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Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes triple the density of lithium batteries
- rini17 6y agoWow, if the coating is so cheap perhaps it can replace activated charcoal elsewhere, too. Would it also triple the capacity of water filters?
- MauranKilom 6y agoI'm not exactly sure you want carbon nanotubes in your water filter. They are mechanically very similar to asbestos and seem to likewise damage lung tissue. Probably better not to ingest them?
- rini17 6y agoBut the activated charcoal too contains all kinds of structures, including nanotubes. It's the filter construction that prevents them to end up in water (and they are much less dangerous in water than in air). If it can filter 3 times as much water before needing to be replaced, why not?
- sambe 6y agoReasons I'm suspicious: * article leads with "in production" but it sounds like they are still at the design phase. production of prototypes maybe? * they are doing a lot of "talking" and "partnering" but not so much selling mentioned. * they are "known for" their similar work in the ultra-capacitor market but the linked page's top comment is "still waiting for a product". * PR about raising funding and starting soon but not a lot of PR about actual products and results. Am I being too cynical - does anybody know if they are for real?
- me_me_me 6y ago"If its too good to be true..." Its healthy to be skeptical until an extraordinary is proven. Meanwhile can I interest you in investing in my hydrogen truck company called TeslaNikola? Its carbon free, costs close to nothing to run. We have a working prototype capable of going downhill.
- 6510 6y agoThe author probably doesn't know how we read articles like this. A wild discovery in it self is fun but one doesn't expect to see products (anymore/any-time-soon). Then towards the end he writes: "The company has moved past its pilot unit and now has a full production unit up and running" :o
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago> Am I being too cynical Nope, I don't think so; battery breakthroughs are reported (probably) several times a month, but what eventually becomes available to the consumer is more evolutionary than revolutionary; we've NEVER experienced a 2x jump in battery capacity for example, it's always been incremental. That said, I may need to take that back; this page (https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-ion-battery-cell-densities-have-almost-tripled-since-2010/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/19/bloombergnef-lithium-io...) seems to indicate that li-ion battery capacity seems to have doubled or tripled since 2010, while prices dropped by 87%.
- imtringued 6y agoThe rule of thumb is that battery density increases by roughly 8% per year. Expect this to go into production in 15 years.
- hinkley 6y agoOr a cheaper, more durable, but less efficient version in 10 years.
- rocqua 6y agoIF this is true, it would be a massive breakthrough. Truly monumental. Hence, I am skeptical. But otherwise, this would be a massive thing. a 2x capacity per weight advantage of batteries? Without an increase in space? That comes down to doubling the range of EVs, and making electric planes and rockets a lot more viable. A 3x capacity per space advantage means roughly a 3x improvement in your phone and laptop battery capacity. Or, more likely, a slight improvement in your phone and much thinner phones. On laptops, we might see the return of more ports. A 10x speedup of charging? That makes all-day EV travel a lot easier. It makes topping off your phone something you can do a minute at a time, rather than an hour long process. It means, with wireless earphones, you can re-charge them in a minute and almost never be without them. If even a third of what they claim here is possible, it would be amazing.
- sveme 6y agoWith the latest iphones, I already stopped night charging and just top it up whenever I'm close to a charger, i.e., in the car or in the kitchen.
- dontcarethrow2 6y agoBig if true, but I really don't need a thinner phone. Marketing will most likely salivate at an easy to break phone. Therefor I really hope this breakthrough is fake.
- Qwertious 6y agoI've seen iPhone ads advertising how hard to break they are recently, if that has a basis in reality and isn't purely marketing spin then we're fine.
- dTal 6y agoWhat exactly is an "electric rocket"?
- Qwertious 6y agoPresumably a rocket with a power source separated from its exhaust, and that flings its exhaust material out with an electrically-powered device. So basically think of a 'reverse railgun'.
- CarVac 6y agoA 3x capacity increase is huuuge but a >10x cost increase is prohibitive except for applications like aircraft.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoMedical devices, wireless headsets, phones, drones, various pro-grade cameras and gear - there are many devices where expensive batteries would still be economical. For some apllications, you need fixed amount of power, perhaps you could have 3 times less batties, at 3x the price. That frees up space and reduces weight.
