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"Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions" It's 10 times

"Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions" It's 10 times more everything, just like every other battery breakthrough in the last several decades. AND, you get to use it as a building material? - Sounds too good to be true: Check - Sounds like every other "big" breakthrough: Check - Article light on science and heavy on assertions: Check - Skepticism engaged: Check

callesgg 6y ago
Presumably that should be read: Better than previous “massless battery’s”. “... produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions”
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  I recommend people read the article, it actually has some information. More info: "The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available. But since the weight of the vehicles can be greatly reduced, less energy will be required to drive an electric car, for example" "the researchers did not choose the materials to try and break records – rather, they wanted to investigate and understand the effects of material architecture and separator thickness." - this implies there may be a lot of room for improvement with this design.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    then the question becomes how are they solving for the increased heat.
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      In increased surface area-to-mass ratio would probably make this easier.
      - ThomPete 6y ago
        Which makes it heavier no?
        TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        No. A rectangular block of a typical battery has a much lower surface area-to-mass ratio than a tube, even if their weights are the same. It's why cooling fins on a CPU are long and skinny. Such length and skinniness makes heat dissipation much easier.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        But if the energy density is higher wouldn't you need more material to cool down the area?
- m463 6y ago
  Add a qualifier and you can claim almost anything! The Fastest Sports car! [1] [1] with a 3.2-liter horizontally opposed flat 6-cylinder engine
  - rzwitserloot 6y ago
    Indeed. From the perspective of battery chemistry technology this paper is utterly unremarkable. But then that's not what it is about. The breakthrough is (oversimplifying here) that they invented a way to whack a bog-standard smartphone battery into the middle of a bunch of layers of building material, such that about 20% of the weight of the end product is battery, whilst the material is still strong enough to not cause a Samsung Galaxy Note style oopsie when structurally compromised, and to be strong enough to build with, and to have some of the mass of the battery improve the structural integrity of the whole, even. The idea being: Take your tesla. Take the batteries out. Smash em to paste. Remove ~20% of the atoms from the chassis materials and replace them with your paste. Voila - made your car 20% lighter.
    - m463 6y ago
      btw, tesla is already doing that in production now. They have a new structural battery, although no carbon fiber yet. I think there might be lots more low hanging fruit, their cars weigh quite a bit.
teekert 6y ago
For me has gotten down to this: "New" and "Battery" in title => Don't read, not worth enthusiasm.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Yet we have had massive increases in battery performance over the last couple decades.
mromanuk 6y ago
It's surprising how all breakthroughs are precisely, always, 10 times better. Let's wait until a HN battery expert tell us
- k__ 6y ago
  Maybe nobody does research on tech that isn't at least 10 times better than the stuff we already have?
  - mratzloff 6y ago
    A 2x increase for battery storage would be game changing for a wide variety of use cases. Electric vehicles, industrial applications...
    - xbmcuser 6y ago
      Battery tech is improving at around 10% a year. Lithium Battery density has tippled in the last 10 years people on hacker news like to comment on how new battery technology has not done anything but since those comments started a decade ago battery density has trippled. 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...
      - tartoran 6y ago
        If it's improving at a rate of 10% per year, a 2x would take 4-5 years to achieve so a 2X is really a good improvement. I wonder where we'd be right now had we not gone the ICE route.
  - xbmcuser 6y ago
    Reality is most new technologies need to be 10 times better to get investment. Otherwise it is generally assumed that by the time new technology gets into production the older tech will still have cost advantage. This is the main reason why we need government investments for unprofitable research.
ok123456 6y ago
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I know what my next (self) carved den plaque is going to say now.
michaelbuckbee 6y ago
I wonder if the switch from Nickel Cadmium to Lithium Ion batteries was also hyped the same way (my google fu is failing me). But even there, I feel like you can't just sum things up and say "LiIon are 10x better than Nickel Cadmium" there's a whole range of requirements.
raducu 6y ago
I couldn't find anything about net inprovement over "massfull" batteries.
eganist 6y ago
In reality, it's 5x worse than current LiIon tech(from the same article): > The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available. But since the weight of the vehicles can be greatly reduced, less energy will be required to drive an electric car, for example, and lower energy density also results in increased safety. And with a stiffness of 25 GPa, the structural battery can really compete with many other commonly used construction materials. This seems a bit more believable. Whether it'll actually be used in that manner is to be seen, but this seems more down to earth. And while the article seems to put emphasis on using it to save weight, it's probably more effective to use it to add capacity while maintaining weight.
- Animats 6y ago
  For a Tesla Model 3, the vehicle is about 1600Kg with battery, and the battery is about 500Kg. The battery is heavy, but less than a third of the vehicle weight. Aircraft, though... Aircraft already have "wet wings", which are fuel tanks. If the battery provided some of the wing's structural strength, that might work. Probably worth trying in military drones first.
