Having read through a lot of battery breakthrough reports, I tend to zero in on the 'hard bit' which in this particular case is here: U-M researchers solved this problem with chemical and mechanical treatments that provide a pristine surface for lithium to plate evenly, effectively suppressing the formation of dendrites or filaments.
My reading of that was if you create this pristine surface, you get a wonder battery. On the other hand, if the surface has a defect in it anywhere you get dendrites, and the subsequent shorts they cause.
When I read that part I said "Ok, so this will make great bespoke batteries that the military can use for their human carried gear, but they will be too expensive to compete with the existing lithium ion technology."
I really hope that I'm wrong here, and there is some process that can reliably make massive numbers of pristine plated lithium / ceramic nodes but until we see that I don't see this breakthrough making it out of the lab.
That is an excellent restatement of the core question. Can the process that makes "pristine ceramic" be scaled. (harder is a dependent variable on scaling difficulty.)
I don't know how much harder it is to make ceramics pristine. I am inferring that it is the thing in the article that wasn't already part of making batteries so the 'new' bit. And after seeing many, many breakthroughs where the 'new' bit was doable in small scales at great expense in a laboratory, but impossible to do at scale in an automated process, I've watched those breakthroughs go from 'world changing' to 'laboratory curiosity.'
So when Nature Materials publishes the paper on the process to repeatedly make tons of pristine ceramic material, then I will be excited for the new batteries that my devices will surely get in an upgrade.
> And after seeing many, many breakthroughs where the 'new' bit was doable in small scales at great expense in a laboratory, but impossible to do at scale in an automated process,
Can you elaborate on that, maybe give a few examples? I always thought that inventions were mainly judged by their merit (efficiency), I guess I was blind to the "scaling" (i.e. "actual industry") variable, and just assumed that there must be some way to automate and streamline almost everything, as long as the demand is there (as Elon Musk has recently been showing, with batteries/electric cars and rockets).
I have found that many times when people are "talking past" each other it is because there is a belief in there somewhere that one holds one way and the other holds a different way. In this case you have illuminated it nicely, which (slightly edited) is this:
I ... assumed that there must be some way to automate and streamline almost everything, as long as the demand is there.
I have experienced many things over my life where this assumption was invalid. The most common reason I have seen that this assumption breaks down is that "demand" is expressly tied to "price." And more specifically when the price goes up, demand goes down (in the economic sense, the number of people willing to pay that price for a widget) and at some price the demand goes to zero. Thus "not possible" which is not literally true, it is only actually true.
Do a search on "Battery breakthrough" (Google Scholar will give you better results but the web search works too) and pick any one where the improvement is >= 50% improvement in any axis (cost, charging, capacity, weight, what ever). This works best for articles that are 5 or more years old (you have to allow some time for them to come up with a way to do it), and then try to find that breakthrough used in any battery today. Sometimes you will find a 'why we couldn't do it' article but mostly it will just not be there. Even though batteries that were 50% better on any axis would seem to have a market right? And then read through to find the 'hard bit' in the break through and go back to Google Scholar and see if you can find papers related to that bit. You will find "the rest of the story" as it is sometimes said where some thing prevents wider adoption than laboratory curiosity.
Here is a simpler technology, silicon anodes (announced in 2010) reviewed in 2018 [1], maybe hitting the market if they can go to production [2]. This is a simpler process and as it has matured its impact has gone down to 10 - 15%.
>I knew this, but reading it again in this context makes many business decisions very clear.
Yeah. You can get this very clear in your mind by considering a few examples. Here's one.
How much demand is there for legal, genuine, clean $2 bills that are legal currency and have no meaningful restrictions (won't get you in trouble, nothing special about it)?
Barring anything I can think of, just your personal demand for such bills should be at least a billion of them... at the price point of $1.99 each. (For a profit of 1 billion * $0.01 = $10 million USD. There are some logistics involved, according to Google a U.S. dollar bill weighs about a gram, so a billion grams weigh in at around 1102 tons. So that is approximately $9074 per ton. But for $10 million you'll figure the logistics out.)
And now compare your personal demand for them at $2.00. That's probably about 0 in number. Why would you want even one of them, they're less useful than the $2 in other currency you bought it for.
So just your personal demand for a legal $2 bill is either a billion of them or 0 of them, depending on whether we're talking about the price point of $2.00 or $1.99.
