
Battery breakthrough could change everything - steven
https://www.wired.com/story/bill-joy-finds-the-jesus-battery/?mbid=synd_digg
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ScottBurson
Okay, this is a little more information than we had a couple of weeks ago [0].

Sounds like these could beat lithium batteries on cost, even if their energy
density and power density aren't at the same levels. (Not saying they won't
be, but we haven't seen any numbers yet.)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14941624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14941624)

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cr0sh
I personally think that, for electric cars at least, there are two main things
in battery tech holding them back:

Capacity and charging time

Basically, if we could get a battery cell that was no bigger than say, the
lithium cells used by Tesla (sub-C size? I can't recall what they used), and
with about the same mass, but had double the capacity - in theory, Tesla could
swap out one for the other and instantly double the range of their vehicles.
That would instantly put them in line with the range of a gasoline powered
vehicle (to be honest, though, they are already there or close enough -
provided you aren't too aggressive with the pedal).

But extra range is just one component. The battery also needs to be able to be
charged in a reasonable amount of time. I would personally like to see 5
minutes tops to a full 100% charge. I want to be able to travel cross country,
and if I don't want to do an extended stop, I'd like to get out, charge the
car to 100% in 5 minutes, and then drive on. I don't want to have to wait, I
want to be able to do the same as I can do today with a gasoline powered
vehicle.

I honestly don't know if such a scheme is even possible within the laws of
physics, while still being safe for the consumer. It might be a case where a
different form of infrastructure needs to be created to handle charging, due
to likely high currents and/or higher voltages involved. It doesn't seem
possible to offer this as a "plug in" style recharging system, but perhaps
something you drive into, and large contacts or something from the bottom rise
up and "plug in" to ports on the underside of the vehicle could work? There
are also the "battery swap" schemes, but this seems like something that could
take longer than 5 minutes. Regardless, just about anything will ultimately
require some kind of standards for car manufacturers to adhere to so it all
works (imagine if there were different size nozzles for each manufactured
vehicle for gasoline).

Note that I don't expect for "overnight charging" to happen quickly; existing
charger designs (or similar) could likely handle this for home or on-the-road
use (when there isn't another option, or for perhaps plugging in while staying
at a hotel or something).

Until these two items are solved, though, I don't see electric cars being as
widespread among consumers as many think they will be.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
To charge an 85 kWh in 5 minutes would be ~1MW which seems beyond home
charging capacity.

Even more out of reach if you want to double the capacity

~~~
im3w1l
If, let's say 95% of energy goes into the battery, and 5% becomes heat - what
would the cooling system need to look like?

~~~
pjc50
5% of 1MW is obviously 20kW. That's rougly comparable to the "large"
68000BTU/hour space heaters.

On the other hand, it's well within the range of a conventional car engine
cooling system: [http://what-when-how.com/automobile/forced-circulation-
water...](http://what-when-how.com/automobile/forced-circulation-water-
cooling-system-automobile/)

It depends somewhat on how hot the hot side can afford to get. The "weak link"
will be getting the heat out of the cells themselves - it's no good if you can
cool the exterior to 20C if the interior exceeds the safe limit of the cell.

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robocat
Summary of tech: But in this battery, you have no liquid. You have just a
plastic, a polymer, that replaces the liquid, so it’s solid. To be solid
instead of liquid is something people have been striving for for 100 years.
Michael Zimmerman was the expert on a certain class of polymers. He invented a
new ionic conduction mechanism.

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Aron
My main concern with the electric vehicle hockey stick growth curve is
sourcing the cobalt required in Li-ion battery chemistry (although there are
non cobalt versions LiFePo with worse metrics). One of the basic problems is
how does a cobalt miner know whether or not something like this article's
battery doesn't pop into existence just as soon as they put in billions of
dollars to get a cobalt mine going. I have a suspicion that Tesla is waiting
to be more clearly stable financially and then they will do something to
derisk cobalt miners (like promise the purchase of a boatload of cobalt at a
certain price).

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ZenoArrow
Aside from a little bit of mainstream tech journalist misinformation (Bill Joy
being co-inventor of Java? News to me, and presumably the inventors of Java
listed on Wikipedia), glad to see this article, the development being
described is very promising. I have a bit more hope in this than in most
battery breakthroughs, the fundamental idea seems sound, will be interested to
see how it develops.

~~~
kasperni
Together with James Gosling and Guy Steele, he wrote the first Java spec:
[http://titanium.cs.berkeley.edu/doc/java-
langspec-1.0/](http://titanium.cs.berkeley.edu/doc/java-langspec-1.0/)

