8 ms·

UCI chemists create rechargeable battery with greatly lengthened lifespan

81 points by Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago

gabemart 10y ago
I believe this is the paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029 The headline, while not outright lying, is clearly playing on ambiguity to suggest a more sensational story The "student" is a doctoral student with multiple previous publications (and not, say, a 17 year old high school student) "Lasts 400 years" refers to the battery's potential ability to withstand a very high number of recharge cycles while maintaining capacity (and not, say, that it can supply energy from a single charge for 400 years)
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  > Lasts 400 years Still a lot better than 3-5 for existing techs. The battery would essentially be immortal. Perfect for large scale deployable for national power grids.
  - steventhedev 10y ago
    3-5 years under ideal conditions. Stick a battery in a phone/laptop that regularly gets used in the heat and it will give up the ghost within a year. It's not even so much the ultimate lifetime that matters so much as the longer 95% capacity life, which is much shorter now. I wouldn't be surprised if this also has some major catch, like manufacturing cost, heat degradation, or instability under mechanical stress. So while it could be an really important discovery, I'll remain skeptic until I have a laptop battery that lasts for longer than 12 hours after a year of heavy use in a hot, humid climate.
    - funkyy 10y ago
      All phones I had lasted at least 3-4 years of constant extensive use. In my Samsung Omnia, I had to change a battery after 3 years just and I was using a lot of it - especially as a GPS unit. The battery fault was also my wrongdoing in this case.
  - chiefalchemist 10y ago
    We'll have fusion before we have mega scale solar.
- bloopletech 10y ago
  The news is also 4 months old. Original press release (unfortunately sans 'Bermuda Triangle scary secrets discovered? what do we know?'): https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/ https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/. The sheer laziness of the article to not even link to the PR release is amazing.
rkangel 10y ago
One day, one of the 'potentially disruptive' battery technologies is going to get developed all the way to production. Surely. Right?
- ajuc 10y ago
  It already happened. Many times. Lead car batteries were disruptive. Li-ion batteries were disruptive (see all the mobile devices).
  - rkangel 10y ago
    Fair point, although they weren't such big news when they happened. I feel that since Li-On batteries there has been a lot of press for interesting academic work to could potentially lead to the next step change in performance, with no results as yet. I understand well the long path from lab to product and the low likelihood of success for any one technology, but there have been enough of them now that surely one of them will stick?
    - slfnflctd 10y ago
      There are probably a good dozen very promising and radically different approaches I've read about in recent years, from compressed air storage, to liquid metal, to MXene clay, to salt water, to 'carbon enhanced anodes' in a tweaked lead acid battery, and many more... In late 2013, it looked like we were on the cusp of finally breaking through the cost per kWh barrier in a matter of months, and I got so excited I started a business built around the anticipation of just one of these things panning out. Then? Crickets. One company I invested in is now a penny stock, and just announced a product which costs twice as much as the Powerwall for the same storage (oh, and it's probably worse in about every other way, too). I might cry if I had any tears left to shed over this. To be honest, I've started to wonder if any breakthroughs that may have happened in this field are being suppressed for some kind of political reason(s). You would think that couldn't go on indefinitely, though.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
laurent123456 10y ago
> It was on a whim that Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel. So not "accidentally".
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  Such a cynic. I'm sure people accidentally coat their gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and Plexiglas-like electrolyte gels all the time. ;)
- anentropic 10y ago
  I just love that there are people out there who would do such a thing "on a whim"
- vorotato 10y ago
  Alice: You got your gold nanowires in my manganese dioxide! Bob: You got your manganese dioxide in my gold nanowires! Charlie trips and his container of a plexiglass-like electrolyte gel spills into the mix. All three: OH NO
MrPatan 10y ago
That's it, I'm filtering all "news" about batteries.
- infodroid 10y ago
  What if it's a battery recall?
- jbb555 10y ago
  This last day or two I have had about 10 people in my facebook feed excitedly post a link to an article about how some scientist has "discovered" that if you cook a potato you can power a led lightbulb off it for 40 days. And then going on about how this is wonderful for the 3rd world because they can grow their own potatoes instead of us having to ship expensive polluting batteries to them. When I point out that the potato is irrelevant and the power is being generated by using up the zinc electrode and if you are going to ship them zinc electrodes for this it's no different to shipping very old, very poor batteries I just get told off for being so negative and how "I'm sure they've thought of that". Ugh.
thunderrabbit 10y ago
Whim != Accident
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tinganho 10y ago
And what's the capacity?
- kazinator 10y ago
