A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/a-glass-battery-that-keeps-getting-better

by jonbaer • 7 years ago

198 55 7 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

kuu• 7 years ago

We need better batteries, this seems promising!

forgotAgain• 7 years ago

Original source has a question mark at the end of the title.

JoeAltmaier• 7 years ago

Lighter weight and cheaper. So both for transportation AND grid storage? A good direction.

Darkphibre• 7 years ago

“The BMS is to control temperatures,” she says. “In our case, we don’t have to have that.” In fact, she adds, up to a point, rising temperatures only increase the electrolyte’s performance.

No need for the stainless steel bunkers to isolate cells. This IS an important breakthrough (if verified).

phkahler• 7 years ago

BMS Is also to balance charge in a string of cells. Also, I thought this material was actually heavier per kWh the last time it showed up here.

srfilipek2• 7 years ago

thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over many charge-discharge cycles.

Well that's just nonsense.

Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.

ElKrist• 7 years ago

I see what you mean (entropy always increases is valid only in a closed system assumption). But didn't you mean "claiming that entropy must increase" instead of "decrease" in your sentence?

srfilipek2• 7 years ago

Whoops, you're right.

rconti• 7 years ago

I almost feel like this is a straw man to make this controversial. I don't see why anyone, even a layman, would say this.

zamalek• 7 years ago

even a layman

Agreed. As far as I remember, the chemical batteries in phones circa 2005 behaved like this: you'd get gradually improving battery life over the first few cycles and then start to experience normal battery deterioration.

So long as nature is paid back its entropy in full it seems to be happy.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

A false "entropy of matter natural law" argument used to be forwarded by "evolution debunkers." Richard Dawkins debunked this fake natural law with a thought exercise involving an hourglass with water in one chamber and salt in the other. You can tilt the hourglass to mix the salt and water in one chamber, but if you sit the device in the sun, such that the sun shines on the full chamber, you will eventually see the hourglass return to a state where water is in one chamber and salt is in the other.

wolfi1• 7 years ago

there is some critique on previous papers[1] I would wait for an update from this blog to actually assess if these claims can hold water

[1] http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery-part-2/

mikeatlas• 7 years ago

what if their claims only hold energy?

ketralnis• 7 years ago

Then we still won't have our water batteries with water density better than that of a bucket

klyrs• 7 years ago

Headline is misleading. The battery has a brief burn-in period where it gets better.

They also published a graph that showed an increase in capacity over more than 300 charge-discharge cycles. (This increase, however, pales in comparison to the cell's at least 23,000-cycle lifespan.)

And once they dig into details, the "apparent increase of entropy" is further exposed as bait. Sounds pretty credible, and not controversial

She says their glass electrolyte is a ferroelectric material—a material whose polarization switches back and forth in the presence of an outside field. So charge-discharge cycles are effectively jiggling the electrolyte back and forth and perhaps, over time, finding the ideal configuration of each electromagnetic dipole.
“This is what happens as you are charging and discharging,” Braga says. “You are aligning the ferroelectric dipoles.”

ummonk• 7 years ago

Right, nothing surprising about having a break-in period.

gnode• 7 years ago

This sounds similar to the concept of self-healing materials. Such materials aren't necessarily at full health (optimal structure) following manufacture, so could expect to see improvements through use.

Some materials and devices also benefit from being broken-in; where properties which impede utility are degraded more rapidly than properties which positively contribute to it.

m4632• 7 years ago

I thought of concrete vibrators. (probably not the best analogy though)

When people pour concrete they get a certain strength out of it. But if they vibrate it, air and excess water gets removed, and the concrete aligns together to become more cohesive.

xhgdvjky• 7 years ago

I think this is a great analogy since air bubbles are easier (for me) to imagine than the polarity of particles

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

The really important bit, comparison to lithium ion:

She did say that large battery banks that might be spun off from this research stand to not only have higher capacity, but also be substantially lighter than lithium ions. Although, she adds, perhaps the greatest weight savings will come not from comparing one battery cell's mass with another. “The biggest difference would be that you don’t have to have the same stainless steel bunkers in each of the cells,” she says.

