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Research Promises Drastically Increased LiOn Capacity
daem0n1x writes "Could this be the breakthrough we've all been expecting that will finally make the electric car a reality? Researchers of Northwestern University USA discovered a new way to build lithium-ion batteries that changes dramatically both the charge time and capacity [original paper, paywalled]. Guess what it involves? That's right, graphene."
Graphene. Is there anything it can't do?
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
Stay in the car!
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What if I am still running Snow Leopard?
Just in time for the cheap, ultra efficient solar panels that will be available then
This is a must read article on the subject. Electric cars fail because batteries are too expensive, and because they required infrastructure of charging stations. This company however solves both these problems. You make an electric car without the battery, which is cheaper than a standard car and more reliable to boot. Then this company leases you a battery, which costs less per month than gas. And they handle the infrastructure, which includes stations that swap your battery out for a fully charged one. You never wait to charge your battery, and they can swap it out since you don't own it.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all
Part of this model is the assumption that battery technology still moves along rapidly. So the company can phase in newer, better batteries and you aren't tied to a battery you purchased when you bought your car.
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I don't even comment on /. anymore.
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Flying cars are already a reality. They are just expensive and inefficient.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Interstellar travel is already a reality. It is just expensive and inefficient.
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That's right, bacon."
More appealing answer.
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If we could combine all the tech from all of the battery stories we've read in the past year, we could power an interstallar craft for a year with a single AAA battery and recharge it by rubbing it on a fluffy shirt for a few seconds.
Having read the article (*gasp*) as well as a few others it seems these batteries do NOT hold 10x more power. They degrade 10x slower on on drain/recharge cycles and can be charged 10x faster. BUT this is not the same as having 10x more POWER per cycle. Gonna have to wait some more before you get an cheap electric car that can go 500 miles before charging (though charging 10x faster is nice).
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... they'll fit right into the steady curve of slowly but steadily increasing battery capacity. People assume that all these battery advancements we keep hearing about never pan out. Well, some of them do, but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic, and after the years go by before they actually hit the market, they're just incremental improvements on what was available before they came out.
There's nothing wrong with that.
If we had listened to Negative Nancys like you, we would never have gotten the flying car.
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Obviously missing data in TFA: estimated cost of production for these marvelous batteries ...
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Yes, we've progressed from not having invented it to having solved some interesting research problems. Next stage is cancelation.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/15/1821238/doj-violating-a-sites-tos-is-a-crime
In other words, they don't know if it will scale.
or duke nukem forever...
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Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.
On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.
Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.
"...will finally make the electric car a reality?" Um, first of all electric cars are actually older than gasoline cars (snobby comment, done). Second, with current battery tech electric cars are already more cost effective than gas driven cars when you compare vehicles of identical costs. The only wrinkle is lack of highways travel, but there's a solution for that too. Compare a $10k used car to $10k electric car: The cost of a decent LiFePO4 battery pack is $6k, the distance per charge is at least 50 mi, the charge cycles is at least 2k -meaning that the $6k battery pack will last for 100k mi. The cost of electricity to recharge the pack is ~$0.10 per 950 Wh which means the cost of 100k mi is ~$1645.14 -or $7645.14 for the total cost of electricity and battery. Now, for the gasoline car lets say gas will average $4/gal for the next 10 years (that seems low considering it more than doubles in price every two years) and that a decent used car will get 35-40 MPG in the city. Considering ONLY the cost of gas (not oil, maintenance, or repairs on the engine), the cost of fuel for 100k mi will be between $10k and $12k. This is with a very conservative estimate of gasoline costs and not accounting for the lower maintenance costs of electric drive systems. To address highway travel, any car 3500 lbs and under requires about 18 HP to travel at 60-70 MPH. If you have trunk space or a trailer hitch on your electric car, you can add a gasoline or propane generator to produce the 13.5 kW that your car uses on the highway and have infinite range. Or do what I do and barrow someone's gas car when you need to go more than 50 mi. Sorry about the formatting, /. took away my paragraphs :(
That's quite affordable for a car that runs on electricity which is far, far cheaper than gas, and requires much less maintenance.
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Rather than make an assumption and start a flame war, I'll just ask: what part of an electric car do you find inefficient?
Will this improve the battery life on my cell phone, laptop, and tablet?
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Just how are they "inefficient"? Tesla's website has plenty of "scientific-like" data showing that they are *much* more efficient users of source energy...
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
You forgot "efficient solar panels".
The confusion is because the paper linked in the summary is incorrect.
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)" and the summary linked paper is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)". The article linked in the summary is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
If there's one event that tipped us into the Singularity that should be the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s.
Or maybe the invention of the scientific method, but that happened centuries before, too much could nave happened in between.
Still, the main use case they are touting in the summary is cars. Faster charging, higher storage density batteries are a huge deal in that space. One of the big complaints with electric cars is that they take much longer to charge than a gas powered car takes to fill up, so faster charging is a big deal. More power density means either a) you can store the same amount of power in fewer batteries (thus theoretically reducing the weight and cost) or b) can get much farther on the same sized battery.
Right now electric cars are right on the cusp of being really commercially viable. If they become a hair cheaper, a hair longer range, a hair quicker to charge... it could put them over the top. This has the potential to do all three, and if the research is accurate increase all of them by more than a hair.
Plus, you know, I wouldn't complain if my iPhone went 3 days without a charge.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Not all of us live in countries where "compact" is classed as a car that can comfortably seat 5 large adults and their luggage.
The Leaf is a pretty average sized car.
Democracies are already a reality. They're just expensive and inefficient.
FTFY.
I was specifically thinking of Voyager 2, which is described as being on an interstellar mission right now (technically, it might still be in our solar system depending on how exactly you define the boundaries). Such a mission for humans is not really possible, or barely so. Might technically be possible to send a person out there, not really sure. Point was, something won't become a feasible reality until it stops being expensive and inefficient.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
These 'amazing new tech' articles are cool and everything, but in a way, I'd rather have stories about how batteries on the market RIGHT NOW hold 10% more energy on average than they did last year. I like seeing more tangible stuff as well as the more speculative news.
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And they only last a few seconds until they hit the ground after you drive them off the cliff. You forgot that part.
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But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more
You lost me there. I could almost get through a weekend without charging my old feature phone if it had good signal. My smartphone doesn't come close to that.
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