‘Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries,’ researcher says
Breakthrough battery charges in minutes and lasts thousands of cycles::‘Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries,’ researcher says
A cool thing to do is to go on a site like GSMArena and follow the battery capacity over time of a particular line of phone (you can adjust for phone weight and volume if you want). It'll steadily go up.
In 2010 most phone batteries were 1000-1500mAh. Even something like 2000mAh was a huge battery.
In 2015, phone batteries were up to 2500-3000mAh.
In 2020, they were up to 4000-4500mAh. 5000mAh was considered a big battery.
Now, we are commonly seeing 5000-5500mAh batteries in mainstream phones, enabling most phones to get 12-14 hours of battery life (when new).
Those 90 stories you’ve seen generally did all ship. Just three decades ago lithium batteries stored about 80Wh per kg. These days it’s around 600Wh per kg and our progress has been particularly rapid lately.
Durability, safety and charge speeds have also all been improving. Oh and costs are coming down dramatically as well.
Ignore the “present” line on this chart as it’s an old one:
Battery news is pretty world changing so I understand whybit gets the same kind of attention miracle health advancements get. Unfortunately the hardest part remains making a commercially viable product but that said even finding new techniques that may not make it to market still advance the field further and expand our understanding.
Admittedly it's been awhile since I've raw dogged the Internet. I'm traveling without my usual pihole. How does anyone do without ad blockers? Reading that was like trying to read an article surrounded by times square billboards. "Support our journalism, turn off your add blocker". My ass
No idea but you can use Firefox mobile and uBlock origin in conjunction with switching your DNS to one that blocks ads. There's also software that modifies your DNS locally.
I have AdGuard set up at home and OpenVPN so I can connect to my home network and route all my traffic through it. Gives the same ad blocking ability but without the need to travel with it.
Can I ask why you’ve taken this approach? I understand why you would use AdGuard at home, but couldn’t you just also use it on your phone/laptop as well when you are away?
Wouldn’t using the VPN to your home network just add extra latency? Or is there some benefit that I’m not aware of?
Capacitors don’t store enough power. They work well in trains where they can be charged continuously with overhead power lines/etc, and a lot of battery EVs have a small capacitor as part of their regen braking system… but if you want to actually store a large amount of power capacitors can’t do it (yet?).
Interface reaction between lithium (Li) and materials at the anode is not well understood in an all-solid environment. This paper unveils a new phenomenon of constriction susceptibility for materials at such an interface, the utilization of which helps facilitate the design of an active three-dimensional scaffold to host rapid plating and stripping of a significant amount of a thick Li metal layer. Here we focus on the well-known anode material silicon (Si) to demonstrate that, rather than strong Li–Si alloying at the conventional solid–liquid interface, the lithiation reaction of micrometre-sized Si can be significantly constricted at the solid–solid interface so that it occurs only at thin surface sites of Si particles due to a reaction-induced, diffusion-limiting process. The dynamic interaction between surface lithiation and Li plating of a family of anode materials, as predicted by our constrained ensemble computational approach and represented by Si, silver (Ag) and alloys of magnesium (Mg), can thus more homogeneously distribute current densities for the rapid cycling of Li metal at high areal capacity, which is important in regard to solid-state battery application.
The research team behind the novel design, who are based at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in the US, claim their solid-state cell could revolutionise electric cars and smartphones by significantly increasing their range and capacity while simultaneously reducing charging times.
“Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries because they have 10 times the capacity of commercial graphite anodes and could drastically increase the driving distance of electric vehicles,” said Xin Li, an associate professor of materials science at SEAS.
“Our research is an important step toward more practical solid state batteries for industrial and commercial applications.”
Their research focussed on lithium metal anode batteries, which have vastly superior capacities but until now have proved too unstable for practical use.
Charging this type of battery can result in them shorting or even catching fire due to a process called plating.
Since making their discovery, Professor Li and his team have licensed the technology through a Harvard spinoff company called Adden Energy in the hope of commercialising it.
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We'll have a battery that will be thousands of times more energy dense that what we have today. The tech industry will make those the size of a rice grain so we can have thinner products and the exact same battery life of electronics today. 😑