  This article is more about the service life of the battery not about charge capacity. (Though, of course, charge capacity would good to know: how does this compare to a Li-Ion of comparable weight or space.) I imagine that the prototypes they are working with don't have great capacity. For that you need clever manufacturing to miniaturize the storage elements and pack a lot of them into a small space.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
Great. But I just wish science would spend less time self-annointing itself as our saviour when such "discoveries" are accidents, if not luck. It's as if winning to lottery makes you a mathematical genius.
- dEnigma 10y ago
  As Louis Pasteur said: "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.", more commonly quoted as "Fortune/Luck favors the prepared mind.". Blind luck alone won't do you any good most of the time, you have to have the training and vision to realize what you're looking at.
pkolaczk 10y ago
It would be interesting to know the weight and cost per capacity of these batteries. Capacitors have almost unlimited cycle count but they can store only tiny amounts of energy, so that makes them somehow useless for powering consumer devices or cars. It seems like the hardest thing in batteries is to get all of the following at the same time: low cost of materials and manufacturing, safety, high energy density, and high durability / high cycle count, high power output / quick charging.
- nine_k 10y ago
  High energy density and safety are somehow mutually contradictory. It's very tricky to have a lot of energy packed into a small volume and not let it be quickly released in a blast. Quick charging is also tricky. If you have a 10 Ampere-hour battery and want to charge it in 15 minutes, you can't have your average charging current below 100 A. This takes really thick wires, and will release a lot of heat.
maga 10y ago
A free startup idea: keep watch on progress made on promising research. Examine.com for tech research in a way, where one can just search for say "batteries" and see all the relevant research directions and their current results on key metrics, say, kWh per kg, charging speed, etc.
- nine_k 10y ago
  And sell this as a subscription service? I wonder how many users there might be.
  - maga 10y ago
    I'm positive it can make its creators filthy rich with the special journalist subscription that offers automatically generated dramatized versions of the research updates. In the dramatized version, every researcher becomes either a child prodigy, a person struggling with social issues, or Elon Musk; every research is a serendipitous breakthrough and destined to save the world at least once; all the while meeting a strong opposition from the established corporations, governments, and other wrong-doers. But seriously, I'd subscribe to such a service, just out of curiosity if nothing else.
    - andy_ppp 10y ago
      These things are sent to journalists for free by university marketing departments/people who want grants. Also the size of the market you are suggesting is not going to be worth pursuing.
      - maga 10y ago
        Well, then we sell it to the marketing departments/grant seekers--problem solved. > Also the size of the market you are suggesting is not going to be worth pursuing. If you mean the journalists, that was a (half) joke, of course. But the people who would be interested in this "examine.com for tech" are, I believe, an audience worth pursuing. I find it too cumbersome to weigh all the monetization options here, but even if we only go with the subscription, I believe there would be enough users to sustain such project. If people are willing to pay for general purpose news such as WSJ, I'm sure there will be enough of us, geeks/nerds/techies, willing to pay twice as much to keep in close touch with the progress, without having to dig through all the bullshit every time we hear about a world saving breakthrough.
cletus 10y ago
Better title that seems to apply to all battery related research: Battery researchers try to make name for themselves with vague announcement of something that has an at most 5% chance of being commercial in 10 years. Honestly, I have battery-research-announcement fatigue at this point. It seems there's a publish-or-perish thing going on or someone is just angling for a grant.
jopython 10y ago
We need a revolution in Battery technology if we were to get rid of our dependence on fossil fuels.
- ConceptJunkie 10y ago
  Batteries don't generate power, they only store it. We still need to get the power from somewhere, and for the foreseeable future, that will have to include fossil fuels.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    But fossil fuels do also solve the problem of storage due to their energy density. One reason you put gas into a gas tank is not only is that a source of energy, but it stores a lot of it in a small space. The tank is also just a cheap steel container that whose capacity doesn't diminish with number of refills. If you can replace that with a battery with all the same properties: cost, space, weight, durability and so on, that does have an impact. The energy for filling that battery can come from fossil fuels, but doesn't have to. We have hydro, wind and solar.
mhb 10y ago
Frequency of Positive Words in Science Abstracts Has Increased 880% in 4 Decades: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556372
- qwtel 10y ago
  how does that compare to increase in frequency of positive words in all published texts? (maybe excluding youtube comments...)
lightedman 10y ago
What caught my attention more was this bit at the bottom of the article: "Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line" So advanced, yet still using a horrible and overly-expensive data transfer line...

