The biggest winner of this, should it come to fruition, would seem to be electric vehicles. Electronic devices would surely prosper, but further miniaturization of smartphones doesn't really seem desirable, so it would go towards increased computational power and battery life. EVs, on the other hand, derive a double benefit: By shrinking the battery, you reduce weight, which increases range and efficiency, which reduces the requisite battery size, etc. The end product would be much cheaper and much more efficient. Having an economical EV that could get 1000 miles to a charge for the price of a Civic would be huge.
Battery life in smartphones is rather marginal today. With light to moderate use it's still necessary to charge smartphones every day and there's no guarantee that your battery won't run out. Changing that equation such that average battery life is on the scale of weeks instead of a day or hours is quite significant, enabling people to use smartphones in new ways they would not have before.
But yes, electric vehicles are definitely the most in need of higher energy density batteries.
>Changing that equation such that average battery life is on the scale of weeks instead of a day or hours is quite significant, enabling people to use smartphones in new ways they would not have before.
At which point battery life will promptly drop back down to a couple of days.
Guys, let's not get hung up on how many days you get with light use and that you already get more than a day. InclinedPlane's point stands whether you get 1/2 a day or 4 days out of your battery with light-ish usage. Hell, I can get 2-3 days out my iPhone if I don't use it much.
It's not good enough until we can get at least 24 solid hours of use out of a modern phone with a big display (>= 3") while using at least one or two of the radios inside it (e.g. 3g and bluetooth).
It depends on how much or little the phone is doing, doesn't it. How much of that time is it connected to wifi? How much data transferred? How many background apps are you running? Do they use location services, orientation sensors, light sensors, etc.? What size is the screen, and what is its power output?
It's true, I put it through pretty light usage, with a meg or two data over wifi a day, a few texts and calls. Still gets 2x the life of any other phone I've ever had my hands on though, no matter how light I used them.
That's a good question. I simply don't know enough about Li batteries to answer it. I would think that nanoscale electroplating, as this effectively does, wouldn't add huge amounts of weight over current methods, in relation to surface area, but I could be grossly mistaken.
I can't be the only one that hates the word "automagically." I don't see anything magic - he's explaining it right there and "therefore" or something similar would have worked fine.
People seem to substitute it for "automatically" as they please, and I find it annoying as well.
But I'm in the seemingly tiny minority that cringe when they see "begs the question" misused, "should of", etc. Most people don't seem to care about these things.
"I know this seems like a semantic quibble, but words mean things."
One of my favourite quotes, no idea where it's from.
There seems to be news about new and revolutionary battery technologies that will increase capacity N-fold every few weeks. I have more or less stopped reading about this, as none of the ideas ever seem to make it to the market. I prefer to be ignorant of emerging battery tech, and would rather be pleasantly surprised if anything of this actually turns into a product :-)
Perfect timing. I was only just discussing battery technology with some friends, who believe batteries cannot possibly grow to capacities larger than we have today on the basis of 'gee, they haven't grown as fast as other technology in the past 100 years'
You reminded of a sort-of related quote: When an expert says something is possible, they're almost certainly right and when an expert says something is impossible, they're almost certainly wrong.
I believe the quote is from sci-fi master Arthur C. Clarke:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Any scientist's understanding of what is possible and what is impossible relies on currently understood theory. It happens rarely, but our understanding of what is possible at even the most basic level is sometimes upended (such as the discovery of nuclear forces, quantum mechanics, and relativity). The most prescient of scientists come clean on this fact when making predictions.
"It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation."
Physicists can set the upper boundaries on engineering problems, engineers can do as much as they can to approach that boundary but will not cross it unless the first person was wrong.
Physics also identifies the dynamics, which are a special type of constraint. Engineers also consider economics, which usually limits you to far less than physics allows.
Still, it's true. Theoretical constraints that exist now might well be removed with new scientific insights. Trying to predict whether something is possible at all is useless given our limited understanding of things.
If an expert says something is possible.. it probably will be developed soon. If an expect says something is not possible, it probably will be developed (far) further in the future.
Battery technology has different constraints than other technologies (such as cpu speed or memory capacity) but there's still a ton of headroom. There's at least a factor of 50 available between today's batteries and the energy density of gasoline (for example).
When making the comparison between batteries and gasoline, it is often useful to note that converting gasoline into mechanical energy is only about 35% efficient. This gives batteries a 3x operational advantage.
> There's at least a factor of 50 available between today's batteries and the energy density of gasoline (for example).
That difference doesn't imply that batteries can be improved at all, let alone by 50x.
There are lots of differences between batteries and gasoline and some of them may limit the energy density of batteries to be less than that of gasoline.
Even small differences matter. For example, diesel has significantly more energy per volume than gasoline. (I forget how the various alcohols rank.)