Right, but that the demand/supply curve isn't really my point. (Maybe we're still "talking past" each other.) Nobody wants to buy 2GB of memory at a "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody" price point; that's fairly obvious. My point is, human civilisation has proven time and again, especially when it comes to micro/nano-electrical/chemical technology (batteries, transistors, screens, chips, ...), that it is possible to optimize, improve, reduce price and make more efficient, production (while making the product better) beyond what anyone thought possible (well except Gordon Moore).
Why would batteries be different? If I find some way to make a battery better, 50% more efficient and/or 50% lighter, why can't I just dump $1-10bn into research/production and then dominate the market (likely worth 10-100x more)? Is there a fundamental technological reason (for some technologies/inventions at least), or is it just a matter of economics/management (too risky)?
I'm guessing this comment reads fairly unclear (my thoughts aren't particularly clear on this matter either), but hopefully it gets some of my point across.
Edit: petra gives a good example below - scaling of biological processes often fails; which makes sense because biology - we don't understand how life works, and it changes/evolves/moves by itself! But it seems that non-biological processes should be manageable, at least at this scale (i.e. not quantum/high-energy processes).
Yes and no, I understand your point. If I can restate it for you, your point is this "Anything that is invented can be improved with a variable amount of effort."
And I don't disagree with that point at all. Where we part ways is that I also believe that there are inventions that cannot be improved enough to actually be worth producing. They are "dead ends" in the parlance when the amount of effort needed to produce the thing (even with the improved process) is insufficient to make that thing worth doing.
My interest in batteries and battery chemistry comes from my interest in mobile robotics (from roomba sized to battlebot sized). So I've been following the market pretty closely since 1986 or so when I joined the Homebrew Robotics Club in the Bay Area. I have watched many battery "breakthroughs" go no where. And it isn't because the people didn't want them to go no where, they lost a lot of money that way[1].
I will grant you that these companies "improved" what they had done in the lab, but they never improved enough to actually be able to sell batteries and keep the company going. Which is what I am defining as "not possible."
If you would like to explore this topic further there is even a book on it [3]. Salient comment from that article "While countless breakthroughs have been announced over the last decade, time and again these advances failed to translate into commercial batteries."
Select VC investors: Bill Gates, CapX Partners, Constellation Technology Ventures
Total disclosed funding: $196.6M
Company CEO, Scott Pearson, commented: “Creating a new electrochemistry and an associated battery platform at commercial scale is extremely complex, time-consuming, and very capital intensive. Despite our best efforts to fund the company and continue to fuel our growth, the Company has been unable to raise the growth capital needed to continue operating as a going concern.” -- https://www.cbinsights.com/research/biggest-startup-failures...
I'm reading a book about rockets right now ("Ignition"). It actually contains many funny stories about inventions and dead ends; how some substance seemed very promising, but then it turned out it corrodes steel very slowly; or how they abandoned a better fuel for a slightly worse one that was more practical (e.g. wouldn't freeze in the winter). I guess in general, we only hear/see the success stories, i.e. technology that is better, and could be put into production and scaled. As a software developer I might be a bit blind to that ;)
Chemistry(and biology) is one such field: the chemical/biological process behaves very differently whether it's don't in small quantities of the lab or in the huge volumes required for a commercial effort.
So think of that large($100mm) factory as a research process , that can often fail.
Example: commercializing biotech often fails because it's not possible to control contamination and genetic evolution of the bacteria you grow in huge processes .
> and just assumed that there must be some way to automate and streamline almost everything, as long as the demand is there
Scaling a solution to the travelling salesman problem would solve many other problems. The demand is definitely there. But many people believe it cannot be done.
That's a fundamentally different problem. "Scaling" it requires figuring out how to solve a different concrete problem every time. Scaling e.g. battery production requires figuring out how to solve the same real-world problem very efficiently.
No, you could (possibly) solve TSP once by providing an algorithm that scales well just like inventing an industrial process. My point was that it looks very much like some problems are fundamentally difficult and have no scalable solutions.
Here'a post a made on reddit a few years ago about this very problem. I think its pretty relevant here and just about anywhere else that does cutting edge research:
"I want to expand on this because it is a point so often overlooked with all these "holy shit we just created a new tech that is 10000% better" articles. I'm gonna use a loose analogy to try and explain it.
