3 ms·
Key numbers: They doubled Wh/kg from about 280 to about 500. I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reac
by mg 4y ago
Key numbers: They doubled Wh/kg from about 280 to about 500.
I assume that thinking about battery capacity form first principles, the theoretical limit is reached when the charged battery consists of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, right?
Then during discharge, the reaction between the two would turn the matter/antimatter into energy.
How would that stack up against the 500Wh/kg stated here?
Update:
Did a bit of googling (Note to my future self: AI was still bad at math in 2023): Looks like 1kg of mass cointains about 25x10^9 Wh.
So if the above assumptions are right, we still have 8 orders of magnitude to go. An electric car with an optimal battery could go 100,000,000 times further on a single charge than the current ones.
- budoso 4y agoit’d be quite a bit better
- atleastoptimal 4y agoprobably better
- dojomouse 4y agoNo. That wouldn’t be a battery by any meaningful definition, nor have any similarities in implementation or enabling technology or physics. But it would deliver 24 trillion wh/kg… so by that metric at least we’ve room to progress :-)
- inasio 4y agoRidiculously higher. One gram of matter converted to energy (matter-antimatter annihilation assumed to be 100% efficient) yields, using E = mc^2 and 3.6x10^6 Joules per Kilowatt-hour, 25 million Kilowatt-hours
- asdfman123 4y agoA unit containing matter and antimatter isn’t a battery, it’s a completely different thing altogether. Maybe a slightly closer but still very different example would be a core of weapons grade plutonium. But what you’ve described would be far more powerful than that.
- Moldoteck 4y agowell, maybe if we'll get batteries with uranium/plutonium, we may get closer to that capacity/performance, but I guess it's a long road to there)
- tuatoru 4y agoWhat's needed is direct matter to energy conversion. That avoids the mass penalty of the containment structures for that inconvenient antimatter. Or, just tap into the zero point energy of empty space.