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Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

news.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#51

Post by manquer »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #34
twoslide wrote: post #33

Really interesting to compare with the publication itself: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03757-z They don't mention six times more charge anywhere. Rather, the novelty is that it they make a discharge reaction re-chargeable for the first time. The final paragraph hints at a rapid drop-off after the first discharge: > The battery delivered about 3,309 mAh first discharge capacity and was cyclable at 500–1…

Must be incredibly frustrating to be a researcher and see the media absolutely butcher things you worked on

The PR dept butcher is what you mean, this is a internal press release.

I won't necessarily assume that it was really a PR /media debacle, I have seen researchers encourage such reports for exposure / project funds etc.

After all we wouldn't really be discussing this if not the overblown title.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#53

Post by AtlasBarfed »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #52

The chemist part of my brain is immediately nervous seeing Na metal + Cl2 gas anywhere near each other

Is that worse than current runaway battery fires in non-LFP lithium batteries?

Edit: I'm reminded of a joke someone told me about making very high density batteries. There's a name for a substance that packs as much energy as possibly into the smallest space possible:

A bomb.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#54

Post by AtlasBarfed »

malchow wrote: post #45

Novel chemistries in nano scale in the lab are fun to puzzle about, but pure silicon anode Li-ion batteries really are coming in the next six months, notably from Enovix, and will actually change things. A 2x density upgrade that's real is a whole lot more interesting than a 6x density upgrade that isn't ready for commercialization.

Have these been independently tested with production form factors? Battery startups seem to have a lot of middle-level fraud in them where they have nice demonstration piddly level cells with great numbers that the internal teams know won't scale to real uses.

I did see they are actually funding a factory... but I only saw a couple stories on "wearables" which implies very small batteries. Ugh, and a SPAC.

I really want these various startups to succeed much like I actually wanted Nikola Motors to succeed and Lordstown to succeed, but the Tesla stock explosion is going to bring these hype-shells out of the woodwork.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#55

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #26
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a similar one yesterday: "Cancer treatment breakthrough". @dang wound up changing that one to a different article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342527 The thing about batteries and about cancer treatments is that there has been very meaningful progress over the years. In contrast, the fusion timetable seems to be getting worse. Now ITER is projected for "full fusion in 2035". So it's actually more th…

I mean, that's ITER. If fusion is ready soon it'll likely be via ARC. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is aiming for SPARC (demonstration reactor) in 2025, ARC (commercial reactor!) in 2030. That's obviously an, um, ambitious goal, and we'll see whether that actually happens; but it's not like ITER is the only possibility. Which is good because even once ITER is turned on, it's hard to see the that direction ever producin…

5 years to construct a commercial fusion reactor after the demonstration? And it's nuclear, even if there isn't nasty fission products, there's still neutron degradation that needs to be shielded.

Again, I'd be happy if cheap fusion appeared, but it doesn't have a good track record.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#56

Post by mdip »

kyriakos wrote: post #13
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #12

Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few…

Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?

> Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?

Perhaps. That, however, is probably not a solvable problem. It's trivial to come up with a list of reasons that something will not work/cannot be made to work. And there are many cases of inventors creating something that many other previous inventors failed to create.

If it can be done and it's worth being done, someone will ignore the pessimists and do it. Maybe the pessimists will reduce the amount of competition that their life-changing creation has to contend with, and maybe it'll turn out to really be a life-changing invention. That'll be life changing for the inventor and possibly the pessimist who now gets to benefit from this impossible creation.

All of that, aside, for us -- the consumer -- it's nice to know how likely a product like this is to actually become a reality in the next few years, and I specifically came to HN to find out why the press release was trash, frankly. To the inventor, it's sometimes helpful to not be aware of what is impossible so that you can accidentally discover it isn't... or maybe it is, but exploring that more deeply reveals something about a "possible" design that is an improvement.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#57

Post by oliwarner »

twoslide wrote: post #42
rsfern wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about the press release. Though they do run it out to ~100 cycles without too much apparent further degradation, so it’s probably not dead on arrival as a contender against Li-ion?

That's a good point, although I am not sure whether the "six times" claim was based on the first cycle or the subsequent cycles (partly because the authors didn't make it themselves). Even if subsequent cycles are 1/3 as the first, that could still mean twice as much charge as li-ion.

But with materials you can extract from seawater (with the valuable by-product of potable water).

All other things being equal (unlikely to begin with), these would be furiously cheaper to make, and wrest production from China.

Even at half the performance of lithium, this would look tempting.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#58

Post by Sniffnoy »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #55
Sniffnoy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's ITER. If fusion is ready soon it'll likely be via ARC. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is aiming for SPARC (demonstration reactor) in 2025, ARC (commercial reactor!) in 2030. That's obviously an, um, ambitious goal, and we'll see whether that actually happens; but it's not like ITER is the only possibility. Which is good because even once ITER is turned on, it's hard to see the that direction ever producin…

5 years to construct a commercial fusion reactor after the demonstration? And it's nuclear, even if there isn't nasty fission products, there's still neutron degradation that needs to be shielded. Again, I'd be happy if cheap fusion appeared, but it doesn't have a good track record.

Well, sure, like I said, it's ambitious; there's no guarantee this is going to actually work. But it's not like the people working on it haven't thought about the problem. They have an interesting approach to the neutron degradation problem, using a liquid blanket that can be circulated, so you don't have to deal with the problem of replacing solid shielding after it becomes too degraded.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#59

Post by malchow »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #54
malchow wrote: post #45

Novel chemistries in nano scale in the lab are fun to puzzle about, but pure silicon anode Li-ion batteries really are coming in the next six months, notably from Enovix, and will actually change things. A 2x density upgrade that's real is a whole lot more interesting than a 6x density upgrade that isn't ready for commercialization.

Have these been independently tested with production form factors? Battery startups seem to have a lot of middle-level fraud in them where they have nice demonstration piddly level cells with great numbers that the internal teams know won't scale to real uses. I did see they are actually funding a factory... but I only saw a couple stories on "wearables" which implies very small batteries. Ugh, and a SPAC. I really w…

Yes, they've been independently tested with production form factors at sampling quantities by major global OEMs: https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/9231246c-a419-46bb-be35-a.... So this is the real one.

You're right – lots of bad actors in the battery space. Investors don't really understand how wide the chasm is between prototypes and low-DPPM autoline production ready for grown-up purchases.

Re: Stanford researchers make rechargeable batteries that store 6x more charge

#60

Post by rsfern »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46
rsfern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Par for the course for a uni press release, unfortunately. Not picking on Stanford at all, it just seems to be a common theme Unfortunately the paper is not open access and I don’t think there’s a preprint, but from my quick read it seems pretty competently executed. (I’m a materials scientist but not a battery researcher.) The cool thing about this paper IMO is that they’ve found a way to make rechargeable an establ…

> Not picking on Stanford at all, it just seems to be a common theme Fair to pick on Stanford when they put out releases containing false information. That other institutions also lie isn't an excuse.

Fair enough, I don’t mean to excuse this, just making it clear that I’m not singling anyone out
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