Battery breakthroughs are announced every day. Very few make it to market.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Yet the batteries on the market keep getting better
I don't think they're discounting the excitement, but keeping realistic expectations. Don't hold off on buying an EV or hybrid if you're in the market right now because headlines say they just discovered this. The path from lab to the dealership is long and sometimes fruitless
They are improving a few percent every other year, but never in big jumps like these headlines would suggest
That's not true, "regular" Li-ion batteries have become tremendously cheaper and have increased their capacity by a lot in the past decade. The next jump in their capacity is about 50% more again, and it's already being previewed by the big battery manufacturers. They're not going to be cheap though.
combustion engines get better every year too. Engineers love optimizing what's already there.
A breakthrough by it's nature isn't just a marginal improvement.
A breakthrough often enables more than just a marginal improvement in theory. However building real world, mass produceable products based on the science is not an instant process, and very commonly manifest as a trickle rather than all at once.
LED lighting has changed the world, when they first came out in 1962 as faint ir emitting devices, they were quite useless for most of the purposes we know them for today.
Worth noting before you get too excited with the possibilities that this is just at lab scale. Being able to manufacture a few grams of a novel design is no guarantee that you can even make it on the scale of tons, much less do so cost competitivly. Even if it is actually possible it will likely take at least a decade before it starts to be available to the public.
I mention all this because battery tech is an area of massive dramatic investment and rapid research for decades now, and a lot of the news coverage tends to talk up the lab stuff and ignore the boring practicalities of what their talking about, which leads to a lot of the public asking why they’ve been hearing breathless news about how new batteries are going to change the world, but never these miraculous new inventions never make it to the public.
The answer of course is that a lot of them run into practical manufacturing problems or are too expensive to be competitive, and the ones that do make it and are coming out today were the subject of breathless news coverage back in two thousand five, which are now competing against the ninties new perfect future batteries.
It’s also worth noting that the practical effects of such new batteries are unlikely to change much. If you need a battery that can output a massive amount of current you use lead acid. If you need a cheap battery that can last for 8000 charge cycles you use lfp, and if you want millions of charge cycles you use the middle 70% of a lfp battery since degradation only happens on the extremes of its range. If you want very small powerful batteries and fast charge times you use lithium ion.
As a result of this, there are few applications where you can’t already do something becuse the battery tech is the limiting factor. Like being able to recharge an EV in five to ten minutes is great, but it’s not going to suddenly allow EVs to do a bunch of things they couldn’t do with our current fifteen to twenty minute charge times, which themselves arn’t that diffeent than the early 2010s thirty to fourty minute charge times. I mean it is a improvement, and it does help with range anxiety while making long trips more comfortable, but it’s not an massive shift that will change the world forever overnight.
Similarly, having a phone that is 20% thinner or lasts an extra hour is an improvement, but it’s not going to suddenly change how we use phones or comilunicate. These are small incremental improvements, like all new technologies are.
The transistor was the largest technological leap of the twentieth century, and it was invented in the forties but only starred to make its way to industry in the fifties and even then it only began to have an impact in the seventies. Technology takes time to scale up and is almost always an small incremental improvement on what came before.
Toyota's announced they'll be using solid state batteries in their production EVs before the end of the decade.
Toyota's been promising that solid state batteries are just around the corner for about 13 years now. They keep bumping the goalposts back every few years.
The first solid state battery was demonstrated in a lab in 1986, the first potentially viable chemistry was demonstrated in a lab in 2011, and Toyota began sinking money into it 2012. They have now spent 13.6 Billion on developing and trying by to scale up solid state batteries over the last twelve years, and are hoping to have a first release in 2027, sixteen years after the initial chemistry was first developed.
Seems other battery research is trying to reduce lithium use, whereas this solution requires more by replacing rather ubiquitous graphite..
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Researchers at Harvard John A. Paulson SEAS have developed a new lithium metal battery that withstand at least 6,000 charging cycles and can be recharged in a matter of minutes.
“Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries because they have ten times the capacity of commercial graphite anodes and could drastically increase the driving distance of electric vehicles,” said Xin Li, Associate Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper.
In 2021, Li and his team offered one way to deal with dendrites by designing a multilayer battery that sandwiched different materials of varying stabilities between the anode and cathode.
This multilayer, multi-material design prevented the penetration of lithium dendrites not by stopping them altogether, but rather by controlling and containing them.
In the new research, Li and his team stop dendrites from forming by using micron-sized silicon particles in the anode to constrict the lithiation reaction and facilitate homogeneous plating of a thick layer of lithium metal.
These coated particles create a homogenous surface across which the current density is evenly distributed, preventing the growth of dendrites.
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Getting the same vibes from this as I got from Hyperloop, it is too hyped up, the claims are way too big to be realistic.
I'll watch from the sides, and if it becomes a proven technology, I will gladly support it, but so far, nope, I don't believe their claims.
Excuse me while I hold my breath...