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A scientific accident that could change the world

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Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#31

Post by Fargren »

jaredmcateer wrote: post #22
Fargren wrote: post #2

Well, the graphene seems easy enough to manufacture. What are the obstacles to start using this technology right now? What is still missing?

In my inexpert knowledge I can see a few problems, while they have probably seen potential, they have yet to prove it can scale. Then there is getting manufacturers of devices to buy in to super capacitors and even worse getting battery life obsessed consumers to accept 1/4 the life as current Li Ion batteries is better because it has nearly instantaneous recharge times.

Maybe you can have both a Li Ion and one of these, and you only sue the LiIon after the graphene one is depleted. That way, you can recharge quickly to a fraction of total power, and optionally wait longer for a full charge.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#32

Post by gizmo686 »

jaredmcateer wrote: post #22
Fargren wrote: post #2

Well, the graphene seems easy enough to manufacture. What are the obstacles to start using this technology right now? What is still missing?

In my inexpert knowledge I can see a few problems, while they have probably seen potential, they have yet to prove it can scale. Then there is getting manufacturers of devices to buy in to super capacitors and even worse getting battery life obsessed consumers to accept 1/4 the life as current Li Ion batteries is better because it has nearly instantaneous recharge times.

In my experience, the reason people are obssessed with battery life is that when it runs out (which it does), then you are pretty much screwed until you can plug it in for the night.

I think that vendors could easily sell devices with a smaller capacity if they can charge in seconds. This seems like a benefit that is very clear, easy to explain, and understandable to a typical consumer, and it provides a near perfect solution to one of the major inconveniences of current phones. And, that inconvenience happens to be what people currently look to long battery life to mitigate.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#33

Post by CompelTechnic »

Fargren wrote: post #2

Well, the graphene seems easy enough to manufacture. What are the obstacles to start using this technology right now? What is still missing?

I don't believe there is anything "missing" to prevent it from starting up. It simply takes work, time, and money to get it off the ground.

I can see this tech being widely used in place of current capacitor technology in a shortish timeframe- maybe 2 to 4 years. It'll also be used in novel technologies as battery replacements, especially for high discharge rate applications, within a similar time scale.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#34

Post by danielweber »

samstave wrote: post #18
brokenparser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your inductive charging tray tables are terrible for my magnetic tapes and floppy disks. Also, where does it get its energy from? It's much more efficient to walk around with wearable solar panels or to embed them directly into the devices. It may not work well on the north pole half the time but batteries aren't very conductive in those environments, anyway.

When was the last time you walked around with a magnetic tape or floppy disc? Now - what happens if you put your wallet full of credit cards on it?

I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#35

Post by gizmo686 »

claudius wrote: post #21
Fargren wrote: post #2

Well, the graphene seems easy enough to manufacture. What are the obstacles to start using this technology right now? What is still missing?

Experience. At least let people experiment a little bit more before building huge fabs using technique A only to realise that technique B works at half the cost and twice the time-efficiency.

But isn't there are huge market advantage to using the technology now, before your competitors do. If you wait until technique B, then you loose out on the first (or early) adopter benefits, and probably lost customers to your competitors that implemented the technology before you.

I suspect that the reason we are not seeing this technology in practice yet, is because of how long the design cycles take. I am not familar at all with small device manufacturing, but it seems like it would take a lot of iterations to make everything fit together so tightly, and a year may not be enough time to introduce a different battery system. Especially a battery system that your engineers have no experience with.

Having said that, batteries do seem like a pretty stand-alone component of phones, so it may be possible to design a graphine based battery that replace an existing phone battery without modification to the phone. It might involve doing more work in the battery to emulate properties of the traditional battery that the phones were designed to compensate for, but it seems like there is enough room in a battery to do that.

The other problem I can see is that standard phones would likely be incapable of charging these batteries at full speed, which would only mean the batteries need a charger external to the phone.

Again, not as good compared to designing the phones with these batteries in mind, but still useful.

