For people having trouble interpreting the graph, the legend from the actual paper says:
"The energy and power density of our microbattery cells (A–H) at low to high C rates, along with previous microbattery cells having 3D electrodes (MB1 through MB3). The plot also includes the performance range of conventional power technologies and commercial batteries from A123 (high power) and Sony (high energy)."
Where C rates stand for charge rates, with 1C being able to charge the full capacity of the battery in 1 hour.
The key take away for the new design's performance isn't the one quoted in the title (of the submission or the article), but rather "Compared with conventional supercapacitors, our microbattery delivers 10 × the power of a supercapacitor at comparable energy density, delivers 10 × the energy of a supercapacitor at comparable power density or has 10 × smaller volume than a supercapacitor at comparable performance".
Just by glancing at the graph, you can see that the design is orders of magnitudes less energy dense than today's lithium-ion batteries. This advancement will make high-power applications more feasible, but will probably not do very much to increase your phone/laptop's battery life.
This is a classic case of a submission title taking liberties with the meaning of the article it links.
This submission's title: "New lithium-ion battery 2000 times more powerful, recharges 1000 times faster"
The actual title: "New lithium-ion battery design that’s 2,000 times more powerful, recharges 1,000 times faster"
The missing word is "design", a word that is crucial to the meaning of the article. The article discusses a design for a battery, not a battery. How important is that? Here's the last sentence in the linked article:
"For this to occur, though, the University of Illinois will first have to prove that their technology scales to larger battery sizes, and that the production process isn’t prohibitively expensive for commercial production."
It's a design, not a battery.
The solution to this problem, as I have pointed out many times before, is to copy the article's title, do not invent your own.
If HN would not force you to reduce titles to < 80 characters then likely the original title would have been used.
The original is 95 characters. "design that’s " and two comma's in the numbers get dropped and we're down to exactly 78.
Dropping words from a title in order to fit the 80 char limit is a bit of an art if you don't want to change the meaning, and making a new title is frowned upon because then you care not using the original title. Effectively you can't post an article with a title > 80 characters and not break the rules.
> So far, the researchers have used this tech to create a button-sized microbattery, and you can see in the graph below how well their battery compares to a conventional Sony CR1620 button cell.
That sounds like a battery to me. The new design has actually been built and tested. The quote you pulled out refers to scaling it up to things like lasers and F1 cars. A button-sized battery sounds fine for a lot of electronics today. Just not an F1 car.
The original title wasn't the greatest either, probably engineered to be link-bait. Nobody cares how fast you can get power out of the thing, they care how much total energy it holds - and the article is clear that it is comparable or slightly worse than current technology.
To be clear, this is the ExtremeTech blog, all of their commentary leans heavily toward wishful thinking.
For context a number of surface area improvements in Lithium-Ion anodes have failed at scale due to the creation of lithium dendrites (metal 'wires' that grow during recharge) which have either rendered large sections of the anode worthless and reduced the capacity of the battery, or created rapid exothermic reactions (aka fires) in the battery.
Its on the BBC New site as well which is actually much less clear in explaining that this research is applicable to the supercapacitor space as opposed to 'normal' Li* batteries.
At some level, it doesn't make too much sense to go that much higher in the power (which I'm assuming is the same as discharge rate, since voltage is fixed). Current lipoly batteries are rated at 30C (Amps per watt*hour). Essentially this means that the battery can be fully discharged in a minimum of two minutes. It doesn't seem like there are that many applications that require higher power output.
Uh, let's combine this with the other 3 articles claiming a 10x more long lasting battery, and we'll have a 1000x longer lasting, 2000x more powerful, 1000x faster recharging battery.
I really love progress, but I've seen too many of these "N times better" articles and no actual consumption products by now.
Same with these memristors, MRAM and feRAM, and 1000x faster internet.
I don't know about you, but my first internet connection was 56 kbps, now I can easily buy 100 Mbps one (I don't cause 10 Mbps is good enough for me) and it would be much cheaper than what I had to pay 15 years ago for that 56 kbps, even including inflation.
Progress is here, we just don't notice (also media and inventors overhype). But in the end the progress is still happening unbeliveably fast. It's decimal order of magnitude every 5 years!
The one thing they did not mention was the battery weight and size. The biggest barrier for electric cars and other battery uses is the ratio of energy to weight and size.
Today, this ratio enables about 70-100 miles travel for an electric car with a similar weight and size as a gasoline car.
If a car battery can be made to charge to 50% capacity in about a minute with a total range greater than 60 miles or so, then a very novel solution to charging electric cars becomes possible -- induction coils at stop lights and along highways.
In the bigger cities and between them we could just connect electric cars to grid the whole time, and put energy meters in each car. Like trolleys. No need for big batteries inside the car, just supercapacitors for a few minutes worth of driving if there's some problem with the grid and you need to park safely.
I wonder if people could buy electric cars like they buy cellphones - you sign a contract with a provider, you pay X USD per month for the car and access to the grid, additionaly you have access to free regular car if you need to drive somehwere the grid doesn't exist yet(but you pay for the fuel by yourself).
No, the energy density is not all that unusual. Assuming the battery is 2000AH and is 100% efficient, the "2000 times more powerful" means you can (theoretically!) discharge it 2000 times faster than the benchmark battery (e.g. 2000A over 1 hour vs. 1A over 2000 hours).
The 1000x recharge rate means you can put the energy back in 1000x faster than the benchmark battery (e.g. 1000A x 2 hours vs. 1A x 2000 hours).
Due to the energy density being comparable, I would expect the actual size of a 2000AH New Improved[tm] lithium-ion battery would be comparable to the size of a traditional 2000AH "benchmark" battery.