Say you made a perfect cupcake. It is insanely fucking delicious, and will revolutionize the idea of cupcakes. You spent years researching the art of cupcakes, and now have written down the perfect combination of all cupcake factors to make this divine cupcake. Your milk must come from a special dairy who set aside the .02% of the milk that meets your needs, your flour must come from one certain granary using a special indoor grown grain, the eggs from your own 3 specially bred super pampered chickens. The mixing takes place over eight unique specialized mixing procedures, with varying steps in between. The cupcake paper is made from the wood of an endangered Guatemalan tree (requiring federal clearance to obtain 10 sheets of it) and the baking tray from a steel alloy made by one company in Japan, and it's not reusable. The baking process has been tailored to the unique characteristics of your $20,000 1'x1'x1' oven. It takes 3 hours to bake with precise temperature control and positioning adjustment needed throughout the process. The icing also requires it's own set of unique ingredients and precise procedures. To make one of these cupcakes takes 14 hours and costs $2600. If any corners are cut in the process the whole thing falls apart. But done right it is indeed perfect.
A business man finds out about the cupcake that makes people cry tears of joy. He comes to you and needs you to make 35,000 of them a day to sell for $10 each in order to be profitable. Logistically this is simply impossible. No equipment on earth exists that can follow such precise steps for such large quantities, much less a company capable of making it. Your oven costs 20 grand and can bake one cupcake in 3 hours, you need 5000 in 3 hours. Your ingredients come from sources that produce only a minute fraction of what you would need. Never mind that they are scattered around the country making same day delivery impossible short of having your own air fleet. Or that there are only 3 chickens on earth that produce the right eggs. Or that the rare beetle poop in the icing comes from an entomology professor in Peru. Even if you could do all this you still need to adjust the recipe to account for being handled by machines and conveyors. And packaging. And shipping. Oh and slash the cost by a factor of 260.
Since this is all obviously impossible at the time (and for the foreseeable future), you instead just submit the recipe to a food journal and let cooking magazines and TV shows have a field day with sensational articles about the coming cupcake jesus. You become well known and grant money for your legendary lasagna project pours in. There never was any intention to bring this to market, it was just a proof of concept with the added benefit of getting your name out there. It's up to someone else down the road to pick it up and figure out mass production.
If anything people should get more hyped about advancements in production techniques. That's when you will actually get new shit in your hands."
This happened to me in real life. I made a circuit board by hand in the 1980's called the Amiga 14. Basicly if you had the board and a 16 MHz 68000 it double the speed of your Amiga 1000.
I demo it at the World of Commodore in Toronto (I was a member of the Amiga Developer Group that had a booth) the following week I go a call from a gentleman, he wanted to buy 5,000 of them if I made them cheap enough.
But when I designed the circuit I just wanted something to speed up my computer, I never planned a design for mass production. I tried for weeks to change the design for mass production but I could not do it.
Today I know how to get the job done, but back then I did not have the knowledge to mass produce anything I designed.
"Let's say you found the recipe for the perfect cupcake, but you need an egg so perfect that only one per day is laid in the whole world. No matter how much demand there is, you can't scale up production, since you depend on that single egg."
The web site [1] shows a much lower level of hype. Listed problems:
- Low-temperature performance
- Density 1.8x to 5x liquid electrolyte
- How to manufacture in quantity?
The increased density is a big problem. The ceramic materials are much heavier than liquids. That seems inherent in using ceramics. This might be a good technology for stationary applications, because of the faster charging and lower fire risk. Depends on cost.
The article seems to skirt around this. It gives the energy per weight for just part of the battery and then gives a theoretical energy per volume for the whole battery. The claimed theoretical improvement for the whole battery per volume is 2x so if the density of the whole battery increases 1.8 to 5x then the solid state battery could be anywhere from slightly better (10%) to significantly worse per weight.
But if that is still less dense than say, a lead-acid battery, but with double the performance of a li-on/polymer battery, is that not still an improvment?
If the weight is prohibitive in mobile applications (cars, portable electronics), this technology could be applied to stationary battery needs such as battery backups for local power grids or even a per-home basis. The longevity and safety factors of the ceramic electrolyte seem like perfect selling points for those applications.
I'm kind of surprised how people are complaining how we hear about many battery break throughs yet we do not see any of them come to reality. Bridging science to reality through engineering takes time. Lots of time. Think of LEDs. We had those tiny dome shaped LEDs for the longest time. Yet it took over two decades to get to useful LEDS to consumers we have today (like CREE).
This isn't a question of lag time. The overwhelming majority of these "breakthroughs" never come to market at all, and Li-Ion batteries are largely the same as five years ago, save some modest cost reductions from economies of scale. The big factors here are a) PR-driven media overhype, b) people not understanding that the big challenge in batteries is not making a few very high-performance batteries, but in building factories that can churn them out economically at enormous scale.
