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John Goodenough's Colleagues Are Skeptical of His New Battery Technology (qz.com)
Earlier this month, a research team led by John Goodenough announced that they had created a new fast charging solid-state battery that can operate in extreme temperatures and store five to ten times as much energy as current standard lithium-ion batteries. The announcement was big enough to have Google's Eric Schmidt tweeting about it. However, there are some skeptics, including other leading battery researchers. "For his invention to work as described, they say, it would probably have to abandon the laws of thermodynamics, which say perpetual motion is not possible," reports Quartz. "The law has been a fundamental of batteries for more than a century and a half." Quartz reports: Goodenough's long career has defined the modern battery industry. Researchers assume that his measurements are exact. But no one outside of Goodenough's own group appears to understand his new concept. The battery community is loath to openly challenge the paper, but some come close. "If anyone but Goodenough published this, I would be, well, it's hard to find a polite word," Daniel Steingart, a professor at Princeton, told Quartz. Goodenough did not respond to emails. But in a statement released by the University of Texas, where he holds an engineering chair, he said, "We believe our discovery solves many of the problems that are inherent in today's batteries. Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted." In addition, Helena Braga, the paper's lead author, in an exchange of emails, insisted that the team's claims are valid. For almost four decades, Goodenough has dominated the world of advanced batteries. If anyone could finally make the breakthrough that allows for cheap, stored electricity in cars and on the grid, it would figure to be him. Goodenough invented the heart of the battery that is all but certainly powering the device on which you are reading this. It's the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode, invented in 1980 and introduced for sale by Sony in 1991. Again and again, Goodenough's lab has emerged with dramatic discoveries confirming his genius. It's what is not stated in the paper that has some of the battery community stumped. How is Goodenough's new invention storing any energy at all? The known rules of physics state that, to derive energy, differing material must produce differing eletro-chemical reactions in the two opposing electrodes. That difference produces voltage, allowing energy to be stored. But Goodenough's battery has pure metallic lithium or sodium on both sides. Therefore, the voltage should be zero, with no energy produced, battery researchers told Quartz. Goodenough reports energy densities multiple times that of current lithium-ion batteries. Where does the energy come from, if not the electrode reactions? That goes unexplained in the paper.
... created a new fast charging solid-state battery that can operate in extreme temperatures and store five to ten times as much energy as current standard lithium-ion batteries.
The first thing that comes to mind is extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I would be more worried about the folks who aren"t skeptical. Hopefully the cold fusion debacle (and others, that is just the most prominent in my mind) has taught us something about the value of scientifically reproducing phenomena. In particular, the community should be diligent regarding those phenomena that seem to defy the known laws of physics or go beyond the known boundaries. Those are most likely to a) be incorrect, subject to some sort of falsification, etc.; or, b) represent a revolutionary change in some area of science.
You mean the guy in power?
Are you positive?
Probably not. You should drop a note to John and link to a wiki article or something about them. He might find it fascinating.
I had no clue there was a li-ion battery powering my desktop.
Aeris Died For Your Sins.
Not in this case. We aren't talking about black holes or climate changes — things, that can not be easily observed and examined by experiments.
He just needs to offer a working line of batteries for sale. Nothing extraordinary about that...
(He can even call them "Shipstones" for all I care.)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"For his invention to work as described, they say, it would probably have to abandon the laws of thermodynamics, which say perpetual motion is not possible,"
I read this section of the article several times, and I cannot make heads nor tails.
The entire invention, assuming it is real, replaces the normally plastic-and-liquid electrolyte with a glass sheet. The major result of this change is that it prevents ion movement across layers, which suppresses dendrite growth. As a result, you can replace the electrodes with pure metal, which you can't do in a conventional design because this massively promotes dendrite growth. Using pure metal electrodes allows higher voltages.
That's it. It's a huge advance, if true, but there's certainly no new physics in here.
So when I real people not understanding the presence of pure electrodes, I wonder what they are thinking. There are lots of batteries with pure electrodes, not the least of which is the common dry cell, and on the other end things like ZEBRA which have pure sodium as one of the electrodes. The ZEBRA is a good example, because it too uses a solid electrolyte (beta something). I don't recall anyone saying it breaks the 2nd law.
Yet, reading the article, that appears to be the argument for this statement.
I believe this technology was being tested in the Galaxy Note 7.
> John Goodenough... ... did not invent this. It was largely developed by the first author on the paper prior to arriving in the US.
Are you asking me if he's in a current position?
Either it's patented (and thus disclosed) or it's a trade secret. You cannot have it both ways.
Goodenough & Helena Braga surely know they were going to be painted bright orange as frauds without additional proof.
They surely know they had to follow up with a public display of a cell under charge, then discharge cycles with component weights and measurements to confirm the claims.
Anything else would be a lifelong purgatory in an engineering gulag of con artists.
Are you positive?
Why? the article summary is mostly, negative.
Those "laws of physics" were created by humans. They're merely mathematical representations of our understanding of the Universe. If we got one tiny yet-unknown detail wrong, it may invalidate or at least modify some of those laws.
#DeleteFacebook
I wish they would be more direct and stop alternating about their position.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
You do realize they are part of the resistance?
Please stop with the good enough jokes. We've heard enough of them, and none were good.
(he's figured out how to create a stable wormhole to another dimension where the charge is much greater than our own (see, not creating energy from nothing, just stealing from someone else)... Whoops! Hope they don't come after me)...
i'd be more worried about the estate of Isaac Asimov coming after you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I read the paper.
The actual paper describes in some detail how the battery is constructed and how it works.
The actual paper makes no extraordinary claims. It's just a better way of making a battery.
10% Asking for clarification on the issue
5% Explaining their understanding of battery tech
8% People talking about the story without reading it
77% 'Good Enough' jokes
Either it's patented (and thus disclosed) or it's a trade secret. You cannot have it both ways.