- lostapathy 6y agoRight. Maybe not a good bargain for cars, but for a lot of things with tiny to small batteries it’d be well worth it.
- moron4hire 6y agoDepends on what proportion of the BOM the electrodes represent. If the electrodes are, say, 1% of the cost of making a battery, than a 1000% increase in the cost of the electrode only adds 9% to the cost of the battery.
- moftz 6y agoCost of manufacturing something like this can only go down and there are plenty of applications where mass or power output/battery life of a device is much more important than cost.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoWould somebody buy an IPhone with 1-week charge, if it was double the price? Probably.
- hinkley 6y agoDidn’t Maxwell Technologies already announce a similar breakthrough a few years ago, and isn’t that why Tesla bought them? Some patent lawyers are going to wake up to some good news today...
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoNanotubes? It admittedly has been a couple years since I checked in on nanotube production, but I found they will be cheap. Also, cycle endurance is paramount in a usable battery, did I miss that? High density batteries form dendrites when they discharge, gradually ruining the battery. The nanotube structure would probably help though. Anyway, need cell cost, vol and mass density, cycles, temp ranges, charge/discharge raye. Those make for a competitive battery.
- danmaz74 6y agoThe article mentions expected 5x durability for the reasons you mention. Even if it was just 2x, that would be great.
- cestith 6y agoI kind of wonder about how they're measuring durability. If it's by time, 5x is really good. If it's by number of charging cycles and it hold 3x as much power that's great.
- j3th9n 6y ago2018: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/scientists-say-new-material-can-triple-lithium-ion-battery-energy-density/525772/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/scientists-say-new-material...
- Qwertious 6y agoArticles like this is why I want a service which lets you "bookmark" the article and have it tell you whether it panned out a few years later. There's not much you can do here other than Defer Judgement yet again, at which point you'll have forgotten about it anyway.
- de_watcher 6y agoThe reddit RemindMe! bot.
- bamboozled 6y agoIf it pans out and is useful, I guess you will be using it by then ? Close too it anyway ?
- mhh__ 6y agoWhat you want is a piece of paper and google, no? I'm not being facetious, I find a piece of paper pinned proudly on my wall catches my eye better than yet more crap on my PC and/or phone.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y agoSave the article to pdf and attach it to a future calendar event?
- danmaz74 6y agoActually good article if you continue reading. Comment from an independent expert: "Research has shown vertically aligned – or even just well distributed – carbon nanotubes have far greater properties than randomly placed carbon nanotubes," said Dr. Shearer. "I am not surprised a x10 in conductivity is possible. Controlling the placement of carbon nanotubes is really the way to unlock their potential. The issue in commercialization is the cost associated with producing aligned carbon nanotubes. My guess is the cost would be much more than x10." Even if it was x10 the cost right now, I would expect that cost to go down a lot as the engineering gets better. Looks interesting.
- choeger 6y agoEven if the cost was x100 of the current technique, if you could double energy density you would find applications. Remember that this is just a part of the total cost of a battery.
- ashtonkem 6y agoRight, there are plenty of places now that would be willing to pay a premium for increased density. The airline industry comes to mind.
- newyankee 6y agoGiven that presumably Tesla's goal is to take battery costs down by 56% in 3 years from (108 - 140 $/kwh) to (50 - 70$/kwh) and widely held consensus is that 100$/kwh is the price point at which EVs are no brainer on upfront costs with ICE cars, i feel that there is a long way to go. However, i think any successful real world demo starting with niche applications will help. We need all the battery tech to succeed.
- DennisP 6y agoElectric airplanes need significantly better energy density.
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- randomly123 6y agoThese material science innovations takes tens of years to bring to the market - and they will take a lot of time again.
- samdung 6y agoBattery noob here: Will this achieve the energy density of fossil fuels? In other words, a 50 litre tank of petrol gets me around 500 km. What will a similar volume of these batteries get me?
- Cerium 6y agoNo, current batteries have about 1 percent the energy density of gasoline.
- pedrocr 6y agoNote that most of the energy in gasoline gets wasted as heat in a car, only a part gets used in winter to heat the cabin. So there's a factor of ~3 that you get back in that comparison. So the more comparable number is more like 3-4%. Still very low of course. The electric motors are also lighter than what creates equivalent power for gasoline so there's another small amount you recover there. ~5% is probably reasonable.
