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Samsung Nanotech Breakthrough Nearly Doubles Li-Ion Battery Capacity
The Korea Times reports that Samsung researchers have published in Nature Communications the results of research (here's the abstract) that could lead to vastly greater storage capacity for lithium-ion batteries. The researchers, by growing graphene on silicon anodes, were able to preserve the shape of the anodes, an outcome which has formerly eluded battery designers: silicon tends to deform over numerous charging cycles. From the linked abstract: Here we report direct graphene growth over silicon nanoparticles without silicon carbide formation. The graphene layers anchored onto the silicon surface accommodate the volume expansion of silicon via a sliding process between adjacent graphene layers. When paired with a commercial lithium cobalt oxide cathode, the silicon carbide-free graphene coating allows the full cell to reach volumetric energy densities of 972 and 700Whl1 at first and 200th cycle, respectively, 1.8 and 1.5 times higher than those of current commercial lithium-ion batteries.
Also at ZDNet.
And battery capacity just doubled last week! It's amazing that they can keep releasing breakthrough after breakthrough!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Problem with lithium based batteries, in general, are two things:
1: Puncture them, they go boom unless engineering is done to prevent this.
2: If they are not discharged and charged correctly, they go boom.
One place where lithium batteries are starting to make an impact (namely LiFePO4 batteries) is RV-ing. However, Silverleaf controllers tend to be expensive, so if you want this and you like off-grid camping, expect to pay upwards of $120,000 just to play in this ballgame. More useful setups (800-1200 ampere-hours) are available (Advanced RV comes to mind as well as Roadtrek), but expect to pay dearly for those.
What really is needed is a charge/discharge controller that can take a bank of lithium cells and make it appear to existing chargers and electrical loads like the battery is a flooded lead-acid or AGM battery. This would allow retrofitting without having to do major re-engineering of the rest of the electrical system. However, in reality, it will take a re-engineering of charging and discharging eventually because of lithium's different charging/discharging curves.
I had a HTC Wizard, with its dual-core TI OMAP puttering along at 200 MHz. Doesn't sound like much, but it did well with calls, and could run a week without having to be charged. This was about a decade ago. Now, most of my smartphones won't persist beyond 24 hours unless I have them plugged into an external battery, or like my HTC One M8, enable the extreme battery saving mode, which replaces the Android Launcher default, disables Wi-Fi, and cellular communication, and only runs the absolute minimum of processes. This probably would make the phone's battery last a week, maybe more.
I sort of wish the philosophy behind apps wasn't "lets make these as fast as a gaming computer or console", but the old PalmOS philosophy of "do the job done right, and if it doesn't need CPU cycles, don't do it." Because of demand for ever faster CPUs and GPUs, phones have to get bigger and bigger for heat dissipation reasons. It would be nice for CPU speed to lag a bit to allow for a better battery life, perhaps adding deeper caches. Adding more RAM to a phone might help things as well. This way, phone shape can be dictated by what users want, not having to have ever larger surfaces for engineering reasons.