Given that Li batteries are packing enough power now to be considered unsafe and "explosive" in some cases, imagine what would happen if their capacity was increased 10 times. I've started thinking conservatively about battery capacity - it's the chips and software we should redesign, not only the batteries.
Outside the movies, it's quite hard to get an explosion with gasoline. Total energy density isn't the only factor. And that applies to batteries as well.
Sure, we wouldn't be using gasoline if it weren't already pretty safe. I'm just saying, before we call something dangerous, we should remember what the alternatives are.
I'm not sure that increasing battery capacity is correlated with more explosive activity. These guys are using using the virus to increase surface area but the amount of lithium polymer may still remain constant so I don't think it will be more dangerous than the current line of lithium battery products.
The energy a battery is storing, in the event of an electrical short, is converted into heat. More energy, more heat. It's tough to work around this basic proposition of thermodynamics.
Every now and then there's news about radically improving battery lifetime. I'm skeptical. Wouldn't the organic cell structure of the TMV decay over time?
Well, as a virus it doesn't have "cells" in the standard biology sense. The nanostructures might be vulnerable to decay, but since (I think) the relevant bits are the outer coat, I'd think they're pretty sturdy. I suspect the longevity is one of the easier barriers to commercialization.
The one thing that popped in my mind when reading this was "poor viruses, they put electric charge on them". :) Now it's clear that a virus is so simple that it's not even clear if it can be considered alive, but what if something similar was devised with bacteria? Where would we draw an ethical line? :)
Life is just self-replication. I don't see why it's interesting in a moral sense — especially when we're talking about something that has nothing to do with self-replication.
Anyway, we kill pigs, which are actually intelligent, so if you're looking to get worked up about something, bacteria in batteries seem like pretty odd candidates.
wow, i'm all for better batteries, but that's a lot of viral mass we're talking about. what are the potential consequences of producing tons of viral matter?
are we already doing this?
and on a related note, i wonder how much viral mass a human gets when he/she is sick from a nasty flu.
There is a link in the article to a more detailed description of the process. Basically, the viruses are used as a structural component that is then coated with metal. They claim the viruses are inert after the process but don't elaborate. My guess is that either the act of coating the viruses damages them, or they intentionally irradiate them somehow to damage their genetic material.
Obviously, production of large amounts of viruses in the wild would have to be tightly controlled. The problem with TMV is that you need to really grow the virus in a plant, you can't just grow a vat of the stuff in an industrial fermentation facility. TMV is used pretty regularly for research, so people do grow big quantities. Probably the biggest industrial virus production to date would be certain kinds of vaccine production. But those quantities are tiny compared with what you would need if everyone started using batteries like these.
You speak as if "viral mass" is some sort of vital force or fundamental thing. The potential consequences of producing this much "viral matter" is that, well, batteries will work a lot better. That's pretty much it, really. It's not like the "viral mass" is going to reach out via its vital virusness and give you AIDS or something. By the time it's done being battery-ified it won't even be a virus anymore.
I respectfully disagree. I would at least refer to a number of evolutionary biologists or geneticists to quantify the risks of generating such a significant mass of these things.
I speak of "viral mass" as a proxy to number of viral bodies, which is probably proportional to its power to mutate and do something unexpected, not inside the batteries but rather in the production thereof. What are we going to do -- create a farm of infected tomato plants? Are we going to evolve the virus until it produces more bodies faster?
I'm not so concerned about viruses that affect humans. I'm concerned about an epidemic of plant viruses, and everything we haven't thought about.
I wish teflon stayed on surfaces, certain chemicals didn't deplete our ozone layer, that we didn't have to ask questions about man-made global warming. But to assume that the things we produce would only have the desired effects with total disregard for physics and biology is, well, absolutely stupid.
On the other hand, I see this as an awesome opportunity to proceed with nanotechnology. After all, a virus is the ultimate self replicating robot.
My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that the only thing about the viruses which is important is that their capsules greatly increase the surface area; the genetic material inside is completely unnecessary. It is therefor an extremely small stretch of the imagination to suppose that they could be produced in massive quantities simply by adding a plasmid to bacteria which contains only the genetic code necessary for the creation of the capsule, which would in theory prevent them from being infectious. Some viral capsules do require dna or rna to be present inside them to function, however, so there are likely flaws in this idea, but keeping them nonvirulent would be a fairly simple matter.
I suspect that at production levels you'll wind up encouraging a mono culture in the host cells. So, the viruses would be poorly suited to the real world.
Relevant question: To recharge them, will you have to feed them?
No.
Viruses do not have any sort of metabolism. They drift until they get into an appropriate target cell, at which point they hijack it and make it make more viruses. Therefore they do not need feeding at the best of times.
However in this case the viruses are being used as convenient particles that will stick to the electrode. We do not care about the health and well-being of the viruses at all.
After much deliberation from top management we have decided that the 10x lithium battery device must be brought in on-time and under budget. Sincerely, Thaddeus Plotz.
