
Progress toward 3D printing lithium-ion batteries - teawithcarl
http://www.b3dgeable.com/2013/11/26/harvard-shows-important-progress-toward-3d-printing-lithium-ion-batteries/
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singular
Wow, that's quite something.

I really feel the tech around batteries needs particular focus, as the one
thing computing technology seems to lag on is battery life - I dream of a time
where I can charge my laptop once a year and not have to worry about it
otherwise.

Perhaps 3D printing of batteries will offer easier iteration on new ideas?

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InclinedPlane
Battery life only sort of bugs me, the real issue I have with modern batteries
is longevity.

Once a typical Li-ion battery is a few years old it might as well be
worthless, it will hold only a fraction of the original charge it could when
it was new and that amount will continue to drop over time. If we could build
batteries with even 80% of the storage density of Li-ion but would retain 90%
of that capacity over 10 years I'd be pretty happy.

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jmpe
That's for a large part due to the charging speed itself. If you charge at the
maximum allowed current your battery will have the shortest longevity. Most
chargers advertise on the capability to charge fast, but for a lot of battery
chemistries it comes with that trade off. If you have the habit of charging
over night I'd suggest to buy a slow charger or trickle charger. The slowest
(optimum longevity) are typically "40 rate" which means (I'm simplifying here)
the charge current is 1/40 the Max capacity current and takes about 40 hours
to charge.

Note: don't go cheap by buying Chinese crap for battery chargers, especially
Li chemistries. Best case: works as advertised. Worst case: electrocution or
house goes up in flames.

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daughart
The Lewis lab's main contribution here is the scale and precision of 3D
printing. These batteries are not immediately useful (although there are
sensors and other electronics that are an order of magnitude smaller than the
batteries that power them, and in the future micro-scale batteries could
overall reduce the size of these electronics). They are not powerful or
robust, but they are precisely assembled. This type of 3D printing will enable
future miniaturization of electronics and be especially useful at the
interface of electronics and biology. For instance, current 3D printers have
resolution several orders of magnitude above the scale of features in tissues.
Increasing the resolution of 3D printing enables tissue engineering at a scale
similar to actual biological features. Batteries are just a flashy and
potentially useful application of this fundamental printing technology.

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jws
I wonder how "sturdiness" scales. What happens when you drop or bang a battery
with such tiny features? Obviously they are very weak, but they also have very
little mass.

I generally count on HN to have someone with experience in any given field.
Today I call on those with experience scaling structures into the larger
micron ranges.

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jmpe
force from acceleration scales linearly with mass. mass, however, scales cubic
with size: something at 1/10 scale is 1/1000 the mass.

surface scales square with scale (something at 1/10 scale has 1/100 surface or
cross section surface)

with miniaturization with factor x you get 1/x^3 mass and 1/x^2 cross section
surface. as a result stresses (Force/Surface) becomes 1/x less on a given
surface for acceleration.

(on mobile, edited a few times)

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officialjunk
Obviously a typo in the title. 300µm in the article.

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hoylemd
Might not be the right place to post this, but the twitter notification for
this article says "300m", I think they made them a bit smaller than that.

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TobbenTM
That's because they use a broken string type.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6807524)

(Sorry)

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Kliment
What's a milli-micro?

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jlas
The correct measurement is µm - micro meter.

