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Researchers Accidentally Make Batteries That Could Last A Lifetime (computerworld.com)
Reader Socguy writes: A typical Lithium-ion battery breaks down badly between 5000-7000 cycles. Researchers at the University of California may have discovered a simple way to build a Lithium battery that can withstand 100,000+ cycles. This was a serendipitous discovery as the researcher was playing around with the battery and coated it in a thin gel layer. The researchers believe the gel plasticizes the metal oxide in the battery and gives it flexibility, preventing cracking.Dave Gershgorn, reporting for Popular Science: Instead of lithium, researchers at UC Irvine have used gold nanowires to store electricity, and have found that their system is able to far outlast traditional lithium battery construction. The Irvine team's system cycled through 200,000 recharges without significant corrosion or decline. However, they don't exactly know why. "We started to cycle the devices, and then realized that they weren't going to die," said Reginald Penner, a lead author of the paper. "We don't understand the mechanism of that yet." The Irvine battery technology uses a gold nanowire, no thicker than a bacterium, coated in manganese oxide and then protected by a layer of electrolyte gel. The gel interacts with the metal oxide coating to prevent corrosion. The longer the wire, the more surface area, and the more charge it can hold. Other researchers have been experimenting with nanowires for years, but the introduction of the protective gel separates UC Irvine's work from other research.Also from the report, "Penner suggests that a more common metal, like nickel, could replace the gold if the technology catches on."
"This was a serendipitous discovery as the researcher was playing around with the battery and coated it in a thin gel layer."
Translated: Scientist was watching porn at work, accidentally got some on the battery.
"This was a serendipitous discovery as the researcher was playing around with the battery and coated it in a thin gel layer".
Just like Fleming's discovery of penicillin. In each case, something "just happened"; and the researcher was knowledgeable and alert enough to spot the significance of an apparently irrelevant event.
We need a lot more of this kind of thing, and it is only likely to happen where researchers have an adequate amount of freedom to experiment and "play around". Perhaps Heinlein's "Long Range Foundation" was a bit extreme - funding only projects that are very ambitious, very far-out, and immensely expensive, and even then only on condition that no useful results are expect for a long time - but that's the true spirit of scientific research. "Cast your bread upon the waters..." Ironically, the greatest practical benefits come from research that does not aim for any practical benefits.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Why am I so confused about this story?
Did they build a Lithium battery, or a gold battery?
Is it holding charge or chemical energy? (If it holds charge, is it a supercapacitor?)
The article linked in the OP isn't very clear either. They made a battery, not with an anode and a cathode, but with *two* cathodes.
Okay, the article states "this isn't a true battery". And it's just a wire loop embedded in PMMA.
WTF? Can I get those 10 minutes of my life back?
you should invent your own slightly different version and give it away for free
The thing is... greed doesn't work that way.
Yes, they may try and hold it as long as possible to increase value, but note that something that sits in your vault, unused, doesn't make any money. And if they patent it, the patent does run out eventually. They need to do *something* with it.
More likely, it becomes used in very, very expensive applications where they can charge an arm and a leg for it. I'm thinking military equipment as a good target.
Eventually, though, unless it is uneconomical to mass produce, it will make its way into other things. Those who are greedy may well try and use older tech to keep it breaking, but someone who wants to break into the market, or someone even greedier is going to use it to differentiate their product in order to eat the lunch of the people using the inferior tech.
Note that it is possible for the better tech to be stopped, possibly through suggesting it is not safe (FUD) or some sort of paid-for government regulation, but greed by itself, won't stop this.
the article is missing a lot of details.. lithium polymer? standard Lithium Ion? or the current best battery the LifePo4 that already has insane battery cycle life as well as extreme tolerance to being charged poorly so you don't need a special high cost charger.
Read the article.....
Ahh, this is not even a battery but a wire loop in acrylic.. Nothing to see here kids but hype.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In case people don't spot the sarcasm, decades ago researchers discovered out how to make cheap lightbulbs that last forever, but makers collectively realized that it would kill their business and decided not to make them.
Well If I happen to own a massive industry that sells batteries that go bad and have to be replaced every 5 years.....and someone comes up with a battery that doesn't need to be replaced it would most definitely make me a lot of money to buy the patent for a few million dollars and sit on it until it ran out and keep selling the batteries that have to be replaced.
This is just one of the reasons that patents really ought to be use it or lose it.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Gold doesn't corrode, and it conducts well. Thus making it really good, and can last for a long time.
Copper will corrode, so after a few years of usage it could reduce in quality.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
On the plus side, China doesn't really respect patents.
That has good and bad consequences, so let's play both sides.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
"Gold nanowires"? They are saying they coat them so they don't corrode but isn't one of the main properties for which gold is valued the fact that it is highly non-reactive and doesn't typically corrode? Plus I've never heard of wires being used as an energy storage medium, nano or otherwise. I'm certainly no expert in chemistry but Popular Science isn't usually where I go to for reliable information about the latest in battery research. If this were real I'd expect to see the research come from some sort of peer reviewed source.