- 0xffff2 6y agoThere are additional factors that are application dependent. I'm not sure how much if affects road vehicles, but for aircraft that fact that fuel burns off, making the aircraft lighter as the tanks empty is a huge contributor to total range, so you would need to subtract some factor to account for the fact that batteries have a constant mass.
- mhh__ 6y agoNot even close, but that's not so bad. ICEs will probably always have their place but most people can go without, especially in Europe (Americans are very loud about how they need to drive 3000 miles to work everyday so I won't bother arguing that)
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- xutopia 6y agoI've yet to see these carbon nanothings on the market. It's been 10 years now that we hear about carbon revolutionizing everything and it never pans out.
- _fizz_buzz_ 6y agoIt's probably going to be like with AI. People talk about it for years and nothing substantial happens and then suddenly it takes off. I was working on AI around 2005 (we called it neural networks). There were no good libraries, the literature was difficult to understand and nothing really worked (at least I didn't get it to work). I was still a student and pretty disillusioned by the whole idea. A few years later the field took off and now it is ubiquitous.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI don't know, it seems like AI/ML are on the cusp of the "Trough of Disillusionment" themselves. And they've been talking about Graphene, Nano-tech since I was in high school.
- baq 6y agoit just stopped being AI. night mode camera on recent android and iphones were top of the line AI couple years ago. DLSS (deep learning super sampling) is allegedly borderline magic; it'll just be DLSS sometime next year. google translate and alpha zero are most definitely amazing AI. carbon nanotubes? yeah.
- stainforth 6y agoCan't we use AI to design carbon nano tube construction processes?
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- immmmmm 6y agoI had the opportunity to work in one of the world best nano technology lab. My supervisor once told me that he refused to work on nano-structured batteries for an obvious reason: These are impossible to recycle. Science these days is often more about the headline (even better if you do the cover of Science) and less about real (societal) benefits.
- ford_o 6y agoIt isn't obvious to me why would they be impossible to recycle.
- extropy 6y agoYeah, just burn it all, collect the volatiles. Actually no idea how battery recycling works.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoCarbon/silicon batteries would be pointless to recycle - ordinary environmental substances (sand and dirt). Just burn them or sequester them. So that's good news.
- demosito666 6y agoI haven't read the article and I have no intention to do it. I've been seeing breakthrough titles like this popping up every month for two decades now. It's not not worth the click unless lithium batteries are your hobby somehow.
- Verdex 6y agoCarbon nanotubes seem to be the real life version of chemical vat accidents or radiation exposure in comic books. I think they also fed some carbon nanotubes to a spider and managed to get stronger silk. Like what's going on here? I'm hoping that the scientists involved know what they are doing because from a layman perspective it just looks like carbon nanotubes can be added to anything to give it super powers.
- war1025 6y ago> carbon nanotubes can be added to anything to give it super powers. I am fairly certain the super power nanotubes give your lungs is cancer. Which is a super power in a way. But super-powered lungs tend not to function so well.
- robotnikman 6y agoYep. Inhaling carbon nanotubes has similar effects on the lungs as inhaling asbestos from what I've heard
- samatman 6y agoGraphene as well: there's a running gag that adding graphene makes everything better, except for products. So like every battery breakthrough that's ever been announced, I'll applaud, and then ignore it until I have one in my pocket. The lithium batteries we have right now are Goodenough, after all.
- ogre_codes 6y agoAm I the only one who gets halfway through this and gets bombed with malware pop-ups? In general I'm cynical about any big breakthroughs which aren't actually in production. Too many steps between the lab and manufacture. I'm not sure what their definition of "Production" is, but in my book production means it's in a customer's product on it's way to the end user. That's clearly not the case here. This all seems sketchy enough, the sketchy advertising just completely sinks it for me.
- Animats 6y agoBad headline. This increases power density, not energy density of lithium batteries, by decreasing internal resistance. That potentially increases charging speed. They claim by 10x. Car charging stations are going to need megawatt chargers if this works. They talk some about the possibility of future silicon batteries using this technology.
- reportingsjr 6y agoMegawatt car charging stations are already a thing. The Tesla V3 supercharges are a 1MW power source, but right now they split that between four charging ports. Battery power density is certainly going to continue increasing through a variety of means. It will be very interesting to see how these sort of power rates are handled safely via charging cables in the future!
