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Isn't there a new cathode material promising manyfold improvement announced about every three weeks or so? I'd like to see one of them actually deliver in new
by jwatte 8y ago
Isn't there a new cathode material promising manyfold improvement announced about every three weeks or so?
I'd like to see one of them actually deliver in new batteries. But instead, the 50% or so improvement we've seen over the last ten years have all been because of incremental refinement.
Color me skeptical until it's proven in production.
- Gibbon1 8y agoThere has been an enormous amount work on battery technology for the last 30 years. Probably 99% of it leads to dead ends. Standard rule of battery development, if everything goes right it takes ten years to market. And another ten to get market share. In the late 90's early 2000's there was paper after paper published on lithium iron phosphate batteries and dick all nothing for sale until ~2010. And ten years later market share is growing slowly.
- ethbro 8y agoAre there any main reasons for this? I'd assume conservative and long-design time downstream users mean there isn't a volume market for new battery tech.
- Gibbon1 8y agoI'm assuming twofold; engineering for scale and marketing. Once you've sort of proven something in research you need to develop processes for manufacturing at scale. Those processes are often radically different than the one used during initial development. 10X rule applies. Take ten times the resources to bring something into production than to just design it. And worse with batteries you're dealing with primary materials. You may have needs for material inputs that simply do not exist at scale. No one makes material X in 100 metric ton quantities. The only source is a post doc making 100 gram batches. Sometimes the batches are bad for reasons unknown.
- skookumchuck 8y agoEdison tried for many, many years to improve batteries for electric cars. This has been going a lot longer than 30 years.
- bdamm 8y agoWell, the power of a battery the size of a brick in the 80’s is now available in a AA form factor. I’d say the improvement has been profound, if not quite as profound as Moore’s law is for CPUs.
- thermodynthrway 8y agoSadly, it isn't remotely that good, closer to a change from C to AA. NiCad rechargeables have been around for over a century and LiPo only has a density about 3x higher. Overall we've only increased the energy density of the average rechargeable battery about 5x in a century, with most of the increase from introduction of NIMH then LiPo Improvements in power efficiency have made battery advancements seem better than they are.
- int_19h 8y agoI think most people are looking at flashlights for comparison, and LEDs were a massive leap in efficiency there. Didn't we make it all a great deal cheaper, though? I'm noticing lately that now even very cheap devices - the kind you can buy on eBay for a couple bucks - that used to be powered by AA batteries and such, are now coming with an integral lithium battery (and usually an integral micro-USB charger).
- thermodynthrway 8y agoBatteries have definitely gotten way cheaper over the years, making them usable despite their marginal energy density in things like cars.
- bdamm 8y agoI was going by rated MAh comparing RC batteries from the 80's to the best (rechargeable!) AA battery I can find today. "A brick" might be overstating it, but 10x by volume isn't. It's more like 6 C down to 1 AA.