Everybody knows how to make bulbs that are cheap and last forever. What's hard is making them so that they are simultaneously bright and energy-efficient and still last forever. If you make them brighter by making the filament thinner so that they burn hotter, it makes them more fragile. If you make them brighter by adding more filaments in parallel, they use more power. Bright, energy-efficient, robust—choose (at most) two.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Divide that by one charge every day for 365 days and that's 275 years of battery life.
Yes please.
If you're using the "firehouse" bulb as your definition of "robust" then many incandescents made in the last 50 years would meet that standard.
Lifetime is approximately proportional to light output ^ -4.
The firehouse bulb is a 4 Watt bulb.
So if you took a 'normal' 40W bulb, and reduced the voltage to make it run at 4W, you'd end up with 10000x the 'normal' life of a 40W bulb (i.e. millions of hours).
In the early years of electricity light bulb makers realized how to make light bulbs last for up to 5 years or longer. However someone else quickly realized that this would mean people would only buy light bulbs every X years as replacements. So a light bulb standard was introduced and passed through congress that effectively limited the lifespan of the light bulb to 1 year. Thus guarantee that people would purchase the product many times.This is called planned obsolescence and exists to this day because of the Phoebus cartel.
links to proof IEEE: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So about patent expiration and things that get bigger when someone does not hold the patent any longer : drugs. And lets pick My favorite drug to talk about Viagra. Viagra started as a possible high blood pressure treatment, but the side effects were amazing as we all know, its patent was scheduled to expire in 2012. So Pfizer sold it for what it did best. Then it became profitable and they increased the price to 60 a pill and a minimum or 8 pills costs someone 500 USD or so. But if Pfizer can show Viagra is a treatment for more than what it was originally marketed for, they can issue a whole new patent for the drug. This is what drug manufacturers do to keep control of a drug and its profits. This is par for the course. Lucky for you and me this drug seems to have only two good usages, luckily i have high blood pressure ;-) And Pfizer extended the patent for the second use case to 2020.
So there is literally a market waiting to explode based on a patent expiring.
Case 2: cell phone modems. This technical patent expired around '99 and those companies selling beepers upgraded to selling cell phones. ... which was bad.
Case 3: K-cups
Case 4: 3D printing - the entire industry kick started in 2013 once the patents expired , and then in 2014 when most of the rest expired
Case 5: Kodak and the digital photography patent : (should be #1 but everyone studies this is college as one of the greatest mistakes )
case 6: home telephones: At&t used to lease telephones to people who paid for a home phone - thats why we all grew up with a phone that all looked the same in the 40's 50's 60's 70's and 80's. In the 80's however they were sued that it was unfair to hold the patent and make people pay for the phone... then all these new shaped phones came out... and the cords got longer which was great.. then they got tangled
These are the top ones that come to mind in 5 minutes if I actually gave it some thought I could probably come up with some good ones.
Greedy bastards will patent it and demand huge fees to license the technology ... Greedy fuckers will make sure this never makes its way into anything I own.
Wrong and Wrong.
As these researchers are part of the University of California system (UC), UC owns the patent. UC's policy for licensing considers the nature of the company seeking the license. Some preference is given to smaller local companies over large multinationals for instance. Also UC retains ownership, they only license. So there is no burying the technology problem.
My thought as well. We won't see this in our devices any time soon unless it comes from Elon Musk via Tesla.
Not true. The University of California (UC) owns this patent. They don't allow their patents to be buried by licensees. They also favor smaller and more local licensees. UC has a pretty good system wide policy and a dedicated staff to handle everything for faculty and student researchers. Doing a social good is part of their mindset. These are the same people that gave you BSD Unix without any real strings attached.
The lightbulbs cartel has nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with economies of scale and businesses colluding.
Nope. There wasn't some big move to use data over analog networks in 1999, if ever. Indeed, in the very late nineties and early 21st Century the digital standards started to take over in the US making analog devices obsolete and making data services widely available. Companies making beepers moved over to other markets because beepers, in a world of SMS messaging, were obsolete. They never, to my knowledge, started making mobile modems.
In Europe, where GSM had been standard for a while, most mobile manufacturers were making phones that supported data and messaging since about 1995. Again, beepers became pretty much non-existent at that time.
Keurig is hardly sitting on the technology. In addition to building K-Cup coffee machines themselves they've been aggressively licensing the technology too.
Possible, I don't know enough about 3D printing.
Any evidence that they sat on this? Kodak was an early pioneer of digital photography, producing some of the first mass market digital cameras - starting in the mid-1990s which was about the time digital photography could become mass market (eg true-color computer monitors and hard drives had finally become de-facto standards on most personal computers.) Their problem with the technology wasn't that they didn't adopt it or tried to suppress it, it was that they couldn't adapt to it - that is, Kodak couldn't find a business model for digital photography while their chemical business declined to (near) irrelevency..
Absolutely nothing to do with patents. Also the rules requiring AT&T open up their networks to third party devices came in the 1960s, not 1980s. Most people still rented the phones because of ease (and the fact the phones were built like tanks), not because of "patents".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.