Not flammable is a big deal in battery tech. We try to pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller cells, so continuing to improve the capacity makes inadvertently releasing all that energy even more dangerous.

Here's another cool project working on that problem with a solid polymer electrolyte. Video shows it continuing to provide power while being sliced into pieces with scissors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik

agumonkey• 7 years ago

I'd love to know what's wrong with the polymer electrolyte, the demo is so amazing..

simcop2387• 7 years ago

Can't find any details myself but the usual issue is energy density or number of charge cycles.

mycall2• 7 years ago

I would think glass is easy to break under heavy vibration or worse. How is that concern handled?

ricardobeat• 7 years ago

Haven’t read the paper, but it seems to use glass powder.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

Can we make the battery transparent and hook an oled to the back?

lostlogin• 7 years ago

Jonny Ive would you this to go thinner.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

If it is nonflammable I wonder what its failure mode would be and how it could be triggered and what counter measures are needed if any.

If it has the energy bound within and accessible there must be some way to release it and some would be faster than others.

challenger22• 7 years ago

I would think that it can still short out and overheat, but the material the battery is made of does not combust or have any exothermic chemical reaction. The energetic failure mode would be- "sparks and gets really really hot."

audunw• 7 years ago

Probably the only way of releasing the energy fast is to short the battery with a thick wire, or to burn the whole battery with an external source.

There's no rule that having lots of bound up energy has to be dangerous, that it has to be possible to release it quickly. There's enormous amount of potential energy in pure hydrogen gas. If you can just fuse the atoms. But it's incredibly hard to release it.

hetman• 7 years ago

Similarly, a candle carries over 10 times the energy of the same sized stick of TNT but you'd have to work pretty hard to get that energy out quickly.

skykooler• 7 years ago

In fact, she adds, up to a point, rising temperatures only increase the electrolyte’s performance.

This is the case for normal lithium-ion batteries as well; they perform better at 120°F than at 70°F (and lose significant performance at even lower temperatures).

cellularmitosis• 7 years ago

Cold weather performance is an issue for the folks who replace their motorcycle battery with a lithium ion aftermarket upgrade. https://advrider.com/f/threads/lithium-ion-batteries-in-cold...

Baeocystin2• 7 years ago

I have a LiFEPO4 battery in my motorcycle, and even here in the bay area of California, I notice the change it its cranking ability on colder days. It's a real issue with the chemistry, as attempting to charge it while cold causes some unfavorable reactions as well, so relying on resistive heating to bring it up to temp isn't a great idea.

It is kind of amusing that cranking it a few times until it peters out from lack of charge, waiting for the heat to spread internally, then firing it right up as the capacity recovered due to temperature overcompensates for the previous drain, is a valid thing to do.

jhayward2• 7 years ago

As far as I know all ion-exchange (chemical) batteries have a positive temperature coefficient of performance. Lead-acid, NiMH, Alkaline, Lithium-ion, Vanadium flow, etc.

oliveshell• 7 years ago

I'm curious, are there types of battery that don't use ion exchange? I'm familiar with physical energy storage using flywheels or compressed air; I suppose you could call something like that a battery if set up to spin a generator.

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

I wonder how many people know that electric vehicles have heaters and AC units for the battery packs?

bitwize• 7 years ago

I'll believe it when I can buy a cellphone with one.

Miracle batteries are like Alzheimer's cures and memristor computers: they show promise in the lab but fall down hard when used to develop products people actually use.

Causality12• 7 years ago

Yep. You can bet that if a patent hasn't been filed the creators have no faith in the scalability of their invention.

vxNsr• 7 years ago

I'd be very surprised if a patent wasn't filed. filing patents has nothing to do with scalability or production. it just is to control an idea.

FabHK• 7 years ago

This could bring electric aviation (constrained by a battery's specific energy currently) a decade forward. Let's see how it pans out.

m4632• 7 years ago

or make electric cars a lot more interesting (literally lower hanging fruit)

AtlasBarfed• 7 years ago

This is the second release from the Goodenough lab from early 2018?

I wish there was more evidence of confirmed working prototypes. It sounds too good to be true, like the 2018 announcement.

A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

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