To expand on this a bit, because it's really sad (and bad!) that so many people don't understand the theory behind patents: Encouraging disclosure, and hence reuse, is the point of having a patent system. The word "patent" is latin for "lying open". Patents were created to allow inventors to open their inventions to the world without fear of losing the opportunity to profit from them. Without patents inventors have to keep their ideas secret to profit from them, which impedes progress and adds huge overhead to the process of using the ideas to build things that benefit society.
The fact that InvalidsYnc fails to understand that the notion of an NDA for a patent is utterly nonsensical is sad, but what makes it a big problem is that this lack of understanding isn't actually unreasonable, given how deeply broken our patent system is. It has been subverted and does not accomplish its primary goals of enabling open sharing of ideas.
To understand just how bad it is, note that the way to test whether a patent system is enabling the spread and reuse of good ideas is to examine the way the patent database is used. If the system is functioning well, we should see inventors regularly scouring the patent database in search of ideas they can license in order to solve their problems. If your widget needs to frobnizz cleanly in order to wozzle, but the frobnizzing operation is unreliable and unstable, you should be able to do a patent search for a frobnizz stabilization system which you can license for less that what it would cost you to research your own, which will enable you to bring your wozzling device to market sooner and cheaper.
But in actual practice, at least in the software field and I haven't heard anyone from other fields saying it's different in theirs, attorneys tell working engineers specifically *not* to look at the patent database. This is because it's chock full of obvious ideas which they might independently reinvent, but if the patent holder can prove that the engineer probably saw the patent then it's not just simple infringement due to independent invention, but willful infringement subject to treble damages. In addition, the way in which patents are written means that the database would be extremely hard to use even if engineers did try to mine it. So engineers avoid using the patent database for its intended purpose.
This doesn't mean the patent system is completely failing to do its job, because it undoubtedly still does remove the need for a lot of secrecy, which removes a lot of overhead. But it does mean that it's not working nearly as well as it should. It may be removing some overhead, but it is not actively enabling the reuse of good ideas.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"For his invention to work as described, they say, it would probably have to abandon the laws of thermodynamics, which say perpetual motion is not possible," reports Quartz. "The law has been a fundamental of batteries for more than a century and a half." Quartz reports
It actually is not fundamental. And if people come up with the law of thermodynamics it would be nice to mention which of the 3 or 4 laws they refered to. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or perhaps a better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only law of thermodynamics that is remotely elevant for batteries is the second one, simplified and summarized as: "entropy will increase over time". In a battery that means the small charged particles are at some point to widely distributed over the substrat that they can not hold a charge anymore.
And exactly this problem the team of Mr. Goodenough and Braga is tackling with a solid state substrat, because there the ions/charged particles have it much harder to distribute themselves over the whole sustrat.
The rest of the "break through", like charging time and charge, has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with thermodynamics.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The company I work for owns patents that are licensed in every mobile device you own. Without the patent system we would either immediately stop investing billions in R&D, or have to manufacture everything in house and instead of licensing technology we would sell black box tamper proof chips to cell phone manufacturers. Phones would suck and cost more.
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To create a standard, however, all you have to do is shout loudly, and become "accepted wisdom".
Except the current standard came into existence by dislodging the previous notion.
There is a long line of such dislodged notions for all current scientific theories, reaching back to the Enlightenment (and beyond, in some cases).
It's not like we had zero explanations for how things worked, so we fought about it until someone killed off or suppressed all dissent. Oh wait, we did, and it's called religion. And science supplanted it centuries ago as a reliable font of knowledge.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Physicist start out insane. They do a better job of selectively hiding it then let themselves go as they get older.
You can read it here:
https://docs.wind-watch.org/br...
If you choose to actually read it, you will find out, that there are absolutely no extraordinary claims in there.
1) The energy density is stated relative to the amount of pure Lithium and they need about 8.5Wh per gramm of lithium or about 120 Gramms of Lithium per kWh. Which is in line with ordinary lithium batteries. The difference is merely, that lithium-ion batteries mostly consist of anything but lithium. The graphite anode alone is about 10 times as heavy as the lithium it can store.
2) The concept is a Lithium-Sulfur battery, in which the cathode consists of lithiumsufide. This is a well known and established concept, that has some major problems with liquid electrolytes, as some of the polysulfides that form as the cathode releases lithium ions are actually liquid themselves. Which causes parasitic discharges and damages in to the cathodes. This battery has a solid electrolyte.
It is also not a panacea. There is a reason why the title isn't "A safe rechargeable battery with insane capacity" but "Alternative strategy for a safe
rechargeable battery". It is a new approach to develop a practical battery with this technology and it looks rather promising, but far from perfect. If you read it, the battery cycled for 1000 hours. Where each cycle consisted of 10 hours charging and 10 hours discharging - so it releases its energy rather slowly (as well as taking it up). There were also only some 40-ish cycles in total.
I don't know who wrote the article or whom they interviewed to write it. But they never read or understood the article that Goodenough actually wrote.
This might sound good, but is not true. I am a physicist, and I know lots of physicists. What happens is: as a student you make a lot of mistakes and get corrected all the time. As you learn stuff, you make less and less mistakes, and get corrected less and less. At the same time, you get used to knowing stuff that most people do not know. Even more, you get used to being right about stuff that most people are just mistaken about (like relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics...). That has an effect on your psyche. As an active researcher, you still have the peer-review system to save your sanity: knowledgeable people criticizing your work keeps your ego in place. But after you retire, you just get prize after prize, and no scientific feedback anymore. Many physicists start believing that every brain fart they have is a genial idea, and that anyone that criticizes them doesn't know the first thing about what they are saying.
entropy happens