
Nobel Prize: Lithium Ion Battery Creators Led a Revolution - Osiris30
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-11/nobel-prize-lithium-ion-battery-creators-led-a-revolution
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hinkley
There was a lot of hope in the '00's that we'd see another revolution from
LIon the way we did from NiMH and NiCD before that, but it just never
happened.

Everyone was projecting out electric cars and busses and planes and such based
on a similar uptick.

Although, if we're really honest, there's a kind of Moore's Law of battery
improvement and it's something like 6% a year, so that's a doubling every 12
years. Every new tech that swamps that performance curve also has extremely
high manufacturing costs, poor yields, or both. You could almost predict when
(if ever) they would become commercially viable by figuring out where the
price/performance lines crossed. If anyone tried to accelerate that crossover
point they did it by reducing the performance of the product to make it
cheaper to build or more reliable.

For example, thicker membranes reduce specific energy but might be easier or
safer to build.

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rafaelvasco
Yeah maybe chemical batteries are nearing their limit in terms of technology,
at least, the classical concept of the battery; Or maybe we'll discover some
new element or something. Who knows;

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torpfactory
What is the limit? I’ve heard a ton of different opinions on what it might be.

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hinkley
I stopped doing any reading in this space when I stopped trying to invest in
any power storage tech, but this is what I recall:

Supercapacitors store electrons directly instead of chemical reactions. They
have much much lower capacities at present (per unit volume for certain, per
kg is a narrower margin), but you can pump and drain them quickly without
damaging them, and hundreds to thousands of times as frequently. But we
construct these materials using chemical reactions, so they are far away from
their theoretical limits.

Every few years lately, someone tries to blur the lines between battery and
capacitor by working on chemistries that can also store electrons. What I
can't recall is the degree to which any of those bested LIon in bench-top
tests.

What I wonder is if lithography will ever enter into this, how many more
features per mm^2 the equipment would have to create to make an equivalent
material, and how much cheaper they'd have to get per feature before it were
financially feasible.

[Edit to add:] I completely spaced on the fact that people are experimenting
with graphene to build supercaps, so we may get closer to that limit
relatively sooner than later. Since many commercial supecaps are essentially
doped charcoal, this isn't the graphene bandwagon it first might seem.

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neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191012004755/https://www.bloom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191012004755/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-11/nobel-
prize-lithium-ion-battery-creators-led-a-revolution)