The main problem I can see with pursuing these batteries is that by the time you are ready to sell them, there may not be a long enough window before they become standard for it to be worth your while.

Makers of portable phone rechargers may be the compromise to those issues.

Regardless, excluding unforeseen drawbacks to this technology, I suspect we will be seeing it within 1 or 2 generations of phone.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#36

Post by clebio »

ratsbane wrote: post #7

Am I the only one to think "hey, I could try this at home?" 1) prepare carbon slurry 2) pour on dvd 3) etch with LightScribe DVD drive... 4) Peel of graphene layer ...? I wonder what, exactly, goes into the carbon slurry and if it's necessary to etch a particular pattern with the LightScribe.

I wondered about the etching process too. It might not be at all like a normal R/W pattern for a DVD. They could conceivably be scanning radially, or using a very slow revolution, or (is this possible?) re-tuning the beam's frequency. Not insurmountable, but might require low-level re-writing of the driver, depending.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#37

Post by gus_massa »

alexjeffrey wrote: post #3

I'd love to see this technology being incorporated into Tesla's batteries. With super-fast and long lasting charges their cars might become viable in countries where charging stations are either incredibly rare or nonexistent.

I searched a little, but the information is confusing. The superchargers (apparently) use 90kW/480V=~190A. I want to highlight this: 190A!!!

A usual home connection can handle only up to ~10A, so 190A is a lot of current. To handle this you must use very thick wires. To charge faster you need move voltage or handle more current, probably you will need even thicker wires and to be careful with the safety measures.

Additionally, this experiment use only in a tiny lab sample. To increase the size and make a big model for a car, a lot of technical details will appear, for example how to handle all the heat that the battery produces during the charge / discharge cycles.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#38

Post by claudius »

gizmo686 wrote: post #35
claudius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experience. At least let people experiment a little bit more before building huge fabs using technique A only to realise that technique B works at half the cost and twice the time-efficiency.

But isn't there are huge market advantage to using the technology now, before your competitors do. If you wait until technique B, then you loose out on the first (or early) adopter benefits, and probably lost customers to your competitors that implemented the technology before you. I suspect that the reason we are not seeing this technology in practice yet, is because of how long the design cycles take. I am not fami…

> But isn't there are huge market advantage to using the technology now, before your competitors do. If you wait until technique B, then you loose out on the first (or early) adopter benefits, and probably lost customers to your competitors that implemented the technology before you.

I am pretty sure every half-decent company has a research team on graphene right now, it is just that they don’t have results yet because results take time and making sure that these results are correct takes even more time.

Furthermore, as you said – even if we now managed to build a battery that charges in half a minute, the surrounding infrastructure is not yet there, and especially with components as critical as batteries, you don’t want them to break/blow up at your customer’s place.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#39

Post by Draco6slayer »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #17

I really don't want to come across as nit picky but is this one time when changing a linkbait headline to something more descriptive would help - on the iPhone this page did not render thE actual text for a full half hour (subjective) and I spent all that time with my brain whirring but not in gear - it was a little frustrating A headline like "DVD Graphene sheets store charge super fast in lab" would have helped me…

This is the first time I've seen this argument against linkbait headlines, and I happen to like it a lot. I've never actually considered headlines from a psychological perspective.

Re: A scientific accident that could change the world

#40

Post by jaredmcateer »

Fargren wrote: post #31
jaredmcateer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my inexpert knowledge I can see a few problems, while they have probably seen potential, they have yet to prove it can scale. Then there is getting manufacturers of devices to buy in to super capacitors and even worse getting battery life obsessed consumers to accept 1/4 the life as current Li Ion batteries is better because it has nearly instantaneous recharge times.

Maybe you can have both a Li Ion and one of these, and you only sue the LiIon after the graphene one is depleted. That way, you can recharge quickly to a fraction of total power, and optionally wait longer for a full charge.

Maybe but both are going to take up space and the video isn't really clear on how much space the super-capacitor is going to need so you'll probably end up with the same problem of not having the same long life as just having the single slower charging Li Ion battery.
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