rzwitserloot 6y ago
It may really be 10x, but you've mischaracterized what the paper is claiming a 10x breakthrough for. In fairness, the linked article is light on the specifics. The claim is: __This battery holds 10x more charge per kilo of material than previous attempts at STRUCTURAL (massless) battery materials__. To be specific, this material holds only _ONE FIFTH_ the charge of what your smartphone's battery can hold per kilo of battery. No laws of thermodynamics is being broken and this is not at all about battery chemistry. It's all about the 'physics' of construction materials: About how this stuff is made in the factory and layered. The basic battery chemistry going on is not much different from what's been available for years - the interesting part is how this material encases it. You can't make a car by building the chassis out of smartphone batteries. But the promise of this paper is that you CAN build the car chassis out of this battery, and even if this battery is only 20% as effective, a car chassis is rather large, and you needed it anyway, so every drop of power you can store in the chassis itself was effectively 'free' - hence the somewhat hyperbolous 'massless' terminology.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Hopefully it'll be easy to repair. I'd hate to replace entire chassis because of light collision.
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    If your fender bender short-circuited your battery and ignited it, you might need a wee bit more than just a new chassis. (This is not a claim that the batteries described in the article are a fire hazard - I don't know)
    - bbarnett 6y ago
      A mechanic working on a car, with enough juice to fry him, and no way to separate the battery from car? I guess a full discharge first. But what about your accident, and the jaws of life? Will they conduct? Will the wrenched apart car have conductive edges?
michaelt 6y ago
> It's 10 times more everything, just like every other battery breakthrough in the last several decades. Has the article been changed since you posted this comment? Because the article I've seen was pretty clear: "Its multifunctional performance is ten times higher than previous structural battery prototypes. [...] The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available." A battery strong enough to be a structural component, at the cost of 80% of its capacity-per-unit-weight, doesn't sound so hard to believe.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
Even the term "massless" is kind of silly. "Structural" should be sufficiently descriptive as most people can infer that if you build the structure out of the material you don't incur any ADDITIONAL weight penalty for the battery (assuming the mass/strength characteristics of the battery are similar to other structural material).
jlg23 6y ago
The article explicitly states that is comparing against other prototypes of massless storage, and that energy density is 20% of lithium ion batteries. It then goes on to explain why they still think it is a breakthrough.
gameswithgo 6y ago
You didn't read the article carefully. One of the things it mentions is that it is 20% less energy dense than lithium ion. Sounds terrible, but the upside is you make the car chassis out of battery, so you haven't added weight to it. The net result could be very good, or maybe they need to work on it and improve on the 20%. Going further with the battery news cynicism idea, batteries have steadily improved over the last 50 years, to an amazing degrees, because of steady breakthroughs causing small improvements. It is why we can have iphones and tesla today.
- tromp 6y ago
  5x less dense is 80% less dense.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    "5x less" would be "x - 5x" or -4x, which of course is nonsense as density can't be negative. "5x as sparse" works if you define sparsity as the inverse of density.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Don't be so weirdly picky. "times less" is division.
      - nybble41 6y ago
        Which inconsistency do you prefer? • "90% less than x" does not equal "10% of x" • "90%" does not equal "0.9 times" • "0.9 times less" means multiplication and subtraction (x - 0.9x) but "1.1 times less" means division (x / 1.1) This is one of those cases where we know from the context what was meant but that isn't the same as what was said. Normalizing this abuse of language introduces unnecessary special cases and discontinuities for readers/listeners to deal with and creates ambiguity in situations where one of the two interpretations is not so obviously wrong as it is here. It's better to keep the rules simple: ratios, percentages and "times" always involve multiplication by the original value, and "more" and "less" refer to addition and subtraction. There should be a deterministic 1:1 correspondence between the phrasing and the formula.
briangerman 6y ago
Yeah if its not from this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough then its not good enough.
macspoofing 6y ago
I understand your skepticism (or maybe cynicism). These kinds of articles have been coming out for years. Usually it's some research group in some University that improved on some narrow aspect of the particular part of material science they focus on and then wildly extrapolate the benefits (with the help of media) ... like here where they say: "Super light electric bikes and consumer electronics could soon be a reality" ... I'm sure this 'COULD' be a reality. Will it though?
pizzazzaro 6y ago
Dont forget, it the battery still needs replacing eventually. Oh, its in the structure of the device? Well that sucks. Talk about planned obsolesence.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Seems like making it part of the mass of the car results in a lot of waste when the car is eventually retired as it would probably be hard to separate anything recyclable.
jxramos 6y ago
"heavy on assertions", I'm going to remember that one. That's a good bottom line characterization to ask oneself.
- mcswell 6y ago
  I'll re-write it so it's 20% lighter on assertions.
davesque 6y ago
Also, "ten times better than all previous versions." So how good were the previous versions?
chovybizzass 6y ago
is this an appril fool's joke?

