Similar with the Tesla, it has enough range to get through five times the average American commute, and the majority of people just charge at home when they sleep.
Bandaging peoples irrational fears might simply not be a very viable business model.
> Bandaging peoples irrational fears might simply not be a very viable business model.
Are you kidding? It's one of the best business models ever.
In this case I think you have it backwards. Instant charging isn't bandaging a fear, because you rightly make the point that the fear of running out of power is already covered by ensuring the device has sufficient capacity for the worst case. Indeed it will create a new fear: forgetting or not being in a position to top off the charge when necessary.
The high current needed for fast charging requires thick connector wires and produces a lot of heat in the battery, and also in other components of the power circuitry. The heat is the limiting factor in the charging speed for phones.
Maybe you can have both a Li Ion and one of these, and you only sue the LiIon after the graphene one is depleted. That way, you can recharge quickly to a fraction of total power, and optionally wait longer for a full charge.
Maybe but both are going to take up space and the video isn't really clear on how much space the super-capacitor is going to need so you'll probably end up with the same problem of not having the same long life as just having the single slower charging Li Ion battery.
I don't believe there is anything "missing" to prevent it from starting up. It simply takes work, time, and money to get it off the ground.
I can see this tech being widely used in place of current capacitor technology in a shortish timeframe- maybe 2 to 4 years. It'll also be used in novel technologies as battery replacements, especially for high discharge rate applications, within a similar time scale.
Electrons don't like graphene, its like trying to stick electrons onto a hunk of wood - which also has a large capacitance. The real story isn't that graphene has magical properties, its that graphene can be tuned and engineered.
Also, there's a lot engineering that needs to happen about how to integrate the proper charging circuits. Plus all the work that needs to go into actual mass manufacturing.
In all there's a shit ton of work for any product to actually make it to a mass market.