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Lithium morphology discovery could lead to safer lithium-metal batteries
- timerol 3y ago> But the UCLA investigators developed a technique that prevents that corrosion and showed that, in its absence, lithium atoms assemble into a surprising shape—the rhombic dodecahedron, a 12-sided figure similar to the dice used in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. I've never seen a rhombic dodecahedron d12 before. They do exist after a quick search, but the much more common d12 is just a dodecahedron, with pentagonal faces.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoThey're not common, but you can get them https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/rhombic-d12-dice https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/rhombic-d12-dice
- jareklupinski 3y agothese look like someones trying to play a perspective trick on me how are they not the common/normal d12s
- sethhochberg 3y agoCount the edges of each flat face - five on a normal d12, four on this one
- jareklupinski 3y agoah i meant "how are they not" incredulously, as in these should be the ones endorsed by the creators i've always had a hard time differentiating between a d12 and its neighbors at a glance, but this would make it clearly stand out from the other shapes
- akomtu 3y agoIs it the shape of lithium's electron shell?
- lightedman 3y agoIt is the crystalline shape of pure lithium metal which is shown.
- dylan604 3y agoaren't shells just these vague clouds where an electron "might" be?
- colechristensen 3y agoNo. Shells are rather precise representations of the wavelike properties of electrons as they exist bound in atoms. Electrons are neither exactly waves or particles, they have properties of both. If you try to interact with an electrons’ particle like properties you tend to get particles, when you try to inject with electrons’ wavelike properties you tend to get waves. The dual nature can be hard to say just right and communicate. The math of what’s going on describes it extremely well… the “this is what’s actually going on” descriptions are more like metaphorical stories because on a human scale quantum objects just don’t exist.
- akomtu 3y agoOn this dual nature, can it be that the electron cloud is the electron itself? i.e. it's not a point-like particle that jumps around, but it's the probability function itself, that upon interaction with another cloud-particle may shrink into a tiny ball-like cloud, but never a point. In atoms, electrons interact in such a way that they assume curious drum-like shapes, but when they are set free somewhere in the interstellar space, the same electron will be a gigantic planet-size, albeit very thin, cloud. Edit: continuing this speculation, in the double-slit experiment an electron passes thru both slits, then shrinks into an atom-size cloud upon contact with the screen, and a "weak measurement" would be a way to slightly disturb the shape of the electron, to correspondingly disturb the shape of the detector.
- puffyengineer 3y ago[dead]
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThe researchers are looking into "leveraging Li rhombic dodecahedra as nucleation seeds, enabling the subsequent growth of dense Li that improves battery performance compared with a baseline" [1]. Does that means being able to run a more-conventional manufacturing process once you have the seeds? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06235-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06235-w
- ChuckMcM 3y agoPossibly, I was looking at it thinking they were going for seeding the re-crystallization process during recharging in order to avoid dendrites and maintain cell energy density. I find it is often hard to deduce exactly where they are thinking of applying this due to the incredible competition around patenting and rechargeable battery ideas. (electrolytes, electrode configurations, etc). I've gotten to the point where I search patent applications with the lead authors names in them to get better clarity on why the author thinks they have made a breakthrough :-)
- porsager 3y agoSeems the artwork i did, for my friends research, that got the cover on "Advanced Energy Materials" wasn't quite right? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/16146840/2012/2/3 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/16146840/2012/2/3 Crazy that it's over 10 years ago he made a material with so huge gains, and nothing has come of it yet. Scaling really is hard!
- whimsicalism 3y agoI’ve read this comment three times and cannot understand it
- pvaldes 3y ago> I’ve read this comment three times and cannot understand it 1) He did a nice paint for a journal cover showing the Lithium morphology ten years ago. 2) Good research is slow. Requiring ten years from initial crawls and mistakes to reaching the market is not uncommon.
- whimsicalism 3y agoThank you. Yeah it was the first sentence in particular I was struggling with
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- willprice89 3y ago> "Now that we know the shape of lithium, the question is, Can we tune it so that it forms cubes, which can be packed in densely to increase both the safety and performance of batteries?" Is the idea that they would stack the dodecahedrons into an approximate cube shape, or can they tweak the synthesis so that lithium cubes are deposited directly?
- rtkwe 3y agoThe latter. Though you can pack rhombic dodecahedrons with 100% efficiency I doubt you could get them to grow that way at an industrial scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_dodecahedral_honeycomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_dodecahedral_honeycomb
- lazide 3y agoDepends on the economic value - we grow monocrystaline silicon at large scale now, for instance.
- rtkwe 3y agoSilicon has an inherently cubic crystalline structure and is way less reactive compared to lithium both of which help a lot. Maybe we could figure out monocrystalline lithium but the structure is a lot less forgiving.
- cubefox 3y agoNext: The Shape of Water
- annadane 3y agoI laughed
- jug 3y agoI enjoy the fact that the study’s author is named Yuzhang Li.
- pishpash 3y ago"It was surprising for us to discover that when we prevented surface corrosion, instead of these ill-defined shapes, we saw a singular polyhedron that matches theoretical predictions based on the metal's crystal structure." Why is it surprising that it matches theoretical predictions? So people knew the true shape of lithium in the first place.
- lazide 3y agoIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are (usually) not. And there are lots of theories, often incompatible. It’s nice when one of them actually pans out and has positive benefits, as it helps show a potentially useful direction to continue in.
- mrichman 3y agoWe've never been so close to dilithium crystals. `2(5)6 dilithium 2(:)l diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide` for the uninitiated.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- msie 3y agoA while ago, I saw that someone developed a really safe lithium battery that can be cut and pierced and yet not explode. Whatever happened to that???
- pengaru 3y agolithium iron phosphate perhaps? it's in widespread use...
- p1mrx 3y agoMatt Parker has made a few videos on the rhombic dodecahedron. This one is the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ7uOj2LRso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ7uOj2LRso