callesgg 6y ago

Presumably that should be read: Better than previous “massless battery’s”. “... produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions”

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
I recommend people read the article, it actually has some information. More info: "The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available. But since the weight of the vehicles can be greatly reduced, less energy will be required to drive an electric car, for example" "the researchers did not choose the materials to try and break records – rather, they wanted to investigate and understand the effects of material architecture and separator thickness." - this implies there may be a lot of room for improvement with this design.
- ThomPete 6y ago
  then the question becomes how are they solving for the increased heat.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    In increased surface area-to-mass ratio would probably make this easier.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      Which makes it heavier no?
      - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        No. A rectangular block of a typical battery has a much lower surface area-to-mass ratio than a tube, even if their weights are the same. It's why cooling fins on a CPU are long and skinny. Such length and skinniness makes heat dissipation much easier.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        But if the energy density is higher wouldn't you need more material to cool down the area?
m463 6y ago
Add a qualifier and you can claim almost anything! The Fastest Sports car! [1] [1] with a 3.2-liter horizontally opposed flat 6-cylinder engine
- rzwitserloot 6y ago
  Indeed. From the perspective of battery chemistry technology this paper is utterly unremarkable. But then that's not what it is about. The breakthrough is (oversimplifying here) that they invented a way to whack a bog-standard smartphone battery into the middle of a bunch of layers of building material, such that about 20% of the weight of the end product is battery, whilst the material is still strong enough to not cause a Samsung Galaxy Note style oopsie when structurally compromised, and to be strong enough to build with, and to have some of the mass of the battery improve the structural integrity of the whole, even. The idea being: Take your tesla. Take the batteries out. Smash em to paste. Remove ~20% of the atoms from the chassis materials and replace them with your paste. Voila - made your car 20% lighter.
  - m463 6y ago
    btw, tesla is already doing that in production now. They have a new structural battery, although no carbon fiber yet. I think there might be lots more low hanging fruit, their cars weigh quite a bit.

teekert 6y ago

For me has gotten down to this: "New" and "Battery" in title => Don't read, not worth enthusiasm.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Yet we have had massive increases in battery performance over the last couple decades.

mromanuk 6y ago

It's surprising how all breakthroughs are precisely, always, 10 times better. Let's wait until a HN battery expert tell us

k__ 6y ago
Maybe nobody does research on tech that isn't at least 10 times better than the stuff we already have?
- mratzloff 6y ago
  A 2x increase for battery storage would be game changing for a wide variety of use cases. Electric vehicles, industrial applications...
  - xbmcuser 6y ago
    Battery tech is improving at around 10% a year. Lithium Battery density has tippled in the last 10 years people on hacker news like to comment on how new battery technology has not done anything but since those comments started a decade ago battery density has trippled. 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...
    - tartoran 6y ago
      If it's improving at a rate of 10% per year, a 2x would take 4-5 years to achieve so a 2X is really a good improvement. I wonder where we'd be right now had we not gone the ICE route.
- xbmcuser 6y ago
  Reality is most new technologies need to be 10 times better to get investment. Otherwise it is generally assumed that by the time new technology gets into production the older tech will still have cost advantage. This is the main reason why we need government investments for unprofitable research.

ok123456 6y ago

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
I know what my next (self) carved den plaque is going to say now.

michaelbuckbee 6y ago

I wonder if the switch from Nickel Cadmium to Lithium Ion batteries was also hyped the same way (my google fu is failing me). But even there, I feel like you can't just sum things up and say "LiIon are 10x better than Nickel Cadmium" there's a whole range of requirements.

raducu 6y ago

I couldn't find anything about net inprovement over "massfull" batteries.

eganist 6y ago

In reality, it's 5x worse than current LiIon tech(from the same article): > The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available. But since the weight of the vehicles can be greatly reduced, less energy will be required to drive an electric car, for example, and lower energy density also results in increased safety. And with a stiffness of 25 GPa, the structural battery can really compete with many other commonly used construction materials. This seems a bit more believable. Whether it'll actually be used in that manner is to be seen, but this seems more down to earth. And while the article seems to put emphasis on using it to save weight, it's probably more effective to use it to add capacity while maintaining weight.