- gpanders 6y agoWrong. From the article: > Also, because there's gaps in that ultra-lightweight nanotube scaffolding and less extraneous binder and additive materials, a battery containing a given amount of active material can become much, much lighter and more compact. Energy density, both by weight and by volume, stands to jump by factors of 2-3.
- aaronblohowiak 6y agoThere are both power and energy density increases!
- Animats 6y agoWe'll see. They ought to get the power increase, just from using something more conductive. The energy density increase looks like more of a maybe. This isn't the first company to claim carbon nanotube batteries.[1] [1] https://www.chasmtek.com/solutions/carbon-nanotube-lithium-ion-batteries https://www.chasmtek.com/solutions/carbon-nanotube-lithium-i...
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- LatteLazy 6y agoThe first person to manage to mass produce CNTs with any reliability around size, shape, resultant properties, alignment, distribution or really any quality will be a trillionaire...
- ggm 6y agoAnyone who cooks rigatoni pasta knows how to vertically align tubes.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThis sounds great. But I first heard of these guys last year around this time when they announced their "NAWACap Ultracapacitors" where you could get a 1000F capacitor with a .1 mOhm ESR @ 1kHz. That was when they announced they were in production. So I reached out to the various distributors I used and put in cash-ok sample request[1] for one. Not a peep in 10 months. It is entirely possible that someone came in and said, "We will buy every capacitor you can make for the foreseeable future." but that generally results in causing the manufacturer to ramp up capacity to maximize revenue until there is excess capacity :-). So what is the deal? Can they build stuff or are they a bunch of scientists who can get something working in the lab or one-off and fail miserably at making it a product? (They would be in good company to be sure if this were the case, just it helps to be a bit more forthright about.) The other argument against the hypothesis that someone is buying everything they build is that they have yet to show up in the Thomas register[2]. If their entire capacity was booked they would have quite the revenue stream. You can of course buy carbon nanotube arrays[3] made to order, the last time I checked (about 2 years ago) they were over $5,000 qty 1. So not something I'd make into a general availability product. But if the NAWA guys can actually print these sheets with no trouble at all maybe Aldrich could use them as a supplier and get the price down to something more accessible? I'm really interested in a reasonably high voltage (say 48V+ super capacitor in the 800 - 1000F range) even better if it weighs less than 50 lbs. But I've got a railgun out back that doesn't do squat without a 500kW power source. [1] Basically this is saying you're willing to pay list price for quantity 1 to get a sample, as opposed to demanding a free sample which involves lying about market opportunity :-) [2] https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/capacitor-manufacturers-suppliers/ https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/capacitor-m... These guys basically have teams of people trying to figure out where to get stuff, so they usually know who is actually shipping. [3] Get your own carbon nanotube array, 1 x 1 cm https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/687812?lang=en https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/687812?...
- ChikkaChiChi 6y agoWon't charging become an issue?
- k_sze 6y agoA bit off-topic, but when you think about it, it’s interesting how our vocabulary is shaped by gravity. I mean, why “vertically aligned” and not “horizontally aligned”, right? It’s not like the performance of the battery actually changes if you made it stand up or lie sideways. Why are we expected to picture “vertically aligned” as |||, but “horizontally aligned” as ——, right? Could we have used different wording that is not influenced by our superfluous spatial perception?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWe want words to communicate, not to abstract robots or something, but to people. Shared experience helps with that. Gravity is a universally shared human experience. So we use words with that bias without even thinking. Should we change? Why? They communicate, which is the point of words.
- filoeleven 6y agoI’m excited for new battery tech, almost entirely due to my niche interest in powered paragliding. Electric paramotors require a lot less maintenance than their gas-powered counterparts, which need servicing after every 10 hours of flight. I’d love to buy one, but I am not interested in becoming a two-stroke mechanic. One of the big names in the sport has said that his only reservation to recommending electrics is their flight time, currently about 45 minutes vs 1.5 hours for gas. This advance, assuming these motors use lithium batteries, which I haven’t checked, bumps them up to 2h 15m on one charge and makes them more compelling. I thought I’d have to wait a decade to get this kind of gain, so this is pretty awesome news.