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Interviews: Ask Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor John Goodenough a Question
John B. Goodenough is a solid-state physicist and professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at The University of Texas at Austin. While he is most famous for identifying and developing the lithium-ion battery, which can be found in just about every portable electronic device on the market, he has recently created a new fast charging solid-state battery that looks to revolutionize the industry. We sent him an email about doing an interview and he has responded. Now is your chance to ask Goodenough a question!
We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to John Goodenough himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) Go on, don't be shy!
We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to John Goodenough himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) Go on, don't be shy!
There are several innovative ideas for better batteries that never make it to market. The problem is that you can make a few by hand in the lab, but production of useful numbers does not scale well at all or it scales, but is horrible expensive.
Will your development reasonably scale? If not, what stands in your way.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
There seems to be some confusion about whether or not your battery has the same material or differing material on the two electrodes. Can you elaborate on this and, if the electrodes are the same material, how the battery works?
Could you speculate on the reasons behind the increasing frequency of li-ion battery fires? Cheaper parts, smaller tolerances, higher energy density, or all of the above?
Over time batter energy density has improved by approximately 5-10% a year. Do you expect this trend to continue? If not, what do you expect will happen in the long-term? Are there other metrics by which you expect batteries to continue to improve?
John,
Is it (theoretically) possible for a battery to reach the same energy density as fossil fuel? Gasoline has an energy density of 46MJ/kg while a lithium based battery has an energy density of around 1MJ/kg.
This would mean that an electric car, boat or airplane would have the same potential range as their oil powered brethren.
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I've noticed that replacement lithium polymer battery packs for hybrid cars sell often sell for less than $1000 on eBay, while much smaller lithium based 12v batteries for conventional cars (with starter motors) often sell for more. As an example, here is a battery suitable for starting a small V8 that sells for $1600.00 http://www.jegs.com/i/Lithium-...
I would assume that it would be much easier to manufacture conventional 12v starter batteries in volume due to the ability to put them in many more different models of vehicles.
The ability to shave off 30+ lbs of weight from racecars would be enormous, so the demand is there, but why not the supply?
We keep hearing about breakthroughs in the battery technology world to the tune of several per year. After many years in this forum, the empirical observation is that such breakthroughs are forgotten after a few months, quietly buried, practically never having a measurable impact on our lives. Please explain why your latest claim about a battery breakthrough is not going to end up following that route.