81 points by Sami_Lehtinen 10y ago

I believe this is the paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029 The headline, while not outright lying, is clearly playing on ambiguity to suggest a more sensational story The "student" is a doctoral student with multiple previous publications (and not, say, a 17 year old high school student) "Lasts 400 years" refers to the battery's potential ability to withstand a very high number of recharge cycles while maintaining capacity (and not, say, that it can supply energy from a single charge for 400 years)

DiabloD3 10y ago
> Lasts 400 years Still a lot better than 3-5 for existing techs. The battery would essentially be immortal. Perfect for large scale deployable for national power grids.
- steventhedev 10y ago
  3-5 years under ideal conditions. Stick a battery in a phone/laptop that regularly gets used in the heat and it will give up the ghost within a year. It's not even so much the ultimate lifetime that matters so much as the longer 95% capacity life, which is much shorter now. I wouldn't be surprised if this also has some major catch, like manufacturing cost, heat degradation, or instability under mechanical stress. So while it could be an really important discovery, I'll remain skeptic until I have a laptop battery that lasts for longer than 12 hours after a year of heavy use in a hot, humid climate.
  - funkyy 10y ago
    All phones I had lasted at least 3-4 years of constant extensive use. In my Samsung Omnia, I had to change a battery after 3 years just and I was using a lot of it - especially as a GPS unit. The battery fault was also my wrongdoing in this case.
- chiefalchemist 10y ago
  We'll have fusion before we have mega scale solar.
bloopletech 10y ago
The news is also 4 months old. Original press release (unfortunately sans 'Bermuda Triangle scary secrets discovered? what do we know?'): https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/ https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/. The sheer laziness of the article to not even link to the PR release is amazing.

rkangel 10y ago

One day, one of the 'potentially disruptive' battery technologies is going to get developed all the way to production. Surely. Right?

ajuc 10y ago
It already happened. Many times. Lead car batteries were disruptive. Li-ion batteries were disruptive (see all the mobile devices).
- rkangel 10y ago
  Fair point, although they weren't such big news when they happened. I feel that since Li-On batteries there has been a lot of press for interesting academic work to could potentially lead to the next step change in performance, with no results as yet. I understand well the long path from lab to product and the low likelihood of success for any one technology, but there have been enough of them now that surely one of them will stick?
  - slfnflctd 10y ago
    There are probably a good dozen very promising and radically different approaches I've read about in recent years, from compressed air storage, to liquid metal, to MXene clay, to salt water, to 'carbon enhanced anodes' in a tweaked lead acid battery, and many more... In late 2013, it looked like we were on the cusp of finally breaking through the cost per kWh barrier in a matter of months, and I got so excited I started a business built around the anticipation of just one of these things panning out. Then? Crickets. One company I invested in is now a penny stock, and just announced a product which costs twice as much as the Powerwall for the same storage (oh, and it's probably worse in about every other way, too). I might cry if I had any tears left to shed over this. To be honest, I've started to wonder if any breakthroughs that may have happened in this field are being suppressed for some kind of political reason(s). You would think that couldn't go on indefinitely, though.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

laurent123456 10y ago

> It was on a whim that Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel. So not "accidentally".

SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
Such a cynic. I'm sure people accidentally coat their gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and Plexiglas-like electrolyte gels all the time. ;)
anentropic 10y ago
I just love that there are people out there who would do such a thing "on a whim"
vorotato 10y ago
Alice: You got your gold nanowires in my manganese dioxide! Bob: You got your manganese dioxide in my gold nanowires! Charlie trips and his container of a plexiglass-like electrolyte gel spills into the mix. All three: OH NO

MrPatan 10y ago

That's it, I'm filtering all "news" about batteries.

infodroid 10y ago
What if it's a battery recall?
jbb555 10y ago
This last day or two I have had about 10 people in my facebook feed excitedly post a link to an article about how some scientist has "discovered" that if you cook a potato you can power a led lightbulb off it for 40 days. And then going on about how this is wonderful for the 3rd world because they can grow their own potatoes instead of us having to ship expensive polluting batteries to them. When I point out that the potato is irrelevant and the power is being generated by using up the zinc electrode and if you are going to ship them zinc electrodes for this it's no different to shipping very old, very poor batteries I just get told off for being so negative and how "I'm sure they've thought of that". Ugh.

thunderrabbit 10y ago

Whim != Accident

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tinganho 10y ago

And what's the capacity?