I agree that a lot these new technology is overhyped. That being said, majority (I would anecdotally argue more than 99%) of new founded science never make it to the market usually due to market limitation (too expensive to make) and adoption (fear of new technology). Battery technology can definitely use a boost but 5 years is nothing on a project scale for a new technology. Making something is super hard. Making something that the market adopts is even harder. Think about the digital camera. Minus the amount of time to develop the CMOS sensors, the "first" digital camera was made in 1975. It took 20 years before it was a consumer friendly device. It took another 20 for us to have the cellphone cameras today.
>Li-Ion batteries are largely the same as five years ago
Try 20. Libretto 50 (Pentium 75MHz palmtop) was released in ~1998. It was powered by two 1300 mAh 17670 cells. Today top of the line 17670 come in 1800 mAh. 20 years, less than 50% improvement.
Panasonic makes a 3400mAh 18650, NCR-18650B, which is very similar in volume and 2.62x higher capacity, ~2.55x higher density than the 1998 17670 cells. Not to mention we also have power density-optimized cells now. High performance DIY drone batteries are available that are 4 cells in series, 14.8-16.8 V, 1300 mah, about 150 grams, and can deliver 100+ A (1500 W), and be recharged hundreds of times before significant degradation. 5 years ago, a similar sized package could've delivered maybe 50 A peak, and it would degrade much faster, only lasting a few dozen cycles at that load before losing significant (20%) capacity. They would "puff" and overheat much more easily.
LEDs is a great example for a current comparison, people were talking about diodes decades ago for lighting, but it isn't until the last few years that they have reached cheap and efficient enough versions to really challenge the lighting marketplace, especially for growing plants. 10 years ago growing with diodes was expensive as hell for negligible returns over specialty growing bulbs. You buy LED tech released in the last year or two though and you are going to be throwing away or selling your old fixtures as a waste of electricity.
In fact it wasn’t until blue LEDs were created and it took over 20 years for the price to come down for economic viability. The scientists that worked on blue LEDs won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work. This came some 70 years after the first LEDs.
Advice I got long ago is that if the industry has a trend and the new process seems to be five years ahead of the trend line? Expect to see it in five years or not at all.
Solar panels, batteries, cpus, the time of big surprises is gone. Now it’s just people putting in hard work on the next thing that wasn’t quite cost effective enough the last go ‘round.
There's good skepticism in this thread, but at the end of the day, I think there's reason to be optimistic about better batteries.
* So many different technologies are showing some promise, and only one needs to be commercialized for a breakthrough. Put another way, this is an engineering an manufacturing issue, not a physics problem.
* The battery market is getting bigger and bigger, with ever more money at stake.
* Some real big investments into various battery startups and R&D programs have been made, at least several hundred million from various automakers. Either they're taking desperate risks, or else they see real progress on solid-state lithium batteries.
So often with technology, you don't see much progress until it arrives, and then things seem to change overnight.
Keep in mind a few things here. This is a press release, and press releases always hype their topic. Researchers discover ways to improve batteries weekly. Until they can prove it's cost effective and mass producible it doesn't matter to most of the world. Don't get excited until they start using it in products.
There is also another type of Lithium ion battery, LifePo4 which is lithium Iron posphate batteries. These type of Lithium ion batteries are much safer and are not likely to catch fire but they have slightly lower energy density. Hopefully the Umich breakthrough can be combined with LifePo4 to give it better energy density.
The common battery type Lithium ion cobalt is bad for the environment due to Cobalt mining in Congo. Cobalt is a conflict mineral. Lithium Cobolt batteries are the type that catches fire. Lithium Cobolt is an environmental risk if it leaks into the soil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_cobalt_oxide
NOVA did a show about batteries, including a researcher at Tufts University who created lithium batteries that you could impale with a sharp object or cut with scissors that would not catch fire even while continuously providing power.
Not a material's scientist, but it seems that they identified the importance of having a "pristine surface" and then developed a process of mechanical and chemical treatments to obtain the "pristine surface" which involves sputter coating with Au?
> U-M engineers created a ceramic layer that stabilizes the surface—keeping dendrites from forming and preventing fires
I'm curious how strong this ceramic layer is. When I hear 'ceramic' I think of 'brittle, fragile' materials, and I'm not sure having a battery that would explode if dropped or hit would be much of an improvement.
