
A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better? - jonbaer
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/a-glass-battery-that-keeps-getting-better
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wlesieutre
The really important bit, comparison to lithium ion:

 _> She did say that large battery banks that might be spun off from this
research stand to not only have higher capacity, but also be substantially
lighter than lithium ions. Although, she adds, perhaps the greatest weight
savings will come not from comparing one battery cell's mass with another.
“The biggest difference would be that you don’t have to have the same
stainless steel bunkers in each of the cells,” she says._

Not flammable is a big deal in battery tech. We try to pack more and more
energy into smaller and smaller cells, so continuing to improve the capacity
makes inadvertently releasing all that energy even more dangerous.

Here's another cool project working on that problem with a solid polymer
electrolyte. Video shows it continuing to provide power while being sliced
into pieces with scissors:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik)

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agumonkey
I'd love to know what's wrong with the polymer electrolyte, the demo is so
amazing..

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simcop2387
Can't find any details myself but the usual issue is energy density or number
of charge cycles.

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kickopotomus
Or prohibitively expensive production cost

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TheSpiceIsLife
A Venn diagram with the labels 'production cost, 'energy density', and 'number
of charge cycles' with 'Ideal Battery Technology' in the centre.

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Dylan16807
Only if you declare the center as infinitely perfect in every way. If you
allow each axis to trade off with the others, then there is no single ideal.
Fixed storage would rather have better prices and cycles in exchange for worse
density. Mobile devices would rather have better density in exchange for
higher prices.

(You can look at it like a path through the solution space. If you keep
letting someone pick which attribute to improve, over and over, you eventually
hit infinity/infinity/infinity, but different users will take very different
paths to get there. At any particular count of improvements, their ideal
batteries are significantly different.)

And with regard to kickopotomus's comment, you can get away with a _much_
higher cost if you're targeting the right niche.

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klyrs
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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ummonk
Right, nothing surprising about having a break-in period.

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gnode
This sounds similar to the concept of self-healing materials. Such materials
aren't necessarily at full health (optimal structure) following manufacture,
so could expect to see improvements through use.

Some materials and devices also benefit from being broken-in; where properties
which impede utility are degraded more rapidly than properties which
positively contribute to it.

~~~
m463
I thought of concrete vibrators. (probably not the best analogy though)

When people pour concrete they get a certain strength out of it. But if they
vibrate it, air and excess water gets removed, and the concrete aligns
together to become more cohesive.

~~~
xhgdvjky
I think this is a great analogy since air bubbles are easier (for me) to
imagine than the polarity of particles

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skykooler
> In fact, she adds, up to a point, rising temperatures only increase the
> electrolyte’s performance.

This is the case for normal lithium-ion batteries as well; they perform better
at 120°F than at 70°F (and lose significant performance at even lower
temperatures).

~~~
cellularmitosis
Cold weather performance is an issue for the folks who replace their
motorcycle battery with a lithium ion aftermarket upgrade.
[https://advrider.com/f/threads/lithium-ion-batteries-in-
cold...](https://advrider.com/f/threads/lithium-ion-batteries-in-cold-
weather.934390/)

~~~
Baeocystin
I have a LiFEPO4 battery in my motorcycle, and even here in the bay area of
California, I notice the change it its cranking ability on colder days. It's a
real issue with the chemistry, as attempting to charge it while cold causes
some unfavorable reactions as well, so relying on resistive heating to bring
it up to temp isn't a great idea.

It _is_ kind of amusing that cranking it a few times until it peters out from
lack of charge, waiting for the heat to spread internally, then firing it
right up as the capacity recovered due to temperature overcompensates for the
previous drain, is a valid thing to do.

~~~
mycall
Have you tried heating blanket?

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Baeocystin
For my location, it would be more trouble than it's worth. If I lived
somewhere a little colder, though, I think some kind of thermal control would
be a real necessity.

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wolfi1
there is some critique on previous papers[1] I would wait for an update from
this blog to actually assess if these claims can hold water

[1] [http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery-
part-2/](http://lacey.se/2018/07/05/glass-battery-part-2/)

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mikeatlas
what if their claims only hold energy?

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ketralnis
Then we still won't have our water batteries with water density better than
that of a bucket

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JoeAltmaier
Lighter weight and cheaper. So both for transportation AND grid storage? A
good direction.

~~~
Darkphibre
> “The BMS is to control temperatures,” she says. “In our case, we don’t have
> to have that.” In fact, she adds, up to a point, rising temperatures only
> increase the electrolyte’s performance.

No need for the stainless steel bunkers to isolate cells. This IS an important
breakthrough (if verified).

~~~
phkahler
BMS Is also to balance charge in a string of cells. Also, I thought this
material was actually heavier per kWh the last time it showed up here.

~~~
jascii
The two are inter-related, the unbalance in Li-Ion packs is largely caused by
the negative temperature coefficient of the cell.

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Nasrudith
If it is nonflammable I wonder what its failure mode would be and how it could
be triggered and what counter measures are needed if any.

If it has the energy bound within and accessible there must be some way to
release it and some would be faster than others.

~~~
audunw
Probably the only way of releasing the energy fast is to short the battery
with a thick wire, or to burn the whole battery with an external source.

There's no rule that having lots of bound up energy has to be dangerous, that
it has to be possible to release it quickly. There's enormous amount of
potential energy in pure hydrogen gas. If you can just fuse the atoms. But
it's incredibly hard to release it.

~~~
hetman
Similarly, a candle carries over 10 times the energy of the same sized stick
of TNT but you'd have to work pretty hard to get that energy out quickly.

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baroffoos
Do you have a source for the candle fact? Thats quite interesting.

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thatcat
A quick search shows tnt has 4 kJ / g while paraffin has 42 kJ / g. A lot of
energy is in paraffin's hydrocarbon chain, but less energy per bond and it is
less accessible.

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forgotAgain
Original source has a question mark at the end of the title.

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AtlasBarfed
This is the second release from the Goodenough lab from early 2018?

I wish there was more evidence of confirmed working prototypes. It sounds too
good to be true, like the 2018 announcement.

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lallysingh
Can we make the battery transparent and hook an oled to the back?

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lostlogin
Jonny Ive would you this to go thinner.

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FabHK
This could bring electric aviation (constrained by a battery's specific energy
currently) a decade forward. Let's see how it pans out.

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m463
or make electric cars a lot more interesting (literally lower hanging fruit)

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bitwize
I'll believe it when I can buy a cellphone with one.

Miracle batteries are like Alzheimer's cures and memristor computers: they
show promise in the lab but fall down hard when used to develop products
people actually use.

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Causality1
Yep. You can bet that if a patent hasn't been filed the creators have no faith
in the scalability of their invention.

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vxNsr
I'd be very surprised if a patent wasn't filed. filing patents has nothing to
do with scalability or production. it just is to control an idea.

~~~
Causality1
Exactly. When a group doesn't file a patent it means they know the idea is
worth less than the application fee.

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kuu
We need better batteries, this seems promising!

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srfilipek
> 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.

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rconti
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.

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stcredzero
A false "entropy of matter natural law" argument used to be forwarded by
"evolution debunkers." Richard Dawkins debunked this fake natural law with a
thought exercise involving an hourglass with water in one chamber and salt in
the other. You can tilt the hourglass to mix the salt and water in one
chamber, but if you sit the device in the sun, such that the sun shines on the
full chamber, you will eventually see the hourglass return to a state where
water is in one chamber and salt is in the other.

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Noumenon72
It's too bad no one ever did this on YouTube. That would be highly persuasive.

