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A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

#5
> thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over many charge-discharge cycles.

Well that's just nonsense.

Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.

Re: A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

#7

> thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over many charge-discharge cycles. Well that's just nonsense. Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.

I see what you mean (entropy always increases is valid only in a closed system assumption). But didn't you mean "claiming that entropy must increase" instead of "decrease" in your sentence?

Re: A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

#8

> thermodynamics might seem to demand that a battery only deteriorates over many charge-discharge cycles. Well that's just nonsense. Any armchair "physicist" claiming that entropy must decrease over time is completely ignoring the fact that the battery is getting energy from an outside source every time it's charged.

I almost feel like this is a straw man to make this controversial. I don't see why anyone, even a layman, would say this.

Re: A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

#10
Headline is misleading. The battery has a brief burn-in period where it gets better.

> They also published a graph that showed an increase in capacity over more than 300 charge-discharge cycles. (This increase, however, pales in comparison to the cell's at least 23,000-cycle lifespan.)

And once they dig into details, the "apparent increase of entropy" is further exposed as bait. Sounds pretty credible, and not controversial

> She says their glass electrolyte is a ferroelectric material—a material whose polarization switches back and forth in the presence of an outside field. So charge-discharge cycles are effectively jiggling the electrolyte back and forth and perhaps, over time, finding the ideal configuration of each electromagnetic dipole.

> “This is what happens as you are charging and discharging,” Braga says. “You are aligning the ferroelectric dipoles.”

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