41–50 of 331 posts
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Less weight (all else being equal) is the same thing as more battery for drones. I.e. better range, payload mass, and/or flight time. You probably want both cheap and poor performing as well as expensive and high performing available.
In current battle conditions isn’t the range primarily determined by the size of the fiber optic spool attached to the drone than battery capacity?
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Tesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).
Range is not a real issue for electric cars. Charging time is, though, and there are massive improvements happening for that right now.
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
I think, apart from finding better Batteries altoghether, we should build multi-tier batteries inspired by biology. Humans have bloodsugar, sugar in the Liver and then fat. All of them have their respective properties with availability and amount. This way, engineering tradeoffs could be allocated much more fine grained. For example, a while ago I read about a startup building an energy storage where they heat up lar…
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
I think people can imagine lighter cars and laptops and things. Is there something bizarre that’s unlocked like battery powered space launches or something?
Electric long distance container ships.
Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.
Even longer range drones.
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I can - it’s called a bomb. Some of the problems with batteries are heat dissipation (one of those problems that superconductors would mostly solve), fire safety, and end of life disposal. Higher energy density makes it even worse. A good place to start would be a BMS on individual cells that monitors them for general degradation, unexpected discharge, unexpected temperature changes, and can remove a failing cell fro…
Gasoline has 10x the energy (MJ/Kg) than TNT, but it's not a "bomb". Being a "bomb" is about energy release rate . A battery is still controlled by its chemistry.
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Tesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).
Range is not a real issue for electric cars. Charging time is, though, and there are massive improvements happening for that right now.
We need way more research on batteries. People cant ingine what is possible if we make battery 10x energy dense.
A 1 GWh grid scale battery takes up about 4 hectares at the moment. The UKs total energy use is about 2,000GWh a day.
It would need to use 240,000 hectares to store all energy requirements (eletric, transport, heating etc) for a whole month. Even in extreme cold conditions it would last a couple of weeks.
That would be about 1% of land use.
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Yes, electricity should be the only abstraction layer to deliver energy to end user. We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants and also continuously switch out dirtier fuels with clean energy. For example, no need to build natural gas infrastructure to every home. Use induction stoves (or electric coil -- already 67% of homes). Heat pump water heater instead of gas. And heat pump for HV…
> We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants This isn't true at all for natural gas. Burning it for heat in the home is much more efficient than burning it in a plant, converting it to electricity, transferring that electricity, then turning that electricity into heat.
Heat pumps are significantly more efficient than 100%. They can get to 500% efficiency. So no, it's definitely not more efficient to burn gas in a home. (To say nothing of the safety of running gas lines to every house.)
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Cheaper yes. Non-aqueous sodium ion batteries (which are most of them) are more dangerous than LiFePO4 though.
In what way, if you don't mind me asking?
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.20...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S20954...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, electricity should be the only abstraction layer to deliver energy to end user. We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants and also continuously switch out dirtier fuels with clean energy. For example, no need to build natural gas infrastructure to every home. Use induction stoves (or electric coil -- already 67% of homes). Heat pump water heater instead of gas. And heat pump for HV…
> We can extract a lot more energy from fossil fuels in large scale plants This isn't true at all for natural gas. Burning it for heat in the home is much more efficient than burning it in a plant, converting it to electricity, transferring that electricity, then turning that electricity into heat.