kazinator 10y ago
This article is more about the service life of the battery not about charge capacity. (Though, of course, charge capacity would good to know: how does this compare to a Li-Ion of comparable weight or space.) I imagine that the prototypes they are working with don't have great capacity. For that you need clever manufacturing to miniaturize the storage elements and pack a lot of them into a small space.

chiefalchemist 10y ago

Great. But I just wish science would spend less time self-annointing itself as our saviour when such "discoveries" are accidents, if not luck. It's as if winning to lottery makes you a mathematical genius.

dEnigma 10y ago
As Louis Pasteur said: "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.", more commonly quoted as "Fortune/Luck favors the prepared mind.". Blind luck alone won't do you any good most of the time, you have to have the training and vision to realize what you're looking at.

pkolaczk 10y ago

It would be interesting to know the weight and cost per capacity of these batteries. Capacitors have almost unlimited cycle count but they can store only tiny amounts of energy, so that makes them somehow useless for powering consumer devices or cars. It seems like the hardest thing in batteries is to get all of the following at the same time: low cost of materials and manufacturing, safety, high energy density, and high durability / high cycle count, high power output / quick charging.

nine_k 10y ago
High energy density and safety are somehow mutually contradictory. It's very tricky to have a lot of energy packed into a small volume and not let it be quickly released in a blast. Quick charging is also tricky. If you have a 10 Ampere-hour battery and want to charge it in 15 minutes, you can't have your average charging current below 100 A. This takes really thick wires, and will release a lot of heat.

maga 10y ago

A free startup idea: keep watch on progress made on promising research. Examine.com for tech research in a way, where one can just search for say "batteries" and see all the relevant research directions and their current results on key metrics, say, kWh per kg, charging speed, etc.

nine_k 10y ago
And sell this as a subscription service? I wonder how many users there might be.
- maga 10y ago
  I'm positive it can make its creators filthy rich with the special journalist subscription that offers automatically generated dramatized versions of the research updates. In the dramatized version, every researcher becomes either a child prodigy, a person struggling with social issues, or Elon Musk; every research is a serendipitous breakthrough and destined to save the world at least once; all the while meeting a strong opposition from the established corporations, governments, and other wrong-doers. But seriously, I'd subscribe to such a service, just out of curiosity if nothing else.
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    These things are sent to journalists for free by university marketing departments/people who want grants. Also the size of the market you are suggesting is not going to be worth pursuing.
    - maga 10y ago
      Well, then we sell it to the marketing departments/grant seekers--problem solved. > Also the size of the market you are suggesting is not going to be worth pursuing. If you mean the journalists, that was a (half) joke, of course. But the people who would be interested in this "examine.com for tech" are, I believe, an audience worth pursuing. I find it too cumbersome to weigh all the monetization options here, but even if we only go with the subscription, I believe there would be enough users to sustain such project. If people are willing to pay for general purpose news such as WSJ, I'm sure there will be enough of us, geeks/nerds/techies, willing to pay twice as much to keep in close touch with the progress, without having to dig through all the bullshit every time we hear about a world saving breakthrough.

cletus 10y ago

Better title that seems to apply to all battery related research: Battery researchers try to make name for themselves with vague announcement of something that has an at most 5% chance of being commercial in 10 years. Honestly, I have battery-research-announcement fatigue at this point. It seems there's a publish-or-perish thing going on or someone is just angling for a grant.

jopython 10y ago

We need a revolution in Battery technology if we were to get rid of our dependence on fossil fuels.

ConceptJunkie 10y ago
Batteries don't generate power, they only store it. We still need to get the power from somewhere, and for the foreseeable future, that will have to include fossil fuels.
- kazinator 10y ago
  But fossil fuels do also solve the problem of storage due to their energy density. One reason you put gas into a gas tank is not only is that a source of energy, but it stores a lot of it in a small space. The tank is also just a cheap steel container that whose capacity doesn't diminish with number of refills. If you can replace that with a battery with all the same properties: cost, space, weight, durability and so on, that does have an impact. The energy for filling that battery can come from fossil fuels, but doesn't have to. We have hydro, wind and solar.

mhb 10y ago

Frequency of Positive Words in Science Abstracts Has Increased 880% in 4 Decades: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556372

qwtel 10y ago
how does that compare to increase in frequency of positive words in all published texts? (maybe excluding youtube comments...)

lightedman 10y ago

What caught my attention more was this bit at the bottom of the article: "Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line" So advanced, yet still using a horrible and overly-expensive data transfer line...