Animats 6y ago
For a Tesla Model 3, the vehicle is about 1600Kg with battery, and the battery is about 500Kg. The battery is heavy, but less than a third of the vehicle weight. Aircraft, though... Aircraft already have "wet wings", which are fuel tanks. If the battery provided some of the wing's structural strength, that might work. Probably worth trying in military drones first.

rzwitserloot 6y ago

It may really be 10x, but you've mischaracterized what the paper is claiming a 10x breakthrough for. In fairness, the linked article is light on the specifics. The claim is: __This battery holds 10x more charge per kilo of material than previous attempts at STRUCTURAL (massless) battery materials__. To be specific, this material holds only _ONE FIFTH_ the charge of what your smartphone's battery can hold per kilo of battery. No laws of thermodynamics is being broken and this is not at all about battery chemistry. It's all about the 'physics' of construction materials: About how this stuff is made in the factory and layered. The basic battery chemistry going on is not much different from what's been available for years - the interesting part is how this material encases it. You can't make a car by building the chassis out of smartphone batteries. But the promise of this paper is that you CAN build the car chassis out of this battery, and even if this battery is only 20% as effective, a car chassis is rather large, and you needed it anyway, so every drop of power you can store in the chassis itself was effectively 'free' - hence the somewhat hyperbolous 'massless' terminology.

vbezhenar 6y ago
Hopefully it'll be easy to repair. I'd hate to replace entire chassis because of light collision.
- gmueckl 6y ago
  If your fender bender short-circuited your battery and ignited it, you might need a wee bit more than just a new chassis. (This is not a claim that the batteries described in the article are a fire hazard - I don't know)
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    A mechanic working on a car, with enough juice to fry him, and no way to separate the battery from car? I guess a full discharge first. But what about your accident, and the jaws of life? Will they conduct? Will the wrenched apart car have conductive edges?

michaelt 6y ago

> It's 10 times more everything, just like every other battery breakthrough in the last several decades. Has the article been changed since you posted this comment? Because the article I've seen was pretty clear: "Its multifunctional performance is ten times higher than previous structural battery prototypes. [...] The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available." A battery strong enough to be a structural component, at the cost of 80% of its capacity-per-unit-weight, doesn't sound so hard to believe.

DebtDeflation 6y ago

Even the term "massless" is kind of silly. "Structural" should be sufficiently descriptive as most people can infer that if you build the structure out of the material you don't incur any ADDITIONAL weight penalty for the battery (assuming the mass/strength characteristics of the battery are similar to other structural material).

jlg23 6y ago

The article explicitly states that is comparing against other prototypes of massless storage, and that energy density is 20% of lithium ion batteries. It then goes on to explain why they still think it is a breakthrough.

gameswithgo 6y ago

You didn't read the article carefully. One of the things it mentions is that it is 20% less energy dense than lithium ion. Sounds terrible, but the upside is you make the car chassis out of battery, so you haven't added weight to it. The net result could be very good, or maybe they need to work on it and improve on the 20%. Going further with the battery news cynicism idea, batteries have steadily improved over the last 50 years, to an amazing degrees, because of steady breakthroughs causing small improvements. It is why we can have iphones and tesla today.

tromp 6y ago
5x less dense is 80% less dense.
- nybble41 6y ago
  "5x less" would be "x - 5x" or -4x, which of course is nonsense as density can't be negative. "5x as sparse" works if you define sparsity as the inverse of density.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Don't be so weirdly picky. "times less" is division.
    - nybble41 6y ago
      Which inconsistency do you prefer? • "90% less than x" does not equal "10% of x" • "90%" does not equal "0.9 times" • "0.9 times less" means multiplication and subtraction (x - 0.9x) but "1.1 times less" means division (x / 1.1) This is one of those cases where we know from the context what was meant but that isn't the same as what was said. Normalizing this abuse of language introduces unnecessary special cases and discontinuities for readers/listeners to deal with and creates ambiguity in situations where one of the two interpretations is not so obviously wrong as it is here. It's better to keep the rules simple: ratios, percentages and "times" always involve multiplication by the original value, and "more" and "less" refer to addition and subtraction. There should be a deterministic 1:1 correspondence between the phrasing and the formula.

briangerman 6y ago

Yeah if its not from this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough then its not good enough.

macspoofing 6y ago

I understand your skepticism (or maybe cynicism). These kinds of articles have been coming out for years. Usually it's some research group in some University that improved on some narrow aspect of the particular part of material science they focus on and then wildly extrapolate the benefits (with the help of media) ... like here where they say: "Super light electric bikes and consumer electronics could soon be a reality" ... I'm sure this 'COULD' be a reality. Will it though?

pizzazzaro 6y ago

Dont forget, it the battery still needs replacing eventually. Oh, its in the structure of the device? Well that sucks. Talk about planned obsolesence.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Seems like making it part of the mass of the car results in a lot of waste when the car is eventually retired as it would probably be hard to separate anything recyclable.

jxramos 6y ago

"heavy on assertions", I'm going to remember that one. That's a good bottom line characterization to ask oneself.

mcswell 6y ago
I'll re-write it so it's 20% lighter on assertions.

davesque 6y ago

Also, "ten times better than all previous versions." So how good were the previous versions?

chovybizzass 6y ago

is this an appril fool's joke?