Disclaimer: All the numbers made up out of thin air using values that were easy to do in my head.
Excellent surface area to volume ratio for cooling.
If you want to shove tens of amps into something tiny its gotta be nearly perfectly efficient and/or excellent cooling and/or be tiny to get a great surface area/volume ratio.
I bet this would rock for bluetooth earpieces.
Also people expect some apps like cars to last for 15 years, but if you're "nervous" about long life, your stereotypical disposable cellphone is a great app.
[+] [-] icegreentea|13 years ago|reply
"The energy and power density of our microbattery cells (A–H) at low to high C rates, along with previous microbattery cells having 3D electrodes (MB1 through MB3). The plot also includes the performance range of conventional power technologies and commercial batteries from A123 (high power) and Sony (high energy)."
Where C rates stand for charge rates, with 1C being able to charge the full capacity of the battery in 1 hour.
The key take away for the new design's performance isn't the one quoted in the title (of the submission or the article), but rather "Compared with conventional supercapacitors, our microbattery delivers 10 × the power of a supercapacitor at comparable energy density, delivers 10 × the energy of a supercapacitor at comparable power density or has 10 × smaller volume than a supercapacitor at comparable performance".
Just by glancing at the graph, you can see that the design is orders of magnitudes less energy dense than today's lithium-ion batteries. This advancement will make high-power applications more feasible, but will probably not do very much to increase your phone/laptop's battery life.
[+] [-] gabipurcaru|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
This submission's title: "New lithium-ion battery 2000 times more powerful, recharges 1000 times faster"
The actual title: "New lithium-ion battery design that’s 2,000 times more powerful, recharges 1,000 times faster"
The missing word is "design", a word that is crucial to the meaning of the article. The article discusses a design for a battery, not a battery. How important is that? Here's the last sentence in the linked article:
"For this to occur, though, the University of Illinois will first have to prove that their technology scales to larger battery sizes, and that the production process isn’t prohibitively expensive for commercial production."
It's a design, not a battery.
The solution to this problem, as I have pointed out many times before, is to copy the article's title, do not invent your own.
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
The original is 95 characters. "design that’s " and two comma's in the numbers get dropped and we're down to exactly 78.
Dropping words from a title in order to fit the 80 char limit is a bit of an art if you don't want to change the meaning, and making a new title is frowned upon because then you care not using the original title. Effectively you can't post an article with a title > 80 characters and not break the rules.
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|13 years ago|reply
That sounds like a battery to me. The new design has actually been built and tested. The quote you pulled out refers to scaling it up to things like lasers and F1 cars. A button-sized battery sounds fine for a lot of electronics today. Just not an F1 car.
[+] [-] mark-r|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derpenxyne|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
For context a number of surface area improvements in Lithium-Ion anodes have failed at scale due to the creation of lithium dendrites (metal 'wires' that grow during recharge) which have either rendered large sections of the anode worthless and reduced the capacity of the battery, or created rapid exothermic reactions (aka fires) in the battery.
[+] [-] g8oz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|13 years ago|reply
Ah here we go: http://xkcd.com/678/
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] idupree|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fryguy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legierski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aardwolf|13 years ago|reply
I really love progress, but I've seen too many of these "N times better" articles and no actual consumption products by now.
Same with these memristors, MRAM and feRAM, and 1000x faster internet.
[+] [-] ajuc|13 years ago|reply
I don't know about you, but my first internet connection was 56 kbps, now I can easily buy 100 Mbps one (I don't cause 10 Mbps is good enough for me) and it would be much cheaper than what I had to pay 15 years ago for that 56 kbps, even including inflation.
Progress is here, we just don't notice (also media and inventors overhype). But in the end the progress is still happening unbeliveably fast. It's decimal order of magnitude every 5 years!
[+] [-] yoava|13 years ago|reply
Today, this ratio enables about 70-100 miles travel for an electric car with a similar weight and size as a gasoline car.
will be interesting to follow this initiative.
[+] [-] transfire|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|13 years ago|reply
I wonder if people could buy electric cars like they buy cellphones - you sign a contract with a provider, you pay X USD per month for the car and access to the grid, additionaly you have access to free regular car if you need to drive somehwere the grid doesn't exist yet(but you pay for the fuel by yourself).
The problem is infrastructure, I think.
[+] [-] gambiting|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gvb|13 years ago|reply
The 1000x recharge rate means you can put the energy back in 1000x faster than the benchmark battery (e.g. 1000A x 2 hours vs. 1A x 2000 hours).
Due to the energy density being comparable, I would expect the actual size of a 2000AH New Improved[tm] lithium-ion battery would be comparable to the size of a traditional 2000AH "benchmark" battery.
Disclaimer: All the numbers made up out of thin air using values that were easy to do in my head.
[+] [-] guilloche|13 years ago|reply
Discharging fast make it more possible to catch fire.
Overall, it seems not very useful for smartphones.
[+] [-] swinglock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tr4656|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ironchief|13 years ago|reply
I love this research but have seen similar articles for the past decade. At scale production is hard, just ask A123.
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
The real: Sell, build, design.
:)
[+] [-] DigitalSea|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbecker|13 years ago|reply
That doesn't seem very forward thinking.
[+] [-] VLM|13 years ago|reply
If you want to shove tens of amps into something tiny its gotta be nearly perfectly efficient and/or excellent cooling and/or be tiny to get a great surface area/volume ratio.
I bet this would rock for bluetooth earpieces.
Also people expect some apps like cars to last for 15 years, but if you're "nervous" about long life, your stereotypical disposable cellphone is a great app.
[+] [-] juskrey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peg_leg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umarrana|13 years ago|reply