I used to have the same intuition but also just recently started to learn about material sciences. They refer to 'ceramics' as a wide family of material that is comparable to "metal" and "crystals" and the likes. These families are usually categorized by the type of atomic bonds found in them. Example, Wikipedia starts the article on "Ceramic" with:
A ceramic is a non-metallic solid material comprising an
inorganic compound of metal, non-metal or metalloid atoms
primarily held in ionic and covalent bonds.
At least, if your mental model was about ceramic vases and ornamental objects.
Interesting, thank you for the explanation. I generally think of things like tiles (e.g. like the ones on the space shuttle that were fragile) when I hear ceramics.
The insulator in common aluminum electrolytic capacitors is also a ceramic -- aluminum oxide. The positive plate is aluminum, and the oxide grows on it because when the capacitor is charged, the positive plate attracts free oxygen atoms from the electrolyte (and hydrogen atoms are released at the cathode).
While it is brittle, it's also self-healing. When it cracks and exposes the aluminum underneath, a new layer of oxide is plated immediately, as long as the capacitor is charged.
Equipment that's been left powered off for a long time and then turned on can sometimes have caps explode because there's a lot of leakage current from holes in the ceramic until it heals (minutes to hours). Lithium batteries are usually completely ruined if they ever discharge down to zero.
> When I hear 'ceramic' I think of 'brittle, fragile' materials
You might be surprised to find out that the best body armor today - NIJ level IV (and similar standards in other countries), the kind that can stop armor-piercing bullets - is made either entirely of ceramic, or (lately) is a ceramic/polyethylene laminate.
Side note: you probably wouldn't expect polyethylene show up in this context either - the one used is ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, and much like ceramics used, it's pretty different from our "common sense" perception of the material.
As far as fragility of such ceramics, this is a topic that comes up often enough to spawn an obligatory "will it ...?" genre on YouTube. So you can watch something like this, and judge for yourself:
Sounds promising but I'm not going to count my chickens until they're in high volume production. Lots of cool technologies never make it to the real world at scale because they can't be manufactured cost effectively at scale because of some little thing that doesn't seem like a big issue at first.
Agreed. Rooting for them but the number of battery and solar breakthroughs that don't get to market make it hard to get too excited on research + a pr push.
So many battery breakthroughs have been announced. Not one of the "breakthroughs" for cars have been released to the public. Most are "5 years away" or more.
Ionic with the polymer batteries looks promising, but again, as others have stated, it's the manufacturing process that is rough.
Works great in the lab, but scaling what was done in the lab to the public is really, really hard.
I agree that scaling is hard and progress is slow. I think that a major breakthrough has made it into cars, though: lithium ion batteries.
The 1990s-vintage GM EV1 used lead-acid or NiMH batteries. The earlier generations of Prius used NiMH batteries too. The Tesla Roadster was the first highway-legal serial production EV to use lithium ion batteries. It took 17 years after lithium ion batteries saw first commercial use in small electronic devices (commercial batteries out in 1991, Roadster in 2008). Because, as you say, scaling is hard.
Of course the first Roadsters now seem like old hat and every auto maker is using lithium ion batteries. We're eager for the next, better kind of lithium battery. But just getting autos to use any kind of lithium battery was a big enough change that it deserved the "breakthrough" moniker, IMO.
A major driving factor in the advancement of lithium-ion batteries for automotive use was the patent issues surrounding large-format NiMH batteries.* Once Chevron got its grubby hands on the NiMH patents, the technology was effectively dead in the water.
Agreed that that was definitely the big initial breakthrough.
We need this next one sooner or later for mass adoption.
As Musk says, show me him a battery with the breakthrough and the manufacturing process for it. If it's good, he'd switch it out to that battery. No one has succeeded yet at that challenge.
Having previously worked in materials science (though not specialised in battery tech), this does sound promising, but without the academic paper (is there a prepub available?) it's impossible to know with any confidence.
When you get the news articles with "breakthrough", just do Ctrl+F and type "could". If you get hit in title or first paragraph, close your tab and move on. You just came across another PR article on immature tech.
My reading of that was if you create this pristine surface, you get a wonder battery. On the other hand, if the surface has a defect in it anywhere you get dendrites, and the subsequent shorts they cause.
When I read that part I said "Ok, so this will make great bespoke batteries that the military can use for their human carried gear, but they will be too expensive to compete with the existing lithium ion technology."
I really hope that I'm wrong here, and there is some process that can reliably make massive numbers of pristine plated lithium / ceramic nodes but until we see that I don't see this breakthrough making it out of the lab.