A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?

[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

[agumonkey]

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

[mycall]

I would think glass is easy to break under heavy vibration or worse. How is that concern handled?

[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.”

[ummonk]

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

[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.

[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...

[jhayward]

As far as I know all ion-exchange (chemical) batteries have a positive temperature coefficient of performance. Lead-acid, NiMH, Alkaline, Lithium-ion, Vanadium flow, etc.

[SlowRobotAhead]

I wonder how many people know that electric vehicles have heaters and AC units for the battery packs?

[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/

[mikeatlas]

what if their claims only hold energy?

[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).

[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.

[challenger22]

I would think that it can still short out and overheat, but the material the battery is made of does not combust or have any exothermic chemical reaction. The energetic failure mode would be- "sparks and gets really really hot."

[forgotAgain]

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

[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.

[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.

[Causality1]

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

[lallysingh]

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

[lostlogin]

Jonny Ive would you this to go thinner.

[FabHK]

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

[m463]

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

[kuu]

We need better batteries, this seems promising!

[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.

[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.

[ElKrist]

I see what you mean (entropy always increases is valid only in a closed system assumption). But didn't you mean "claiming that entropy must increase" instead of "decrease" in your sentence?